Systemic Shock tq-1 Read online

  "How do I get outa this chickenshit outfit," Ted grinned as they pulled the tent fabric taut. No answer beyond a smile. Tom Schell flipped his version of the scout salute from one buttock and wandered off to help elsewhere, leaving Ted to pound anchor stakes. Ray had forgotten the stakes, sidling toward the big campfire site where Little was talking with the strangers.

  When he finished, Ted fluffed his mummybag into the sheltering hemisphere of fabric. He found Ray with the others, who by now had abandoned their weiner roast to listen to the tall stranger and to gawk wistfully at his two stalwart daughters. “We'll sleep on the trail if we have to," the man was saying. "We're taking the first ride back toward Huntsville, Mr. Little. I hope it's still there tomorrow."

  "We've got a radio too. “Purvis Little did not try to hide his irritation. "I heard all about that tanker. I'm sure it has nothing to do with that mess in India and even if it did, you're only scaring the boys."

  A murmur of denial swelled around him; no young male liked to let his visceral butterflies flutter before young females. The stranger said, “I'm scared," in a shaky basso, “and I'd like to see all of us go back together. If there's to be a war, we should be with our families."

  "Good luck on the trail," Little replied, his hands urging the man and his silent daughters toward the path. Then he added, with insight rare for him: "If there's another war, those families would be better off here than in Huntsville, or any other big city."

  The older scouts were plainly disappointed to see the girls striding from sight in the afterlight. “What the heck was that all about," Ted asked.

  "Beats me," said Thad Young. "What's an escalation syndrome?"

  "It's when one government tries to hit back at another one," Ray said, "and hits too hard."

  "Like Torquemada Atkinson," Thad guessed.

  Ray, following Ted back to their tent: "Naw. That's annihilation.” Pleased with his definitions, Ray Kenney did not realize that the first was genesis of the second.

  Chapter Seven

  The RUS vessel Purukhaut Tuzhauliye nosed into the Arctic Ocean, two days out of the Yenisey Gulf, early Saturday morning with nearly two hundred thousand tons of heavy Siberian crude scheduled for the White Sea and Archangelsk. That was by Russian reckoning; the Chinese had scheduled her up the escalator.

  The P. Tuzhauliye's cargo had been extracted from beneath treacherously shifting, half-frozen peat in the oil fields near Dudinka and, by Siberian standards, was precious stuff. The ship's captain conned her carefully through the Kara Sea shallows, quickened her diesels south of Novaya Zemlya Island, neared the dropoff of the continental shelf where, many fathoms deep, something huge and hostile lay waiting.

  Chapter Eight

  Eight o'clock in the morning, or almost any other time, off Novaya Zemlya was broad daylight in August. Transmuted to a campsite near Clingman's Dome in the Smoky Mountains, that same instant was illuminated only by dying embers of a showy, wasteful Friday night campfire. While Wayne Atkinson outlined the sport he proposed the following day with the help of Joey and Tom, a 'Bulgarian' radioman's assistant on the P. Tuzhauliye received a signal through his microwave unit.

  Wayne did not bother to tell his confederates that hazing Ray Kenney might bring on violence with Ted Quantrill. The radioman's assistant had not told anyone his secrets, either. One, that he had been raised an Albanian, scornful of Russians; two, that he had emplaced explosives with remote detonators on every communication device he could find aboard ship, including sonar; and three, that he was one of Peking's many agents in place. The Albanian mole had been in place for over a year. Wayne Atkinson had been enjoying the sleep of the innocent for only a few minutes when, a continent and an ocean beyond, the Albanian paused at his breakfast in the ship's mess.

  After a moment the man checked his watch, decided against filling his belly because of the icy water he expected to feel soon, sought his exposure gear, then paid attention to his receiver again. He encoded a signal on his watch while standing in the shadow of the broad fo'c'sle, estimating his chances of surviving the wake of 50,000 horsepower screws after a free leap of ten meters from deck to salt water.

  From widely-spaced points down the length of the four-block-long tanker came sounds, hardly more than echoes, of muffled detonations. The Albanian eased himself over the rail, inhaled deeply, and leaped out as far as adrenaline could carry him.

  The Albanian heard faint alarm hoots over the splash of his own struggle and the hissing passage of the P. Tuzhauliye, braced himself to enter the great vessel's wake, then felt a series of thudding impacts through the water. More alarms were going off aboard ship, which began to settle visibly as gigantic bubbles burst around her.

