“Mommy! Mommy! Brad hit me! Mommy! Make him stop!”

“All right, kids…”

“Bradley? How many times do I have to tell you? Leave your sister alone!”

Standing to one side of McKinley Park, Trooper Miguel Rodriguez of the Arizona Highway Patrol stood by his car and watched the picnic in progress. It was now eleven-thirty in the morning, and the kids were getting hungry. They were starting to fight. All around the park, barbecues were going, the smoke rising into an ever-darkening sky. Some of the parents looked upward with concern, but nobody was leaving the park. And the rain hadn’t started here, even though they had heard the crack of lightning and the rumble of thunder a few miles to the north.

Rodriguez glanced at the bullhorn resting on the seat of his car. For the last half hour, he had waited impatiently for the radio call from Agent Kenner, telling him to clear the park.

But the call hadn’t yet come.

And Agent Kenner had given him explicit instructions. Do not clear McKinley Park before he was given the word.

Trooper Rodriguez didn’t understand why it was necessary to wait, but Kenner had been insistent. He said it was a matter of national security. Rodriguez didn’t understand that either. How was a damn picnic in a park a matter of national security?

But he knew an order when he heard one. So Rodriguez waited, impatient and uneasy, and watched the sky. Even when he heard the weather service announce a flash flood advisory for the eastern counties from Kayenta to Two Guns and Camp Payson—an area that included McKinley—Rodriguez still waited.

He could not know that the radio call he was waiting for would never come.