"That depends on who 'he' is," Elliot warned.

"Yes, what is it?"

"Mr. President, what we have here is simple confusion."

"Ryan! We don't want a.n.a.lysis, we want information. Do you have any?" Liz shouted.

"The Soviets are sortieing their ships out of the Northern Fleet ports. One missile submarine is supposed to be heading out."

"So their land-based missiles are fully alerted?"

"Correct."

"And they're adding to their submarine missile force also?"

"Yes, Mr. President."

"Do you have any good news?"

"Sir, the news is that there is no real news right now, and you're-"

"Listen, Ryan. One last time: I want information from you and nothing else. You brought me that Kadishev stuff and now you're saying it was all wrong. So why should I believe you now?"

"Sir, when I gave it to you I told you it was not confirmed!"

"I think we may have confirmation now," Liz pointed out. "General Borstein, if they're fully on line, what exactly is the threat?"

"The fastest thing they can get to us is an ICBM. Figure one regiment of SS-18s targeted on the Washington area, and most of the others targeted on our missile fields in the Dakotas, plus the sub bases at Charleston, King's Bay, Bangor, and the rest. Warning time will be twenty-five minutes."

"And we will be targets here?" Liz asked.

"That is a reasonable a.s.sumption, Dr. Elliot."

"So they will try to use SS-18s to finish what the first weapon missed?"

"If that was their work, yes."

"General Fremont, how far out is the backup Kneecap?"

"Dr. Elliot, it took off about ten minutes ago. It'll be at Hagerstown in ninety-five minutes. They have some good tail winds." CINC-SAC regretted that addition almost at once.

"So if they are thinking about an attack, and they launch it within the next hour and a half, we're dead here?"

"Yes."

"Elizabeth, it's our job to prevent that, remember?" Fowler said quietly.

The National Security Advisor looked over at the President. Her face might have been made of gla.s.s, so brittle it looked. It wasn't supposed to be like this. She was the chief adviser to the most powerful man in the world, in a place of ultimate safety, guarded by dedicated servants, but less than thirty minutes from the time some faceless, nameless Russian made a decision, perhaps one already made, she'd be dead. Dead, a few ashes in the wind, certainly no more than that. Everything she'd worked for, all the books and cla.s.ses and seminars would have ended in a blinding, annihilating flash.

"Robert, we don't even know who we're talking to," she said in an uneven voice.

"Back to their message, Mr. President," General Fremont said. "'Additional troops to investigate.' Sir, that sounds like reinforcements."

A rookie fireman found the first survivor, crawling up the concrete ramp from the bas.e.m.e.nt loading dock. It was amazing he'd made it. His hands had second-degree burns, and the crawl had ground bits of gla.s.s and concrete and Lord knew what into his injuries. The firefighter lifted the man-it was a cop-and carried him off to the evacuation point. The two remaining fire engines sprayed both men with water, then they were ordered to strip, and they were hosed again. The police officer was semiconscious, but tore a sheet of paper off the clipboard he'd been holding, and all during the ambulance ride he was trying to tell the fireman something, but the firefighter was too cold, too tired, and much too scared to pay attention. He'd done his job, and might have lost his life in the process. It was altogether too much for a twenty-year-old, who simply stared at the wet floor of the ambulance and shivered inside his blanket.

The entranceway had been topped with a pre-stressed concrete lintel. That had been shattered by the blast, with one piece blocking the way in. A soldier from the tank snaked a cable from the turret-mounted winch around the largest of the remaining blocks. As he did this, Chief Callaghan kept staring at his watch. It was too late to stop now in any case. He had to see this through if he died in the process.

The cable went taut, pulling the concrete fragment clear. Miraculously, the remainder of the entranceway did not collapse. Callaghan led the way through the rubbled opening, with Colonel Lyle behind him.

The emergency lights were on, and it seemed that every sprinkler head had gone off. This part of the stadium was where the main came into the structure, Callaghan remembered, and that explained the falling water. There were other sounds, the kind that came from people. Callaghan went into a men's room and found two women, both sitting in the water, both of their coats sprinkled with their own vomit.

