* * *

FLASH is the highest priority communication in the military directory, superceding even Operational Immediate. Satellites in orbit noted the explosion and computers on the ground automatically categorized it as a nuclear explosion.

“Holy shit!” the Air Force sergeant monitoring the nuclear attack warning console muttered, his stomach dropping. In the old days he would have picked up a phone. Now he hit three buttons and confirmed three separate pop-ups sending a FLASH priority message to the National Military Command Center in the bowels of the Pentagon. Then he picked up the phone as sirens went off in the normally quiet room in Sunnyvale California.

* * *

The wonder of military communications and computers meant that the President of the United States got word that a probable nuclear attack had occurred on Central Florida a whole thirty seconds before Fox broke the news.

“I know we can’t say who did it, yet,” the President said calmly. He was at Camp David for the weekend but most of his senior staff was on the phone already. “But I’ll make three guesses and only two of them count.”

“Mr. President, let’s not jump to conclusions,” his national security advisor said. She was a specialist in nuclear strategy and had been doing makee-learnee on terrorism ever since the attacks of September 11, 2001. And this didn’t fit the profile of a terrorist attack. “First of all, nobody thinks that they have access to nuclear weapons of this sort. Radiological bombs, maybe. But this appears to be a nuclear weapon. However, the target makes no sense for a terrorist. It has been located precisely as being on the grounds of the University of Central Florida. Why waste a nuclear weapon on a university when they could use it on New York or Washington or L.A. or Atlanta?”