Systemic Shock

From satellite and local report, it was obvious that the Gujarat disaster was more than the loss of a water conduit. Whole square kilometers were ablaze in an area known for its experimental cotton production by Indians with Chinese advisors. But cotton did not burn this way; and even if it did, China would not have risen to such monolithic fury over a trifling setback to an ally's agribiz. The blaze and the fury might be appropriate if both were rooted in oil. Not a few thousand gallons of it, but a few million.

Ranked fourth behind Arabia, the RUS, and Mexico in her known reserves of oil, China could have been providing India's supply, and this scenario was studied. But China exported significant quantities of the stuff only to Japan. With its expertise in shipbuilding and manufacture of precision equipment, Japan slowly forged her co- prosperity link with China, and shared the cyclopean fuel supply. Some of China's imported oil came from Mexico and Venezuela and some, for the sake of appearance, came in tankers from the Middle East. American satellites yielded an estimate, based on a nosecount of tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, that China was buying a third of her oil from Arabs.

But no satellite had penetrated the bottom of the Arabian Sea. No research vessel had identified the progress of a stunning Chinese engineering project which, using an acid-hydraulic process, quietly tunneled a meters-broad pipeline under the continental shelf from Arabia to Gujarat on the western plain of India. It was known that China had invested in a scheme to run water conduits from the Himalayas to western India. What no one had suspected was that the conduit was double-barreled. Water ran toward the southwest. Oil ran toward the northeast, then on to China herself. No wonder, then, that China had exploded so many nuclear devices under the Tibetan plateau; the resulting cavities were being filled with oil pumped from the AIR crescent. It was an immense undertaking, yet it required no technical breakthroughs. Its strength lay primarily in its secrecy.

With one well-placed demolition device just upline from a pumping station, the RUS severed water and oil conduits. Automatic cutoffs could not prevent the immediate loss of fifty thousand barrels of crude oil, which gravity-flowed from its conduit and spread atop the water as it burned. The RUS had well and truly blown the cover of the SinoInd conduit. Now, everybody's fat would sizzle in that fire.

Chapter Five

The train clung to its monorail and hummed an electric song as it fled in a lateral arc from Raleigh past Winston-Salem. The scoutmaster, Little, was too busy controlling sixteen of his charges to worry about the seventeenth. The Quantrill boy lazed alone by a window, one hand cupped to his ear, watching an unusual volume of traffic stream near their track that overhung the highway median strip. As always, most highway traffic was cargo; some old diesels, mostly short-haul electrics. But today a surprising number of private cars shared the freeway.

Bustling down the aisle, Purvis Little promised himself to confiscate the Quantrill radio, which defied Little's orders on a pack trip.

Ray Kenney flopped into the seat next to Ted, jabbed an obscene finger in Little's direction. “Old fart, he muttered; 'took my translator. Said we were only looking for the dirty words.'

Quietly, without stirring: 'Weren't you?'

'If I'm gonna learn the language, I gotta know 'em all,' Ray said, innocence spread across the pinched features.

Ted smiled at the tacit admission. What Ray lacked in muscle and coordination, he made up by honing his tongue. If words were muscle, Ray Kenney could outrun the monorail.

Ray leaned toward his friend, pretended to stare at the traffic, and whispered. 'Got a fiver? Wayne's gonna buy some joints in Asheville. If you want in, I can fix it.'

Ted considered the idea. A few tokes by the underaged on a weed in a sleeping bag was nothing new, a token rebellion to relieve chafing under Little's authority. But Wayne Atkinson, their only Eagle scout, seldom did favors without three hidden reasons for them. Atkinson probably had the joints already. 'I'll pass, Ray. Thanks anyway.'

'Scared?' Ray caught the cool glance from Ted Quantrill's mint-green eyes. The scar over Ted's nose and the sturdy limbs furthered the impression that Ted did not yield easily to fear. He might, however, yield to a claim of it. 'Wayne isn't scared. He's cool, he never gets caught.'

'But you do; you're not Little's pride and joy.'

'If I had merit badges coming out of my ass like Wayne does,' Ray began, and then jerked around.

There was no way to tell how many seconds Little had been standing behind them. Ray braced his knees against the seat ahead, thrust his hands between his thighs, slumped and stared at nothing.

'I'll take that radio, Quantrill,' said the scoutmaster after waiting long enough to make Ray Kenney sweat. He took the radio, slipped it into his shirt pocket, pursed his zealot lips. 'Was it reggae jazz, or polluting your mind with a porn station?'

Not sullen, but weary: 'Just a newscast, Mr. Little.'

'Oh, no doubt,' said Little, suddenly favoring Ray Kenney with a we-know-better smirk. 'How will we ever explain your sudden interest in current events, Quantrill?'

Little turned away expecting no answer. He was halfway to his seat when Ted replied, 'No mystery, Mr. Little. My father's in the Reserve, flies patrol from Key West to Norfolk. And there's a big tanker gone off the Florida coast.'

Little frowned. 'Sunk, you say?'

'Just gone; disappeared.' Ted's shrug implied, you tell me, you've got the radio.

'Get your gear together, boys,' Little called. “Asheville is the next stop.' Then he hurried to his seat, fumbled in his shirt pocket, and cupped one hand to his ear.

Ted Quantrill was wrong; a compelling mystery was unfolding in the Florida Strait sea lanes. The tanker Cambio Justo, under Panamanian registry, had last been reported off Long Key, lumbering north toward Hampton Roads with a quarter-million deadweight tons of Mexican crude oil in her guts. The Cambio Justo could hardly run aground in four-hundred-fathom straits. She could not just fly away, nor could she evade satellite surveillance while she thrummed over the surface of a calm sea. But she could always sink.

Two hours after the Cambio Justo vanished, a sinking was everybody's best guess, and as far as it went that guess was dead accurate. What no newsman had guessed yet was that she had not sunk very far.

Chapter Six

The interurban coach disgorged Little's brood in Cherokee. From there to Newfound Gap they invested an old diesel bus with their high spirits. At the Tennessee border they reached the old Appalachian Trail, streamed off the bus, watched the vehicle drone up a switchback and out of sight. The bright orange paint and the acrid stink of diesel exhaust bespoke a familiar world that, for a few of them, vanished with the bus as completely as had the Cambio Justo—and for the same reasons.

'Wait up,' Ray Kenney puffed as the youths ambled down the trail under a canopy of oak, hemlock and pine. He pulled a light windbreaker from his pack, zipped it over slender limbs as Ted Quantrill sniffed the sweet tang of conifers in the mountain air.

'Move it, Kenney,' a voice commanded from behind. Wayne Atkinson, the oldest of the boy's, enjoy ed a number of advantages in Little's troop. Wayne wouldn't have said just what they were; not couldn't, but wouldn't. His rearguard position was one of responsibility, which Wayne accepted because it also carried great authority. Below average height for his age, he was strongly built, fresh-faced, button-bright and sixteen. Wayne Atkinson gave the impression that he was