"Robert McCammon - Swan Song" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCammon Robert R)

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BOOK
ONE

ONE
The Point of
No Return

Once upon a time /
Sister Creep / Black
Frankenstein /
The spooky kid /
King’s Knight



One
July 16

10:27 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time
Washington, D.C.



Once upon a time we had a love affair with fire, the president of the United States thought as the match
that he’d just struck to light his pipe flared beneath his fingers.

He stared into it, mesmerized by its color—and as the fire grew he had the vision of a tower of flame
a thousand feet tall, whirling across the country he loved, torching cities and towns, turning rivers to
steam, ripping across the ruins of heartland farms and casting the ashes of seventy million human beings
into a black sky. He watched with dreadful fascination as the flame crawled up the match, and he realized
that there, on a tiny scale, was the power of both creation and destruction; it could cook food, illuminate
the darkness, melt iron and sear human flesh. Something that resembled a small, unblinking scarlet eye
opened in the center of the flame, and he wanted to scream. He had awakened at two in the morning
from a nightmare of holocaust; he’d begun crying and couldn’t stop, and the first lady had tried to calm
him, but he just kept shaking and sobbing like a child. He’d sat in the Oval Office until dawn, going over
the maps and top-security reports again and again, but they all said the same thing: First Strike.
 The fire burned his fingers. He shook the match out and dropped it into the ashtray embossed with the
presidential seal in front of him. The thin thread of smoke began to curl up toward the vent of the
air-filtration system.