"So they deserve whatever you guys in your Iron Man suits do to them."
Actually, yes, but Cole understood she believed otherwise. "They're funding this genocidal treatment of the southern Nigerians by stockpiling the money from the sales of oil, all of which is found under the ground in southern Nigeria. So the north is stealing from the south the very means by which they're destroying them."
"The ironies of geography," said Cecily. "Again, is this grounds for your going in and killing?"
"Cecily, you know the business your husband was in. You know that this would have been his assignment if he were alive."
"Or he would have turned it down and ended his career over it."
"The southern Nigerians are an oppressed, unarmed people in the midst of one of the worst plagues in history. The northern Nigerians are slaughtering those who survived, people who already faced death once, and lived. They're making war against the people they are supposed to protect, and they're using their victims' own money to pay for it."
"And what is your goal?" asked Cecily. "To stop the northerners from keeping the plague away from their families. You won't really have succeeded until babies are dying of the nictovirus in the north as well as the south. You are actually aiding and abetting the nictovirus."
"Why are you doing this?" said Cole. "You know that what we're doing is right. The Nigerian government is like the crew of a submarine shooting at the lifeboats of survivors of a ship the sub just sank. It's an atrocity."
"Why is it the other guy is the only one who commits atrocities?"
"Never mind, Cecily," said Cole. "I can see by your face that I'll never persuade you. And that's surprising, because usually you at least try to see my side."
"I can see your side," said Cecily. "I've got a much clearer view of it than you do, from over here on my side."
"Let's talk again when somebody's trying to commit genocide against someone you care about," said Cole—which he knew was unfair, but unfairness in this argument was her choice, not his.
Cole had left feeling hurt and angry. He couldn't understand why she was being so deliberately obtuse. There must be something else going on in her mind that he was not privy to, some missing argument that would make her position sensible.
Philosophy was for professors and, apparently, presidential advisers and war widows. Cole was in the business of war.
There were six other special-ops teams at work on the Nigerian operation, all of which reported to Cole, but most of them were involved in supporting the police forces in the cities of the south by seeking out and destroying the bands of robbers that had inevitably grown up in the countryside. Nigeria could not survive as a society if safe transportation were not maintained.
So far only Cole's team had the Bones and Noodles—they were still prototypes. And Cole worried because they weren't well trained with them, especially not himself. He could walk along just fine, of course, but leaping and running and throwing in combat conditions made him deeply uneasy. He couldn't yet trust his reflexes to respond properly, and he'd overleap and hit his head on something, or throw too far or, second-guessing himself, not far enough. Which is why he barely trusted himself with grenades.
Babe, Drew, and Benny were as undertrained as Cole, so when they encountered enemy forces, the four of them served as the baseline force, while Mingo, Cat, Load, and Arty did all the scampering around the enemy's periphery, so they seemed to be everywhere at once.
The whole jeesh, of course, did all its yelling in Arabic. It wasn't the native language of the Hausas they were facing, but the Hausas would have heard Arabic in their mosques from childhood on up, since good Muslims wouldn't dream of translating the Quran into an inferior language. Cole hoped that it would sound to the hostile forces as if their own scriptures were screaming at them. And since English was the colonial language of Nigeria and most people spoke and understood it to some degree, Cole's jeesh used Farsi for the communications they didn't want the enemy to understand.
Having a lot of high-tech sources of information didn't make you infallible—no serious soldier would ever think it did. Today they had guessed wrong about the target of a foray by a group of nearly a thousand Nigerian Army regulars. Cole had assumed that a group that size, riding in trucks on main highways, would be making a major assault on a fairly urban area—a real counter strike.
Instead, they pulled down a group of side roads and struck at a series of Ibo villages. They had apparently known something that none of Cole's intelligence sources had told him—that in the absence of Nigerian government authority, a number of Ibo regions had taken to calling themselves Biafrans.
Old memories died hard, and the Nigerian Civil War was still fresh in many minds. The reason the Hausas of the north had sent such a large force was to strike many villages at once, so that the message would be clear: The Hausas would be back, and no Biafran nation would rise from the ashes of the epidemic.
"Having drones that watch from the sky don't make us local," said Cat, when they realized what was happening. They could see only where the enemy was, never where they intended to go or what they intended to do when they got there.
All they could do was move as quickly as possible to where the UAS operators spotted Nigerian squads striking. They got on their chopper and dropped down into a yam field a few miles from the enemy. They wore masks that filtered out or killed any microbes in the air, so they could avoid getting infected themselves—the nictovirus still raged through the villages of Nigeria.
