“I can’t slow down,” Crichton replied. “I need to set up a radiological station before anybody can go outside even after the first thirty minutes.”

“What’s with the thirty minutes?” Staff Sergeant Wolf asked. The operations sergeant was medium height and well over what the Army considered acceptable weight for his height. And it wasn’t muscle, like the CO’s driver who was a fricking tank, it was fat. But he was pretty sharp. Not unflappable, he was clearly taking even more time to adjust than the first sergeant, but smart. When he wasn’t in one third-world shit hole or another he was a manager of a Kinkos.

“Falling debris,” Crichton asked. “We don’t know it’s a nuke. It probably was but it could have been an asteroid hit. They throw chunks of burning rock into the stratosphere and they take a while to come down.”

“Top?” Crichton heard from behind him. The chemical specialist turned around and saw that the mortar platoon sergeant had come up behind him while he was talking. The platoon sergeant, a staff sergeant who was a delivery manager for UPS when he was home, showed a physique developed from years of throwing often quite heavy boxes through the air. It was running to fat now that he worked behind a desk ten months out of the year, but he still was a big guy you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley.

“Get Crichton his survey teams,” the first sergeant said, looking at the suddenly irrelevant papers on his desk. “Send Sergeant Burell around to get everybody inside until the all clear sounds. Then get with the rest of the platoon sergeants in the Swamp. Wolf, head over to battalion, see what’s up.”

“Where’s the CO?” Crichton asked, looking at the closed door at the back of the room.

“At breakfast with the platoon leaders and the battalion commander,” the first sergeant answered, dryly. “We can handle this until they get back. Go.”