  In itself, the ship's wake would not have been fatal. The Albanian resurfaced, pulled the 'D' ring on his flotation device, then felt it ripped from his benumbed hands by an enormous eddy — the kind of eddy that might accompany the sudden sinking of four square city blocks. The inflating raft fled in the direction of the P. Tuzhauliye's radar mast which was rapidly submerging and, as the Albanian gasped, he rolled and strangled on ice brine. He was not as lucky as the Grenadan agent on the Cambio Justo, who had been picked up alive by a small submarine tug.

  Concrete ships were well-known to westerners. But the first oil tankers had been Chinese junks and so were the first submersibles expressly designed to steal a supertanker intact. For all their burgeoning industry, the Chinese owed much to friendly Japanese shipbuilders. Early semisubmersible drill rigs such as the Aleutian Key, designed in New Orleans, had been built by the Japanese a full generation before. Even the details of omnithrustor propulsion, long a feature of seagoing drill rigs, were employed. Indeed, the Chinese craft had been perfected while transporting oil from wellheads in the East China Sea. Enormous turbine-driven concrete caissons fitted with half-acre suction pads on hydraulic rams, the Chinese submersibles were capable of changing from strongly negative to positive buoyancy in seconds. Or vice-versa. Like the Great Wall and SinoInd pipeline, these craft were both vast and conceptually simple. The most complicated detail was sliding the filmy half-kilometer plastic condom over the submersible and its prey by means of small submarine tugs. No oil slick traced the passage of the drowned tanker as she was borne under polar ice to her final resting place on the shallow undersea Yermak Plateau, sixteen hundred klicks distant.

  Though the P. Tuzhauliye was never found, the Cambio Justo would be located four years hence near Matanzas, Cuba. In both cases, the Chinese saw to it that the tanker was soon minus her crude oil, and plus a great deal of salt water.

  Chapter Nine

  Purvis Little finished gnawing a breakfast chickenbone and began on a cuticle. Ted Quantrill's radio finished its newscast as the scoutmaster turned to his Eagle scout. “First time I've ever been sorry I didn't bring a transceiver. Maybe I'd best hike to the Ranger Station and call some of the parents."

  "I'll hold the fort here," said Wayne Atkinson. And make war on some of our little Indians, he added to himself.

  Thad Young took his skillet from the coals and wandered from Little's vicinity spooning Stroganoff. In common with most twelve-year-olds, Thad had bizarre notions about breakfast. He listened to Ted and Ray argue the demerits of ashes in their omelet, then remembered the morning newscast and pointed his spoon at Ray. "What's a measured reprisal?"

  Blink. "Uhh — exactly two litres of shit in Atkinson's hat," Ray said. "I dunno, Thad; where'd you hear it?"

  "Oh, the President's afraid the Russians won't make a measured reprisal. What're you laughing about, Teddy, it's your radio they're listening to."

  Ted jogged Ray's shoulder in rough endorsement of the joke, then turned serious. "I think it's about that missing tanker; a lot of politics in the air. My dad'll find the tanker, wait and see."

  “In the Arctic? This is another one,” Thad said, with a roll of his eyes. “Mr. Little is gonna hike out and see about it. Or somethin',” he added, consigning all adult motives to limbo.
/>   The warble of Little's whistle convened the troop a few minutes later. Nothing to worry about, said Little, looking worried; but while he visited the ranger station, the troop would be in Wayne Atkinson's care. There were to be no excursions far from camp, and — a hesitation — their gear should be packed in case they had to move to another site.

  "I'll bet," said Ray as they watched Little's head bob from sight. "A tenner says we're going home."

  "Knock it off, Kenney," from the gangling Joey Cameron. Joey, no great mental specimen, hewed to one cardinal principle: he worshipped authority. Joey enforced his religion whenever possible.

  Ray again: “Betcha I'm right. We won't even get to swim in the pond."

  "I'll throw you in if you don't strike that tent and pack up." With that, Joey swept his brogan toward a tent stake. They all heard the snap as the stiffener rod broke near the stake.

  Ted came to his feet with an anguished, "Cameron, you klutz! That's my—"

  Joey Cameron caught Ted off-balance with a big hand on his breastbone, pushed the smaller youth who fell backward over a log. "That's your tough luck," he said. He had intended neither the injury nor the insult, had acted on impulse. But Joey patterned his behavior on Wayne's. Contrition was somehow a weakness to be avoided.

