‘Don’t tell anybody anything. The whole reason I want you to call Mr Parker is because he doesn’t know I work for Senator Jones. It’s important we don’t start a panic, otherwise everybody’s going to start stock-piling food and the shortage is going to be even worse.’

‘I see, dear. All right. Can I tell Mrs Kroger?’

‘Don’t tell anybody. I’ll call you later.’

Peter banged the phone down. Karen, biting her lip, replaced her own receiver. She could scarcely believe that any of what she had heard was real. Surely, in a country like the United States, with all those newspapers and television stations, somebody would have realised what was happening and warned the public? Surely one man like Senator Jones couldn’t suppress the news so easily? Yet it seemed as if nobody really cared – as if reporters and politicians and government experts were all quite happy to take whatever they were told as the gospel truth, provided it was couched in reasonable-sounding language. Even the president had accepted Shearson Jones’s waffle about ‘cracking the problem wide open’, and ‘not anticipating a serious shortfall.’

Karen’s telephone light flashed again. She picked up the receiver and said, ‘Yes?’

‘Karen – can you try to get me Mr Ed Hardesty, at South Burlington Farm, near Wichita?’

‘Yes, Mr Kaiser. I won’t be a moment. I have one other call to make first.’

‘Okay, Karen. But don’t make it too long.’

‘No, Mr Kaiser.’

Karen pushed a button to get herself an outside line, and listened to the dialling tone for a moment. Then she punched out a number with a 218 code. The phone was answered almost immediately.

‘Mom?’ she said. ‘It’s Karen. Yes, it really is. I know. But, please. Mom, I’ve got something terribly important to tell you.’

Eight

As the sun set over South Burlington Farm, Ed and Willard and Dyson Kane stood waist-high amongst the blackened wheat, smoking in silence and watching the smoke drift diagonally across the decaying reaches of the south-eastern fields. Usually, smoking was totally forbidden in the crops, but now it didn’t matter any more, and they had lit up in the same way that Hitler’s staffhad all lit up, once the Führer was dead and the Third Reich was over for ever.

The Hughes helicopter rested a few yards away on a slight slope, white and clean and shining amidst all the oily and stinking devastation in the fields around it. A flock of birds wheeled and turned overhead.

Ed was tired and unshaven, dressed in jeans and a red plaid cowboy shirt. Beside him, Willard stood with his arms folded, his eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses, but his whole posture betraying how defeated he felt.

‘I just never saw anything like it,’ he said, after a while. ‘We didn’t even get the chance to try to fight back.’