"Heard some explosions," said Mingo. "Preds?"
"Hellfire. Reduction of enemy force by at least one-sixth," said Cole. "And they're on foot now. The computer counts 105 of them. Must have had about twenty-five per truck, plus drivers."
"Can you see what they're carrying?"
"No," said Cole. "The UAS operators can, but I can't focus that well." He switched back to the DGS in Langley. "Can you guys see how the targets are armed?"
The sensor operator's voice came into his ears. "Looks like automatics but we don't see anything with exploding shells."
They want the killing to be up close and personal, thought Cole.
The sensor operator started enumerating weapons. "Ten of them have something I've never seen before, bulky back end, narrow front. Flamethrower? Why make one with an inflexible nozzle?" A view of a man carrying one popped up on his display.
Cole knew what it was. "They're EMP devices."
"We need to get those on the recognition drills," said the sensor operator.
"Haven't captured any yet. You're the first to spot them from the air."
"Then how did you know what it was?"
"Because you didn't recognize it," said Cole, "and whoever set up the trap for us in Bangui sent these guys after us."
"Stands to reason."
Cole's Noodle was still open to his men, so they heard all this.
"Sounds to me," said Babe, "that when Cole is sick, he thinks like us."
"You got it," said Cole. He checked his vitals display. "I'm at 105 degrees."
"Same number of degrees as enemy soldiers," said Drew. "Coincidence? You decide."
They all laughed softly.
"About two hundred yards out. Mingo and Babe, you're too far out front, pull back. You'll get cut off by the group coming from your right." Cole knew they were seeing the same drone display he was, now, and knew what he was talking about.
"Got 'em," said Mingo, and in a moment the locate display showed Mingo and Babe moving back, getting ready to spring a little surprise on one squad of five.
Meanwhile, the bad guys started shooting. For a moment Cole was disoriented, trying to figure out which of his men was the target. Then he realized there was no target. These clowns were just shooting. The modern equivalent of the rebel yell, apparently. Bullets as emotional display. No discipline. They were no damn good, these Sudanese goons, except against helpless civilians and desperately ill soldiers.
He realized that he had made an ID without reporting it. "Sudanese army, right?" he asked the drone pilot.
"Computer just matched them up," the pilot reported.
So I still have some mental function, thought Cole. That's encouraging.
Then Mingo and Babe sprang their little ambush. Five shots, five-man squad wiped out. "Good shooting for sick men," said Cole.
"Got their cousins next," said Mingo.
Now the enemy knew they were under fire and they got a tiny bit more cautious. As in: frozen in place. But Mingo and Babe couldn't wait to pick them off one by one. There were other squads still moving forward—eighteen of them—and Cole heard Mingo tell Babe to fall back.
Now it was Drew's and Load's turn. It took them eight shots, but the bad guys were ready, so it was just a little harder.
They'd killed ten enemy soldiers so far. There were still ninety-five of them, moving toward the university. The ones close to where Cole's men had taken out their targets were moving more slowly—but the ones that had fanned out farther were still going at a quick pace. One squad was already closer to the university than any of the jeesh except himself.
"All of you, shoot and fall back," said Cole. "We aren't the objective, the base is. We got no victory if we kill half of them and the other half get inside the base while we're busy."
It was the classic problem of an undermanned defense. You could beat the enemy at any point where you concentrated your forces, but they could always get around you. So you had to keep falling back, falling back, so they couldn't surround you, and finally you had fallen back as far as you could go and now they had you pinned, they could bring their force to bear, and numbers would win.
Well, so be it, thought Cole. We have to make them all slow down. Slow down, buy time.
He was saying it out loud, like the song a few minutes before. "Slow them down, buy some time."
"Got it, Cole," said Drew. "Now shut up please."
Cole shut up. And started moving. Hallucinations or not, he was the rear echelon, and his men were coming back toward his position. He needed to stay ahead of them, heading back toward the university. He also had to keep his eye on the enemy, make sure where they were.
Ordinarily Cole would have gotten into place and taken out an enemy squad by himself. But he couldn't trust himself to shoot that well, or move that fast, or stay concealed. He'd do more good for his men closer to the university, keeping track of all the enemy squads, calling their attention to the most urgent problems.
More shooting. Now the enemy's bursts of gunfire were meant to kill. "Stay out of sight, guys," said Cole.
"Hard to shoot through concrete," said Mingo.
"Most of this stuff isn't concrete, it's just plaster on wood," said Cole. "Shoot through it."
"Ouch," said Mingo. "That means they can, too."
"Can they pulse through it?" asked Drew.
The answer came almost before he asked. "Babe's down," said Mingo. "Pulse, he's not hit, but I've got to stay and cover him."
"Three squads heading right for Babe's position," Cole said as he showed Mingo the relevant view.
"Maybe I should lose the Bones," said Mingo. "I'm in better shape than anybody."
"You're weak as a puppy," said Cole. "Don't get delusions of grandeur because the Bones make you feel like you can move. Keep the exoskeleton, make them take it away from you. I can't get there, can you, Load?"
