Empire

Chapter One Captain Malich Treason only matters when it is committed by trusted men. The team of four Americans had been in the village for three months. Their mission was to build trust until they could acquire accurate information about the activities of a nearby warlord believed to be harboring some operatives of Al Qaeda. All four soldiers were highly trained for their Special Ops assignment. Which meant that they understood a great deal about local agriculture and husbandry, trade, food storage, and other issues on which the survival and prosperity of the village depended. They had arrived with rudimentary skills in the pertinent languages, but now they were reasonably fluent in the language of the village. The village girls were beginning to find occasions to walk near whatever project the American soldiers were working on. But the soldiers ignored them, and by now the parents of these girls knew they were safe enoughthough that didn't stop them from rebuking the girls for their immodesty with men who were, after all, unbelievers and foreigners and dangerous men. For these American soldiers had also been trained to killsilently or noisily, close at hand or from a distance, individually or in groups, with weapons or without. They had killed no one in front of these villagers, and in fact they had killed no one, ever, anywhere. Yet there was something about them, their alertness, the way they moved, that gave warning, the way a tiger gives warning simply by the fluidity of its movement and the alertness of its eyes. There came a day that one of the villagers, a young man who had been away for a week, came home, and within a few minutes had told his news to the elder who, for lack of anyone better, was regarded by the villagers as the wisest counselor. He, in turn, brought the young man to the Americans. The terrorists, he said, were building up a cache of weapons away to the southwest. The local warlord had not given his consentin fact, he disapproved, but would not dare to intervene. "He would be as happy as anyone to be rid of these men. They frighten him as much as they frighten everyone else." The young man was also, obviously, afraid. The Americans got directions from him and strode out of the camp, following one of the trails the shepherds used. When they were behind the first hillthough this "hill" in most other places would have been called a mountainthey stopped. "It's a trap, of course," said one of the Americans. "Yes," said the leader, a young captain named Reuben Malich. "But will they spring it when we reach the place where his directions would send us? Or when we return?" In other words, as they all understood: Was the village part of the conspiracy or not? If it was, then the trap would be sprung far away. But if the villagers had not betrayed them (except for the one young man), then in all likelihood the village was in as much danger as the Americans. Captain Malich briefly discussed the possibilities with his team, so that by the time he gave his orders, they were all in complete agreement. A few minutes later, using routes they had planned on the first day, before they ever entered the village, they crested the hill at four separate vantage points and spotted the armed men who had just entered the village and were taking up many of the positions surrounding it that the Americans had guessed they would use. The Americans' plan, in the event of such an ambush, was to approach these positions with stealth and kill the enemy one by one, silently.Card, Orson Scott is the author of 'Empire', published 2006 under ISBN 9780765316110 and ISBN 0765316110.