Two of the giant, experimental UAVs were over the continental US at that moment, covering Miami and Kansas City. In contrast to the first moments after the Disappearance hit, when everyone had been wired and speeding on fear of the unknown, the feeling in the expanded op centre was now resigned and sombre. Everyone knew what to expect from the footage. Empty cities. Deserted streets. Massive pile-ups on the road networks. Some burning buildings, many more charred ruins. Stillness. Ditches and craters of burning ruin in the fields where aircraft had gone down over what many called ‘Flyover Country’, in the Midwest. Where there should have been cattle or horses, there were charred spots and grassfires, especially in west Texas.

Mega-fires still blazed across the length of America, spewing unknowable tonnages of pollution into the atmosphere. Thankfully, there had been only two meltdowns in a couple of older nuclear plants when the auto shutdowns failed – at Browns Ferry in Alabama and Hartsville, South Carolina. On the other hand, many coal-fired plants went up for want of human attention or computer intervention. But in these two metro centres at least, the worst of the conflagration was over. Indeed, it never really started. Cold, soaking rain had hosed down most of the initial outbreaks in Kansas City. An airliner had speared into a power station in Miami, killing the grid before an untended waffle iron or hair curler was able to burn down half the city. Satellite imagery confirmed similar strokes of luck had spared dozens of other cities, but hundreds more had been incinerated. The number of population centres lost came to thousands, however, once you counted all the minor towns and burgs that had gone up for one reason or another.

‘Miami on the right-hand screen, KC to the left, General.’

Musso thanked Ensign Oschin again, even though the two cities didn’t look much alike and there was no trouble telling one from the other. The footage of Kansas City was trisected by a meeting of the Kansas and Missouri rivers in the centre of the metropolis. No beaches, that was for certain. Musso had been to nearby Fort Leavenworth during the course of his career, for some joint-forces training with the US Army. It had been the coldest winter he had ever experienced and he certainly wasn’t eager to go back there any time soon.

‘Okay,’ said Musso, as he turned to address the tightly packed group of officers seated on plastic chairs behind him. ‘This is a highlights package, cut together an hour ago from twelve hours of coverage by our two Hawks.’

Fifteen men and women had squeezed into the small room for the briefing, including Lieutenant Colonel Pileggi, who’d flown up from Joint Task Force Bravo in Honduras the previous day. The senior SOUTHCOM representative sat in the front row with a notepad and pen at the ready. She and Musso were supposed to present a plan to Ritchie that evening to evacuate any and all US citizens who wanted to go, from South and Central America to an as-yet-undetermined location. It meant moving hundreds of thousands of people God only knew where. But certainly not to Gitmo. It already had a diabolical refugee problem.

Musso thumbed a control stick and brought up the first set of images. Still shots from the downtown areas of both cities. ‘I’m afraid there’s nothing new to report here,’ he announced. ‘Just better imaging than we’ve had so far. The power grid in both cities has failed, meaning there’s less chance of a catastrophic urban firestorm starting up, although spot fires continue to break out here and there for whatever reason.’

Musso examined the Kansas City screen, which displayed the footage of a burnt-out Quiktrip on Armour Boulevard, across from a post office and a couple of larger buildings in Northtown. He never could keep all of Kansas City’s various townships and municipalities straight when he was there. The Heart of America Bridge along with the Paseo and Hannibal bridges showed evidence of multi-vehicle pile-ups, some of which had combusted and later burnt out in the schizophrenic weather of the Midwest. A train had derailed on the ASB Bridge next to the Heart of America and dumped itself into the Muddy Mo. One of the towers, he couldn’t tell which one, looked like it had been slashed with something – probably a Cessna or a Learjet from Downtown Airport.

On the other screen, a Walmart Supercenter on 88th Street in Miami had been reduced to a smouldering shell. Several watercraft in a variety of flavours and sizes had washed up on the beaches and canals. Musso couldn’t help but be struck by the similarity between these images and those stolen from blasted landscapes throughout the Balkans and in Kuwait after the Iraqi invasion. There was one major difference, of course: no bodies.

‘We chose these two cities for the Hawks, partly because they remain comparatively undamaged, and also because local weather patterns have temporarily cleared away some of the pollutants that are choking the air pretty much everywhere else. That won’t last.’

He thumbed the control again, and the twin displays appeared to blink, as they switched to a different video stream.

‘You’re now looking at imaging taken from Montgomery, Memphis and St Louis as the first bird made its way up to KC

The screens reformatted into a series of windows, all showing bleak, grey landscapes that reminded Musso of photographs of old industrial towns, where soggy ash and acid rain permanently blanketed the landscape, leaching the colour from everything. A couple of low grunts and a curse or two were evidence that some capacity to be surprised remained in his audience.

‘This nuclear-winter effect has been replicated across the continental US, although not uniformly. As you might expect, the concentrations of airborne pollutants are most dense at the source, and data from our weather satellites indicates that a significantly thick tail measuring about a hundred and fifty to two hundred miles extends east from each of the largest cities to have burned. In some areas of the country, in certain parts of the Rockies and on the West Coast well to the north and south of the LA Basin, the concentration of particulates is not yet at critical levels. Because of a low-pressure system sitting off the coast this last week, Seattle did suffer some contamination from the mega-fires that burnt out Portland and Spokane, but that system moved east and dragged a good deal of the plume with it.’

The scratch on his head was bleeding again, forcing Musso to reach for another tissue with which to dab it. He patted down his pockets, unable to find one, until Colonel Pileggi passed him a Kleenex from a handbag down by her feet.

‘Thanks, Susan. Feels like I’m bleeding out here.’

‘Don’t worry, General. Chicks dig scars.’

A strained chuckle ran through the tightly packed group and eased just a little of the utter hopelessness that had begun to take hold. Musso turned back to the briefing with at least some sense of purpose.

‘Okay. Average temperatures under the particulate cloud are up to twenty degrees cooler than average, although again, that varies from one locale to another. The variations are much more pronounced inland than by the sea, and proximity to a major source has an effect too.’