"Already on my way."
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
Civilization is about creating children, protecting them till they reproduce, and making sure that each generation retains the behavior patterns that led to that civilization's being successful in the first place. Fail at any of these tasks, and your civilization is fodder for the dissertations of archaeologists.
Chinma looked around at the people in the room—the helpless soldiers, the scarcely less helpless caregivers—and he could only think of his village, watching from above as the soldiers came in their trucks and shot everyone down. At least there were no babies for them to toss in the air for target practice. That would probably come later, in the city, as the victorious Sudanese death squad searched for the rest of the Americans.
These soldiers would not speak the same language as those who massacred the Ayere people. Nor would they be of the same race, nor wear the same uniform. But their faces would be the same, the rage of bloodlust, the delight in evil.
This time, though, there was no tree for Chinma to climb.
He wouldn't climb it even if there were. This is why he had come back to Nigeria, he understood it now. It was a mistake for him not to die with his village. A mistake for the Ayere people to still have one survivor. And now the mistake would be rectified. It was only a shame that these others had to die with him.
The firing outside was growing closer.
He looked around at the soldiers—especially the ones that he and Mark had tended in overlapping shifts. Benny and Arty, Mark called them, not Captain Sandolini and Captain Wu. Walking up the stairs to this room had about done them in—they had no strength at all right now. Mark was pressing a damp cloth against Benny's face, trying to keep him a little cooler than the fever wanted him to be.
Chinma saw that Arty was moving his hand. It was at his side, and he was making faint squeezing motions and flapping his hand just a little as he did.
Chinma knelt beside him. "What do you want, Arty?"
Arty could not even open his eyes, but he could whisper one word: "Pistol."
"You are not strong enough to shoot," said Chinma.
"Pistol," repeated Arty.
"And I will not let you kill yourself with it," said Chinma, assuming that Arty merely wanted to avoid falling into enemy hands. But suicide was wrong—that was one thing that the ancestral gods and the Christian minister both agreed on. Pain was terrible, but not as bad as going to hell for having killed yourself, Chinma understood that.
"Pisssstol," Arty said more fiercely, then fell back slack, exhausted.
"What is he saying?" asked Mark, now interested.
"Pistol," said Chinma.
At that word, Benny's eyes opened. "Me too," he whispered.
Mark asked Benny, "Is your pistol in your room downstairs?"
"Locker," said Benny.
Chinma had no idea what that meant.
"Come with me, Chinma," said Mark. "Run."
Chinma followed Mark down the corridor to the stairs at the end. Mark practically flew down, but Chinma had not known many stairs in his life until he lived at the Malich house, and he didn't have the confidence Mark did in his ability to hit every third step and then hold on to the banister to make a fast turn around the landing and start down the next flight.
So when he got to the room where they had tended Cole's jeesh for the past two weeks, Mark already had Benny's locker open and was rummaging through it. "Got it," said Mark, holding up a pistol.
Chinma headed for Arty's footlocker as Mark ran to the window to look out.
"Here they come," he said.
Chinma found the pistol. "I have it."
Mark was already running for the door. Then he stopped so abruptly that Chinma ran into him. "Stupid stupid stupid," he said.
Chinma thought for a moment that Mark was calling Chinma stupid because he ran into him, and he was going to apologize but then Mark rushed back to Benny's footlocker, flung it open again, and this time came up with a small box. "Ammunition," he said.
Chinma did the same, while again Mark ran to the window. "Oh God, those poor students."
> Chinma ran up beside him and saw what was happening at the entrance to the campus. University students with clubs were running into a hail of bullets and swinging clubs at men with automatics. But they must have surprised the soldiers, because there were half a dozen of them on the ground, dead or unconscious, and even more before the last student died. Only two of the soldiers remained, the only ones standing.
Those two began jogging toward the building where Chinma stood beside Mark.
"Let's go," said Mark. "Better not let them catch us down here."
The room they were at was on the first floor above ground level, and the stairs that they and the enemy soldiers would have to share were closer to the soldiers than to Chinma and Mark. They ran full-out and reached the stairs at about the same time as they heard the enemy soldiers start clattering up.
Chinma, being barefoot, was much quieter running up the stairs than Mark, whose shoes made a noise. Fortunately, the enemies' own footfalls were so noisy that they didn't hear, and instead of following them on up to the top floor, they started down the corridor. They would find no one in the room where Chinma had helped tend to Cole's jeesh, and no one in Cole's quarters, but there were a few weak soldiers and their stubborn caregivers in other rooms on that floor. They were about to die.
But Chinma understood that he and Mark were no match for those soldiers, neither boys against men nor pistols against automatics. The people downstairs would die, but they would get these guns to Arty and Benny.
The gunfire downstairs started before they got back to the room, short savage bursts, and when they flung open the door a couple of women shrieked. Mark sharply hissed at them to be quiet.
Chinma held out Arty's pistol, but saw that Arty could not take it.
Arty was shaking his head slightly.
"You have to load it," said Mark.