knew; preferred, in fact, a sixteen-year-old who already knew her way around. There had been plenty of those in the cities, Mills reflected; but it might be different at Kikepa Point.
He would cope somehow. As he packed, Mills was smiling on the inside. His posting to the Naval R & D facility suggested that he was already on the way to success. In a trivial way, he had already proven that he could remotely stuff an electronic system with balderdash.
Chapter Forty-Six
Just when the optimists were clearing their throats to gloat over the 'modest' levels of global fallout, the second paroxysm of nukes came in October. The first group emerged from the sand seas of eastern Libya to take out Schwyz (an error; it was meant for Zurich), Lucerne, Berne, Lausanne, Zurich (if at first you don't succeed…), and in a shocker, Rome. It amounted to a simple refusal by Libya to take any more guff from the UN, from which she had withdrawn. Libya did not know whether she was united with Syria at the moment, or not. Syria said not. Libya's ruling junta, more willing than their venerated Khaddafi to follow bombast with bombs, unilaterally chose to break through the stalemate with Israel. Other countries of the AIR might permit the UN to mediate the newly vexed Jewish Question, but not Libya. To her junta it seemed clear that Christians and Jews had turned the UN into one enormous Swiss-based conspiracy.
Libya did not target Cyprus or Israel itself, convinced that the Jewish Ghost Armada would somehow deflect her medium-range missiles harmlessly. Libya did not have enough Indian nukes to waste a single one.
Within a day, Libya's Mediterranean coast was a beach of radioactive glass, her junta atomized, her southern borders invaded by neighboring Chad, her existence as a political entity erased by a rain of missiles from a still- functioning Europe.
Strategists on all sides blanched, then, when missiles streaked up from a site near Ras Lanuf on the Libyan coast two days later. No one had suspected that Libya had a nuclear second-strike capability, let alone a delivery system that could reach the port cities of Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Cuba.
It seemed to Latin-American Marxists almost as if a maddened Libya, in her death throes, had responded on behalf of the US in retaliation for the Florida invasion. But the US submarine-based Trident missiles threw many smaller warheads, and did not throw them so far. SinoInd leaders insisted that the Libyan second-strike had really been a Yanqui stroke, but no one could prove it. No one except the crew of the USS
As if to prove they were as capable as anyone of further contaminating the globe, Chinese subs launched waves of nukes against RUS industrial centers in Western Siberia, and US centers in Colorado and Wyoming. In both cases, fossil fuels were the targets. The RUS machine still depended on petroleum, though America had made headway in converting western shale and coal into fuel. Too many of the warheads got through, and some were ground-pounders.
The immediate US/RUS answer was nuclear, chiefly from subs that pounded SinoInd oil reserves in Rajasthan and Sinkiang. As if in afterthought, a flurry of RUS warheads detonated underwater in Japan's inland sea north of Kyushu, where shoreline debris eventually proved that Chinese submersibles had been hiding there. Japan's leaders could hardly have been ignorant of the Chinese presence, as Japanese media were quick to allege. The Japanese dead numbered only in thousands, chiefly from inundations by great waves. But the inland sea was squarely between Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and Japan was virtually one great urban clot. Thereafter, Japan took her neutrality seriously.
The delayed US/RUS response began quietly in places like Vorkuta, San Marcos, Izhevsk, Klamath Falls: basic training sites. Green US troops began their passage through Ontario to Hudson Bay. Canada had developed her submersible cargo fleet to carry ore and petroleum under pack ice through a wintry Northwest Passage, but with round-the-clock refitting the sluggish vessels soon carried troops past Peary Land and Spitzbergen to Archangelsk. It was hoped that lurking SinoInd attack vessels could be decoyed by surface applications of the Ghost Armada. Meanwhile, so many US/RUS all-weather stealth aircraft were spanning the Bering Strait that visual- contact air engagements with SinoInd swing-wings were becoming the rule there.
Chapter Forty-Seven
It had been over a month since Cathy Palma had ridden with Quantrill to the Grange cave. They'd found the entrance dynamited, the survivors gone without trace. The single wooden cross that stood in the rubble had been carefully carved:
For a time, Quantrill hoped Louise and Sandy Grange would turn up in Sonora, or among the thousands in the relocation center. Then in early October, Grange's Blazer was found abandoned and stripped, evidently by one of the religious zealot groups that seemed to be flowering as suddenly as desert plants. Quantrill accepted the news without comment.
Soon afterward came the flurry of second strikes that sent survivors back underground for weeks. Quantrill read more and watched the holo. And avoided emotional ties more than ever, though Palma had urged him to enroll in the relocation center school, hoping that he would respond to others his own age.
'Look,' he said once to the exasperated Palma; 'my strategy is to learn from the library terminal. Geometry, inorganic chem, military history. It's all I have time for, and you said yourself I shouldn't go outside again for another week.'
'You think we can't run an immunology program without you, Ted? Don't flatter yourself.' She saw the dull anger in his face. 'You've done a lot; nobody denies that. But just between us, they're already in Phase Three in the labs. We're licking the bug! Believe me, Aggie Station can spare one cargo handler. And I can spare you if it means finishing your education.' She did not add,
'Between you and the holo, I'm getting what I want,' he said stonily, and changed the subject. 'For one thing, I'd like you to help me cut through all the crap I'm getting on the news about local guerrilla gangs. They sound like crazies to me, but you don't see anybody on the news really saying that. I need somebody to brief me, not bullshit me.'
Palma did not like his increasing use of military terms:
He took his time phrasing the question, a legacy from taking courses via library holo terminals. 'Are they Mormons?'
'No!' Her knee-jerk response surprised Palma herself. She chuckled, peered guiltily at Quantrill, then back to her work. 'Well, actually some of them think they are. I could make the same claim, Ted. I was raised LDS, but after my husband began trying to be a closet polygamist I backslid to a jack-Mormon, and then—' Shrug. 'No, you can't be a Mormon and deny the tenets of the Apostles. Or the revelations of the modern Prophets. But a lot of people have their own revelations, and these days a lot of those are nightmarish. That can be a strong divisive force if it happens to a particularly devout man.'
'Or woman.'
'All males may become priests, even blacks,' she said. She added with a trace of bitterness, 'Females can never attain priesthood. Honor, veneration, service, yes; priest hood, no. You wouldn't believe the underclothes a
