The girl rolled her eyes in exasperated horror.

"Oh, nooo! If the boss saw me..." She rolled her eyes again. "I'd lose my job like that." She clicked her fingers. "Then where would I work?"

"You could come and live with me."

"Oh!" She giggled and laid a hand on his shoulder. "You're terrible!"

One of the other men leaned forward conspiratorially as she disappeared through the beaded curtains into the kitchen.

"Sir, I don't think it's wise to..."

"Relax, Captain." The older man waved him silent.

"That's why we're in our civvies-so we don't have to keep looking over our shoulders all the time. Nobody recognizes us out of uniform. I've been flirting with that little number for over a month now. Sooner or later she's bound to give in."

"But sir..."

"If anything was going to happen, it would have by now. Look, she doesn't even know my name, so relax."

But Tamia knew his name, and a good deal more. General Thomas Dunn was the main reason she was working at this shabby restaurant, an assignment that ended this evening when she received a phone call. The general stopped here nightly for a bowl of won ton soup, and tonight there would be a special surprise in it. Tonight she would include the special noodles she had been carrying for a month.

Actually, the basis for the idea was Eskimo, not Japanese, but the Japanese were never a group to ignore a good idea just because someone else thought of it first. The Eskimos would kill polar bears by freezing coiled slivers of bone inside a snowball flavored with seal blubber and leaving it on the ice floes. A bear would eat the snowball, and his body heat would melt the snow, releasing the bone sliver to tear, at his insides.

The Japanese had improved on the concept. Instead of bone slivers, they were using a substance more like ground glass, guaranteed to cause a painful and irreversible death. In addition, they added a special touch of subtlety especially for the general. Instead of ice and seal blubber, they imbedded their lethal surprise in a special gel. Tamia would serve the general and his aides out of the same large bowl openly at the table. The gel would pass completely through the human digestive tract without dissolving. In fact, it would only dissolve if it came into contact with alcohol.

The files on the government forces were very complete. Of the three men at the table, only the general drank. In fact, he always had at least one nightcap before retiring for the evening.

After his death, his aides could and would tell the medic that they had shared the general's soup without any noticeable side effects, averting suspicion from the small restaurant and from Tamia.

Tamia scowled as she went about her task. While it was true she was successfully completing her mission and it would look good on her performance review, she wished she was in the field with the rest of her team. That's where the challenging work was.

Lieutenant Booth was nervous. So far their "big offensive" had been no different from a hundred other fruitless missions they had been on. All their infrared and sonic scans had yielded nothing. They were sweeping back and forth looking for one of the laser cannons reported to be in their vicinity. In theory, if they could knock out the cannon and if the other forces were equally successful, the government troops could regain air supremacy.

That was the theory, In actuality, they were finding nothing to fight. It was the lieutenant's guess that this mission would end up like all the others-a big bust. The only difference was that their radios were acting up again. They had lost contact both with headquarters and with their flanking company.

This was nothing new. It wasn't the first time they had had trouble with their radios in the field. As such, the captain just kept the company plodding on, but it made Booth nervous. To him it meant their much valued technology was unreliable. If the radios could malfunction, so could the scanners!

"...And I repeat, gentlemen, the troops employed by the corporations have not been fighting at their full capacity."

"Frankly, Mr. Yamada, I find that a little hard to swallow."

Yamada sighed slightly.

"For proof, I would offer two examples. First, it is not in the corporations' best interests to indulge in the bloodbath form of warfare the governments' forces seem to favor. We make a living by selling our products to consumers, to the public. If we inflict heavy casualties on you, it hurts us in the marketplace. Currently, public sympathy, as well as the sympathy of many of your own troops, is with the corporations. We will not jeopardize this by making martyrs out of the forces opposing us. All we have to do is wait until public opinion forces your governments to withdraw from the conflict."

The military men in the room maintained thoughtful silence as Yamada pursued his point.

"Think back, gentlemen. Our troops have spent exceptional time and effort evading your forces. When they have fought, it has always been to discourage rather than to destroy. In every situation, your troops were called upon to surrender or withdraw before our men opened fire."

The American officer was scowling.

"You mentioned two points of proof, Air. Yamada. What's the other one?"

"There may be those who would question our capacities, whether we have the ability to inflict more damage than we have. To prove this ability, you need only to try to phone your commanding officers. I say specifically to phone because by now we will have jammed or disrupted all your radio communications. As soon as you placed us under arrest, an order went out to some very specialized soldiers in our employment. All officers in your forces above the rank of lieutenant colonel have been assassinated. Your forces, already demoralized, are now without communications or leaders."

Lieutenant Booth could scarcely contain his excitement as he waited for confirmation on the smoke flare coordinates.

"I've got it, Lieutenant! Right on the button! They're clear!"

"Open fire! Level the entire target area."

The shells were hitting before he stopped talking as his mortar teams eagerly pumped round after round into the designated target area.

At last! After six months-contact! He watched gleefully as explosion after explosion rocked the area. Luckily they picked up that transmission from B Company. The way the radios had been acting up they could have missed it completely. Probably some new jamming device the mercenaries were using. Well, it was nice to know they had trouble with their gear too.

"Keep it up, men!"

B Company was under fire from the mercenaries. If the radio signal hadn't come through the bastards could have chopped up the government troops one company at a time, but now their plan had backfired. B Company's position was marked by the smoke flare, and for the first time the mortar teams knew where the mercenaries were.

"Lieutenant Booth! Cease fire! Cease fire!"

The lieutenant turned to see a soldier running toward him waving his arms.

"Cease fire!" he barked at his men, and the cry was echoed down the line.

The sergeant who had hailed him ran up, ashen-faced and out of breath.

"What is it, Sergeant?" Booth was aware of the nearby teams listening in curiously.

"Lieutenant, that's not...we saw them...it's not..."

"Spit it out, Sergeant!"

"It's not the mercenaries. We're shelling our own troops!"

"What?"

"Sommers climbed a tree with binoculars to watch the show! Those are our men down there!"

"But the smoke flare..."

Realization struck him like a slap in the face. It was the mercenaries. They had given him a fake radio call and a fake smoke flare.