The Kabul Incident(10)

Still, thought Brazer to himself, it never hurts to have a big gun on hand…just in case.

“Range to target is approximately four-hundred fifty-one meters…” The ice blue eyes of Cestus were laser-locked onto the Afghani terrorist compound, nearly invisible to the normal humans in the party without the benefit of bionic upgrades.

“I’ve got it,” groaned Gauss, stamping his feet like a thoroughbred waiting on the starting line. The man’s impatience was becoming palpable to all around him.

“Wind speed is just under six klicks,” continued Cestus, going down some unseen checklist.

“I know my job, Cestus…quit stalling.”

Twin arms of mirrored titanium-carbon alloy slammed together, generating a shock wave around the tightly packed military group. Brazier watched in awe as Gauss began to build a magnetic field around his body, weaving it in and out in preparation for what was to come next. Tiny pieces of metal—zippers, d-rings, dog tags, even ammo straps—began to twitch and shudder, rising up in place to face the cyborg’s humming form. When the warble began to crescendo, a shining hand shot out towards Cestus, lifting him roughly a few centimeters off the ground before bouncing him back to the earth.

“Get ready…Alley…”

“Be prepared to compensate for the low atmospheri—”

“…Oop!”

Gauss cut Cestus off, jerking his hand skyward, palm up and fingers spread. With the motion, the sound spiked into a frequency more felt than heard by those present…a high-pitched squeal just out of the range of normal hearing. Along with the sound, the magnetic wave enveloped Cestus in a cocoon of energy and flung him out into the darkened abyss of space stretching out between the military unit and their unsuspecting foes. If Brazier didn’t know better it looked like the soldier was tossing a ball up in the air rather than sending a six-foot two-inch, three-hundred plus pound cyborg flying.

“Fastball special.” The sheer insanity of what had just played out before his eyes hit Brazier hard. “Just like something out of a comic book.”

Watching as Cestus landed, nearly five-hundred yards away with a tuck-and-roll and tiny mushroom cloud of dust, just beyond the outer perimeter of the insurgents’ high-walled compound, Brazier found himself smiling. As safe, secure, and comfortable as he’d felt in all the missions he’d monitored remotely from Hardwired headquarters back in California, the thin man had to admit there was nothing quite like the surge of adrenaline he got from being out live in the field with its heat and mosquitoes. It got his heart pumping, his blood racing, and, he was almost ashamed to admit, things were even stirring down below.

Perhaps, if things went well Brazier would be able to hook up with the cute Air Force flight commander who had accompanied the Project Hardwired team on the flight over from Germany. They’d had a couple of nice moments between them during their time in the air and the young engineer was pretty sure he could pick things up right where he left off.

An irritatingly shrill hiss snapped Brazier’s attention back to the work at hand and, sadly, knocked the inspired muscle in his pants back down to six o’clock from noon.

“No time for love, Doctor Jones,” thought Brazier as he peeked over his shoulder into the darkness in an attempt to locate his counterpart. She was out there, hunkered down in a foxhole just like he was, sitting back and waiting with Gauss while Cestus went in to do the government’s dirty work. The pair of cyborgs had been out on four joint missions in the past 3 months, all with a high success rating. To the eternal annoyance of the chrome-armed Gauss, his role had transitioned to one consisting almost completely of support, dropping his actual combat time down to zero. For a hardened killer like Designate Gauss, it had been a hard pill to swallow. Still, pondered Brazier as he requested Talborg to repeat her transmission, at least ‘Magnet Boy’ could share in the spoils of having the best mission record in the department.

“I said, ‘Designate Cestus is in play.’ Switch to night vision and watch point…in other words, pay attention, Scotty-boy,” said Talborg with as much professional and personal disdain as she could muster.

With the touch of a button on the side of his helmet’s visor, the world went green for Brazier. The sights popping up through his equipment’s low-light infra-red mode had become familiar through the remote viewing Brazier’s team had done for much of the previous nine months. Of course, having to actively move his head and zoom in-and-out on his own were a bit trickier than following along with the playback of a field-drone’s camera systems…especially when he had to keep up with the constantly moving and dodging form of Cestus as the super-soldier worked his way up and over the twelve-foot high bare concrete walls of the target facilities to gain entry to the courtyard they protected.