Even over the sound of the explosion, which seemed to envelope the whole world, he heard the sound of the big windows in the armory crashing to the floor of the parade hall. There was a sound of tearing metal, probably one of the old girders that held up the roof of the parade hall, then relative silence except for a distant screaming. He waited a moment, catching creaking from the old building but figuring it was as safe as it was going to get, then climbed out from under his desk and headed for the company commander’s office.

The first sergeant and the operations sergeant were just pulling themselves out from under their own desks when Crichton burst through the door without knocking, normally a cardinal offense but he figured this was as good a time as any to ignore the directive.

“Nobody goes outside for at least thirty minutes, Top,” he said, bouncing from one foot to the other in the doorway. “And I need my survey teams, that’s Ramage, Guptill, Casey, Garcia and Lambert. And as soon as it’s clear I need a platoon to start filling sandbags for the Humvees—”

“Slow down,” the first sergeant said, sitting down in his chair and then standing up to brush crumbs from the drop ceiling off of it. The first sergeant was tall and lanky. Up until the last year he’d been the chief investigator for the Lake County Sheriff’s Department. When they got deployed, ignoring the Soldiers and Sailors’ Act, he’d given the sheriff his okay to appoint his deputy to the job. So when they got back he took a cut in pay and went back to work as a sergeant. Give him a crime scene and he knew where he was at. He even was pretty good at recovering the company from a mortar attack or a convoy ambush. He was one of the best guys in the world at training his troops to sniff out hidden explosives, weapons and other prohibited materials — he thought of it as shaking down a dealer’s house. But nuclear attacks were a new one for him and it was taking him a minute to get his bearings.