Systemic Shock Read Free

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 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