The American west and midwest fared as well as could be expected, as reclamation teams cleared debris from city sites most vital to the war effort. Bakersfield had been a petroleum nexus and would be again; the burly oilfield workers learned new skills while revitalizing the city. Fresno, Lubbock, Wichita, and Des Moines were rapidly rebuilt into the agrarian centers they had been before. The first rolling stock into Lubbock's rail yards brought cultivation equipment to plant more Jojoba and variant Euphorbia than cotton. You could dress in cowhides if necessary, but you couldn't run the railroads on cottonseed oil. We did not expect vegetable oils to become a cheap mainstay. We could only hope they would fill the gaps in our production of oil from wells and Colorado shale.
Faced with widespread demolition of energy sources, President Collier gave a nod of the leonine head to fission reactors. Americans had learned to accept the pervasiveness of ionizing radiation; well then, they would learn to accept fission reactors again. Collier was initially heartened by the simultaneous revelations of a dozen LDS Apostles, all divinely guided to press for more reactors. God had not told anyone how they could be secretly built on short notice. Nor had the Deity hinted that nuclear reactors might become targets of gentiles who would view fission reactors as a symbol of a repressive theocracy. The President went ahead with a sense of disquiet. In the future, he felt, it might be wiser to keep these multiple revelations out of the eye of the gentile public. And for that, he would need more control of media.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
"Now you're being testy, Eve," said Rudolf Berg, one of NBN's senior VP's. "Some might even say unpatriotic."
Eve Simpson slid from the exercise machine, mopping her forehead as she glared from Berg to the beach far below. Wind currents from Santa Barbara and Los Angeles had not been kind in March. Eve missed her little outings, and somebody had to pay… "Brucie, get me a Drambuie."
"Calories, Eve," he clucked.
She would not look toward the mirror in the exercise room; she knew what it would tell her. Those extra few kilos were showing at her waist and chin. "A joint then," she raged. "A cup of hemlock, Bruce; something! Rudy here has Brigham-friggin' City on his brain!"
"I'm only thinking of the network and your future, Eve," said Berg. "You can't really expect the President to drop everything and come here."
"I'm becoming nothing more than an interviewer," she spat, then inhaled on the proffered filter-tip joint.
Berg met her anger with aplomb, a grey little man with sequined ideas. Even Professor Kelsey praised Berg's sensitivity to the public pulse. "You're playing a vital role as sugar-tit, Eve. Don't knock it. You have more credibility now than you ever had."
"I have more tit, you mean," she grumbled. “Is there no such thing as a low-calorie London broil?" She inhaled again; held it.
"Eat less, chase your young men more." Berg scratched his nose to hide his expression. “I should imagine there are enough studly young priests in Brigham City to please you."
"Salt Lake City's still hot," she accused, exhaling as if Berg himself had dropped the single nuke that exploded over North Temple Street.
"They'll take you around it, as you very well know. And the Gulf of Kutch invasion is really hot, Eve. Media hot." His tone said that the wheedling phase was over. Her irises said that the marijuana was taking effect. "It's the biggest positive step in this war, and you can get an exclusive from Yale Collier himself — but it won't wait. You 'll have to be on that shuttle in an hour or we go with Lindermann. And the President, I'm told, was looking forward to a chat with you beforehand."
Berg did know how to pull triggers. Eve despised the upstart Ynga Lindermann with her exotic accent and slender rump, whom NBN was surely grooming as a capital-P Personality. Berg knew, too, that Eve valued her tete-a-tetes with men of great power. She hoped that Berg would never guess how simply and directly that aura of power affected her sexually. Even spindly little Berg, when he was wheeling and dealing, made Evie itch.
Of course the idea of virile, farm-raised young Mormon men gave her a different itch; less deeply psychic, much easier to scratch. Also, the Gulf of Kutch affair was more than just prime time. It was a world series-super bowl-Oscar night parlay, and an exclusive summary with Collier was worth a seventy share of the public's attention. "Get wardrobe and makeup alerted," Eve sighed; "and remember, you owe me for this one."
Before she caught the hovership to the Lancaster shuttle, Eve managed a brief video call to her mentor, Kelsey. "You must evince genuine confidence in the church's infallibility," Kelsey counseled in his overblown academese that always made Eve feel like screaming. "Be deferential and dress demurely, and don't hold eye contact with him. The President knows you only as America's sweetheart; don't violate his expectations.
"Drop a few terms about demographics and sub rosa media alliances — just enought to dispel any idea that your youth is equivalent to political naivete. Ah, you might drop my name once. Not twice. Don't argue with anything he says. If the President is convinced you are in thrall to his charisma in your personal private session, this relationship could have an incipient importance far beyond your career at NBN."
"And you could pull strings through me, Doc," she teased. "Just between us, is the Kutch invasion really anything more than a snatch-and-grab raid for morale purposes?"
"Immensely more," he nodded, and switched off.
Eve grabbed the latest microfile on her way to the hover-ship, scanning press releases from ComCenPac in Hawaii. Kelsey had not exaggerated. An Allied airborne brigade dropped into Gujarat lowlands might, by itself, have been only a sacrifice move like the infamous old Dieppe raid — but not when joined by five American divisions sweeping in from the Arabian Sea, with more on the way.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Lieutenant Mills fingerprint-signed the latest dispatch and keyed it for transmission to stateside censors, having performed his own deft deletions on messages that referred, however vaguely, to Project Phillipus. Phillip n had fielded an enormous armada in 1588 A.D.; thanks to the upgraded
Israeli weapon, US/RUS Allies now had ghost armadas of any size we liked.
We had used the deception only once before, to disguise our Trident strikes on Latin American ports. This time the SinoInds might know the nature of the ruse, might find ways to penetrate it the next time. But this time Phillipus had sent waves of Indian interceptors eastward into the Bay of Bengal in search of an invasion force that did not exist beyond a token force. The real invasion had proceeded north from Diego Garcia into the Arabian Sea, then under its cloak of electronic invisibility to the Gulf of Kutch on India's western flank.
The thirty transmach transports, each lumbering up from Diego Garcia with upwards of an entire airborne company including weapons, had been the last force to leave the island and the first to cross Indian shores three hours before dawn on Sunday, 9 March. The scores of huge skirted hovercraft, prefabricated in Australia and sub-freighted as nested modules to the island, were even slower; had embarked for India the previous evening with their own attack choppers running as vanguard. Each craft carried its battalion, self-sufficient with antitank weapons, hoverchoppers, and rations for a week. After that it would be two intertwined wars in India; one of motorized infantry, the other of supply and interdiction. The Indians would depend more on eyesight, less on microwaves — and they didn't have to be geniuses to see our strategy.