"John Ringo - Into the Looking Glass" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ringo John)

three separate pop-ups sending a FLASH priority message to the National Military Command Center in
the bowels of the Pentagon.Then he picked up the phone as sirens went off in the normally quiet room in
Sunnyvale, California.

The wonder of military communications and computers meant that the President of the United States got
word that a probable nuclear attack had occurred on Central Florida a whole thirty seconds before Fox
broke the news.

"I know we can't say who did it, yet," the President said calmly. He was at Camp David for the
weekend but most of his senior staff was on the phone already. "But I'll make three guesses and only two
of them count."

"Mr. President, let's not jump to conclusions," his national security advisor said. She was a specialist in
nuclear strategy and had been doing makee-learnee on terrorism ever since the attacks of September 11,
2001. And this didn't fit the profile of a terrorist attack. "First of all, nobody thinks that they have access
to nuclear weapons of this sort. Radiological bombs, maybe. But this appears to be a nuclear weapon.
However, the target makes no sense for a terrorist. It has been located precisely as being on the grounds
of the University of Central Florida. Why waste a nuclear weapon on a university when they could use it
on New York or Washington or L.A. or Atlanta?"

"I gotta go with the NSA on this one, Mister President," the secretary of defense said. "This doesn't feel
like an attack. What's the chance it could have been some sort of accident?"

"I don't know that much about UCF," the NSA admitted. She had once been the dean of a major
college but for the last few years she'd been holding down the national security advisor's desk in the
middle of a war. Her stated ambition after leaving government service was to become the commissioner
of the National Football League. "But I don't think they're doing anything in the nuclear program, I'm
pretty sure I'd remember that. And you just don'tget accidents with weapons. They're hard enough to get
to go off at all."

"So we're in a holding pattern?" the President asked.

"Yes, sir," the secretary of defense answered.

"We need to get a statement out, fast," the chief of staff said. "Especially if we're pretty sure it wasn't a
terrorist attack."

"Have one made up," the President said. "I'm going to go take a nap. I figure this is gonna be a long
one."

"Okay, Crichton, what do you have?"

The battalion headquarters of Second Battalion was collocated in the armory with Charlie Company. At
the moment the Battalion, which should have had a staff sergeant and two specialists as a nuclear,
biological and chemical weapons team, was without any of the three. Crichton had for the last year been
the only trained NBC specialist in the entire battalion. He reflected, somewhat bitterly, that while he'd
been holding down the work of a staff sergeant, a sergeant and six other privates it hadn't been reflected
in a promotion.

"None of my instruments are reading any increase in background radiation here, sir," the specialist