"Get 'em out of here!" he shouted to his men. "Go both ways, give it a quick check, and get back here fast as you can!" Callaghan checked all the toilet stalls. They were unoccupied. Another look at the room showed nothing else. They'd come all this way for two women in the wrong bathroom. Just two. The chief looked at Colonel Lyle, but there really wasn't anything to say. Both men walked out into the concourse.

It took Callaghan a moment to realize it, even though it was right there, an entrance to the stadium's lower level. Whereas only a short time before the view would have been of the stadium south side, and the roof, what he now saw was the mountains, still outlined in orange by a distant setting sun. The opening called to him, and as though in a trance, he walked up the ramp.

It was a scene from h.e.l.l. Somehow this section had been shielded one way or another from the blast. But not the thermal pulse. There were perhaps three hundred seats, still largely intact, still with people in them. What had once been people. They were burned black, charcoaled like overdone meat, worse than any fire victim he'd ever seen in nearly thirty years of fighting fires. At least three hundred, still sitting there, looking at where the field had been.

"Come on, Chief," Colonel Lyle said, pulling him away. The man collapsed, and Lyle saw him vomiting inside his gas mask. The Colonel got it off him and pulled him clear. "Time to leave. It's all over here. You've done your job." It turned out that four more people were still alive. The firemen loaded them on the engine deck of the tank, which drove off at once to the evacuation point. The remaining firefighters there washed everything off and departed, too.

Perhaps the only good luck of the day, Larry Parsons thought, was the snow cover. It had attenuated the thermal damage to the adjacent buildings. Instead of hundreds of house fires, there were only a few. Better, the afternoon sun of the previous day had been just intense enough to form a crust on the yards and roofs around the stadium. Parsons was looking for material on that crust. He and his men searched with scintillometers. The almost incredible fact of the matter was that while a nuclear bomb converted much of its ma.s.s into energy, the total ma.s.s lost in the process was minuscule. Aside from that, matter is very hard to destroy, and he was searching for residue from the device. This was easier than one might have thought. The material was dark, on a flat white surface, and it was also highly radioactive. He had a choice of six very hot spots, two miles downrange of the stadium. Parsons had taken the hottest. Dressed in his lead-coated protective suit, he was trudging across a snow-covered lawn. Probably an elderly couple, he thought. No kids had built a snowman or lain down to make angels. The rippling sound of the counter grew larger ... there.

The residue was hardly larger in size than dust particles, but there were many of them, probably pulverized gravel and paving material from the parking lot, Parsons thought. If he were very lucky, it had been sucked up through the center of the fireball, and bomb residue had affixed itself to it. If he were lucky. Parsons scooped up a trowel's worth and slid it into a plastic bag. This he tossed to his teammate, who dropped the bag into a lead bucket.

"Very hot stuff, Larry!"

"I know. Let me get one more." He scooped up another sample and bagged it as well. Then he lifted his radio.

"Parsons here. You got anything?"

"Yeah, three nice ones, Larry. Enough, I think, for an a.s.say."

"Meet me at the chopper."

"On the way."

Parsons and his partner walked off, ignoring the wide eyes watching from behind windows. Those people were not his concern for the moment. Thank G.o.d, he thought, that they hadn't bothered him with questions. The helicopter sat in the middle of a street, its rotor still turning.

"Where to?" Andy Bowler asked.

"We're going to the command center-shopping center. Should be nice and cold there. You take the samples back and run them through the spectrometer."

"You should come along."

"Can't," Parsons said with a shake of the head. "I have to call into D.C. This isn't what they told us. Somebody goofed, and I gotta tell them. Have to use a landline for that."

The conference room had at least forty phone lines routed into it, one of which was Ryan's direct line. The electronic warble caught his attention. Jack pushed the flashing b.u.t.ton and lifted the receiver.

