The names brought up a flickering montage of imagery from Caitlin’s briefing set. Musso had just described the southern limits of her so-called area of operation.

The day remained cool and grey as they motored away from the airfield, but mild compared to the deep freeze of the Midwest that she had recently left behind. She was glad of the leather jacket, though. It prevented the chill of the cab from getting through to her. Hummers weren’t the most comfortable of chariots.

‘I’d run the heater, but it isn’t working,’ Musso said. ‘Probably never will work again. I can’t seem to get parts, even though Blackstone is sitting on a mountain of them.’

‘Should I take that as an indication of your working relationship with the Governor, sir?’ she asked. The fact that the general here was headquartered a fair way east at Temple, and not in Fort Hood itself, made the question redundant, but it was worth getting his take.

‘Governor Blackstone has an open-door policy,’ explained Musso, having to speak loudly because of the engine’s roar. ‘When he needs something from us, his door is wide open. When he’s got what he wants, the door is still open – but only so’s he can slam it on my ass as I leave.’

The former Marine seemed inexplicably amused by what had to be a fairly fraught situation. But then, given his record in Gitmo, Tusk Musso was probably entitled to regard his latest posting as a milk run.

‘What’s he going to want out of me? Or rather, out of Colonel Murdoch?’ asked Caitlin as they sped away down the well-maintained blacktop of Clear Creek Road.

Regimented lines of shake’n’bake housing slipped by on Musso’s left, while the terrain outside of her own zipper-shut plastic window was wilder, more unkempt. All scrubby thornbush, trees and what looked like waist-high grass, broken up here and there by patches of sand and dirt. If it weren’t for the difference in temperature, this part of east-central Texas could easily have been mistaken for some of the wasteland around Kansas City. The orderly presentation of dormitory suburbs spoke well of the effort that had gone into reclamation down here. There was certainly no way of telling that Killeen had lain empty for so long until midway through ’05 when the newly elected Governor Blackstone turned his energies towards Reconstruction. But the bleak wastes on the right-hand side of the road emphasised what a small, insignificant impact the return of humankind had really made to this part of Texas.