FOUR-THIRTY IN THE morning, Webster was more than ready for the watch change. Jade and Garber and the General's aide have been dozing in their chairs. McGrath was outdoor with the smartphone linemen. They were simply ending up. The job had taken a whole lot longer than they had anticipated. Some kind of interface problem. They had physically cut the phone line coming out of Yorke, and bent the stiff copper down to a transient terminal box they had positioned at the base of a pole. Then they had spooled cable from the terminal box down the road to the cellular command vehicle. Connected it into one of the communications ports.
But it didn't work. Not proper away. The linemen had fussed with multimeters and muttered about impedances and capacitances. They had worked for three stable hours.
