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airport fire crew, and more coming. The air fills them up, and the cold keeps the volume to a minimum. It’s the best we can do right now, and with luck we won’t need them for long. Frankly, I think it’s just one big cover-your-ass.”
    “Who gets to seal them off and change the hoses when they’re full?”
    Scholz wiped the sweat from her forehead and smiled for the first time in hours.
    “Some grunt,” she said. “Presumably lower in grade than sergeant.”
    “Which reminds me, Major. How did you draw this lowly shit detail?”
    “I’ve known those kids nearly all of their lives,” she said. “If they’re going to be held in security isolation, even for twenty-four hours, I want familiar faces around. That’s why you’re here, too.”
    “But I don’t. . . .”
    “Yes you do, Sergeant,” she said. “You’ve sneaked Sonja into every flight trainer and cockpit we’ve got out here. You saved their lives, Sergeant.”
    “I did?”
    “Absolutely. Details forthcoming; you didn’t hear it from me.”
    The teams setting up the other two isolettes worked in a sweaty silence, the air in the warehouse almost too thick to breathe.
    “They’ve been together all through this, so why build separate chambers?”
    “Orders,” she said.
    Scholz had asked the same question herself, and got the same answer. The guerrillas, the chopper crew, the ambulance team—they all waited out their fate in the adjacent warehouse without the luxury of these isolettes. When she questioned this, the answer from her chief, Trenton Solaris, was, “We’re doing the best with what we have.”
    The other question she had asked but received no answer to had to do with the Children of Eden hangar and warehouse directly across the airfield. They were locked up tight over there, presumably for their Sabbath. Still, she couldn’t help wonder how they could sit quietly by when a couple of thousand of their personnel just disappeared under a few million tons of water. In spite of Major Hodge’s hands-off attitude, Scholz put the place under surveillance, physical and electronic. If they tried to move anybody or anything out of there, she’d take action. Until then, it was easier for everybody if she let them sit tight.
    Sergeant Trethewey dragged a couple of lengths of fire hose to their work area and dropped them at the major’s feet.
    “Major, are you all right? I heard you were in the embassy when the bomb . . .”
    “I’m fine,” she said. Then she shook her head and laughed. “A fluke. I hate to say it, but Hodge saved my skin. He called me out of the reception area back to snoop and sniff, clear on the other side of the building, just before it blew. By the time I got back through all the debris, Colonel Toledo was gone.”
    She shot some Quik-Bond into the threads and screwed them into the coupling in the Plexiglas.
    “They say it was a suicide mission,” Trethewey said. “That he did it to get his ex-wife.”
    “More complicated than that,” Scholz said. “Believe me, he didn’t do it. And he didn’t blow the dam at ViraVax, either. The guerrillas verified that when they brought the kids in. Quik-Bond all these couplings until the bonding seeps out. We don’t want any air leaks.”
    “The kids . . . they’re still okay?” Trethewey asked.
    Scholz patted her Sidekick.
    “As okay as could be expected under the circumstances. They’re in an ambulance out back—which we’ve been ordered to bury in concrete as soon as they’re moved in here.”
    “Those goddamn guerrillas. . . .”
    “It wasn’t them,” the major interrupted. “They discovered the charges when they went to help the Colonel get the kids. They’re the ones who rescued the kids, and that woman virologist. She’s the sole survivor out there, it looks like. Garcia’s people shot them down— our standing orders—and would have killed them all if they’d found them first.”
    “What happened with the team that Major Hodge sent