Systemic Shock (2 page)

With one well-placed demolition device just upline from a pumping station, the RUS severed water and oil conduits. Automatic cutoffs could not prevent the immediate loss of fifty thousand barrels of crude oil, which gravity-flowed from its conduit and spread atop the water as it burned. The RUS had well and truly blown the cover of the SinoInd conduit. Now, everybody's fat would sizzle in that fire.

The train clung to its monorail and hummed an electric song as it fled in a lateral arc from Raleigh past Winston-Salem. The scoutmaster, Little, was too busy controlling sixteen of his charges to worry about the seventeenth. The Quantrill boy lazed alone by a window, one hand cupped to his ear, watching an unusual volume of traffic stream near their track that overhung the highway median strip. As always, most highway traffic was cargo; some old diesels, mostly short-haul electrics. But today a surprising number of private cars shared the freeway.

Bustling down the aisle, Purvis Little promised himself to confiscate the Quantrill radio, which defied Little's orders on a pack trip.

Ray Kenney flopped into the seat next to Ted, jabbed an obscene finger in Little's direction. “Old fart, he muttered; "took my translator. Said we were only looking for the dirty words."

Quietly, without stirring: "Weren't you?"

"If I'm gonna learn the language, I gotta know 'em all," Ray said, innocence spread across the pinched features.

Ted smiled at the tacit admission. What Ray lacked in muscle and coordination, he made up by honing his tongue. If words were muscle, Ray Kenney could outrun the monorail.

Ray leaned toward his friend, pretended to stare at the traffic, and whispered. "Got a fiver? Wayne's gonna buy some joints in Asheville. If you want in, I can fix it."

Ted considered the idea. A few tokes by the underaged on a weed in a sleeping bag was nothing new, a token rebellion to relieve chafing under Little's authority. But Wayne Atkinson, their only Eagle scout, seldom did favors without three hidden reasons for them. Atkinson probably had the joints already. "I'll pass, Ray. Thanks anyway."

"Scared?" Ray caught the cool glance from Ted Quantrill's mint-green eyes. The scar over Ted's nose and the sturdy limbs furthered the impression that Ted did not yield easily to fear. He might, however, yield to a claim of it. "Wayne isn't scared. He's cool, he never gets caught."

"But you do; you're not Little's pride and joy."

"If I had merit badges coming out of my ass like Wayne does," Ray began, and then jerked around.

There was no way to tell how many seconds Little had been standing behind them. Ray braced his knees against the seat ahead, thrust his hands between his thighs, slumped and stared at nothing.

"I'll take that radio, Quantrill," said the scoutmaster after waiting long enough to make Ray Kenney sweat. He took the radio, slipped it into his shirt pocket, pursed his zealot lips. "Was it reggae jazz, or polluting your mind with a porn station?"

Not sullen, but weary: "Just a newscast, Mr. Little."

"Oh, no doubt," said Little, suddenly favoring Ray Kenney with a we-know-better smirk. "How will we ever explain your sudden interest in current events, Quantrill?"

Little turned away expecting no answer. He was halfway to his seat when Ted replied, "No mystery, Mr. Little. My father's in the Reserve, flies patrol from Key West to Norfolk. And there's a big tanker gone off the Florida coast."

Little frowned. "Sunk, you say?"

"Just gone; disappeared." Ted's shrug implied,
you tell me, you've got the radio
.

"Get your gear together, boys," Little called. “Asheville is the next stop." Then he hurried to his seat, fumbled in his shirt pocket, and cupped one hand to his ear.

Ted Quantrill was wrong; a compelling mystery
was
unfolding in the Florida Strait sea lanes. The tanker
Cambio Justo
, under Panamanian registry, had last been reported off Long Key, lumbering north toward Hampton Roads with a quarter-million deadweight tons of Mexican crude oil in her guts. The
Cambio Justo
could hardly run aground in four-hundred-fathom straits. She could not just fly away, nor could she evade satellite surveillance while she thrummed over the surface of a calm sea. But she could always sink.

