Systemic Shock

Russian winter, winter itself is the enemy.

The SinoInd movement to the west was slowed by the ferocity of Kazakhs, then stopped by the more ferocious ice storms. Only in warmer climes could a war against other men be prosecuted. Chad, for example, was dissuaded by her AIR neighbors from absorbing Libya. If Chad could only wait until the colossi fought to their mutual deaths, an Islamic crescent could become an Islamic world.

Australians and New Zealanders completed their ANZUS exercises with American marines during a sweltering antipodal summer, making ready for a daring game of transoceanic hopscotch, while Canadian diplomats broached tender topics with Somalia for a bailout procedure, just in case. Canada's defensive game and her natural resources were burnishing her image as a major power. Somalia reflected on the Israeli/Turk agreement and its outcome, and then raised the ante. But at least she kept quiet.

In Florida, surviving SinoInd irregulars pushed past the Caloosahatchee River, bypassed the Miami ruins, sacked Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach, and advanced on the Tampa Bay cities. Every Chris-Craft and dinghy in the American sports-fishing fleet was now armed: night-scoped AR-18's, heat-seeking SSM, or a self-correcting mortar — anything to interdict the supply hovercraft that hummed across from Cuba. There were still enough Harriers north of Orlando to make a SinoInd air supply route plain suicide. The average Florida cracker was just as irregular as the invader, but he fought for his own turf and knew the inlets and hummocks better. The 'gators fed well. It was thought that Tampa might hold.

Throughout the Northern Hemisphere and to a lesser degree in the Southern, background radiation was still dangerously high two months after the second-strike nuclear flurries of October. Among the most essential of US industries, suddenly, was the scatter of small processing plants for production of selective chelates.

Years before, the Lawrence Berkeley Labs had created LICAM- C, the first chemical capable of selectively and safely removing plutonium ions from living tissue. By now, other chelates existed which had special affinities for iodine, cesium, strontium, calcium. Of course, a human body robbed of its stable iodine and calcium isotopes would not function for long. The murky suspension of Keylate that Americans swallowed contained not only the selective chelates, but coated particles of replacement elements which, like tiny timed-release caps, became available to the body only after chelates had removed newly-absorbed elements. There were side effects, but temporary nausea was better than cancer of the spleen.

Americans listened to local media and took the recommended doses of Keylate. In the Ukraine, Keylate was in short supply. In San Bernardino, missile plant workers took it every four hours through November. In San Marcos Infantry Training School, Recruit Ted Quantrill took it once a day through December.

Chapter Forty-Nine

The big man in the dun uniform barked an order in Chinese, jerking the barrel of his assault rifle as if to goad his prisoner. Quantrill grasped the weapon, thrusting its barrel to the side as he swept one leg behind his captor's knee and wheeled. He fell atop the man, one elbow seeking the vulnerable soft flesh just beneath the sternum's bony mass; jerked his head back as his adversary spat in his face; found his throat hooked by the big man's calf, and was hurled backward.

The dun-clad man swung his weapon toward Quantrill without rising, a grim smile across his camouflage- painted face. 'Zap, Quantrill, you're dogmeat,' he growled, then shouted at the circle of onlookers: 'When are you ass-breaths gonna learn to follow through? You let go of a Sino's weapon once you snag it, and it's all over!' He waved Quantrill back to the encircling squad of recruits and came to his feet in a practiced backward roll, watching the recruit wipe spittle from his face. The instructor's half-sneer seemed fully permanent. This bunch of green- uniformed recruits, it implied, would always be green until the day they saw hand-to-hand combat; that is to say, the day they died.

Sergeant Rafael Sabado could afford to sneer. Though garbed for the moment as a Sino, his own forest- green uniform was neatly sewn with small patches that meant more than some campaign ribbons. Airborne training at Benning; special combat school at Ord; languages at Monterey; unconventional warfare at Bliss. Now that most troop transportation was hamstrung and Fort Benning no longer existed, the Army was forced into one-station training with too few specialists. These poor raw recruits, thought Sabado, would be funneled straight from Texas to Russia. All but a very, very few…

'Sergeant?' The lettering on the fatigues said it was Symons; the concern in the lank intelligent face said he wasn't being a smart-ass. 'How can he hold onto a weapon when a bigger man is hauling him away by the neck?'

Sabado paused, cocking his head, then smiled. 'Leverage, Symons. He had it, but he let it go. Come back here, uh, Quantrill; we'll run through it.'

Quantrill, with surprisingly little reluctance for an anglo kid who couldn't be much over sixteen, moved onto the practice mats. The green eyes watched Sabado's moves with flickering interest. He nodded as Sabado showed him how to hook his arms over the weapon, seemed satisfied with the other instructions.

'Now I want you to spit in my face,' Sabado smiled.'I'd castrate you for that ordinarily, but when we're on the mat, be my guest.'

The circle was suddenly silent, the recruits motionless. 'Fair's fair, Quantrill,' someone joked.

'Fuck fairness,' Sabado said; 'Go ahead, recruit. I won't hurt you.'

The Quantrill youth smiled almost shyly, then spat without seeming to pause for spittle. Sabado's eyes flickered, but his head did not move a millimeter. Yet even that instant's involuntary blink hid the beginning of Quantrill's sidelong ducking roll that carried him to the edge of the mats.

'Very good,' Sabado purred. “You don't trust me in this uniform. But what's more important is that I didn't flinch from a little spit.' He motioned the recruit back with the others, looked around him. 'In personal combat you can't afford to care about little things. Flood, mud, shit or blood, it's all the same: flinch and you're dead.'

Into the murmur around him, Sabado inserted his calm Tex-Mex voice of command with a tone his recruits had come to dread. This was something Sabado liked, so it was sure as hell gonna hurt. 'Choose a partner; don't choose a buddy. I see any asshole buddies, I get to make 'em my partners. Move,' he said. Soon, twenty-five pairs of recruits stood toe-to-toe. It was a little exercise their mommies never taught them, Sabado said with relish, though his brother had taught him in a Houston slum. The pairs were to take turns. Every time a man flinched, he lost his turn. If any recruit lost his temper, he'd do laps with a full pack instead of eating chow.

In a way, it was a very simple exercise requiring stainless steel discipline. All the recruits had to do was spit into each other's faces.

Sabado halted the drill after two minutes, affecting not to see the bottled rage in the men; judging to a nicety when they had taken enough. 'From now on, every day we run a two-minute spit drill,' he said, pausing a beat before adding, 'just like screwing a schoolteacher. You got to do it and do it, 'til you get it right.' Sabado was good at his work; the laughter took the edge off their outrage and, with luck, some of these recruits would master one more small advantage.

Sabado took them through a few two-on-ones, then some slow practice throws, and lazed watchfully while they continued at it in pairs. He watched the Quantrill kid surreptitiously. A lot of kids, given the order to spit like that, were so scared they could muster no spit at all. Quantrill had tried to sandbag him with that smile — and his side roll had been damned fast. All right then: unbelievably fast. Nobody could be faster than Rafael Sabado, but a very few were almost as fast. The problem was in taking time to hone that natural gift. Sabado knew what the recruits did not: in three weeks they would all be headed past the Canadian border. All but a very, very few…

Chapter Fifty

Two weeks later, Symons and Quantrill were en route to an hour of classroom drill on maintenance of the new Heckler & Koch machine carbine, walking in step as prescribed. Symons sought the source of an aerial whisper overhead, pointed at the drab, newly-camouflaged delta in the distance. 'Don't you wish you were crewing