“Hey, Jeb,” the President said, calmly. “A black day.”

“Yes.”

“Okay, right away. Good luck and God Bless.”

He handed the phone back and nodded at the Homeland Security director.

“That was an official request from the governor to declare a state of emergency. I think this counts.”

“I’ll tell my people,” the director said, standing up and walking out of the room.

News helicopters that had been loitering near the dust-ball zoomed in on a white and green helicopter that bore the logo of the Orange County Sheriff’s department as it approached the scene of devastation. An area could now be seen that was stripped clean of all vegetation and homes although some foundations remained. The helicopter came in slowly and hovered low, stirring up dust from the ground to add to the pall that was drifting lightly to the west.

“There goes the first survey,” the defense secretary said, quietly. The National Military Command Center had already sent in its estimate of casualties. NMCC had programs and protocols dating back to the Cold War for estimating casualties. The estimate they had given him, backed by high end modeling that had taken a series of servers nearly fifteen minutes to run, said that the FEMA estimate was low.

By nearly an order of magnitude.

* * *

“We just picked up some dust,” Crichton yelled, cracking the door on the helicopter and holding out the wand on his Geiger counter. “Hold it there.”

“You sure this is safe?” the Emergency Services guy shouted, his voice muffled by his chemical suit and almost impossible to hear over the sound from the rotors.

“No,” Crichton responded. “But you want to die in bed?”

The Emergency Services guy, Crichton hadn’t caught his name, was used to responding to spills on I-4 in Orlando. He knew all about how to contain a dumped tanker truck of carbon fluoride. He even knew about containment and cleanup of a dumped load of radioactive material. But responding to a nuke was pretty much outside of his normal job description.