Oscar glanced at Fontenot. “Can they do that?”

“Sure, it’s doable,” Fontenot said. Fontenot was ex-Secret Ser-vice. The USSS had always been very up to speed on these issues.

The PR man laughed bitterly. “That’s what the Governor likes to call it… Look, this is just a standard infowar operation, the stuff we used to do overseas all the time. Fly in, disrupt vital systems, low or zero casualties, achieve the mission objective. Then we just vanish, all gone, forget about it. Turn the page.”

“Right,” said Fontenot. “Just like Second Panama.”

“Hey,” the officer said proudly, “I was in Second Panama! That was classic netwar! We took down the local regime just by screwing with their bitstreams. No fatalities! Never a shot fired!”

“It’s really good when there are no fatalities.” Fontenot flexed his false leg with a squeak.

“Had to quit my TV news work after that, though. Blew my cover. Very long story really.” Their host slurped at his paper cup and looked extremely sad. “You guys need a bourbon?”

“You bet we do!” Oscar said. “Thanks a lot!” He accepted a paper cup brimming with yellow booze, and pretended to sip at it. Oscar never drank alcohol. He had seen it kill people in slow and terrible ways.

“When exactly do you plan to relocate?” Fontenot said, ac-cepting his cup with a ready Eisenhower grin.

“Oh, nineteen hundred hours. Maybe. That’s what the com-mander had in mind this morning.”

“Your commander looks a bit tired,” Oscar said.

That remark made the PR man angry. He put down his bour-bon and looked at Oscar with eyes like two shucked oysters. “Yeah. That’s right. My commander is tired. He broke his sworn oath of allegiance, and he’s robbing U.S. citizens, the people he swore to protect. That tends to tire you out.”