Hidden Empire (Empire 2)

ervously. "Man, isn't this, like, an atrocity? Like when they sent smallpox-infected blankets to freezing Indians to make sure they got sick and died?"

"Bit different, here," said Cole. "We didn't infect the blankets. These guys were volunteers."

They gathered in thicker brush outside the village and Cole explained the plan. "We can track these guys," he said, "but only to make sure they rejoin the main force. We don't want to kill them."

"Come on," said Mingo. "Are we going to let them get away with this?"

"We're not here to punish," said Cole, "we're here to protect the main population from attacks. Killing Hausa soldiers ourselves is only one means of doing that. The north is going to get this disease sooner or later. But sooner will stop them from slaughtering a lot of southerners."

"I don't know, man," said Drew. "That's women and children now."

"Did you see who was dead in that village? We're letting their own kind of war flow back at them—we're not even doing it, we're just letting them do it, as if we hadn't been here."

Mingo laughed sharply. "Drew's just shittin' you, Cole," he said. "He likes making you go off on a rant about why us killing people is okay and them killing people isn't."

Cole took a deep breath. "I knew that," he said, knowing that they would know that he knew that they knew that he didn't know any such thing, which made it a joke. And, pleasantly enough, they laughed.

"So what do we do, let them continue this rampage?" asked Cat.

"No," said Cole. "But we go intercept other squads and leave the one that did this alone. I think once we start shooting up one of the raiding parties they'll all be called back—these guys know what we can do, and they don't want to die. So they'll all link up with the main body as fast as they can—and get infected on the way back to base."

Cole assigned one drone—or, rather, assigned the human operator of the drone in his workstation in some town in California—to follow the perpetrators of this attack, while Cole used the other drones to locate the nearest squad. They took off at a jog along a dirt track that seemed to lead in that direction.

And indeed it did. They reached another village that had already been destroyed. The bodies were still warm, the blood undried. "Right behind them, dammit," said Cat.

"Think we can outrun their trucks?" asked Cole.

They laughed and began to run. Great bounds, rather like kangaroos, only one foot at a time, each step like flight, as if they were nearly weightless.

Cole lagged behind. It was where he was supposed to be, as the wearer of the main Noodle, so he could monitor everything that was happening. It was also where he naturally ended up, since he was less experienced than some of them at running in Bones, and he was also distracted by a much larger and more complicated heads-up display than the others were seeing.

Besides the electronics, though, he could see them with his real eyes as they bounded along ahead of him. It reminded him of the Terminator movies, with a relentless robot chasing a speeding truck on foot—and gaining on it. Not that the trucks were speeding—on these roads? Tracks, really.

When they got within range, the jeesh started shooting, and then the trucks did speed up. Which worked rather nicely, since two of them ended up crashing off the road and into the trees.

The lead team—the experienced guys, Mingo, Cat, Load, and Arty—kept right on running past the wrecked trucks—nobody fired at them. By the time the slower guys got there—five seconds later—there were Nigerian soldiers crawling out of the wrecked trucks and some of them were ambitious to bring their weapons to bear.

In Farsi, Cole gave the order not to wipe them out. Just bloody them enough to get their heads down. It didn't take much—nothing like a car wreck to take the fighting spirit out of a guy. In moments they were scurrying or limping or crawling away in the brush. Those that could. When you sprayed out bullets, you couldn't help killing somebody, even if you weren't trying to eradicate the enemy force.

The voice of the drone operator came back into Cole's ear. "That team you set me to follow?" he said. "They got the distress call from this team, and they're closest, so they're coming."

"That is sweet," said Cole. "How close?"

"About five minutes away at current speeds."

Cole immediately gave the order to the whole jeesh: In about three minutes, at my order, stop firing and disengage. Rendezvous just north of the first village.

When the others reached the rendezvous site, Cole was already there, sitting on a low tree limb with his feet on the ground, watching what the drone was showing him. "They're a bunch of regular good Samaritans, these rapist bastards," said Cole. "They're picking their injured buddies up, binding their wounds, loading them on trucks."

"Sneezing on them?"

"Hope so," said Cole. "My Noodle focus isn't sharp enough to see."

They moved out again, to more remote enemy squads, and they were able to stop two of them before they could wipe out the villages they were assigned to, though in one of them, the village leader had already died with the Biafran flag around his throat. After that, a general retreat must have been ordered, because the whole Nigerian Army force got onto the main roads and headed back north to safety.

Cole could have ordered in a strike and wiped the whole group out. That was the nice thing about Torrent's having announced this campaign to stop the genocide in Nigeria—they could bring in air strikes in full view of civilians in the most populous country in Africa. But this was one time when they wanted the enemy to escape. Though he did have his guys intercept them once and fire at them just after they passed, to give the illusion of hot pursuit. Cole didn't want to have it occur to the enemy that the Americans had deliberately allowed this regiment to return home mostly alive.

When Cole's team returned to base—which was not much of a base, just a location on high ground far from any villages, where they stashed supplies—they were grim but exhilarated, a combination of emotions that Cole had seen with such intensity only in the aftermath of victory.