Ruth joined him against the jeep, fidgeting with her M4. “Were those our planes?” she asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“Where were the nukes? Grand Lake?”
“No. We would have burned.”
The sunrise crept over the highest points of the land like yellow paint, touching the earth and the grass with heat. Cam felt the air change as he lifted his head to track a distant howl. The sound reverberated from the mountains in the east. At least one jet was curling back. Or were there more?
Somewhere, Bobbi was yelling, and Ruth shouted, “We’re here! We’re here!”
Now the sky in the west trembled with new engines — the lower, deeper growl of prop-driven aircraft. Cam waited as Bobbi ran and joined them, shoving her hands against her face to reseat her goggles and mask. “What’s happening?” she cried.
Wherever the nukes had landed, it was a long way off. The Chinese aircraft must have a different target. Cam could only think of one place that made sense.
“Those planes are headed for Grand Lake,” he said.
15
Deborah Reece looked up from her atomic force microscope when the room trembled with a sharp, hammerlike boom. “What—” she said, studying the concrete ceiling. Then her chair rattled as the sound was repeated again and again.
“Air strikes,” Bornmann said nearby, muffled in his suit. “Son of a bitch.”
“Where the fuck are our planes!?” someone yelled as another man said, “Rezac, what’ve you got?”
In her fear, Deborah thought Dirk Walls had called for her. He was a two-star Marine general and as out of his element in this tiny squad as Deborah herself. She leaned away from her equipment, turning her entire torso inside her suit, but Walls was talking to the communications specialist attached to their unit, NSA Special Agent Michelle Rezac, a dark-haired woman with a soft voice and hard gray eyes.
Suddenly the floor went sideways. It shoved Deborah’s feet out from under her. The mountain groaned. Bornmann fell against her and she screamed — but even in the confusion, it was the sideways jolt of this quake that caught her attention. The other explosions were clearly downwards. The larger quake felt as if it had come from another direction entirely and it was followed by aftershocks, none of which matched the detonations overhead.
“What was that!?” a man yelled.
Dust sifted down from a corner of the room where the concrete was under strain. Deborah clambered back to her feet. Somehow her microscope was still on the desk and she grabbed it in case there was another quake.
She wouldn’t have believed the pressure on her could increase. Now there were Chinese aircraft in the sky, plastering the surface of Grand Lake with fire. Why? Would they land?
She wondered how many people General Caruso could send against enemy soldiers, and if that number included herself. Of course it did. There couldn’t be more than a few dozen effective troops outside the command center and she bunched her hand inside her glove, remembering the jolt of her pistol all the way up her arm.
Deborah and four others had left the command center an hour ago, hurrying to a makeshift lab in the upper levels of Complex 1, where they found the hardware retrieved from 3 by a squad of USAF commandos. Those men stayed with her as bodyguards. The other members of the group, like Walls and Rezac, were only here because Caruso had four more suits he hadn’t committed elsewhere. Caruso wanted to safeguard Deborah, but he also must have felt like there was no longer any point in holding onto his reserves. They were living on borrowed time.
They were late, so late. Deborah never would have imagined the U.S. arsenal would still be in the ground, and yet she’d been thrilled by Caruso’s decision to keep their missiles in check. She had been wrong about him.
Across the room, desks and gear clattered against the floor. Deborah looked at the ceiling again. The fluorescent lights gleamed in every scratch in her faceplate. This suit had seen plenty of action and it smelled of other people despite the nauseating rubber stink. Pulling on the heavy pantlegs, sleeves, and chest piece had been like wrapping herself in a men’s locker room.
“Rezac!” Walls shouted, but Agent Rezac ignored him. She stood at the intercom with her hand collapsing her bright yellow rubberized helmet against her ear to secure her headset. At her waist, like all of them, she wore a control box, but she’d disconnected the short wire that connected her to their radios and jacked herself into the intercom instead.
The nine of them were a hodgepodge of colors. One man wore a yellow civilian suit like Rezac, one was Army green, and the remainder were black as night. Deborah wore black, too, and she was glad. If they needed to ambush Chinese storm troopers, she didn’t want to do it in an emergency yellow hazmat suit.
Rezac’s voice was an unintelligible mumble. Deborah stared at the other woman, needing information. In fact, everyone was watching Rezac except Emma.
“I think I have a picture,” Emma said.
“Really? Good work.” Deborah shuffled to a neighboring desk, where she’d paired Emma with a magnetic resonance force microscope and a small plastic tray littered with thin, square, colorless tabs called substrates. The MRFM was bigger than Deborah’s AFM. It had a larger base and internal arrays. Otherwise it looked much the same — a stout, glossy white tower with digital controls and a black eyepiece on top.
“This is what we’re supposed to be looking at, right?” Emma said without using the radio, raising her voice to be heard outside her helmet.
Deborah bent beneath the weight of her air tanks, taking care not to bang her faceplate against the eyepiece. She saw a black-and-white topography like the bottom of an egg carton, a symmetrical row of bumps joined by perfectly identical ribs and struts — but was she looking at the nano or just the material of the substrate itself?
A speck of dust wouldn’t be so uniformly structured. She was sure of that. But the only way she’d known how to capture samples of the mind plague was to wave the substrates in the air, then insert the slides one by one into their microscopes and look for proof of the invisible machines. Unfortunately, holding the tiny squares in her gloves was an exercise in frustration. The substrates were made of sapphire, she remembered, but were just one centimeter across and only one millimeter thick, which made them as substantial as cellophane.
If Emma had zeroed in on a nano at last, this would be only part of it. Was the magnification set too high? They were actually making some progress. It wasn’t enough, but at least they’d taken a few steps forward.
Deborah was the most proud of saving Emma.
Deborah was finally questioning herself and what was most important to her — her country or her life. It was
