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.
"Hit the dirt!" Zen yelled at the troops. A few had already heard the lion cough in the sky and had begun to take cover, following the pattern of experienced fighters who never need an order to dive for the nearest hole. He saw, as he shouted, that the number who had already begun to hit the dirt was pitifully few and he knew the reason for this. Most of these men were green conscripts on their first fighting mission, the results of digging deep into a population that had already been scoured to the bone for manpower—and for everything else. Conscripts were likely to stare at the sky and die with their mouths open.
"What is it?" the girl asked. "What's wrong?"
"Don't you hear that blooper in the sky overhead?"