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struggled to produce a democracy, falling back on martial law each time. Thanks to her draconian rule she lost her eastern half to India in 1971, and when India annexed Bangladesh she welcomed more Moslems into parliament. Still devoutly Moslem, still incapable of sustaining a democracy, still wrangling with India and fumbling with nuclear energy, Pakistan existed largely with western aid until 1988, when she lost the River War.
    The Sutlej River cascades from Himalayan headwaters, crossing India's Punjab before entering Pakistan. Pakistan was well into her project to irrigate fallow land with Sutlej water when India, with desert property of her own, began to divert too much of the Sutlej. Pakistan protested. India borrowed a smile from Buddha. And while debate smouldered in the UN, Pakistan's agribiz choked on dust. Pakistan gathered her American tanks and RUS Kalashnikovs, and struck.
    Twenty days later, Pakistan was only a memory. If India was poor in fertilizer, it was because a full one-third of her national budget was spent on arms. As her exports of steel, cement, and machinery mushroomed, so did her imports of French helicopters. Profits from her new shipyards funded her navy. Pakistan had suicidally attacked a nation whose one prosperity lay in arms, a growing giant with growing power.
    India overflew Sukkur and Karachi in two waves. The first was a horde of small choppers firing minicannon and homing missiles; the second was a wave of larger choppers transporting whole infantry companies. Pakistan surrendered, obtained recognition as the State of Sulaiman, and was instantly absorbed by India as educated Moslems everywhere gave thanks. It was thought possible that India had deliberately provoked the River War. Perhaps 'possible' was too weak a word.
    Now, in 1996, the fifty million Moslems of Sulaiman formed a gentle buffer as India's border with the AIR crescent. India was now one-third Moslem; her Hindu majority found it easier to accommodate Islam every day.
    In capitals from Moscow to Washington—with a studied pause in Brussels, the real nerve center of common-market Europe—one glance at a map could bring cold sweat. The Islamic co-prosperity sphere ran from Gibraltar to Indonesia; and now that China had made her peace with Islam and forged links to Japan, the still-floundering RUS might be excused for fearing herself savaged by COMECON, the Asiatic common market. It was well-known that India had taken Chinese aid to build her 'irrigation' conduits near the old Pakistani border. But the RUS had only now discovered that China was irrigating her subterranean tanks with oil via the new conduit.
    The RUS sabotage, then, was a ploy to reveal SinoInd duplicity, while interrupting it, using American hardware so that retaliation might be delayed and, when it came, less tightly-focused on a RUS barely able to defend its huge perimeter since 1985. Surely the RUS never expected the reprisal to spread across the globe as World War Four.
    So much for expectation. India's furious militants scanned American foreign and domestic crises, judged despite Peking's counsel that Washington's response to the tanker reprisal was one of weakness, and made a terrible mistake.

Chapter Fifteen
    Ted Quantrill surged up from his mummy bag, mumbling, then fully awake as Ray Kenney continued to shake him. "Ah, jeez, I thought we'd settled all that last night," he said. " What shit's in the fan?"
    Ray's eyes were haunted. "On your radio," he said. "Everybody's at Little's tent; come on!" With that Ray ducked out, leaving Quantrill to translate as he would.
    In jeans and sneakers, Quantrill plodded to Little's tent. He could hear his radio before he arrived; saw in Purvis Little's face a bleakness deeper than ever before.
    "…in Trincomalee fear that the Indian assault group has subdued the leased US base on Sri Lanka. From New Delhi comes a warning that captured American personnel will be held hostage against any loss of Indian lives. This,