“The colonel said you’d bring equipment we could use to get through that door,” Lockhart said. “What have you got? Claymores? Detonator cord?”

“For this guy, I’ve got something better.”

A minute later, the chopper lifted off, hovered a hundred feet above the lane, and fired a rocket.

From a safe distance, Lockhart watched with joy. He’d wanted something to get him through the door. But this was so much better. With a satisfying roar, the rocket blew the whole damned concrete shed into pieces.

72

Brent stood on the motor home, describing the chaos of the crowd below him. Mindful of what had happened the night before, he’d al- most decided to do his commentary from the ground or from some- thing modestly higher.

But how the hell would that look? I’m supposed to be the toughest re- porter in the business, and I do my spot on a picnic table?

Even so, every time the crowd jostled the motor home and forced him to correct his balance, he remembered what it had felt like to plummet to the ground. No camera operator had enough of Anita’s determination to be willing to get on the roof with him. The producer had finally put a remote camera up there. It and the handheld cameras among the crowd, as well as the nose camera on the chopper, would provide ample coverage. But there wasn’t any question where the viewers’ attention would be-with the guy risking his life on the mo- tor home’s roof while all the other television reporters looked like wimps, doing their spots from the ground.

When the floodlights went out, Brent made a dramatic moment of it.

“Did somebody sabotage the lights?” he asked before realizing that his own lights had gone out, also-not to mention the lights on the cameras, the cars, and the choppers.

Jesus, don’t tell me I’m off the air.

Blinded by the sudden darkness, he groped toward the ladder at the side of the motor home. People banged against the vehicle, shouting in panic. He wavered, reached the ladder, started down, and froze as helicopters plummeted to the ground, bursting into flames.

Shrapnel flying past him, Brent hugged the ladder and waited for the shock waves to subside. His eyes were level with the motor home’s roof. He looked directly over the concrete barrier toward the field beyond the viewing area.

A glow approached.

At first Brent thought it was the residual image that the broadcast lights had imprinted on his eyes. But then he realized that what he saw stretched a hundred yards from right to left. The glow got bigger and closer, so strong that it dispelled the darkness, a tidal wave of colors rushing angrily across the grassland toward him.

Maybe the microphone is still working!

He spoke frantically into it. “Tonight this reporter is seeing the most powerful manifestation yet of the Rostov lights, stretching across my field of vision and approaching the crowd that has gathered here.”

The glow became harsh.

“Lightning appears to be flashing inside it! The effect on the spectators is tremendous.”

People in the crowd wept, wailed, and prayed. But the sounds they made weren’t loud enough to shut out the growing hum of the lights speeding toward them.

“The air’s getting hotter!” Brent shouted. “Grass is catching fire! Wait a minute, something’s racing from the lights! The microphone’s almost too hot to hold! My face is…”

He screamed.

73

When the Black Hawk blew the concrete shed apart, Lockhart and the assault team whistled in approval. A hole gaped, pointing the way downward.

“Now let’s toast the son of a bitch!” Lockhart said.

Without warning, all the floodlights went off, plunging the area into darkness. Tensing, he told himself it was only because of the damage the explosion had inflicted. But before the chopper could land, its lights went off, also.

So did its engine.

Abruptly losing altitude, it walloped fifty feet onto the ground, rotors whistling, skids snapping. The only illumination was from the fires.

No, I’m wrong, Lockhart thought. To the southeast, where the abandoned military base was located, a glow attracted his attention. Even with his eyes straining to adjust to the darkness, it was impossible to ignore.

“What the hell is that?” a member of the special-ops team shouted.

“I don’t know, but it’s getting brighter! And it’s coming this way!”

“Hit the ground!”

For an instant, Lockhart thought it was a missile streaking toward them, but as he landed on his chest, he realized it was a beam of light. The light was composed of spinning colors-red, green, yellow, blue. It shot from the horizon, hissed across the ground, and radiated heat as it passed over him. He smelled smoke from his hair and swatted out embers.

Throwing sparks, the light struck a satellite dish that was tilted sideways in the direction of the airbase. At once the light was redirected so that it rocketed upward from a dish pointed toward the sky. It reminded Lockhart of World War II movies in which powerful spotlights searched the sky for enemy bombers making a night raid.

Though it was only one beam of light, the multicolored radiance hurt his eyes. It soared higher, stretching toward heaven until it reached something up there and threw off sparks before it suddenly blazed on a downward angle, streaking toward something on the ground far away to the northwest. It left a tube of pulsing light that continued to crackle over the ground and pointed upward from the dishes.

“I’m on fire!” somebody yelled. His teammates hurried to swat at the man’s flaming clothes.

Lockhart held his hands over his ears. The beam of light hissed and crackled, but there was another sound-static that might have been a hum that might have been high-pitched music, threatening to split his eardrums.

74

July 16, 1945.

Just before dawn, the first atomic bomb was detonated outside Alamogordo in remote southern New Mexico. As the blinding, mushroom-shaped fireball rose thirty-eight thousand feet into the air and burned ten thousand times more fiercely than the exterior of the sun, the project’s director, Robert Oppenheimer, recited a passage from the Bhagavad Gita in which God reveals his true, awesome, terrifying form to a disciple.

“‘If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one,’” Oppenheimer quoted. “‘Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.’”

At the same time, all telephone and radio messages ceased to be acknowledged by or sent from the military airbase outside Rostov, Texas, two hundred and fifty miles southeast of Alamogordo. Of particular concern was the status of the facility beneath the airbase, where research on an alternative weapon of mass destruction had been in progress since 1943.

After six hours of attempts to reestablish communication, the Army sent a P-40 Warhawk fighter plane on a reconnaissance mission from Fort Bliss. It arrived at 2 in the afternoon. Flying over the airfield, the pilot reported no activity whatsoever.

“I see open hangars. Trucks and aircraft at the side of the runway. A B-24’s at the end of the runway, looking as if it’s about to take off, but the propellers aren’t moving. In fact, nothing’s moving. I don’t see any people.”

Ordered to land and investigate, the pilot banked into a final approach. At two hundred feet, he finally did see something moving- a man in uniform staggering down the runway’s centerline. The pilot performed an emergency go-around and watched the man in uniform continue staggering until he collapsed at the end of the runway.

After landing, the pilot did a quick scan of the area but still didn’t see any people among the motionless trucks and aircraft. He rushed to the man he’d seen collapse. The man was semiconscious, moaning. His uniform had a colonel’s insignia and was covered with blood. His face was burned. Identification in a pocket revealed that his name was Edward Raleigh.