What was happening? Patrick cried to himself. Jesus, was it a chemical or biological weapon attack? He didn’t have long himself if it was. He took the keys from the woman’s dead fingers, slipped on the jacket, then went back inside the security building. After twenty minutes of searching, he found his battle armor, exoskeleton, backpack unit, and helmet, and headed outside. After a five-minute search of the parking lot, he found the right vehicle and drove off.

What he saw on that drive was unimaginable horror— dead bodies everywhere. He saw vehicles overturned, corpses still in the driver’s seats. He saw armored vehicles and tanks crashed into buildings and gates with corpses hanging out of them as if they tried to climb out just as they died. There were burning, crashed helicopters dotting the flight-line access road, fires everywhere—even dead vultures and other desert animals lying everywhere. It was like a scene in some kind of horror movie. As far as he could see, across the runway and toward the main base area, he could see signs of slow, painful death. He . . .

Patrick gasped. The base ... the base where Wendy, the other Night Stalkers, and the other prisoners had been taken. My God!

He tried the car radio: It was working, but it was silent— not static, just a silence, as if the announcer’s microphone was left open. But if the car and the radio worked, maybe his battle armor did too! He stopped the car and dragged all his gear out of the trunk. Sure enough, the outside status lights were green—the power pack and computer were working. As quickly as he could, Patrick climbed into the suit and powered it up. It was working again! He put on the helmet and secured the entire system ...

. .. and then learned what had happened: Radiation alarms were going off. There had been an intense release of gamma and neutron radiation in the past several hours. Although the radiation levels now were high—he would have to get out of the area within thirty minutes or risk getting seriously sick—they had been a thousand times higher not long ago.

A neutron bomb. It had to be. Someone had set off a neutron bomb on the base. Everyone within a mile of the explosion would be dead within hours, and everyone within two miles would get sick from radiation poisoning. The neutron bomb—a conventional hydrogen bomb without its uranium-238 jacket—was designed to kill humans but leave vehicles and buildings intact.

Wendy...