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  Single Combat

  ( Ted Quantrill - 2 )

  Dean Ing

  The exciting sequel to Systemic Shock from the bestselling author of The Ransom of Black Stealth One. The nuclear war against China and India has left America victorious, but devastated, and a strong and survival-minded government has seized control of what's left.

  Dean Ing

  Single Combat

  PART 1: SEARCH & RESCUE

  CHAPTER 1

  The reverend Ora McCarty faced the wall in the most sacrosanct office of International Entertainment and Electronics and watched a holo image of himself sing an old inspirational: 'Rocky Mountain High'. It had aired — or so McCarty believed — during his Sunday morning program. From the corner of his eye McCarty could see the expression on the face of IEE Chairman Boren Mills. It was, in Ora McCarty's jargon, nervous-makin'.

  The holovised McCarty strummed a last chord on a sequined guitar, held the last note, then winked from existence as Mills keyed his hand-terminal. "Hey, you cut off my finish," McCarty said affably.

  "Call me a music-lover," Boren Mills replied in soft derision. "But don't tell me you didn't know that song is on the prohibited list."

  McCarty turned to face the smaller Mills. "Aw, that's for Mormons! That song don't tempt people to take drugs, no matter what they think in Salt Lake—"

  "Do I have to remind you who subsidizes your gentile services?" Boren Mills snapped, his bright dark eyes flashing under heavy brows. "If the church is liberal enough to support a mildly heretical preacher, the least you can do is exercise judgment with your material."

  "Censor myself, you mean," McCarty grumbled. "Seems to me, you LDS folks—"

  "Correction! I'm a Congregationalist, Ora. Never, ever, link me with the Latter-Day Saints."

  "Well…" McCarty's half-smile suggested that he was buying a polite fiction, "… those LDS folks are happy with my mission just so long as it's mainly country-western entertainment that don't take issue with anything they want said."

  "Entertainment is my middle name," said Mills with deliberate symbolism. IEE's middle name was 'entertainment', and whatever board members twice his age might prefer, thirtyish Boren Mills was IEE.

  "Entertainment's what I gave my holo audience," McCarty nodded.

  "Not with 'Rocky Mountain High," Mills rejoined, the receding vee of his widow's peak moving side-to-side in negation. "Your monitor has his orders. Since my last name is 'Electronics', what your holo audience got was 'In The Fourth Year of Zion'."

  "The hell they did."

  "The hell they didn't," Mills replied easily.

  "I don't even know that piece," McCarty insisted, then formed a silent 'oh' of sudden enlightenment. Ora McCarty was still essentially a twentieth-century man in 2002 AD, coping with the technology of war-ravaged, Streamlined America. At times that coping was slow, and sullen. "You faked me."

  "Regenerated you," Mills shrugged the implied correction. "Don't worry; thanks to us you never looked better or sounded half so good. Want to see what you really sang?" The Mills hand, small and exquisitely manicured, held the wireless terminal, thumb poised.

  McCarty shook his head quickly, both hands up in dismay. "Now that's an abomination, Mr. Mills. And what's worse it makes me break a sweat to see a me that isn't me." To stress his rejection, McCarty turned his back on the holo wall and faced rooftops of Ogden, Utah outside the smoke-tinted glass panel. The giddy height of the IEE tower yielded a unique view; no other commercial structure in Ogden was permitted such an imposing skyward reach. McCarty supposed it had something to do with the microwave translators built into the temple-like spire. Even in architecture, IEE suggested its sympathy with the reigning Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints. Now that a Mormon administration directed the rebuilding of an America whittled down by ravages of the Sinolnd War, McCarty could condone such corporate cozening as good conservative business practice. He let his eyes roam past the city to salt flats shimmering in late spring heat, to the tepid Great Salt Lake beyond, so impossibly blue in the sun as to seem artificial.

  As artificial, for instance, as his rendition of a song he'd never sung, or as his effectiveness as a man of God, when image-generating modules could replace him right down to the wrinkles in his shirt. Squinting against a glint of sunlight from the too-blue lake: "I wonder when they'll start fakin' the news," McCarty said.

