Hidden Empire (Empire 2)

"Go ahead, Mom. I'm not leaving them."

"I'm not leaving you!"

"You've been working with the people out there," said Mark. "Chinma and I have been working in here. It's our job. It's what we came for."

Mrs. Malich was crying now. Tough as nails, she was. But for her son, she cried. "Don't do this to me, Mark. We came here to heal the sick, not get shot at."

"We could have been killed by the D.C. sniper back home," said Mark.

"You were four years old back then, and we weren't in Virginia yet," said Mrs. Malich. "Please come. I beg you."

"Go," said Mark. "The other kids need you to get home safe."

"I need you to get home with me!" said Mrs. Malich.

"And you have responsibilities," said Mark. "People out there depend on you. Go."

To Rusty's surprise, the African boy, Chinma, stepped between them. "Nobody will change minds. Do your jobs."

And that was that. The young African was right, and they both saw that he was. Still weeping, Mrs. Malich touched Mark's face. He kissed her hand. Then she took off at a trot.

With that, Rusty made up his mind. He wasn't going into the city. He was casting his lot here, with the sick and dying soldiers and the brave people who were staying with them so they wouldn't die of the nictovirus during the attack. If they lived, he'd live, and he'd leave with the best story. Out there, the combat might quickly move away from him. He might miss it all. But here, the story was inside the four walls of every room that held soldiers and their caregivers.

Rusty left Mark and Chinma in the room with the two remaining men from Coleman's team—Benito Sandolini and Aristotle Wu, Mark told him—and went from room to room, talking to the soldiers, the caregivers, whoever was conscious and willing to chat. Rusty told a few jokes on himself, got them laughing here and there. Some of them had been listeners back in the States on local stations, or satellite radio, or Armed Forces Radio, and so they talked to him like an old friend. "I knew you'd show up here, Rusty. Just the kind of insane place you'd go."

He finally worked his way down to the supply room, where a handful of caregivers were arguing. "I'm not taking up arms," one man insisted.

"The enemy doesn't care—if you're here, they'll kill you," said a woman.

"I'm not here to kill, I'm here to heal."

"Then go out into the city and be safe!"

"Don't do this. If any of us picks up a gun, we're all fair game."

"We're fair game anyway, don't you know what these guys have done in Darfur?"

"You don't even know who they are."

Rusty remembered what the African kid had done, and he bustled in, all cheerful business. "Well, I've got that on tape, and it's really dramatic. But nobody's going to change anybody's mind, so why don't you get back to the soldiers, and if the bad guys break in here, well, then you do whatever you think is right at the time."

"Who are you?" asked a woman.

"I'm Rusty Humphries. Who are you?"

"You were taping us?" asked a man.

"Automatically comes on. Don't worry, it'll never play on the air. Go. Your patients need you."

"We're the night shift," said the woman. "And you aren't in charge here."

Now Rusty was getting a little irritated. Apparently talking sense only worked when you were talking to sensible people. "Let me put it to you another way. You're standing down here doing nothing. If that's all you're good for, get out of here. Me, I'm staying with these American soldiers and I'm going to do whatever I can to keep them safe. Like moving them up to the top floor."

"How will that help?"

Rusty wasn't sure it would—he'd just made it up right then. But, as always, he came up with a pretty good reason after he'd made up his mind. "We've got to buy time. We've called on the fleet to send choppers and Marines, but it'll take time to cover the distance. We just have to keep these boys alive long enough for the Marines to take over. You can do that, can't you? It's not picking up a gun, it's moving the victims. Okay?"

All they needed, apparently, was a plan and somebody to tell them what to do, as cheerfully as Rusty knew how, yet with all the steel in his voice, too.