"Dean Ing - Systemic Shock" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ing Dean)

By Thursday, August 8, alliances had crystallized in the UN. Every active unit of the National Guard
went on standby alert.

Chapter 3

Ted Quantrill had given up hope of shouldering a backpack until his father, an active reservist, took
a hard look at his orders on a Thursday evening. The following day, Ted was en route to the high
Appalachian Trail. On that day the boy assumed his own argumentтАФthe trek would be his fifteenth
birthday presentтАФhad caused the change of heart. Only later did Ted Quantrill begin to suspect the
truth.

Chapter 4

From satellite and local report, it was obvious that the Gujarat disaster was more than the loss of a
water conduit. Whole square kilometers were ablaze in an area known for its experimental cotton
production by Indians with Chinese advisors. But cotton did not burn this way; and even if it did,
China would not have risen to such monolithic fury over a trifling setback to an ally's agribiz. The
blaze and the fury might be appropriate if both were rooted in oil. Not a few thousand gallons of it,
but a few million.

Ranked fourth behind Arabia, the RUS, and Mexico in her known reserves of oil, China could have
been providing India's supply, and this scenario was studied. But China exported significant
quantities of the stuff only to Japan. With its expertise in shipbuilding and manufacture of precision
equipment, Japan slowly forged her co-prosperity link with China, and shared the cyclopean fuel
supply. Some of China's imported oil came from Mexico and Venezuela and some, for the sake of
appearance, came in tankers from the Middle East. American satellites yielded an estimate, based
on a nosecount of tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, that China was buying a third of her oil
from Arabs.

But no satellite had penetrated the bottom of the Arabian Sea. No research vessel had identified the
progress of a stunning Chinese engineering project which, using an acid-hydraulic process, quietly
tunneled a meters-broad pipeline under the continental shelf from Arabia to Gujarat on the western
plain of India. It was known that China had invested in a scheme to run water conduits from the
Himalayas to western India. What no one had suspected was that the conduit was double-barreled.
Water ran toward the southwest. Oil ran toward the northeast, then on to China herself. No
wonder, then, that China had exploded so many nuclear devices under the Tibetan plateau; the
resulting cavities were being filled with oil pumped from the AIR crescent. It was an immense
undertaking, yet it required no technical breakthroughs. Its strength lay primarily in its secrecy.

With one well-placed demolition device just upline from a pumping station, the RUS severed water
and oil conduits. Automatic cutoffs could not prevent the immediate loss of fifty thousand barrels of
crude oil, which gravity-flowed from its conduit and spread atop the water as it burned. The RUS
had well and truly blown the cover of the Sinolnd conduit. Now, everybody's fat would sizzle in that
fire.

Chapter 5

The train clung to its monorail and hummed an electric song as it fled in a lateral arc from Raleigh
past Winston-Salem. The scoutmaster, Little, was too busy controlling sixteen of his charges to
worry about the seventeenth. The Quantrill boy lazed alone by a window, one hand cupped to his