Canadian money was now preferred in most of the US northwest. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and their frequently summary courts were already maintaining order from Portland to Duluth, sanctioned by the US Government which worried more about its southern borders than its north. There was, bluntly, not enough US Government to go around anymore.
It became clear to the Collier administration that we could keep Alaska and Hawaii but we would — temporarily of course — lose Washington, Oregon, Montana, most of Idaho, North Dakota, and so on to the shrewdly sympathetic Canadians. But there was hope for future reparations because, for one thing, Mormonism had a solid toehold in western Canada.
It was equally clear to the RUS that the Union of Soviets was dying of Chinese Plague and Canadian neglect. On September 23 the RUS made their demand on Canada: vaccine or war.
No one — not Canada, not the US, not even Chairman Konieff — knew whether remaining RUS weapons could deal serious blows past Canadian defenses. Canada's Parliament quickly replied that shipments of oral vaccine were being readied for the Russians and, meanwhile, the US Third Army in Turkey could help by sending its stocks of Canadian chocolate to the Ukraine and Azerbaijan, across the Turkish borders.
The RUS, naturally, wanted distribution to begin in the Urals and the heartlands around Novgorod, Gorkiy, Volgograd. It was transparently clear to the Supreme Council that Canada was more interested in saving rebellious Ukrainians than in protecting the central RUS nervous system.
Less than fifty hours after acceding to the RUS demand, Canada began her airlift of vaccine-laden chocolate. Ironically, the distribution could have been faster if the vaccine had been by gel capsule, but Russians knew by now that immunity came in shukulaht; so chocolate it must be.
A few cases of plague had turned up in Leningrad, Grodno, and Baku, cities on the edge of RUS dominion. Tens of thousands of cases were being treated in the heartlands. Naturally, predictably, the Canadian airdrops began in Estonia, Byelorussia, Azerbaijan. Canada wisely asked UN observers to help, and to vouch for the fact that enough vaccine had been dropped onto Russian soil to immunize a hundred million people. All the RUS needed to do was complete the distribution. Any country powerful enough to threaten war on Canada was surely capable of passing out chocolate — and, Canada added, she would not send aircrews of slow transport craft two thousand klicks into the heartlands of a country which had just threatened war against her.
Boren Mills could not have optimized messages better than the Canadians. Millions of RUS citizens — Russians, Tatars, Bashkirs, all those who heard the news through RUS jamming and feared the plague more than they feared the Supreme Council — made pathetic attempts to reach the vaccine dropsites. Few RUS citizens owned private vehicles, so most of the travelers went by government-owned mass transit, which required faked permits, outright bribes, or stowaway status. The result of the peripheral airdrop by Canada was almost complete clogging of RUS mass transit. This failure of the RUS circulatory system destroyed the remaining confidence Russians had in their leaders — gangrene throughout the body politic.
Chairman Konieff'slast success, in a stormy session of the Supreme Council, was in preventing Field Marshal Zenkovitch and his faction from countering civilian panic with bullets. Zenkovitch was after all, said Konieff, a Ukrainian who perhaps thought real Russians should not obtain their chocolate immunity.
Taras Zenkovitch removed his belt with its empty holster and placed it, breathing deeply, on the table. "If that is what you believe," he said to them all, "you leave me no alternative to resignation."
"I spoke in anger with a troubled soul," said Konieff. "We are not Dzugashvilü, Stalins who would destroy our people to save an idea. Please, comrade Zenkovitch, accept my public apology."
Second Minister Vyacheslov, a gaunt Byelorussian, patted the trembling arm of Zenkovitch and said in his vodka tenor, "Taras Zenkovitch, your army might serve best by trying to keep the transit system running. At the same time, surely each of us retains enough personal charm to obtain a few cartons of vaccine from local officials."
"Begging from party hacks in Estonia," growled Zenkovitch; "is that what we are reduced to?"
"We could be further reduced," said Vyacheslov, placing a hand over his own eyes in a gesture that now signified plague.
Vyacheslov, a great believer in hands-on charisma, carried the day. Both Zenkovitch and the absent Suslov had been assured by field officers that any orders to a military unit that included forcible removal of vaccine from a dropsite would mean almost certain mutiny, supported by the local officials. Marshal Zenkovitch huddled with his staff to expedite civilian travel while Konieff and others made ready to visit known dropsites. Each committeeman carried a pocketful of small elegant cases, and in each case was a large elegant medal. It was the only coin in which they hoped to pay party hacks.
Though Vyacheslov and several others returned with vaccine, Konieff'stwo-place jet vanished over the Caspian Sea. It was believed that he fell victim to Iranian or friendly fire. In any case, Konieff would not have returned to find a functioning Supreme Council near Perm; the transportation riots had already begun, and the food riots would not be long in coming.
China's fragmentation was well advanced, more profoundly than in RUS states because Chang's Central Committee had depended even more on the acceptance of central control. With the unitary breakdown in the CPA came a fast reshuffle into China's ancient standby, the feudal warlord system. The best that could be said for Chang's government was that, until early October, it still controlled Shansi Province with remnants of the Third CPA manning parapets of the Great Wall against plague-infected deserters returning from the western provinces.
Then Jung Hsia, Third Army Marshal, discovered that Chang was dickering with Canadians for plague vaccine in a transaction which would amount to surrender. Supposedly, Chang hoped to buy immunity from prosecution with mi-crocoded specifications for some secret device, no doubt a weapon. Jung reflected that Chang's own death squad had removed a number of top technical people during the past fortnight; and Jung further reflected that he knew a few folk whose unpleasant arts might unlock Chang's tongue. But art sometimes fails in its purpose, and Jung did not learn what kind of weapon had been worth so many assassinations. Chang Wei died of multiple injuries in the night, and Jung became a warlord until Chang sympathizers offered Jung Hsia to Canada as 'earnest money' for a transaction they needed urgently.
India's Casimiro, taken alive near Nagpur by New Zealanders, was released on October 3, disappearing again into Madhya Pradesh with a Turkish delegate from the UN. It took Casimiro two weeks to assemble something that might be called a Parliamentary quorum, with a few members voting arguable proxies. The chaos of India was hardly more chaotic than it had been a decade, or two or three, before.
In some ways Indians stood to gain; many US troops in western India were to remain as an army of occupation. For the first time in Indian history, hungry Indians had reasonable hopes that surpluses in certain regions would be diverted in the interests of full bellies instead of mountainous bribes.
Still, angry Moslem tribesmen sniped at the garrisoned infidels and were targeted in turn. It had always been thus. It might always be thus. The winter of 1997-8 would see as many deaths throughout moribund Asia as had been suffered in the opening weeks of the war.