It was in the first village that Arty, never very squeamish, pulled the scarf from around the neck of what seemed to be the village headman, who had apparently been strangled in front of the whole village before the rest were massacred. The scarf turned out to be a Biafran flag.
"They had to do this up close and personal," said Babe. "And you can see from the bodies, a lot of these villagers had the nicto."
"So I guess there are higher priorities than avoiding the epidemic," said Cole.
"Or lower ones," said Drew, from a few paces away. He beckoned them to follow him toward a semiconcealed location away from the main village, and Cole, Mingo, and Cat came over.
They never allowed the whole team to assemble in one spot—too easy for an enemy to wipe them all out at once with a well-placed grenade, or surround them and cut them off from escape. So Load, Arty, Babe, and Benny stayed spread out to watch the perimeter.
The corpses of three women hidden behind some brush showed clear signs of having been raped before they died.
"Somebody broke discipline," said Mingo. "The whole point of the Hausa quarantine is to avoid physical contact with people who might be carrying the nicto."
"Well, strangling doesn't do that job, either," said Drew.
"Bet the guy who did the strangling wore a gas mask and a protective suit," said Cat.
"Bet the guys who did the raping unzipped their protective pants," said Mingo.
Drew gestured toward the women's slit throats. "Everybody calls it sneezing flu, so people think they can only catch it from a sneeze. I bet they killed these women first, so—no sneezing, but the bodies were still warm. Dead wouldn't bother some men, if they thought it meant they were safe."
"So I have a question," said Cole. "And Babe is the one most likely to know the answer." He started to move away from the others. Behind him, he heard the others still talking.
"Burn the bodies?" asked Drew.
"And notify the hostiles that we're on their trail?" asked Cat. "What are you thinking?"
"Cole's wearing the big Noodle, not me," said Drew.
Meanwhile, Cole had made his way over to where Babe was on watch. Without any need for orders, Mingo had run ahead to take Babe's place, and Babe jogged back toward Cole.
"You've been with the doctors," said Cole. "So you know stuff about how this disease spreads."
"I was doing security. They didn't exactly discuss the science with me."
"Well, you're likely to know more than t
he rest of us. What Ineed to know is—first, there are two forms of the disease, right? The one spread by blood contact, and the other by sneezing."
"That's just a working hypothesis," said Babe. "There were only four who died from the quick bloody disease. Everybody else has the slow-to-show sneezing version, because that's the one people live long enough to spread."
"That's the thing," said Cole. "Are they the same virus?"
"Maybe somebody knows now, but they'd be in Atlanta or Reston, where the monkeys and the corpses of the first victims were taken. When I was with the doctors they didn't have a clue."
"Damn," said Cole. "I have to know—the guys who did this rape, are they going to catch the sneezing flu and show no symptoms for a week, or are they going to drop dead with blood coming out of their eyes six hours after they did this?"
"Who cares?" asked Babe. "Just a few more guys we don't have to kill."
"If they only catch the sneezing flu," said Cole, "then the most important thing we can do is make sure these guys live to get back to Hausa country."
Babe got it at once. "Oh, man. A bunch of Typhoid Marys."
"As soon as the epidemic reaches the north, then this whole operation goes away. It's going to happen eventually, because there's no way, not even genocide, to hold this back. The only real boundaries are the Sahara and the ocean, the way Torrent planned it."
Babe grinned savagely. "Sounds like you think Torrent planned this epidemic."
"I meant the way he planned the African quarantine," said Cole, irritated.
"I know what you meant," said Babe.
"I don't know what you mean," said Cole. "Torrent isn't some evil scientist who created a virus and cleverly implanted it in a troop of monkeys that someone might or might not have found."
"Unless Chinma was a plant," said Babe.
"Paranoia check," said Cole. "You spent hours with the boy. Was he some stooge, or did his whole family really die?"
It was obvious Babe knew that Chinma was no fake. "Why can't it be both?" said Babe defiantly.
"Keep it real, Babe," said Cole. "You're scaring me, and not about President Torrent."
"Just speculating," said Babe. "Things occur to me, I talk them out."
Not if you didn't think they had some merit, thought Cole. And he remembered the guys talking about how the Bones would get them over the White House fences before the Secret Service could even react. "Back to my question," said Cole. "This village was still in the grip of the nicto. Could these rapists catch sneezing flu from the corpses?"
"Why are you asking me?" asked Babe.
"Because I hoped you knew."
"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
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.
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