  “We can fix it," Ray said quickly, fearful that Ted might come up swinging. He extended his hand to his friend, watched Joey back away with long careful strides, managed to deflect Ted from anger as they studied instructions and ferrules in the mending kit.

  In half an hour the rod was repaired, their gear repacked in backpacks. Robbie and Tim Calhoun, thirteen-year-old twins, aided in rigging a polymer line between trees so that packs could be hung above the range of marauding ants. Robbie nodded, satisfied. "Now let's take a swim. Joey can be lifeguard."

  "Who'll guard his life," Ted muttered, half in jest.

  Ray patted the air. "Forget it, Teddy. You're like the damn' Russians, trying to make a war out of an accident."

  "And you're like the damn' UN, trying to get me to do nothing and hiding it with big words." The Calhoun twins stood listening, mystified.

  "You mean like 'measured reprisal'? Just remember to measure Joey Cameron first, Teddy. He's a klick high and a year older.”

  "So?" Next Thursday I'll be a year older too."

  "You'll be a few days older, just like everybody else. Come on, let's see how deep the pond is."

  The pond had been dammed a century before; local flat stones fitted by long-dead hands of pioneers. Descendants of those folk still lived nearby in the valleys, with the help of legislation in Tennessee and North Carolina. Sites in Utah, Idaho and Oregon were also set aside for people who kept the old ways; living anachronisms who spun their own cloth, cured their own meat, distilled their own whiskey. There were still other repositories of ancient crafts and ethics in the north among the Amish, in the west among separatists from Mormonism, and in the southwest among latino Catholics, Amerinds, and just plain ornery Texans. City-bred in Raleigh, Ted Quantrill knew little about the back-country ways in his own region and next to nothing about those beyond it. Late Saturday morning, he only knew the sun felt good on his back as he spread himself to dry on moss-crusted stones after his swim.

  Gabe Hooker was a boy who went along. He was roughly Ted's age and size, with the special talent for being agreeable. Across the pond, affable Gabe basked in the momentary favor of Wayne Atkinson. He heard Wayne suggest a cleanup project for the tenderfeet back at the campsite, and found himself selected as leader of the cleanup. Gabe rounded up the neophytes and went along.

  Ted Quantrill's first intuition came with the silence, and the repeated soughing gasp that punctuated it. He opened one eye, surveyed an apparently empty pond, half-dozed again. He enjoyed the breeze tingly-cool on naked arms; lay cat-smug and mindless as a stone in celebration of idleness. During the early part of the summer Ted had worked half-days at a Raleigh pool, checking filters and diving for lost objects, scrubbing concrete and learning to catnap. And losing baby fat, and gaining inches in height. Unnoticed to himself, Ted was emerging from the cocoon of boyhood. Wayne Atkinson had noticed it — which explains why he was drowning Ray Kenney.

  Again the quiet cough, a wheezing word through water. Ted opened the eye again, moved his head very slightly. Twenty meters away was Tom Schell, legs dangling from the lip of mossy stones into deep water at the dam. Tom frowned down at Joey Cameron, neck-deep in water, and at Atkinson whose muscular left arm encircled a log. Wayne's right arm, and both of Joey's, were busy.

  "Let him up a minute," Tom urged quietly. "He's swallowed water twice."

  "You afraid pissant Quantrill will hear?" Atkinson sneered at Tom Schell, hauled something to the surface, let it burble.

  “You want him to?" Tom glanced quickly at Ted, saw no movement.

  Wayne and Joey glanced too. “Who cares,” Wayne said, caring a great deal. The Kenney kid had allowed himself to be drawn into the game, duck and be ducked, and had realized too late that Wayne had vicious ideas about its outcome. “You're the little shit that gave me that nickname, aren't you?"

  No answer. Schell, reaching out: "Enough's enough, Wayne."

  Joey saw his leader nod, wrestled a limply-moving mass to the lip of the dam. Ted Quantrill recognized the face of Ray Kenney as it drooled water.

  Flashes of successive thought rapid-fired through Ted's mind. Purvis Little: no help there. Ray was coughing and gagging as Schell dragged him from the water. Schell, Cameron and Atkinson had deliberately set the stage with only one witness, or at least Atkinson had, and none of them doubted that they could overpower Ray and Ted together. Quantrill went to a crouch inhaling deeply, quietly, hyperventilating as he ran on silent feet. Joey saw him then, yelled an alarm in time for Wayne Atkinson to turn.

