CHAPTER 1
Fifteen-thirty hours: Twenty-two Klicks out from Kabul, Afghanistan.
“First time on nanny duty?” The boisterous voice startled Engineer First Grade Scott Brazier out of the wide-mouthed stupor consuming every ounce of his attention since he geared up back in Berlin. The only thing keeping the modestly built, blond-haired man with shining white teeth from being the perfect poster-boy for ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ was the lack of a Japanese made camera strapped around his neck…and, truth be told, Brazier was pretty sure the quartermaster back at Ramstein Air Base had stuck one of those in his pack somewhere. Heck, he had just about everything else jammed into the fifty pound black nylon backpack currently wedged down between his legs.
Bright hazel eyes flashed out from beneath the thin, pale brows that gave little in the way of protection from the harsh Central Asian sun. A half squint finally allowed Brazier to locate the owner of the voice. “Excuse me?” he asked in a way that labeled him one of the few non-military types assigned to the top secret operation deep within the heart of Afghanistan.
The burly soldier seated diagonally across from Brazier in the back of the half-covered armored trooper carrier grinned widely from beneath deep chocolate skin tinged with a hint of redness from the blazing Afghan sun. It took Brazier a second to make the man’s name out—the name tag sewn onto the left breast of his black tactical uniform had come lose, causing the right edge to flap freely in rhythm to the bouncing wheels of the massive vehicle the group rode in.
Gunnery Sergeant Ray Height echoed back, “Nanny duty? Your first time keeping eye on one of the Pinos?”
A quick nod and sideways glance down the row of men seated next to him was all Brazier gave the jovial United States Marine in response. He was already uncomfortable enough with being pulled away from his nice air-conditioned cubicle in Project Hardwired headquarters back in Los Angeles and thrown onto a series of military planes with hard seats and no drink service for thirty-six hours. There was no way he was going to make things worse by telling the hardened soldiers around him that it was the first field operation he’d ever been assigned to.
Signing up for field work had looked good on paper—increased pay, higher likelihood of promotion…and the added boost to his rep back at HQ didn’t hurt. Looking back on things, though, Brazier quickly admitted that the videos and virtual reality sims he’d run through did absolutely nothing to prepare the Springfield, Illinois-native for the heat, the bugs, or the smells that had assaulted him since touchdown two hours earlier.
“‘Pinos?’”
Leaning down and whispering, Height answered, “Pinocchios…toy boys. You know…” A thick thumb jerked its way towards the rear of the vehicle and a pair of men dressed from head to toe in high tech tactical gear outlandish enough to make James Bond soil his panties. “Designates.”
“Yes. I’ve done monitor duty from remote locations on a number of operations, but this is my first time on the ground.”
“Which one is yours?”
Brazier scrolled his gaze towards the back of the fifteen ton MRAP vehicle and the unusual quartet of men arranged in two rows near its exit hatch. The first two, seated at full attention and seemingly completely unaware of their surroundings, were of no consequence to the government engineer. The large white letters emblazoned across their black helmets and along the upper portions of their equally dark shirt sleeves proclaimed what they were: GMRs of Rho-Team. Nearly mindless automatons in direct control of Project Hardwired’s mainframe and overseen by the boys back in the weapons division. Rho-Four and Rho-Five were grunts, operating under a hive-mind system and had no need for a monitor agent. The third man, a tall, broad-shouldered blond man with wavy hair and a gleaming chrome right eye was more interesting.
Designate Gauss was one of twelve Prime Units created under the auspices of Project Hardwired—the entire reason the project had been formed nearly a year earlier. He was a cybernetic soldier. Hardwired’s executive director, Gordon Kiesling, had often called Gauss and his half-machine brothers the ‘future of warfare,’ and Brazier wasn’t one to disagree with the man who signed his paychecks. Large portion’s of Gauss’s body and brain had been replaced by the sort of cutting-edge technology the common United States citizen assumed was relegated to science fiction novels or Michael Bay movies. The twin, mirror-like metallic arms mounted onto where Gauss’s original human appendages had been, allowed the soldier to generate magnetic fields intense enough to warp steel or even lift a sedan over his head. If the reports Brazier had reviewed were accurate, on a recent mission to Switzerland, Gauss had torn a five ton bank door off its settings. The man, if he could still be called such a thing, was an absolute brute.