Dean Ing
Systemic Shock
PART I: VICTIMS
Chapter One
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 Two
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 SinoInd 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 Three
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 Four
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.