device, after all, connected to the fusion synthesizer? Well, at least Bonham Base on Kauai would suffer little damage. Mills indulged in this small patriotism, sipped coffee, and avoided looking toward the west. If he could not become a rich man, at least he could avoid blindness.
Two hours later, the synthesizer sat on the desk before Mills. It looked a bit like a cipher machine from an earlier war, fitted for intravenous feeding.
'Nothing to it, eh?' Mills extended his hand. 'When all this is over, Kim, you'll be remembered.' He swore Norton to secrecy and dismissed him. Then Mills generated a new report that made no mention of the synthesizer. He sealed the device in a desiccant-filled bag, placed that in another bag, then buried the treasure near the access road.
The next morning, Mills and his crew were again at the sub, ostensibly to take exact measurements and photographs for the salvage teams. Mills put two men to work examining the keel, stationed a third on deck to keep the forced-air unit cramming fresh air into the sub, then shifted his big shoulder-bag and went below. He took Kim Norton with him.
While Norton obediently listed loose personal articles in the crew compartment, Mills selected a package in his bag and placed it in the weapons storage locker. He then took the forage hatchet from his bag and carefully brained Kim Norton from behind. He returned to the storage locker to recheck the setting of the timer, then laid his pocket 'corder near the bangalore torpedoes and checked his watch as he flicked the 'corder switch.
Mills climbed outside empty-handed. 'I forgot my fast film,' he called down the hatch. 'We'll have to get it from the cache on shore.' While the three crewmen scurried to the small ACV moored by the hatch, he checked the time again, temporized by inspecting the forced-air unit, then called down the hatch again. 'Taking the rest of the crew, Kim. We'll be gone fifteen minutes. Sure you don't want to go?'
There was the briefest of pauses before, 'I told you before, uh, Boren no,' said Norton's recorded voice with a trace of irritation.
'Suit yourself, love,' Mills forced himself to say, choosing a phrase least likely to sound premeditated. 'But keep your damned hands off those munitions.' Then Lieutenant Boren Mills leaped into the ACV. They were nearly to their equipment cache when the submarine disintegrated with two distinct explosions.
Mills was absolved by the board of inquiry, though he assumed blame for leaving Radioman Second Class Norton behind. Fragments of the Chinese vessel were recovered, some of them quite large, none of them in condition to answer the Navy's most vexing questions. In time, fragments of similar vessels turned up.
The Navy file characterized the doomed fleet as an official curiosity, but opined that the craft must have had a huge tender, a mother ship. There was never any serious suggestion that the tiny craft were capable of running submerged from a thousand klicks up the Yangtze to the Oregon coast. The only evidence of that lay buried near Kikepa Point.
During the next two weeks, Mills found a suspicion confirmed: interservice rivalries could not match the complex intimacies of rivalry within the Department of the Navy. During the series of conferences provoked by his scholarship, Mills watched the maneuvering between his superiors in the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Public Information pundits of OPI, and the crusty staff of CNO who only wanted, as one rear admiral said, to cut the crap and convert some senators.
Day by day, hobnobbing with few ranks below full commander, Mills expounded on the persuasive uses of his new discipline and stressed the need for experimental work to prove his ideas. If transferred directly to the CNO staff he would chafe under the control of old men in Naval Ops. If he stayed in Intelligence, he might be hamstrung by their passion for watching the watchers. But the OPI was an aggregate, the Public Information career officers rattling and clanging against men who had been civilian media men a year previous, who would be civilians again a year or so hence. Here in media lay priceless connections and worthless bullshit; expertises so vague, so multifariously counterfeit, that a legitimate media theorist could help himself to a pretty piece of territory among them.
Mills maintained his studious mien, implied a 'natural' preference for his existing Intelligence connections, and steadily built a case for testing optimal control theory on segments of the public. He permitted himself to be persuaded that the best way to test his ideas lay with the feedback techniques already in use by the OPI. Besides, the OPI was fundamentally a service available to both Intelligence and Operations, both of which could profit from Mills's work as media control segued into social control.
By mid-July, Lt. Commander Boren Mills had seen the orders posting him to Sound Stage West. His floppy cassettes, his notes, even old textbooks were accorded special security and Mills made certain that his personal effects were packed in the same containers. In one container lay a souvenir for which he had a less than compelling cover story. It was hardly larger than a breadbox. He hoped he would not have to claim he had found it among the personal effects of Radioman Second Class Kimball Norton.
Chapter Seventy
The revenues of Schleicher County, Texas were not wasted on air-conditioning the Eldorado jail. Quantrill had sweated off two kilos after three days in his shared cell. 'Man's got a right to be with his helpmeet,' he yelled, shaking the bars, the concrete walls mocking him with echoes.
'If you was a man,' chuckled the husky scarred specimen who lay on the lower bunk, 'you wouldn't'a let no half pint deputy bust you both.'
'God's curse on 'em,' Quantrill spat, then railed again at the bars. 'God's curse on the gentile bastards!'
'I've had about enough of your noise,' said his cellmate. 'You and that hightits bitch in the women's wing — what's her name? Delight?'
'Delight,' Quantrill yelled, his shoulder-length hair flying as he gripped the bars again. 'Pray for deliverance, darlin'!'
From the opposite wing came an answering cry; a pitiable hopeless wail of female anguish. Sanger's voice, maintaining the guise of a young woman easily led.
The open-handed slap drove Quantrill's head against steel bars. 'I'll give you deliverance if you don't shut up,' said the man, fists on hips, no longer good-humored. 'Them gentiles won't care if I beat some true religion into you.'
Quantrill, huddling on his knees, hid his face and surreptitiously watched the man's feet. A reasonable amount of abuse, he could handle; but he could not pursue an assignment in the field with broken ribs. Snuffling, wishing he had the knack of weeping real tears on demand: “You sound like my pa.'
'Maybe I am your pa,' said the man, pleased with himself. 'Your ma ever mention a Mitch Beasley?' Beasley eased himself back on his bunk.
'My ma didn't talk about men,' said the youth querulously. 'She was a good God-fearin' vessel — like my Delight. ' He let the silence spread; turned and wiped his nose on his sleeve; let his eyes grow wide and full of ersatz trust. 'You really do remind me of my pa,' he said. 'But pa wasn't no gentile. He was kind of a prophet.'
'The hell you say,' Beasley murmured.
'We liberated a lot of folks, pa and me,' Quantrill insisted. 'Andalotofwordly treasure, too. Why, the stuff we buried near Ozona would buy salvation for a dozen sinners.'
Beasley, after a long thoughtful pause: 'I might just want to meet your pa.'
'Gone to his reward,' Quantrill said, biting his lip, looking away.
Locusts buzzed in the hackberry tree outside the cell. Beasley's bunk creaked. After an endless thirty seconds: 'What if I was to tell you they call me Prophet Beasley?'
'Not in the fullness of time,' Beasley intoned, studying the muscles of his heavy forearms as he stretched. The deep-chested voice lowered to accommodate the topic: 'Maybe it was God's will brought us together, boy. You ever think about that?'