  "Oh, — I suppose someone will try it sooner or later," said Mills, but McCarty did not notice the subtle twitch that passed for a smile. "You can't imagine how much it cost FBN to regenerate your little ditty." It was, of course, very cheap. "If it happens again, you'll pay the tab. Try to curb your paranoid fantasies, Ora; as long as we maintain control of FBN Holovision, we won't often squander big money regenerating events."

  Not once did Mills lie outright; as usual, his lies were chiefly implicit.

  Reluctantly, McCarty faced Mills. "I guess the world isn't as simple as I'd like," he sighed, fashioning a shrug that ingratiated him to audiences; awkward, gangling, suggestive of a reticent mind in the big rawboned body. "I appreciate your takin' your own time on this, Mr. Mills. A lot of men wouldn't bother."

  "A lot of men don't succeed," Mills replied evenly, with a light touch at McCarty's elbow, steering him to the door. Boren Mills was one of those compact models that did not seem diminished when standing among taller men. With a forefinger he indicated the needlepoint legend framed behind his rosewood desk: SURPRISE IS A DIRTY WORD. "See that your programming people check your scripts from now on. We can do without any more surprises on the Ora McCarty Devotional Hour."

  "That goes without saying," McCarty murmured.

  "Nothing goes without saying," Mills replied. "That's the essence of written contracts. Read the prohibited list, Ora."

  Damn the man, thought McCarty, and tried to respond lightly as he stood in the doorway: "You've made me a believer, Mr. Mills. If I lost network support by stickin' a burr under the LDS's saddle blanket, I'd wind up so far out in the sticks you couldn't find me with a Search & Rescue team."

  "Nicely put," Mills grinned, and terminated the interview. Mills was still chuckling to himself as he returned to his desk, knowing that McCarty could not fully appreciate his own jest. If the federally-funded Search & Rescue ever did seek the reverend Ora McCarty, McCarty would not survive that search.

  CHAPTER 2

  Ted Quantrill was not yet twenty-one, Marbrye Sanger was twenty-four; and their entwined communion was as old as humankind. Their Search & Rescue uniforms lay near, boot-tips aligned with unconscious military precision. Had the lovers stood erect there would not have been a centimeter's difference in their heights, for the long taper of her questing fingers was repeated in the span of her arms, the extraordinary length of her legs. Yet many men would have been reluctant, viewing her naked splendor, to seek her embrace. Those long limbs revealed the muscles of an athlete, the physical equal of the youth who shared her delight. Only in the upper body could his sinew overmatch hers.

  Presently she smiled for him, her eyes heavy-lidded through an errant lock of chestnut hair, and arched against him as she felt his thrusts quicken. At his faint moan she pressed a forefinger against his open mouth, now grinning, teasing him, then reaching down with her other hand to milk his masculinity. At the same moment she made her eyes wide, her mouth a tiny V of innocence, brows elevated as if to ask, 'who, me'?

  Gritting his teeth, laughing softly through the pulses of his own climax, he nodded back a silent, 'yes you'.

  You, you and I, we together. They lay, mouths open to silence their breathing, her roan-flecked eyes interlocked with the startling green of his own.

  Then he rolled slightly to one side, brought his right hand up, said in sign-talk: "
I died. You?"

  She would not lie to him about the little things. Signing in the bastard dialect they had learned while still in Army Intelligence: No. Doesn't matter. Love to watch you."

  It was the only use either of them dared make of the heart-touch gesture, love. Each of them — mistakenly — assumed the other would recoil from overt words of tenderness.

  "I'm only a sex object," he signed in mock dejection.

  "A killing object. You died, remember?" Then she thought of something else; bit her lower lip.

  "Problem," he signed. Not a question, but his eyes probed.

  She nodded. Carefully, she placed a strong hand against his breast, rolled to one side, breathed in the conifer-spiced evening air of northern Wyoming highlands. Signing: "My last hit. They always promised we'd never get a mission against someone we know."

  "So?"

  "I knew her— second-hand."

  There was really nothing he could do about it but: "Sorry," he signed.

