Between India's heartland and Sulaiman, nee Pakistan, stretches the great Indian desert which runs north with the Indus River toward Kashmir. If unchecked, Allied hovercraft could swoop up from the Gulf of Kutch, over the Gujarat marshes, and to the very minarets of Lahore in scarcely five hours. Between Lahore and Kazakhstan lay one of the world's great desolations, an awesome series of snowclad mountain ranges. They had names: Karakoram, Pamir, Ladakh. No despot, no army, no form of life had ever conquered them in a thousand times a million years. Whether the US/RUS speared across passes into Tibet, sought passage through the Afghans to RUS territory, or simply sat tight, SinoInds would be cut off from the supplies they needed from the AIR 'neutrals'.
Supply would depend on air cover, and SinoInd forces had no aircraft that could fly rotor-to-rotor with RUS attack choppers developed after the Afghanistan lesson in the eighties. Even US high-tech loiter aircraft could not maneuver well with a rack of heat-seekers at ten-thousand-meter altitudes. RUS air cover could not conquer the Karakorum range, but it could macerate any large supply line trying to use those fastnesses as a conduit.
Suddenly China's thawing spring offensive in Kazakhstan developed more intensity along its southern boundary. She must wreck the Allied transAsian pincer movement at all costs. Her nuke-carved subterranean cavities in Tibet, full of AIR oil, now seemed less secure.
Given the Starlinger-Ahbez scenario, Chang Wei's response might have been expected. He raised the priority of the Ministry of Transport to speed the repair of routes between Szechuan and Tibet. Those routes would soon be choked with human materiel heading for the Tibetan frontier, for Chang would fight to his last Viet to save those oil reserves.
On Nühau, Boren Mills was both fortunate and canny. He was lucky in being so positioned that he, personally, had a need to know the uses of Kikepa Point as a Phillipus relay and perceiver station. Mills had known the airborne troops were Australians and New Zealanders; the seaborne troops were US Marines. He had known of the abort stations in Somalia, and of the two surface ships we sent to certain destruction in the Bay of Bengal.
Because he was a strategist, Mills began to consider a recurrence of searing headaches and double-vision. The Navy would be sending smart young officers to the coast and islands of the Arabian Sea, and Mills had no desire to place his hide where it could be perforated or irradiated by desperate Indians in what would inevitably become all-out suicide attacks to beggar the legends of Iwo Jima.
If the Gulf of Kutch operation was successful. The invasion was only hours old, and if satellite reports were any omen the Marines would face another kind of sea, a boiling bloody surf of Gujaratis and Rajas thanis, north of the coastal swamps. It would almost be a mirror image of the Florida invasion if several divisions of Allied troops were stopped south of the Indian desert.
One thing Mills could depend on because he knew it from a briefing. The Navy would emplace no Phillipus installations in a region subject to sudden capture by counterattack. And what, Mills asked himself more or less rhetorically, if the invasion faltered? Not a total failure; nothing as disastrous as all that. Something more like a momentarily crippling delay. India had failed to delay the invading Allies at the crucial moments before Aussies secured the Kutch beachhead only because Phillipus worked so well.
But Phillipus worked so well because it had been designed by outrageously creative Israelis, systematically modified by extremely orderly Americans skilled in systems management. The perceivers and relays were triplicated so that if one failed, others went on-line instantly. No, argued the Mills alter ego — rhetorically, of course — a crippling 'accidental' failure of the system could not even be surrogated. A truly systemic failure would have to be so exactly triplicated that, eventually, it would be identified as deliberate. Therefore, anybody who tampered with the Phillipus system should leave a subtle trail that would lead to someone else.
Mills knew how to lie to himself. It was just another hypothetical case for his scholarly managerial mind, he mused; if worst came to worse, he could always suffer a relapse from the Wisconsin burrow-bomb, and spend a few weeks recuperating. Someone else — someone like Jon Fowler, the damned circuit designer who was almost certain to be promoted over Mills because two of Fowler's Phillipus refinements quickened the relay response — someone else would be posted to Diego Garcia, or to Jamnagar.
Four days later, elements of the American Sixth Army pushed beyond the coastal lowlands into Rajasthan despite fiendish resistance by ill-equipped, incredibly tenacious Indian regulars. Our Asian foothold seemed secure.
Mills felt insecure. By the most delicate of discreet inquiries he had learned an unpleasant tactical reality about his project, Phillipus. So crucial was its progress, so secret its existence, that personnel in positions like his came under psychiatric scrutiny as a matter of course. Any failure, or suspicion of it, within his cranium would automatically result in his reposting to some forgotten supply depot in, say, central Australia. That might not have been so bad, but under those circumstances the reposting was tantamount to being permanently passed over; sequestered from any possibility of advancement. Such a stigma usually followed its victim into civilian life.
Mills had already decided that after the final curtain of this war he would perform on corporate stages; knew the importance of an outstanding record in reaching the top echelons where military, industrial, and political officers shared first names and villas. Boren Mills could not afford to avoid an Asiatic duty station by claiming a cross-threaded screw upstairs.
It seemed to Mills as though he might develop other plans.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Latinos, thought Quantrill, sought variety in their accents. He had flogged his way through Crypto and Psych, Poly Sci and Cover courses by sheer doggedness, but he feared that Linguistics would boil his brains before the end of March.
"No, Quantrill; slur it and slow it," said Karen Smetana, whose fortyish but still evil little body contrived to distract her students. "In Mexico, only urbanites pick up the tempo — but never as upbeat as Puerto Ricans. Try it again — not so crisp on the rolled 'r', please."
And again. And again. "I'm not getting any better, Smetana," he said. "I'd always be spotted by a local."
"You're already better. And you aren't supposed to pass yourself off as a local; you can't develop deep cover on a week-long assignment. Be glad you took high-school Spanish instead of French, idiot! Would you rather spend a week in Cuernavaca sunshine, or Quebec?"
"She's got a point," smiled Goldhaber to the grumbling Quantrill.
"And you've got a long way to go to pass as njudio from Ciudad Mejico," Smetana reminded Goldhaber.
"Practiced all my life to outgrow Miami pawnshop intonations, and this yentzer wants to give me one from Mexico City."
"You just be glad I don't know what ayentzer is," said the linguist primly. “And don't avoid your strengths. Wherever there's a Jewish community," Smetana punctuated it with a fingerwag, "you'll have something going for you that Zachary or Quantrill would need years to learn. In T Section we don't train you all alike. That's one way a good counter-agent might spot you; most agencies leave indelible marks on an agent's behavior. We want each of you unique. No agency pattern, especially linguistic."
"They'd find a pattern damn' fast if they captured us," Goldhaber cracked. Smetana merely shrugged; his insinuation touched a sore spot.