"What do you think, Dan?"

"It's - Christ, Jack, where are the words for something like this?"

"The man's got cancer," Clark said. "He figures that if he has to die - why not a bunch of others? Dedicated son-of-a-bitch, isn't he?"

"What are you going to do?" Murray asked.

"We don't have a federal death-penalty statute, do we?"

"No, neither does Colorado as a matter of fact." Murray took a moment to understand where Ryan was heading. "Oh."

Golovko had considerable trouble tracking Ryan down with his phone call. The report on his desk from Dr Moiseyev, sitting there amid all the other things, had dumbfounded him, but on learning Jack's plans, it was easy to set the rendezvous.

Perhaps the only good news of the week was the rescue. The Admiral Lunin pulled into Kodiak harbor at dawn. Alongside the pier, she offloaded her guests. Of the Maine’s crew of one hundred fifty-seven, perhaps a hundred had gotten off before the submarine was claimed by the sea. Dubinin and his crew had rescued eighty-one of them, and recovered eleven bodies, one of which was Captain Harry Ricks. Professionals regarded it as an incredible feat of seamanship, though the news media failed to cover the story until the Soviet submarine had put back to sea. Among the first to call home was Ensign Ken Shaw.

Joining them on the trip out of Andrews was Dr Woodrow Lowell of the Lawrence-Livermore Laboratory, a bearded, bearish man, known to his friends as Red because of his hair. He'd spent six hours in Denver reviewing the damage patterns.

"I have a question," Jack said to him. "How was it the yield estimates were so far off? That almost made us think the Russians did it."

"It was a parking lot," Lowell replied. "It was made of macadam, a mixture of gravel and asphalt. The energy from the bomb liberated various complex hydrocarbons from the upper layer of the pavement and ignited it - like a great big fuel-air explosive bomb. The water vapor there - from the snow that flashed away - caused another reaction that released more energy. What resulted was a flame-front double the diameter of the nuclear fireball. Add to that the fact that snow cover reflected a lot of the energy, and you got a huge augmentation of the apparent energy released. It would have fooled anybody. Then afterwards, the pavement had another effect. It radiated residual heat very rapidly. The short version is, the energy signature was much larger than the actual yield justified. Now, you want the real bad news?" Lowell asked.

"Okay."

"The bomb was a fizzle."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean it should have been much larger, and we don't know why. The bomb residue was lousy with tritium. The design yield was at least ten times what it actually delivered."

"You mean?"

"Yeah, if this thing had worked "

"We were lucky, weren't we?"

"If you want to call that luck, yeah."