  Quantrill was unsure of the murky bottom and chose to leap feet-first. He chose to plant one foot where Joey's solar plexus should be, and made his next choice in grabbing the handiest piece of Atkinson. It happened to be the sleek blond hair.

  Ted's inertia carried him past them and his tactical instinct made him slide behind Atkinson as he gripped and shook the blond mop underwater. He hammered at the face with his free hand, knew from the sodden impacts that his fist caused little damage, released his grip, thrust away and surfaced.

  Atkinson emerged facing Joey Cameron, dodged a roundhouse swing by his friend. "It's me, you fucker," he sputtered, and whirled to find Ted.

  Their quarry made his eyes wide, began to swim backward into deeper water bearing all the stigmata of terror. Even Joey Cameron was not tall enough to stand on the bottom farther out.

  A brave scenario occurred to Mr. Little's pride. “Stay put, this 'un's mine," said Atkinson, who was a fair swimmer.

  Ted continued his inhale-exhale cycles; noted that Ray ivcnney was trying to sit up as Joey climbed onto the dam. Dirty water hid his legs as Ted drew them up to his chest, still simulating a poor backstroke, mimicking mortal fear of the older youth. Atkinson swam in a fast crawl, grinned, paused to enjoy the moment as he reached for Ted Quantrill's hair. The doubled blow of Quantrill's heels onto his shoulder and sternum knocked him nearly unconscious.

  Wayne blanched, shook a mist of pain from his eyes. "For that," he began, then realized that Quantrill had used the double kick to start a backward somersault. Wayne kicked hard, encountered nothing, then felt himself again dragged backward by his hair. He managed to gargle Joey's name before being hauled under, inhaling more water than air as he gasped. His thighs were scissored by another's, his right hand cruelly twisted by another's, his world a light-and-shadow swirl of horror until his groping left hand found another's locked in his hair. Then Atkinson's head was free, but both arms were now pinioned by another's, and in his spinning choking confusion he tried to breathe. It was not a very smart move.

  When Quantrill felt his struggling burden grow spastic, less patterned in its panic, he released it and treaded water calmly as Atkinson, sobbing, floundered toward sh
ore. Joey Cameron thought about loyalty instead of terrain and stalked Quantrill across the pond. Here the silt was unroiled. Joey could see the stones on the bottom. He did not see the one Quantrill was holding until it crashed under his chin, and from that instant his vision improved remarkably. He saw that a fist with a rock in it beats a long advantage in reach, and he saw the futility of swinging on someone you cannot find when your eyes are swollen shut and your opponent waits to slash like a barracuda.

  Throughout the fight, Quantrill coupled his terrible slashing fury with utter silence as he mastered the urge to weep in rage, and with an increasing clarity of purpose. The cries and sobs that drew younger boys back to the pond issued from older throats than his. By the time Ted Quantrill chased a galloping blood-streaming Joey Cameron to shore, he was dimly aware that he had done several things right; things that were new to him but that seemed very old and appropriate.

  Item: let the other guy make all the noise. You know how he's taking it, and your silence rattles him.

  Item: make the other guy fight your fight in a setting you choose.

  Item: one enemy at a time, please.

  Item: don't expect help from weak friends.

  Item: don't expect thanks, either. Your friends may not see it the way you do.

  Tom Schell qualified for a merit badge in first aid that day; would have qualified for another if they gave them for diplomacy. Tom listened to the wound-licking growls of Atkinson and Cameron, kept his own counsel, and found Ted nursing skinned knuckles at the pond. "You won't get a date with Eve Simpson for that dumb stunt," he said, invoking the name of a buxom teen-aged holovision star. "Wayne was just teaching Ray a lesson. When Little gets back he's gonna be plain pissed off.”

  “Let him take it out on Wayne. I did," Quantrill smiled.

  This kid is all wire and ice water, thought Schell, staring at Quantrill as if seeing him for the first time. The chill down his back only aggravated Schell. “Su-u-ure. And why'd you tell the twins about your goddam birthday? They passed it along. A word to the wise, Teddy.” Tom Schell shook his head as though superior to all that had happened, as though he had not lent tacit support to the worst of it.