“Wow,” was the extent of the eloquence Brazier could muster when he saw the first pair of Afghan terrorists fall to the ten-inch blades that slid quickly from housings deep within the forearms of Cestus. Two backhanded swipes left a pair of heads rolling away from twitching corpses.
“Your boy is on fire,” commented Private Grundy with a grin that split his long face from ear to ear.
“I want two squads of six. Davis, Purcell, Freeman, Schmidt, and DeVito, you’re with me. The rest of you are team two. Hochberg and Grundy, keep us covered from Rally One,” said Height, prepping his gear and getting ready to march across the moonlit plain to where Cestus had already begun his killing.
Grace scowled at Height’s order. “And us?”
“Agent Talborg, you, Designate Gauss, and your men remain here with Grundy and Hochberg.” The two marine snipers dropped to the ground a few feet from the civilians, already prepping their .50 caliber DARPA EXACTO rifles. “We should have the target secured and ready for you in less than ten. Be ready.”
Brazier stepped past Gauss and the two members of Rho-Unit, doing his best to completely ignore the blistering look Talborg kept shooting his way as he did, and asked, “Where do I set up, Sergeant? Should I monitor the progress of Designate Cestus from the rally point?”
The large head of Height gave one shake before training it’s gaze onto the engineer.
“Best place for you is with my team following Blades in. Stay close, keep your head down and your mouth shut. If we’re lucky, Designate Cestus will have the Tangos cleared out and we’ll be back to base in time for breakfast.”
“More mystery meat?” Brazier groaned at the thought of having to spend another meal at Camp Eggers. All he wanted was a hot, identifiable plate of bacon and eggs…the kind from a chicken and not powdered from a box.
“Only the best for our Project Hardwired guests,” chuckled Height, pushing the smaller man down a small dirt path leading towards the golden glow of the terrorist compound out near the horizon. “Bring the fitties, leave the rest,” ordered Height, sending his men into motion. “I want us knocking on their front door in two minutes. Let’s move!”
CHAPTER 4
Oh-Four-Thirty-Seven: Ten Kilometers North of Kabul.
There was nothing better than feeling like he was the head coach of the Super Bowl winning football team. Sure, you may not be the quarterback leading the team from down on the field, but you were still the place where the buck stopped. The man seen as ultimately responsible for getting a big star in the ‘win’ column.
Hunched down in a small, dry culvert just outside the Jabhat al-Nusrah compound, covered from head-to-toe in the mealy tan dust that seemed to cover every square inch of the area, that sense of pride, that sense of accomplishment, filled Scott Brazier to overflowing. Seated in the sand, surrounded by a group of ten well-armed marines, he stared into the tiny flat-screened tablet computer allowing him to monitor every move his cyborg partner made on the grounds inside the stone walls stretching for three hundred feet on a side. What he witnessed was a ballet of death that would have been scary had he taken the time to analyze it. Two minutes into his breach of the enemy’s perimeter and Cestus had already dispatched more than twenty terrorist soldiers with the ten-inch razor sharp blades extending from each finger of his metallic hands. Silent and deadly, each of the Afghani insurgents fell to the cybernetic killer without ever having the opportunity or awareness to fire a single shot.
The mission ran with the kind of clockwork precision a mission engineer like Brazier only ever dreamed of. Things moved along better than any simulation the tech had ever run back at Project Hardwired. He almost wished Grace Talborg and her own metal-armed thug had tagged along. Seeing the arrogant duo sit idly by while Cestus was inside doing the real work would have made putting up with her foul demeanor and Gauss’s cocksure attitude worth it. Well, almost.
Oh, how much fun writing the end of mission report was going to be, Brazier grinned. He’d make sure everyone got a copy…two for frigid little Grace and her pompous Pino. If that didn’t take some of the wind out of the woman’s sails, then nothing would.
“Good times,” he thought to himself.
Two more revolutionaries dropped, split from crotch to sternum, bleeding out in a shivering pile of cooling meat. The liquidations did little to slow down the bionic soldier. Another guerrilla fell. And another. At each turn there seemed to be another armed rebel, unaware of the shadow of death slowly stretching out across the courtyard towards them.
An itch began to tickle the back of Brazier’s mind. It increased in intensity over the ten seconds that followed as he bore witness to four more uncontested slayings by Cestus.