Hidden Empire (Empire 2)

Cole could see that the others would deal with the fifteen enemy soldiers heading for Babe. But that still left seventy of them on their way to the university. Which became Cole's assignment to himself. Hurry up, buy time.

He moved as quickly as he could, but all this movement wasn't making his fever any better. His bowels were grinding with pain, though he knew there was nothing in them. Unless they were filling up with blood.

Okay, God, I know I'm going to die, but let me help my men first, just let me stop the enemy long enough.

The ETA of the choppers was still four minutes off. A lot of things can happen in four minutes. Like the fact that two squads were converging on the north entrance of the university grounds and Cole had no hope of getting there in time.

There was gunfire from the gate. Who was there? Cole's Noodle didn't show him anything except other guys with Noodles. Had some of the soldiers come out of the hospital after all and made some kind of stand? He prepared himself for the sight of a bloody massacre of his men.

But when he finally staggered to where he could see the entranceway, there were a lot of bodies, but none of them were Americans. Most of the bodies were Nigerian students. The only weapons they seemed to have had were clubs.

Guarding the sick American soldiers with big heavy sticks, against automatic weapons. And yet they had brought down eight of the bad guys. Where were the other two?

No time to look for them. Five other groups were converging on the university from other directions.

"The two you're looking for went inside your headquarters building," said the DGS operator. "In case you missed that."

"I can't … can't chase them. Got too many others out here."

"Anybody inside got weapons?"

"Lots of weapons. Strength to lift them? No."

The sound of automatic weapons fire inside the building made Cole want to scream, but he didn't have either the strength or the time. He got to a spot where he could watch the entrance that the rest of the enemy soldiers were heading for and waited.

If they'd had any kind of traini

ng, they would have split up and covered every entrance. Instead, they all just headed for the nearest one, bunching up as they neared the door.

Then again, training wasn't what was driving them. For them, this wasn't a job or an adventure. It was one or both of the two things that would get Arab soldiers to keep fighting when victory was in doubt and there was a strong possibility that they'd get killed—religious fervor and vengeance. It didn't matter much to Cole what was driving them. What did matter to him was that when these guys met resistance, they kept right on coming. That made them crack troops, by the standards of your normal Arab army.

Another burst of gunfire from inside the building.

I'll kill this crowd and then get inside over their dead bodies and find those two bastards who are shooting at my men.

Cole opened fire. To him it felt like he was putting his last ounce of adrenaline and strength into his movements—he should be leaping about like a cricket, but instead he was staggering like a drunk.

Except for one thing. He knew how to use his weapon, and his Bones were designed to help him do it. Once he aimed, and his Noodle was looking at the target, if his arms and hands wobbled the Bones would compensate. And it didn't matter that his trigger finger was so weak and trembly—the Bones were designed for that wounded soldier fighting to defend himself to the last. Normally it took serious pressure on the trigger to make it work, but now the Bones were converting it into a hair trigger, so that the slightest intent to fire caused a bullet to come out of the muzzle of his weapon; if he sustained it at all, then it was a burst.

And there was another feature Cole had never thought that he would need—assisted targeting. With his weak and trembling hands, he had no hope of precise aim. So he activated what Mingo called "girly mode," in which the Noodle took over the targeting and aimed the weapon, learning from the first shots exactly how to hold the weapon to hit the targets, one after another. Cole still had to pull the trigger—barely—and he could override the aim if he wanted to, but it was mostly going to be machine work.

The bad guys saw him, but his bullets were already hitting them before they could bring weapons to bear. It was so fast Cole could hardly believe it had happened. Twenty-five men converging on the door, and now every one of them down. And all Cole had suffered was the sharp hard blows of a scattering of bullets against his Kevlar. The assisted targeting had worked, his Kevlar had worked, and the Bones had kept him from falling over with the recoil of the weapon.

He would have gone into the building then, but bullets started spattering around him from another direction, hitting him, which was tolerable until there was a sharp burst of loud static. When his Bones and Noodle went down, so did Cole. Another group of enemy soldiers must have come up while he was killing the first crowd, and they had hit him with the handheld EMP, and even though he said "reboot," they'd have a crucial thirty seconds in which to kill him.

His Kevlar was still holding. They kept firing as they approached. He struggled to curl himself into something like fetal position, and felt the impact of bullets on his back. Only now the Bones weren't working and so the bullets were skidding him across the pavement and it was only a matter of time before a bullet hit him somewhere that the Kevlar didn't cover. Or they came close enough that the velocity of the bullets would punch on through.

He was halfway through the reboot when another EMP hit him.

That's it, he thought. I'll never get inside the building to stop the two who made it in. I hope some of the shooting in there was my soldiers taking out the bastards.

The enemy fire continued but nothing was hitting him. Shouldn't they be on top of him by now?

Then he realized he was hearing choppers. The cavalry had arrived.

It was their job now. It was okay for Cole to go sleep or die or whatever it was his body was doing. Shutting down, anyway, and there was no reboot command for his brain.

BOYS WITH GUNS