Although flying at less than 500 feet above the surface of the light-starved desert below, the air inside the helicopter seemed anemic and oxygen-starved to Brazier. He had been covered in a cold sweat that manifested itself along his brow, neck, and armpits within seconds of lift-off. He screwed his eyes shut and tried to modulate his breathing—it was all in his head. Just his nerves overreacting to the influx of adrenaline.
“Nothing to be ashamed of,” he thought, trying to block out all external stimulus. It was his first field mission, after all. Completely normal to be a tad nervous. Leaning back and pretending to sleep, Brazier hoped no one else would notice his anxiety.
A noise from across the tiny cabin dispelled that hope with a series of deep-throated chuckles.
“Don’t be so uptight, Scotty. If the hajis get wise, I’ll generate an EM field to keep their SAMs off our tail.” Gauss’s voice annoyed Brazier as much as the cyborg’s attitude. The guy really was a dick.
“‘Hajis?’” The term felt sour in the engineer’s mouth. He was stunned by the blatant racism flung about by the super solider. And, looking over at how the Designate’s handler was grinning and nodding in agreement, Brazier was just as stunned by Talborg’s own callousness.
Before Brazier could formulate even the most basic of reprimands to launch back at the two, he was cut off by the even, nearly mechanical toned voice of Cestus emanating from the seat next to him. The tempo of the cyborg’s speech pattern was stilted, unnatural, and disquieting to Brazier’s ear.
“Negative, Designate Gauss,” corrected the computerized warrior without the slightest hint of emotion, or humor.
“Any magnetic field you generated strong enough to deflect airborne rocket ordnance would be sufficient to disrupt the electronics of our own aircraft.” All eyes in the cargo hold of the Blackhawk trained on the cyborg. “Evacuating the vehicle from the rear access point and deploying parachutes would be the course of action producing the highest probability of survival.”
Groaning, Brazier added halfheartedly, “Wicked burn there, Cestus my man…wicked burn.” Of course, thought the engineer, it was just his luck to be given the cyborg without a sense of humor programmed into his sub-routines.
“Chatter to a minimum, people. We’re going silent for final approach,” said the pilot, a tall, nearly emaciated looking man with a lazy eye so extreme it had caused Brazier a near panic attack when he saw the man strap into the helicopter’s cockpit for lift-off. If there was one thing Brazier looked for in the person given a high level of responsibility for his survival it was a pair of eyes that pointed in the same direction. To Lieutenant Arias, standing in the doorway between the forward flight controls and the main cargo bay of the helicopter, the pilot added “Touchdown in T-minus sixty seconds, Lieutenant.”
“You heard the man…lock and load. Prepare for rapid deploy.”
High caliber rounds ratcheted into place in response to the command from Arias. A dull red light flooded the interior of the aircraft, giving Brazier the feeling he was sitting in some giant heart as a quartet of rotors pumped away just over head. The thumping above and jostling from within did little to help ease the skittish computer technician’s nerves. The thought of twenty marines prepping for battle and armed with enough firepower to vaporize a small town accentuated his unease. In the midst of the restrained chaos surrounding him, Brazier had a clarifying thought that wrenched a chuckle from his gut and allowed most of his tension to drain away.
As the black-skinned stealth helicopter shuddered and jerked onto the ground, Brazier turned to the soldier next to him and said “Jeez, you got a big pussy…jeez, you got a big pussy.”
“Haw! Because of the echo!” Sergeant Height’s laughter was contagious and spread quickly through the men in his command.
A loud bang cut off the group’s merriment with a sharp metallic note. Arias gestured out of the now wide-open ramp leading from the crowded interior hold to the hot Afghanistan night area beyond.
“Move!” shouted the Lieutenant, filled with none of the mirth infecting the rest of the group.
“What? Not a ‘Predator’ fan?” pouted Brazier quietly as he dropped into the line of men filing out and down the chopper’s rear exit hatch.
“Local authorities aren’t prompt, but they will come to investigate if things get out of hand,” said Arias, leaning out of the open aft bay doors of the lead Blackhawk as its rotors began to whine in preparation for take-off. “If the situation gets messy, your team will have no more than twenty minutes to clear out before the nationals arrive. We’ll have birds on hand for evac, but if you aren’t here, you ladies are on your own. Clear?”