Hidden Empire (Empire 2)

"You're wearing your Noodle, aren't you?" asked Babe. "Ask the experts. Phone a friend."

Cole felt like an idiot. He had gotten used to using the helmet to monitor the location and condition of the other guys, and was beginning to get used to watching the UASs, though he had to sit down and shut out his peripheral vision with his hands in order not to throw up when a drone's-eye view of Africa was zipping and jagging around in his field of vision. But he was too used to operating cut off from home base. The helmet's ability to talk by satellite relay to AFRICOM in Stuttgart—or to the Pentagon, or the President—was simply not reflex to him yet. He flicked to that channel and asked his question.

They continued reconnoitering the area, knowing that some Army film editor back in the States would be cutting together footage from their Noodles that would be watched on the evening news. Cole wondered if they'd show the raped women, and if anyone would get the implications. Probably not. But just in case, he opened the channel again. Only this time he clicked his way to the channel that got him straight to Torrent. A feature that had been installed at the President's insistence.

Torrent was probably the first president to carry a bunch of cellphones in his pockets, each a secure line to a different person or group. No waiting to talk their way through layers of bureaucracy—it was like a dozen pocket hotlines. Cole had never used it till now, but if he stated his concern to his counterparts in the States, they'd obey him only if they felt like it.

"In a meeting," said Torrent as he answered the phone.

"Footage of raped women is in today's feed," said Cole. "Can't be shown or discussed in the news for at least a week."

"I'll take your word for that," said Torrent. Cole broke the connection.

Cole realized that he was trusting Torrent completely, with no more conversation than that, to make sure the information was not aired. And Torrent hadn't even asked to know Cole's reasons.

I'm fully on his team, Cole realized.

Then he remembered Babe's paranoid speculation and realized: Maybe I'm the only one here who is. Were these guys testing me when they joked about attacking the White House? About Torrent as a tyrant? And what were they testing for? Are they probing to see what I think about Torrent before … what, inviting me to enter a conspiracy?

No, no, it was the assassination of a president that brought Cole into this jeesh. An assassination that was going to be blamed on Reuben Malich, and probably would have been if Cecily had not had the ear of LaMonte Nielson, the Speaker of the House, when he was advanced to the presidency to fill out the interrupted term. These guys had fought beside him to protect the Constitution and keep the country together. They'd never …

Or had they fought for the Constitution? Soldiers rarely discussed their motives, and for all Cole knew, these guys had fought the Progressive Restoration with him because it was a leftist movement, not because it threatened the union. But surely he would have known, during those months of fighting together, if these were a bunch of right-wing nut jobs.

Reuben Malich would never have assembled them into his jeesh if they had been. Because Reuben most definitely was not a right-wing nut job, or even, really, all that conservative. Traditional conservative, maybe, the way Cecily was a traditional liberal, neither one so extreme as to block them from having a happy marriage and seeing eye to eye on most things.

Don't start distrusting your own guys, Cole.

It was only a few minutes before he got a response from the disease experts, though because he didn't need to know, he had no idea whether the answer was coming from Reston or Atlanta or some other unknown location. The epidemiologist couldn't very well announce to the general public that they had brought these devastating disease agents into the United States in order to study them, though anybody with an ounce of sense would realize that they'd had no choice.

"They're almost the identical virus," said the voice in his ear, "but not quite. The blood-only virus has a slight difference that makes it so much more virulent. You know what 'virulent' means?"

"I'm Googling it on my BlackBerry," said Cole. "Go ahead and assume I know."

"I'm not sure what you're hoping to hear," said the voice.

"I'm hoping to hear accurate information on which I can base field decisions," said Cole.

"Is one of your men infected?" asked the voice.

"Negative. We need to know whether raping fresh but infected corpses could transmit the sneezing form of the disease."

"My God," said the voice. "Oh my God." Maybe he was retching, or maybe not.

"I'm in a war zone here, I need an answer so I can decide what to do about the enemy force that did it."

"They've got to be quarantined. The nictovirus in either form can be transmitted by blood-to-blood contact. If the victims were sick, the … rapists probably have the virus now, too."

"All I needed to know," said Cole.

"Can you even do that? Quarantine the enemy?"

"We call it 'killing them,' and yes, we can," said Cole. Then he clicked off the connection and said, more to himself than to Babe, "But we won't."

"We really won't kill these bastards?" asked Babe.

"They've probably already killed themselves," said Cole. "The nicto was still rampant in this village. The odds are that at least one of those women they raped was sick."

Babe laughed n