Systemic Shock

half-dozen other trainees to a refurbished barn for a class; or find a dubok, a message drop, while alone with memorized instructions. He saw the lissome Sanger only in cryptanalysis class; she ignored him. At no time did any class, either in the big house or outside it, contain more than eight members.

Much of the training pitted trainees against each other; no one had to be cautioned against forming close friendships. He failed to locate the scalpel tip which little Barbara Zachary had cyanoacrylated to the back of her neck until the 'unconscious' Zachary pressed it to his throat — but he did not repeat that failure. He forgot that a one-time cipher could be generated from a telephone directory, and drew two extra cryptanalysis tasks that took him half a night to complete. The youngest of the trainees, Quantrill forgot a lot of things; but only once.

He would never forget his instructors. Marty Cross was half Cheyenne and all whip leather, a wizened wisp of a man so adept at covert pursuit that he seemed to simply materialize behind the trainee he stalked. It was Cross who taught Quantrill to become utterly still; so inert that he could stand erect in a cluttered room and be unnoticed for vital seconds.

Sean Lasser, whose middle-aged paunch danced when he laughed, always had something to laugh about after submitting to a search. Quantrill exulted the day he identified Lasser's signet ring as a garrotte complete with spring-wound wire.

Seth Howell, heavy-bodied with spidery arms and legs, had a whispery tenor and a gift for phrasing the dullest indoctrination material as though analyzing an invisible cud of tobacco. Craggy of face, prematurely graying, Howell claimed a hitch in the quad-service Rapid Deployment Force — and another in the maximum-security federal prison in Marion, Illinois. Howell's adumbration of the current political mess might not be the whole truth, but it didn't put you to sleep either. He took, for example, the Starlinger-Ahbez hypothesis.

Starlinger, a German, had long ago warned of China's expansive dreams, whatever denials she might make. With her southern borders already overpopulated, China would eventually find it necessary to expand into underpopulated Siberia.

Ahbez, a NATO strategist from Turkey, had added an alternative. China might indeed be able to expand southward if her southern neighbors, for whatever reason, became underpopulated. Ahbez theorized that China might find ways to depopulate India, or the Vietnamese peninsula, without overtly declaring war on them. She might even maintain an outward alliance while draining that ally of people.

'Now, Ahbez is a freak about germ warfare,' Howell drawled, his Colorado twang lending him the air of an inspired hick; 'and he figgered China might dump a few bugs down south. Well, she didn't; she gave the goddam Injuns the paranthrax they dumped on us. Makes sense. China had the technology, and thought she could hamstring us and let India take the heat.

'That explains why China didn't dump paranthrax on the RUS. She wants to avoid retaliation in kind, and depletion of RUS livestock she intends to own later. But if the Allies start an epidemic in India, — well, China's natural borders to the south could protect her long enough to produce a defense. Meanwhile, India would go belly- up.

'We think China's waiting for us to do just that. But guess what we've spotted from orbit.' Howell snapped the holo projector on; the display was a map of the SinoInd lands. He spread one big hand like a tarantula, placed fingertips on Cambodia, Laos, and the other Viet republics, and slid the tarantula to ward China's heartland, Szechuan. 'Viets. More of 'em than you ever saw, swarming north like ants as far as the Yangtse River.

'Some are doing winter harvests in Yunnan, feeding others who're training in little groups all over south China. And then a lot are disappearing along the Yangtse. Now, the Yangtse's a muddy bitch; even infrared doesn't tell us what's going on under its surface. Some Viets are going upriver, possibly through pressure locks under the dams that're left. One hell of a lot of Viets are popping up on the Kazakhstan front. You guess where all the rest are.'

'Spam?' Quantrill could not resist the awful jest.

'That's been discussed,' Howell said. 'Cold storage, too. But we think they're going underground, trained as factory workers while they mass for a hundred-division offensive. Little factories, lots of 'em; a cottage-industry war. It'd be futile to impact-nuke every square meter of Szechuan. Just maybe, it's time we gave the Sinos a taste of their own medicine in Szechuan.'

Graeme Duff, the bull-necked trainee from Minneapolis: 'How do we send germs down into filtered tunnels?'

'Wouldn't the Sinos like to know?' Howell's smile was one-sided. 'You can bet they have moles boring around every lab in this country, trying to dope that one out. And that,' he said, snapping off the projector, 'is where gunsels like you come in.'

'We're supposed to penetrate deep cover?' Zachary was always thinking two steps ahead, thought Quantrill enviously.

'Other people are trained for that. They finger the mole; you take him — or her — out. Usually you just disappear him. That leaves the other side wondering if we've turned him.

'Chances are, you'd get a different assignment against certain folks in media.' He waited for the murmur of surprise to abate. 'Do I have to tell you how important our media are in reassuring what's left of this country that we're winning — whether we are or not? Face it: we've lost half our population and the other half needs its daily holo fix! The SinoInds would love to nuke NBN's world of make-believe, if they knew where our production centers are. Damn' few foreign stars or directors know; we can't be absolutely sure of their loyalties.'

'Rivas Paloma,' said elegant young Goldhaber, with a surgeon's fingersnap. 'Killed in a strafing on location in Mazatlan. Am I right?'

'The Spanish film industry's loss,' said Howell obliquely, 'may have been NATO's gain.'

'But Paloma got an Oscar for directing an anti-Chinese movie,' said Goldhaber, frowning. You could depend on the well-born Goldhaber for cultural snippets.

'If he was an assignment — I say if—then he was a mole. Depend on it.'

'I guess we have to.'

The thin voice was almost a falsetto whisper: 'Oh, yes. You literally bet your life you have to. Media star, bishop or bird colonel: if Control says he goes, he goes.

'Which reminds me.' Did Seth Howell betray faint cynicism? Quantrill could not be sure as the instructor continued, “Never doubt for a second that President Collier was a lucky break for this country. The Mormons, and nobody else in the US, were ready for this war. They're going to pull us through if we follow the right path. In a war of survival we can't afford the sedition of every Jew and Catholic who won't accept a moral imperative.

'But the LDS has more splinter groups than a toothpick factory. Some of 'em are just wrong. Others are violently opposed to the administration — and they are dead wrong.'

Kent Ethridge, the gymnast from Iowa State, spoke as rarely as Quantrill. 'In other words,' he said slowly, 'a war of religious extermination.'

'What d 'you think the AIR confederacy is doing,' asked Howell.

'Threatening Jews,' said Goldhaber, not smiling.

'What if Control identified someone in the Jewish Defense League who was trying to assassinate your President,' Howell asked.

'Ice him,' Goldhaber replied. 'No religion is more important than my country.'

Howell stared out the window for a long time, then glanced at each of his trainees. 'Thanks to the no-hum outlook most Americans had before last August, one religion is your country. That's overstated a mite, but it's closer to the facts every day.'

'I'm not exactly wild,' said Goldhaber, 'about joining the LDS.'

'A gunsel,' Howell snorted, 'is not exactly eligible.' The tone of his voice put an end to one unsettling topic, and led Howell to the unsettled problems between the Allies.

Chapter Fifty-Six

The US, as Howell put it, had a neighbor problem. We needed Mexican oil and were still getting it; but the capitalist, Mormon Collier administration could not entirely satisfy socialist, Catholic Mexico of our continuing good