"Ryan."

"Jack, what's going on?" Cathy Ryan asked her husband. There was alarm but not panic in her voice.

"What do you mean?"

"The local TV station says an atomic bomb went off in Denver. Is there a war, Jack?"

"Cathy, I can't-no, honey, there's no war going on, okay?"

"Jack, they showed a picture. Is there anything I need to know?"

"You know almost everything I know. Something happened. We don't know what exactly, and we're trying to find out. The President's at Camp David with the National Security Advisor and-"

"Elliot?"

"Yes. They're talking to the Russians right now. Honey, I have work to do."

"Should I take the children somewhere?"

The proper thing, and the honorable and dramatic thing, Jack told himself, was to tell his wife to stay home, that they had to share the risks with everyone else, but the fact was there was no place of safety that he knew. Ryan looked out the window, wondering what the h.e.l.l he should say.

"No."

"Liz Elliot is advising the President?"

"That's right."

"Jack, she's a small, weak person. Maybe she's smart, but inside she's weak."

"I know. Cathy, I really have things to do here."

"Love you."

"And I love you, too, babe. 'Bye." Jack replaced the receiver. "The word's out," he announced, "pictures and all."

"Jack!" It was the Senior Duty Officer. "AP just sent out a flash: shooting in Berlin between U.S. and Soviet forces. Reuters is reporting the explosion in Denver."

Ryan got on the phone to Murray. "You have the wire services?"

"Jack, I knew this wouldn't work."

"What do you mean?"

"The President told us to shut the networks down. I guess we goofed somewhere."

"Super. You should have refused that one, Dan."

"I tried, okay?"

There were just too many redundancies, too many nodes. Two satellites serving the United States were still up and operating, and so was nearly all of the microwave-repeater system that had preceded them. The networks didn't merely run out of New York and Atlanta. NBC's Los Angeles bureau, after a surrept.i.tious call from Rockefeller Center, took over for that network. CBS and ABC accomplished the same out of Washington and Chicago, respectively. The irate reporters also let the public know that FBI agents were "holding hostage" the network news headquarters people in the most heinous abuse yet of the First Amendment. ABC was outraged that its crew had been killed, but that was a small thing compared to the scope of the story. The proverbial cat was out of the bag, and phone lines at the White House press office lit up. Many reporters had the direct number to Camp David as well. There was no statement from the President. That only made things worse. The CBS affiliate in Omaha, Nebraska, had only to drive past SAC headquarters to note the beefed-up guard force and the empty flight line. Those pictures would be on nationwide in a matter of minutes, but it was the local news teams who did the best and the worst work. There is scarcely a city or town in America that lacks a National Guard armory or a base for reservists. Concealing the activity at all of them was tantamount to concealing a sunrise, and the wire-service printers reported activity everywhere. All that was needed to punctuate those reports was the few minutes of tape from KOLD in Denver, running almost continuously now, to explain what was going on, and why.

The phones at the Aurora Presbyterian were all being used. Parsons knew that he could have forced his way onto one, but it was easier to run across the street to a largely deserted shopping center. He found an FBI agent there, wearing a blue "raid" jacket that proclaimed his ident.i.ty in large block letters.

"You the guy from the stadium?" Parsons' headgear was gone, but he still wore the metallic coat and pants.

"Yeah."

"I need a phone."

"Save your quarters." They were standing outside a men's clothing store. The door had alarm tape on it, but looked cheap. The agent pulled out his service pistol and fired five rounds, shattering the gla.s.s. "After you, pal."

Parsons ran to the counter and lifted the store phone, dialing his headquarters in Washington. Nothing happened.

"Where are you calling?"

"D.C."

"The long-distance lines are down."

"What do you mean? The phone company shouldn't be hurt from this."

"We did it. Orders from Washington," the agent explained.

"What f.u.c.king idiot ordered that?"

"The President."

"Outstanding. I gotta get a call out."

"Wait." The agent took the phone and called his own office.