Hidden Empire (Empire 2)

"Cecily, you know the business your husband was in. You know that this would have been his assignment if he were alive."

"Or he would have turned it down and ended his career over it."

"The southern Nigerians are an oppressed, unarmed people in the midst of one of the worst plagues in history. The northern Nigerians are slaughtering those who survived, people who already faced death once, and lived. They're making war against the people they are supposed to protect, and they're using their victims' own money to pay for it."

"And what is your goal?" asked Cecily. "To stop the northerners from keeping the plague away from their families. You won't really have succeeded until babies are dying of the nictovirus in the north as well as the south. You are actually aiding and abetting the nictovirus."

"Why are you doing this?" said Cole. "You know that what we're doing is right. The Nigerian government is like the crew of a submarine shooting at the lifeboats of survivors of a ship the sub just sank. It's an atrocity."

"Why is it the other guy is the only one who commits atrocities?"

"Never mind, Cecily," said Cole. "I can see by your face that I'll never persuade you. And that's surprising, because usually you at least try to see my side."

"I can see your side," said Cecily. "I've got a much clearer view of it than you do, from over here on my side."

"Let's talk again when somebody's trying to commit genocide against someone you care about," said Cole—which he knew was unfair, but unfairness in this argument was her choice, not his.

Cole had left feeling hurt and angry. He couldn't understand why she was being so deliberately obtuse. There must be something else going on in her mind that he was not privy to, some missing argument that would make her position sensible.

Philosophy was for professors and, apparently, presidential advisers and war widows. Cole was in the business of war.

There were six other special-ops teams at work on the Nigerian operation, all of which reported to Cole, but most of them were involved in supporting the police forces in the cities of the south by seeking out and destroying the bands of robbers that had inevitably grown up in the countryside. Nigeria could not survive as a society if safe transportation were not maintained.

So far only Cole's team had the Bones and Noodles—they were still prototypes. And Cole worried because they weren't well trained with them, especially not himself. He could walk along just fine, of course, but leaping and running and throwing in combat conditions made him deeply uneasy. He couldn't yet trust his reflexes to respond properly, and he'd overleap and hit his head on something, or throw too far or, second-guessing himself, not far enough. Which is why he barely trusted himself with grenades.

Babe, Drew, and Benny were as undertrained as Cole, so when they encountered enemy forces, the four of them served as the baseline force, while Mingo, Cat, Load, and Arty did all the scampering around the enemy's periphery, so they seemed to be everywhere at once.

The whole jeesh, of course, did all its yelling in Arabic. It wasn't the native language of the Hausas they were facing, but the Hausas would have heard Arabic in their mosques from childhood on up, since good Muslims wouldn't dream of translating the Quran into an inferior language. Cole hoped that it would sound to the hostile forces as if their own scriptures were screaming at them. And since English was the colonial language of Nigeria and most people spoke and understood it to some degree, Cole's jeesh used Farsi for the communications they didn't want the enemy to understand.

Having a lot of high-tech sources of information didn't make you infallible—no serious soldier would ever think it did. Today they had guessed wrong about the target of a foray by a group of nearly a thousand Nigerian Army regulars. Cole had assumed that a group that size, riding in trucks on main highways, would be making a major assault on a fairly urban area—a real counter strike.

Instead, they pulled down a group of side roads and struck at a series of Ibo villages. They had apparently known something that none of Cole's intelligence sources had told him—that in the absence of Nigerian government authority, a number of Ibo regions had taken to calling themselves Biafrans.

Old memories died hard, and the Nigerian Civil War was still fresh in many minds. The reason the Hausas of the north had sent such a large force was to strike many villages at once, so that the message would be clear: The Hausas would be back, and no Biafran nation would rise from the ashes of the epidemic.

"Having drones that watch from the sky don't make us local," said Cat, when they realized what was happening. They could see only where the enemy was, never where they intended to go or what they intended to do when they got there.

All they could do was move as quickly as possible to where the UAS operators spotted Nigerian squads striking. They got on their chopper and dropped down into a yam field a few miles from the enemy. They wore masks that filtered out or killed any microbes in the air, so they could avoid getting infected themselves—the nictovirus still raged through the villages of Nigeria.

It was in the first village that Arty, never very squeamish, pulled the scarf from around the neck of what seemed to be the village headman, who had apparently been strangled in front of the whole village before the rest were massacred. The scarf turned out to be a Biafran flag.

"They had to do this up close and personal," said Babe. "And you can see from the bodies, a lot of these villagers had the nicto."

"So I guess there are higher priorities than avoiding the epidemic," said Cole.

"Or lower ones," said Drew, from a few paces away. He beckoned them to follow him toward a semiconcealed location away from the main village, and Cole, Mingo, and Cat came over.

They never allowed the whole team to assemble in one spot—too easy for an enemy to wipe them all out at once with a well-placed grenade, or surround them and cut them off from escape. So Load, Arty, Babe, and Benny stayed spread out to watch the perimeter.

The corpses of three women hidden behind some brush showed clear signs of having been raped before they died.

"Somebody broke discipline," said Mingo. "The whole point of the Hausa quarantine is to avoid physical contact with people who might be carrying the nicto."

"Well, strangling doesn't do that job, either," said Drew.

"Bet the guy who did the strangling wore a gas mask and a protective suit," said Cat.

"Bet the guys who did the raping unzipped their protective pants," said Mingo.