  Momentarily then she wanted him to feel the full impact, and spelled it out for him. "Dr. Catherine Palma."

  Quantrill froze. He had known the woman well, a stolid, fiftyish medic who'd risked lingering death in the fight against Chinese plague during the war. Palma, a mother-figure for him before his enlistment at age fifteen. He'd mentioned Palma to Sanger on many occasions, always silently by necessity. The late Palma? In a soundless agony he balled his fists, rolled onto his back, eyes closed.

  Sanger placed her hand on his breast as if to smooth away the tendons that stood out, fanning inward and up from pectorals to throat. Then she coughed, a demand for attention.

  When he opened his eyes again she was smiling, almost in apology. "I suspect she was on guard," said the lithe fingers. "Rebel medic now; couldn't find her." About the big things, she had to lie.

  "Bitch. Could've told me an easier way."

  "Sorry; honestly," she signed in shame.

  Suddenly suspicious, he squinted as his hands said, "Really couldn't find her? Or wouldn't?"

  " Think I want to die? Tried my best," she lied again.

  His exhalation lasted at least five seconds. "I believe you."

  Now she was up on one elbow, frantic with the notion that he might not believe her. They were both professionals; it was his duty to report suspicions, even such a one as this. Perhaps she could phrase it in a way to compel belief. "Listen hotsy; better believe me. If you ever deliberately funk a mission, make sure you tell me first."

  "Why?"

  "Because I want you to get it from friendly fire," said graceful hands that could kill him as easily as caress him.

  CHAPTER 3

  Search & Rescue was both highly publicized and saturated in secrecy. Boren Mills was one of a dozen outside S & R ranks who knew its double purpose. At war's end in 1998 America's great Mormon president, Yale Collier, had envisioned a regular cadre of young civilians who would operate directly under executive orders, and who would be superbly trained to rescue citizens in mortal trouble. Freeway overpasses, weakened years before by nuclear blasts, still occasionally collapsed without warning — as did buildings, dams, and underground structures. Along the eastern border of Streamlined America, hotspots of paranthrax sometimes appeared, usually borne by some illegal immigrant from the Confederation East of the Mississippi River. Along the vaguely-defined southern border region called Wild Country, ranchers from Texas to the San Joaquin valley appealed for help against a variety of deadly problems.

  To the North, Canada now controlled what had once been most of the northern U. S. until the keratophagic staph plague scare during the great war; and along that border, the problems were less obvious.

  Collier had become infused with a dream that Streamlined America, under the Mormon stewardship of his administration and those groomed to follow, would be rebuilt into the true Zion. But Yale Collier had been infused with cancer, too. He lived long enough to see his Search & Rescue teams become a symbol of young American altruism and audacity, and he entrusted the development of S & R

  to his successor, Blanton Young. Collier was spared any suspicion that Young might have his own ideas about the uses to which a small cadre of daredevils might be put.

  Shortly after the death of Yale Collier in 1999, President Young exercised some executive options.

  Search & Rescue's three hundred regulars already had Loring Aircraft's sleekest new close-support sprint choppers, with the shrouded fans swiveling on stubby wingtips to provide both helicopter modes and level flight in excess of six hundred kph — and the hell with fuel consumption.

  They already got the best training: paramedic skills, alpine and desert survival courses, flood and mine disaster seminars. Their equipment was already the latest, including dress and mission uniforms familiar to millions who saw holovised rescues to the greater glory of Blanton Young and his Federalist party.

  What S & R did not initially have, — what the sainted Collier had not wanted it to have, as an arm reporting only to the Chief Executive — was a covert military charter. Blanton Young wasted no time in swelling the S & R ranks with another select group which had been attached to Army Intelligence during the war. The group had been known to its members as T Section; T, as in 'terminate'.

  Survivors of T Section were almost all wary youthful specimens to whom the quick covert kill was paramount, and these few became S & R's rovers. Regulars gave each other nicknames. Rovers did not answer to nicknames, scorning even the small luxury of feeling damned together. Quantrill was only Quantrill; Sanger only Sanger.

