Dean Ing - Systemic Shock

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PART I: VICTIMS

Chapter 1

In early August of 1996 the Atlantic states baked like some vast piecrust under a paralyzing heat

wave. It moved scoutmaster Purvis Little, in Raleigh, to plan the Smoky Mountain pack trip that

would save a few lives. It also moved the President of the United States to his retreat in the

Shenandoah hills.

The weather relented on the evening of Friday, the ninth. Young Ted Quantrill hardly noticed, racing

home after his troop meeting in Raleigh, because he knew he'd have to politick for that pack trip.

The President noticed it still less; despite the air conditioning in his hoverchopper, a tiara of sweat

beaded his balding head. The bulletin that had drawn him back to Washington suggested

complications in the sharp new rise of foreign oil prices; a rise that in itself further impeded his race

for reelection against Utah's Senator Yale Collier. The President considered Yale Collier a

charismatic fool. Ted Quantrill's parents thought the same of scoutmaster Little. In any event, a

modest proportion of fools would survive the next week, while some of their critics would die.

Chapter 2

Through twenty years and three administrations, pundits in American government had watched

helplessly as the Socialist Party of China wooed lubricious favors from the Middle East. Every few

years some think-tank would announce that global addiction to oil was on the wane, thanks to this

or that alternative energy source. Just as regularly, the thinkers went into the tank. Fusion was still

an elusive technique. New fission plants had been banned in the UN General Assembly after the

pandemic of fear that peaked in 1994. Loss of coolant (Alabama, '87), outgassing (Wales, '91),

partial meltdown (Karachi, '93), and accidental scatter of confined radioactive waste (Honshu, '89;

Connecticut, Shantung, '94) had taken only a few hundred lives—far fewer than, say, offshore oil

rigs had taken.

But the fission boojum had scared the bejeezus out of voters from Reykjavik to Christchurch, and

even autocrats reluctantly agreed to decommission some of their reactors. It was not that fission

plants no longer existed, but they were fewer while power requirements grew.

If the million-plus deaths from the Birmingham and Minsk bombs of '85 added to the clamor against

fission plants, that connection was hard to find. A million deliberate killings was human nature

acceptable to the public, while a few hundred accidental killings composed a goad toward reform.

Industrialized nations rushed to develop clean power sources. Meanwhile, they continued to burn

petroleum.

Direct solar conversion, wind-driven generators, and alternative chemical fuels plugged part of the

energy gap, while the price of energy made conservationists of most Americans. Still, fossil fuel

remained a favored energy source: storable, compact, simple. While developing one's own oil

resources, one was wise to import as much as practicable. So said the Chinese; so said we all. As

early as 1979 China's ruling party, the SPC, served notice of its intent to anyone who might be

paying attention. The SPC's official news agency, Xinhua, said:

Nearly 160 Moslem mosques of the autonomous Ningxia Hui region of Northwest China are being

reopened… after damage to varying degrees in the past few years. The mosques are under repair

with government funds, including the famed Yinchuan edifice and a Tonxin mosque known to be

800 years old.

And again:

The Koran, the sacred book of Islam, is now being retranslated into Chinese…

Though riddled with dissent on many topics, the Associated Islamic Republics was quick to imply

devout thanks to China for her turnabout. The SPC could pivot as effortlessly on oil as anybody,

with better coordination than the reconstituted, ham-fisted Russian Union of Soviets.

The abortive NATO-USSR conflict of 1985 has been chronicled elsewhere by Hackett, et al.

Doubtless it won the popular title of World War Three on the basis of the nuclear exchange that

swapped Birmingham in England for Minsk in Byelorussia before the collapse of the USSR. The

newer and smaller RUS retained the frozen mineral wealth of Siberia; had lost nothing directly to

China. But the lands lost to the RUS were all in the temperate zone where grain—and Islam—could

be grown, and even exported.

No war, or any other movement, could be considered truly worldwide if it did not directly involve

the two billion residents of China and India. Between 1985 and 1996, China's heavy industry

expanded with Chinese supertugs towing icebergs to (ex-Saudi) Arabian shores, bringing

desalinization equipment to rival Israel's and aiding the transformation of desert wastes. If a few

million Chinese suffered from lack of that equipment in 1995, the SPC could wax philosophical so

long as those old Japanese-built oil tankers kept sliding into ports near Peking.

