“Foreign Legion, Chief.” Corporal Gruber was one of the MPs at the gate. His arm was still in a sling, and his eyes were red from alkali dust. “A hundred degrees every day for two weeks. Fucking badges? Security? There must be fifty guys every night who walk off the desert for a beer. Single file between the snakes.” He wrote Joe’s name under the proper date and time on his clipboard. “Friday the thirteenth. Some day to bring down the bomb. Feeling good, Chief?”

“Good enough.”

Gruber licked dry lips. “It’s a question of confidence, right?”

“To a point.”

Gruber waved him through. “One more fight, that’s all we ask.”

The ranch access road that Joe remembered as a faint trail in the snow was newly graded and topped with colichi, a sand-and-clay compound that had quickly disintegrated into fine white powder. Clouds of dust trailed another convoy far ahead. Jaworski joined Joe and Ray in the lead jeep. He had a portable FM receiver, and around his neck he wore the Polaroid all-purpose red goggles issued for the test. With his dark mustache, he looked like a touring grandee.

“The orders are that we monitor the receivers at all times here, in case of an accident,” Jaworski said. “Keys are supposed to be kept in ignitions at all times, in case of evacuation. That’s why the roads are so wide. Myself, I wonder what you’re supposed to do if there is an accident and you’re not near a road and you don’t have a real field radio you can actually transmit on.”

Some static-ridden communications were erupting from the FM. Mainly there was music—Carmen Miranda.

“Don’t ask me how,” Ray said. “The Army spent months finding a special channel just for us? It’s the same channel for the Voice of America. The Latin edition. Orders are, ignore the sambas and the bombers.”

Joe asked Jaworski, “Well, what do you do if you’re stuck out in the open and the bomb accidentally goes off?”

“The flash, the burst of gamma rays and neutrons, would kill anything within a mile and a half of the tower. If you could get a couple of miles away and find a depression, a stream—”

“A stream in the Jornada del Muerto? That sounds like planning. There couldn’t really be an accident, though, could there?”

“Yesterday, Joe, they were testing the firing circuits on a dummy bomb in the tower. Out of the blue, a lightning bolt. Imagine if the real bomb had been there. By the way, Anna asked me to tell you good-bye. She left early this morning for Chicago. She borrowed Teller’s car to drive there; otherwise I suppose you would have driven her to the station.”

“I suppose so.”