  Blanton Young did not regard himself as a heretic. He took great pains to show that one could remain on the church's Council of Apostles while serving as the nation's chief executive. America was recovering; and as always during a reconstruction period, the government relaxed its restrictions on business and industry. And individual freedoms? That was something else again.

  An industrial spy, a union organizer, or an anti-Mormon activist was more likely to disappear than to face public trial. The President viewed his S & R cadre as a nicely-balanced tool. Regular missions, eighty per cent of the total, searched out the vulnerable and rescued individuals. The rover missions searched out dissidents and rescued the status quo. So far, Young's hit team was barely a rumor even among grumbling Catholics and members of masonic orders. Certainly the regular S & R members would not broach the secret because they did not share it. Just as certainly the assassins would not divulge it; each of them still carried small mastoid-implant transceivers, 'critics', with self-destruct charges that could drive a gram of debris into the brain with the same results as an explosive bullet.

  The critic had been a wartime innovation and, working with Naval Intelligence, Boren Mills was as quick as Young to see the potential peacetime uses of this tiny, deadly audio monitor buried behind the ears of agents thoroughly trained in single combat. If government and business found common cause, they could also share common remedies. When both could fly the banners of a popular religious movement, a certain amount of excess could be made palatable to the public.

  This was not to say that most Mormons, guided by their Council of Apostles, sought a repressive society.

  In a genuine ecumenical spirit, LDS tithes helped defray the costs of some protestant sects and promoted open forums for debate. The church had even donated campaign contributions to some fence-straddling legislators of the Independent party, though Indys were similar to Democrats of the prewar era, many of them openly critical of this growing connection between the state and the church of the LDS.

  It was not the fault of devout Mormons if open debate helped pinpoint certain rabble-rousers who might, if they proved both troublesome and refractory, simply disappear while crossing the path of an S & R rover.

  CHAPTER 4

  Quantrill felt the sprint chopper lurch in treacherous downdrafts behind Cloud Peak, wrestled his backpac into place without disconnecting his seat harness. "Sorry 'bout that," said the voice of Miles Grenier in his headset
. "These ugly birds are too sensitive with a light load."

  Like all regular S & R pilots, Grenier disparaged the beauty of his sprint chopper and his expertise in flying it, as a good Mormon curb against excessive pride. Grenier did not ask why he'd been ordered to leave the alpine survival exercises near Sheridan, Wyoming to drop this lone S & R/over into broken country to the South.

  For an S & R regular, the primary virtues were skill, unquestioning obedience, a good nature, and good looks — in that order. Rovers were a phylum apart. The rovers trained first with one team, then another.

  They seldom talked about their ‘surveillance' sorties and were clearly not LDS in outlook. For a rover, good looks were secondary and good nature just about nonexistent. Rovers had been known to rage against a mission, to swill illegal hard liquor, even to grow combative. The one thing a rover almost never did was to encourage close friendship with regulars or, so far as Grenier knew, anybody else.

  Of course some rovers seemed to relax among themselves, thought Grenier. Quantrill, the youngest rover of them all, definitely seemed to unwind in the company of that gorgeous creature, Marbrye Sanger, during paradrop practice into rotting snow in the Bighorn National Forest.

  Sanger, one of the half-dozen female rovers, could have had all the friends she wanted merely by a toss of those chestnut curls or a flirt of the long strong legs. Instead, she spent much of her time as companion to the silent, muscular Quantrill. Grenier thought them an unlikely pair: Sanger in her mid-twenties, elegant even in her mottled coverall, vivacious on a team problem but otherwise aloof. Ted Quantrill, and scarcely out of his teens, a sturdy churl of Sanger's height with chilled creme de menthe eyes and a talent for doing nothing until the last possible second. When Quantrill moved, you knew he'd been thinking about the problem; the little son of perdition might make a botch of it the first time, but it was the fastest botch anybody could ask for. The second time — with a rappel, recovery winch, whatever — he was usually perfect. And quicker still. Grenier decided that Quantrill had already had his second time with Sanger, and cheerfully damned him for getting there first. But then, Sanger was a rover, too…