'Wait one, Q.' The long pause gave the major time to key vital data on his display, then to query the automatic event analyzers that monitored military and civilian agencies in Corvallis, Oregon. There was no homicide bulletin or APB on anyone matching the description of Ted Quantrill. “You're clean,' Control reported, 'and on the carpet. 'So, he could fly back to San Luis Obispo. Other key phrases would have sent the gunsel to a safe site, or to one of the transient camps that now stretched along railway right-of-ways near some cities.
Quantrill acknowledged the flying carpet sanction and, with a mixed bag of passengers, caught a flight from Salem before noon on Sunday. By that time Lt. Jon Fowler's body had been discovered. His death was attributed to heart failure, possibly induced by an early-hours encounter reported by another Naval officer. Boren Mills felt certain it had been a sexual encounter but craftily refused to say so. He thought it wise to leave room for the inference that Fowler might have harbored other secrets. His young visitor, said Mills, had been a foreigner.
Mills did not waste much time gloating over his good fortune in Fowler's death. During the last days of the seminar Mills grew enthusiastic over its subject, which was the refinement of optimal control theory for Project Phillipus. Mills spent much of his spare time with media theorists across the campus, catching up on the academic fads and jargon that had penetrated their field since his last courses at Annenberg. Mills did not discuss the paper he was preparing for two reasons. First, he did not want anyone else writing scholarly papers on the application of optimal control theory to propaganda. And second because he intended to have his own paper protected by the highest security classification he could wangle. It was Mills's intent to submit his paper to the Navy's Office of Public Information. If he could get all such papers classified, he would not have to cope with many rivals. Wiener, Shannon, and Weaver had failed to protect their pre-eminences in information theory after World War II — that is to say, not one of them became a billionaire. Instead, they had spread their new discipline as broadly as possible.
This, to Mills, was plain foolishness. The longer he could cover his arse in his specialty, the faster he might climb to rarefied regions in media. With keenly intelligent planning and a little luck, Mills might exert more influence over his repostings now. One thing he could never do again was to repeat his cunning Phillipus sabotage which, he was sure, would sooner or later be traced to his dead rival, Fowler. Not only was sabotage a personal risk; Mills also felt a mild patriotic fervor. The US/RUS Allies had to win if Boren Mills was to soar triumphant above American business.
From recent reports, the Allies were having a bitch of a time just holding their own.
Chapter Sixty-Four
As the Kazakhstan front warmed up in April, it became clearer to Yale Collier's chiefs of staff that RUS troops and supplies would not be forthcoming in western India. Burnt hulks of RUS cargo aircraft dotted the sandy plain of Iran and the sere Afghan mountain ranges, mute testimony that the RUS had made a genuine run at it. Emboldened by American success with Project Phillipus, the Allies had gambled that they could get away with overflights above AIR neutrals that leaned toward the SinoInds. But SinoInd interceptors lay in wait at places like Kabul, Ashkhabad, and Isfahan, relying on visual intercept and Indian pilots flying the colors of Afghanistan, Iran, Turkmenistan. The ill will sown by the pre-1985 USSR had grown into a bitter harvest, urged on by every mullah and tariqat of the AIR.
In Latin America it was the Catholics who stirred up pro-Axis sentiment. We could not maintain military bases in the West Indies any more than we could in Chile, Brazil, or Panama. The genuine neutrality of Argentina, Paraguay, and Bolivia was due largely to the same general factors that caused Africa's western and southern countries to stay neutral. They might resent Industrialized Allied wealth, but they feared the fanaticism of their pro-Axis neighbors.
Mexico and the northwestern countries of South America, at least, remained pro-Allies. Thanks to their oil and other developed resources, they had bought enough arms to quiet their fears. Venezuela might be OPEC, but she was not Islamic.
Indonesia, on the other side of the globe,
So the Aussie fighter-bombers grew bulges in their fuselages, fairings to accommodate fat low-pressure tires, and soon those sortie craft were dispersed so widely across northern Australia that no raid could destroy more than a half-dozen aircraft at a site. Those same aircraft showered the relatively few Indonesian airstrips with bomblets, leaving island runways so cratered that, by May 1997, very few Indonesian sorties flew. Meanwhile, Aussies scanned the Timor Sea and awaited an invasion, while they airlifted supplies to the Rajasthan front.
The SinoInds nuked more than one island in the Indian Ocean, though wasting fully ninety per cent of the bombs intended for those crucial waystations. We needed only a few delta dirigibles cruising at six thousand meters with particle beam weapons to pick off most of the ballistic incomings that our Moonkillers and F-23's missed. After all, we knew exactly what targets the SinoInds sought.
Despite the density of our defensive curtain, Diego Garcia was now uninhabitable; Aussies refueled in the Maldives.
In Rajasthan we fought a desert war, protecting our new air bases near Jodhpur. Our strategy was to press on toward Delhi while provoking the remains of India's air force into ruinous engagements. Indian pilots drew top marks for resourcefulness and courage — a necessity since they fought faster Allied craft that boasted longer range and more advanced fire-control systems. By mid-May, our air sorties into Uttar Pradesh again threatened an utterly crucial wheat supply, and India began pulling her interceptors back from their AIR sites to make up for local attrition.
Twice, in the spring, India had followed up on radar anomalies to find Allied supply convoys motoring boldly toward the Gulf of Kutch. She had dumped a lot of Allied supplies into the Arabian Sea — so much jet fuel, in fact, that Indians calculated our support aircraft would no longer be able to fly cover missions from the Indian desert by June. Our Aussie-bolstered Sixth and Eighth Armies would then be in serious trouble.
Prime Minister Casimiro was stunned, then, to learn in May that New Zealanders were turning SinoInd oil into Allied jet fuel using modular refinery equipment near the Indus. Safe in tunnels near Nagpur, Casimiro had been hopeful until now. 'Surely,' he said to Minister Chandra, “our second priority is to destroy those midget refineries.'
'Our first — surely?' The warrior Kirpal said it as a question, but wanted it as an order.
'First comes our bread. To fight, our people must eat.' Casimiro was still looking at Chandra, an old man long familiar with Allied stratagems.
'To eat next winter, we must choke off those airfields now,' sighed Chandra, who understood both hunger and priorities, and did not envy Casimiro his political future. “We must never forget that the RUS can airlift mountains of supplies the moment we abandon the AIR corridor to them.'
'I knew Russians when they were
Kirpal, in a soft rumble: 'The day they see us depending on that, they will send a division of Germans to our soil in Tupolevs. And then one of Poles, one of Bulgarians, one of—'
'Always assuming they would go,' said Chandra, who knew how quickly the Russians had lost their clout after the internal defections of '85. 'But with Slavs or Yakuts, the RUS is perfectly capable of finding reinforcements. Perhaps from the American Fifth Army; as Allah knows, American reinforcements have begun to roll up the southern edge of the Kazakhstan front.'
'Chang Wei is not Allah,' Kirpal replied with narrowed eyes, 'however much he yearns to be. We have little more than his word that the Americans have turned the tide. His demand for more of our troops would bleed the Madhya Pradesh.'
On that at least, he had agreement from Chandra and Casimiro. The Prime Minister, with a bleak view of postwar elections, agreed to throw his support to an all-out offensive against those Indus refineries. That meant more conscripts from the factories and repair crews of the eastern provinces; more chaos when recruits speaking a
