Hidden Empire (Empire 2)

This is where they stopped to drop off their supply packages in the lee of a high wall surrounding an even more depressed-looking weedy lot.

"You in place?" asked Cole, and the other team said yes, and that was it. Except that Cole thought to check the drones and saw something he didn't like.

He saw nothing.

Not five minutes ago, as they were coming in on the chopper, the press had shown Avenue David Dacko crowded with bandits. Now there wasn't a soul there.

Cole gave the command to share the image with the others. "You getting that?" he said.

"Looks like everybody went home to get ready for the birthday party," said Mingo.

"Has our plan been compromised?" asked Cole.

"I'd say yes, if we had a plan," said Arty.

"I think we were spotted coming in and the other bandits took off," said Mingo. "We weren't trying to be invisible."

"You'd think they'd stay to take a few shots at the evil Americans," said Cole.

"Maybe they have friends in Nigeria and they've heard about us," said Drew.

"Whatever it is," said Cole, "we still have to do it. The backdoor team had better hold off and let us see if it's a trap coming in the front."

He heard assent from both teams and then he said to his guys, "Gentlemen, start your engines."

They bounded over a couple of fences and then leapt Avenue David Dacko. A very empty avenue, except for a couple of thoroughly shot-up cars. No time even to tell the other guys that it gave him the same kind of uneasy feeling that Butch and Sundance had before going out to get shot to pieces in the plaza. It was just another bound and Cole and Cat were up in the air soaring over the embassy wall, looking down at the embassy grounds, with Arty and Babe right behind.

There wasn't a soul waiting for them out in the open, and they had jumped high enough to see that there was no ambush on the lower roofs, anyway.

But somebody was there with a nice welcome for them, because After Cole and Cat landed, and while Arty and Babe were in the air, there was a savage popping sound from the Noodle and suddenly Cole's Bones became a dead weight, still flexible but dragging him down instead of giving him a boost.

Then there were yells from both Arty and Babe as they landed without benefit of their Bones. Only Cole didn't hear them over the Noodle, he just heard them with his ears, kind of muffled because of the helmet covering them.

Cole flashed on the two jets that he had seen brought down by the electromagnetic-pulse death ray during the assault on New York. This had to be something similar, an EMP that jolted their electronics.

That was the problem with high-tech equipment. If you got dependent on it, and somebody figured out a way to shut it down, you were in deep poo.

But there was a chance that their equipment had only been stunned, not killed. Cole clicked twice and said, "Reboot," and to his relief, the boot sequence initiated. His electronics weren't permanently fried, they'd just been given the old blue screen of death.

The boot sequence was only about thirty seconds, but that was long enough to die.

"Reboot!" Cole yelled. "And get close to the building! Crawl!"

It was the hardest five yards Cole had ever crawled, dragging the Bones along with him. They were heavy and awkward, and it didn't help that almost at once there were bullets flying. But because they had moved immediately, they were in the shelter of the embassy, and the gunmen weren't in a position to see them.

They were in a perfect position, however, for the bad guys to drop grenades on them, so they couldn't stay there long.

"What good does rebooting do?" asked Arty. "They'll just zap us again."

"They can't," said Cole. "It takes them a lot longer to recharge than it does for us to reboot."

"What if they've got a dozen spares already fully charged?" asked Cat.

"So they get to knock us down three more times," said Cole, "and then they're done. But I think we just saw all they've got."

He was back online and gave the backdoor team a quick account of what happened to them in the front yard. "They might have an EMP for you, too," said Cole, "or they might have something different. One thing's for sure—they absolutely knew we were coming."

"Gotcha," said Mingo, who was leading the other team. "We'll come in soft and low."