Aside from the stories told by the soldiers--and the Asian fighting men also had their tales to tell--only one thing was certain: if the new people existed at all, they were very elusive. Only the grave of the man who had founded the group, old Jal Jonnor, was still to be found in the high Sierras of California. Zen did not go looking for this grave, but he saw photographs of it. He also studied the biographies that had been compiled on this colossal but enigmatical figure. Were the grave and the thick files the only remaining evidence that at least one human had dared to dream of a new day? Zen did not think so. Most of all, he longed to capture one of the new people for questioning. Then, in a daring coup that was intended to strike a spearhead at the heart of America, Cuso, the top Asian fighting leader, and thousands of tough Asian paratroopers floated down into the mountains between British Columbia and the United States. Cuso and his men, hiding out in the high mountain ranges, resisted all efforts to dislodge them. They became a festering thorn in the side of America, a threat that was not quite big enough to take seriously, or slight enough to overlook. He was hidden so deep in the mountain caverns that he could not be bombed out and the terrain was so rugged that his paratroopers could withstand the assault of a full army. As his men began making forays into the lower ranges, searching for food and women, the inhabitants of the area fled in terror. This was the situation when Kurt Zen accompanied a body of troops up the last fairly good trail toward Cuso's hidden lair. Neither the troops nor Cuso really interested him. What interested him was an army nurse with the medical detachment. He suspected this nurse was one of the new people. In months of patient, painstaking work, she was the only good lead to this group that he had uncovered. He was going up a steep mountain trail, with troops ahead and behind, when something that sounded like a wounded lion began to cough in the sky overhead. II Kurt Zen heard the lion cough in the sky overhead. He knew that it would hit in about four minutes and that it would seem to open a tunnel upward from hell, that the mountains would shake and tremble, that the air would vibrate and rattle as if a dozen thunderbolts had exploded at the same instant, and that a good number of the troops laboriously circling the incline of the ridge above would die. He knew that more of them would die a horrible lingering death as a result of the radioactivity that would be released by the blast. "Pardon me, Nedra," he said to the nurse, who was just ahead of him. She had stopped to stare upward.