"Other people are trained for that. They finger the mole; you take him — or her — out. Usually you just disappear him. That leaves the other side wondering if we've turned him.
"Chances are, you'd get a different assignment against certain folks in media." He waited for the murmur of surprise to abate. "Do I have to tell you how important our media are in reassuring what's left of this country that we're winning — whether we are or not? Face it: we've lost half our population and the other half needs its daily holo fix! The SinoInds would love to nuke NBN's world of make-believe, if they knew where our production centers are. Damn' few foreign stars or directors know; we can't be absolutely sure of their loyalties."
"Rivas Paloma," said elegant young Goldhaber, with a surgeon's fingersnap. "Killed in a strafing on location in Mazatlan. Am I right?"
"The Spanish film industry's loss," said Howell obliquely, "may have been NATO's gain."
"But Paloma got an Oscar for directing an anti-Chinese movie," said Goldhaber, frowning. You could depend on the well-born Goldhaber for cultural snippets.
"If he was an assignment — I say if—then he was a mole. Depend on it."
"I guess we have to."
The thin voice was almost a falsetto whisper: "Oh, yes. You literally bet your life you have to. Media star, bishop or bird coloneclass="underline" if Control says he goes, he goes.
"Which reminds me." Did Seth Howell betray faint cynicism? Quantrill could not be sure as the instructor continued, “Never doubt for a second that President Collier was a lucky break for this country. The Mormons, and nobody else in the US, were ready for this war. They're going to pull us through if we follow the right path. In a war of survival we can't afford the sedition of every Jew and Catholic who won't accept a moral imperative.
"But the LDS has more splinter groups than a toothpick factory. Some of 'em are just wrong. Others are violently opposed to the administration — and they are dead wrong."
Kent Ethridge, the gymnast from Iowa State, spoke as rarely as Quantrill. "In other words," he said slowly, "a war of religious extermination."
"What d 'you think the AIR confederacy is doing," asked Howell.
"Threatening Jews," said Goldhaber, not smiling.
"What if Control identified someone in the Jewish Defense League who was trying to assassinate your President," Howell asked.
"Ice him," Goldhaber replied. "No religion is more important than my country."
Howell stared out the window for a long time, then glanced at each of his trainees. "Thanks to the no-hum outlook most Americans had before last August, one religion is your country. That's overstated a mite, but it's closer to the facts every day."
"I'm not exactly wild," said Goldhaber, "about joining the LDS."
"A gunsel," Howell snorted, "is not exactly eligible." The tone of his voice put an end to one unsettling topic, and led Howell to the unsettled problems between the Allies.
Chapter Fifty-Six
The US, as Howell put it, had a neighbor problem. We needed Mexican oil and were still getting it; but the capitalist, Mormon Collier administration could not entirely satisfy socialist, Catholic Mexico of our continuing good will. One needed only study the bloody clashes between Mormon angles and Catholic latinos in the American southwest. Already the media were spiking rumors that White House Central might relocate again from its New Mexico warrens.
Canada, too, had a strong gentile distaste for the new turn in our political path, but chose to treat it as a temporary aberration. Canada's gross national product and her technologies had swelled to the point where she no longer needed to feel defensive about her southern sister. Rather, said Howell, she began to feel all too protective. From the remnants of Maine to the desperate survivors freezing in Michigan, Canadian currency was now more readily acceptable than US greenbacks. Because Canada was our conduit to Asian battlefields and a potential source of fossil fuel, the Collier administration kept a discreet silence on the currency question. But — Seth Howell chose his words with great care in describing US/Canadian relations — White House Central had an obvious problem. Quantrill had to check the definition of the key word, 'hegemony'.
Meanwhile, Canada worried about her RUS alliance. It was not just a question of competition for polar resources, but also of a big new semi-capitalist union adjacent to an enormous semi-Marxist union. Canadians never tired of warning that the Russians had learned nothing but caution in their 1985 debacle. After the RUS learned to modernize their own frozen northlands and to fully exploit their resources, she would doubtless covet Canada's.
Doubtless. But all that could be dealt with later; the spectre of a Chinese Siberia frightened the Canadians even more than
Russians did. Canada stretched out her hand to the RUS, and counted her fingers.
If anyone expected the Russians to make a big display of thanks for Canadian aid, he courted disappointment. The official line from Tass maintained that the ice-crusted Kazakhstan front held the key to western survival. The RUS Supreme Council no longer blustered in blunt ideological jargon terms for foreign audiences. The old words could be dusted off again after the war. The RUS relied instead on a partly genuine, partly spurious identification with the west, and backed the claim with a few gestures such as the Frisbees they exported for US deployment. Without question, the Frisbees had been a major factor in limiting the Indian-supplied invasion of Florida. Just as surely, that invasion was doomed anyway by the vulnerability of its supply lines. Its Latin American supply sources evaporated with the 'Libyan' nuke strikes on Latin American ports, and excepting the few supply submersibles India had punched through the gauntlet of Allied hunter-killer teams, the invaders were now on their own. Tampa Bay would hold.
A few nations were still seeking ways to turn a global atrocity into local profit. Neutral Sweden remembered her windfalls in World War II and sought to employ her merchant fleet as a pipeline for refugees. She could rake in the krona by providing safe floating platforms for those who could pay the price. Brazil, whose neutrality leaned toward the SinoInds, listened to the Swedes; thought she might slash her huge external debt by billions of cruzeiros; and magnanimously offered sanctuary to SinoInd refugees — prepaid in precious metal which Indians had in quantity.
But Argentina and Peru bordered Brazil, and had scarifying debts of their own. They promptly offered to accept Allied refugees for so many pesos and sols per head, whether they came by Swedish surface ships or waterwings. Brazil instantly reconsidered her offer. She needed high technology, not a prefabricated war. The Swedes sulked, and went on selling machine tools to both sides.
Yet America's most sharply-felt boundary was internaclass="underline" the paranthrax quarantine line which ran up the Mississippi, then the Ohio, extending to Lake Erie via the Ohio state line. Early in February of 1997, the long-awaited vaccine was ready for airdrop, packaged as pressure-fed intramuscular injection ampoules for the millions of Americans in our eastern states. The first drops were made in Tampa and Orlando; the health of our swamp guerrillas was more immediately important than that of miners in West Virginia.
Americans knew, because the holo told them, that the quarantine would be lifted in time. But even the reassurances of Eve Simpson could not counter a suspicion that paranthrax spores might lie dormant for decades. Rumors among the well-informed suggested that the quarantine would stay in effect until every mammal in the US was vaccinated. Until then, it was said, quarantine-runners would be shot on sight. Even quintessential materiel like titanium from mines in New York and Virginia was refined and packaged hot, for hot shipment through Cincinnati. No one needed worry about any bug surviving a ride on that stuff.