Two hours after the
Cambio Justo
vanished, a sinking was everybody's best guess, and as far as it went that guess was dead accurate. What no newsman had guessed yet was that she had not sunk very far.

The interurban coach disgorged Little's brood in Cherokee. From there to Newfound Gap they invested an old diesel bus with their high spirits. At the Tennessee border they reached the old Appalachian Trail, streamed off the bus, watched the vehicle drone up a switchback and out of sight. The bright orange paint and the acrid stink of diesel exhaust bespoke a familiar world that, for a few of them, vanished with the bus as completely as had the
Cambio Justo
—and for the same reasons.

"Wait up," Ray Kenney puffed as the youths ambled down the trail under a canopy of oak, hemlock and pine. He pulled a light windbreaker from his pack, zipped it over slender limbs as Ted Quantrill sniffed the sweet tang of conifers in the mountain air.

"Move it, Kenney," a voice commanded from behind. Wayne Atkinson, the oldest of the boy's, enjoy ed a number of advantages in Little's troop. Wayne wouldn't have said just what they were; not
couldn't
, but
wouldn't
. His rearguard position was one of responsibility, which Wayne accepted because it also carried great authority. Below average height for his age, he was strongly built, fresh-faced, button-bright and sixteen. Wayne Atkinson gave the impression that he was younger, which enhanced his image to adults. The biggest members of the troop, Joey Cameron and Tom Schell, accepted Wayne's intellectual leadership without qualm and, because they could look down on the top of his head, without fear. Among themselves, the smaller boys called him 'Torquemada'.

Ray was already shrugging his backpack into place when the last of the others eased past on the narrow trail and Atkinson got within jostling distance. Lazily, self-assured: "If your ass is on the trail at sundown, I get to kick it." He followed this promise with a push and Ray, stumbling, trotted forward.

Atkinson reached toward Ted Quantrill with a glance, let his arm drop again, motioned Ted ahead. Ted moved off, trotting after Ray, leaving Atkinson to ponder the moment. Quantrill's part-time job at the swimming pool had toned his body, added some muscle, subtracted some humility. Sooner or later that kind of insolence could infect others, even little twits like Ray Kenney, unless stern measures were taken. Wayne considered the possibilities, pleased with his position, able to see the others ahead who could not see him. It would be necessary to enlist Joey and Tom, just to be sure; and they could provoke the Quantrill kid by using his little pal Kenney as bait. All this required isolation from Purvis Little, who would sooner accept the word of his Eagle scout than that of God Almighty. Wayne's roles at award ceremonies reflected glory on his scoutmaster, and God had never seen fit to do much of that.

To give Little his due, he took his duties seriously and imagined that he was wise. He called rest stops whenever Thad Young faltered. The spindly Thad, long on courage but short on wind, made every march a metaphor of the public education system: everyone proceeded at the pace of the slowest.

The summer sun had disappeared below Thunderhead Mountain, far to their west, before Little reached their campsite near a sparkling creek. The National Park Service still kept some areas pristine; no plumbing, no cabins. The more experienced youths erected their igloo tents quickly to escape the cutting edge of an evening breeze, then emerged again, grumbling, in aid of the fumble-fingered.

Tom Schell slapped good-naturedly at Ted's hand. “Take it easy with that stiffener rod," he said, helping guide it through a tube in the tent fabric. “It's carbon filament. Bust it and it's hell to repair."

"Thanks. It's brand-new; an advance birthday present," Ted replied, imitating Schell's deft handiwork.

The Schell hands were still for a moment. “If you have a birthday up here, I don't wanta know about it."

Ted thought about that. "Aw, birthday hazing is kind of fun."

"Not if Wayne's got it in for you. Look: you've got your friends and I have mine, Teddy. If you're smart, you won't talk about birthdays until we're back in Raleigh."

"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.

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.

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.