China did not lack oil but what she had, she proposed to keep while importing more from reluctant

Mexicans and willing Arabs. India was not rich in oil; but she was well-positioned to obtain it easily

from Islamic friends.

All this, Americans knew. What had alarmed the State Department a week previously was the first

of a series of urgent communiques from Mikhail Talbukhin, the RUS ambassador. The Supreme

Council of the RUS had decided that Talbukhin should share a maddening discovery with us: recent

price hikes on Arab oil were by no means uniform.

The Russians had voice-printed tapes to prove it. China and India were obtaining massive

kickbacks, and had done so for years. Somehow, under the noses of US and RUS spy satellites,

the Sinolnd powers were obtaining twice as much Middle-East oil as we had thought.

At first the notion of smuggled oil seemed wildly unlikely, but State Department people agreed that

the evidence was convincing. The President addressed the question, What Do We Do About It?

He did not address it quickly enough for RUS leaders, who saw that something was done about it

the following Tuesday.

On Tuesday, August 6, a tremendous explosion had been noted by a US satellite over India's

coastal state of Gujarat. It was no coincidence that Gujarat lay directly across the Arabian Sea from

the source of India's, and China's, oil. Within hours the United States had stood accused, on the

evidence of Indian ordnance experts, of sabotaging a huge Indian water conduit. The RUS backed

US denials; not merely because Russians had in fact done the job themselves, but for a much better

reason. The RUS craved Western support against the unreconstructed socialists next door.

By Thursday, August 8, alliances had crystallized in the UN. Every active unit of the National Guard

went on standby alert.

Chapter 3

Ted Quantrill had given up hope of shouldering a backpack until his father, an active reservist, took

a hard look at his orders on a Thursday evening. The following day, Ted was en route to the high

Appalachian Trail. On that day the boy assumed his own argument—the trek would be his fifteenth

birthday present—had caused the change of heart. Only later did Ted Quantrill begin to suspect the

truth.

Chapter 4

From satellite and local report, it was obvious that the Gujarat disaster was more than the loss of a

water conduit. Whole square kilometers were ablaze in an area known for its experimental cotton

production by Indians with Chinese advisors. But cotton did not burn this way; and even if it did,

China would not have risen to such monolithic fury over a trifling setback to an ally's agribiz. The

blaze and the fury might be appropriate if both were rooted in oil. Not a few thousand gallons of it,

but a few million.

Ranked fourth behind Arabia, the RUS, and Mexico in her known reserves of oil, China could have

been providing India's supply, and this scenario was studied. But China exported significant

quantities of the stuff only to Japan. With its expertise in shipbuilding and manufacture of precision

equipment, Japan slowly forged her co-prosperity link with China, and shared the cyclopean fuel

supply. Some of China's imported oil came from Mexico and Venezuela and some, for the sake of

appearance, came in tankers from the Middle East. American satellites yielded an estimate, based

on a nosecount of tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, that China was buying a third of her oil

from Arabs.

But no satellite had penetrated the bottom of the Arabian Sea. No research vessel had identified the

progress of a stunning Chinese engineering project which, using an acid-hydraulic process, quietly

tunneled a meters-broad pipeline under the continental shelf from Arabia to Gujarat on the western

plain of India. It was known that China had invested in a scheme to run water conduits from the

Himalayas to western India. What no one had suspected was that the conduit was double-barreled.

Water ran toward the southwest. Oil ran toward the northeast, then on to China herself. No

wonder, then, that China had exploded so many nuclear devices under the Tibetan plateau; the

resulting cavities were being filled with oil pumped from the AIR crescent. It was an immense

undertaking, yet it required no technical breakthroughs. Its strength lay primarily in its secrecy.

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 Sinolnd conduit. Now, everybody's fat would sizzle in that

fire.

Chapter 5

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.

Chapter 6

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.

Chapter 7

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 8

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 Sinolnd

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 9

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

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ScannedbyHighrollerandproofedmoreorlessbyHighroller.PARTI:VICTIMSChapter1InearlyAugustof1996theAtlanticstatesbakedlikesomevastpiecrustunderaparalyzingheatwave.ItmovedscoutmasterPurvisLittle,inRaleigh,toplantheSmokyMountainpacktripthatwouldsaveafewlives.ItalsomovedthePresidentoftheUnitedStatestohisre...

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Dean Ing - Systemic Shock

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