“I gotta go with the NSA on this one, Mister President,” the secretary of defense said. “This doesn’t feel like an attack. What’s the chance it could have been some sort of accident?”

“I don’t know that much about UCF,” the NSA admitted. She had once been the dean of a major college but for the last few years she’d been holding down the national security advisor’s desk in the middle of a war. Her stated ambition after leaving government service was to become the commissioner of the National Football League. “But I don’t think they’re doing anything in the nuclear program, I’m pretty sure I’d remember that. And you just don’t get accidents with weapons. They’re hard enough to get to go off at all.”

“So we’re in a holding pattern?” the President asked.

“Yes, sir,” the secretary of defense answered.

“We need to get a statement out, fast,” the chief of staff said. “Especially if we’re pretty sure it wasn’t a terrorist attack.”

“Have one made up,” the President said. “I’m going to go take a nap. I figure this is gonna be a long one.”

“Okay, Crichton, what do you have?”

The battalion headquarters of Second Battalion was collocated in the armory with Charlie Company. At the moment the Battalion, which should have had a staff sergeant and two specialists as a nuclear, biological and chemical weapons team, was without any of the three. Crichton had for the last year been the only trained NBC specialist in the entire battalion. He reflected, somewhat bitterly, that while he’d been holding down the work of a staff sergeant, a sergeant and six other privates it hadn’t been reflected in a promotion.

“None of my instruments are reading any increase in background radiation here, sir,” the specialist temporized. The meeting of the battalion staff and company commanders was taking place in the battalion meeting room, a small room with a large table and its walls lined with unit insignias, awards and trophies. The question hit him as he walked through the door. Crichton had been told only two minutes before to “shag your ass over to battalion and report to the sergeant major.” At the time he’d been prepping his survey teams.