Travis looked at him and didn't stop applying the cream. There was silence for a while.
"Sarge, do you get scared?" Stef asked.
Travis nodded.
"I've been scared since I came here, Sarge. Since before the autosniper and the ambush."
"Everybody's scared at first, Stef. It's a natural reaction."
"Bill-boy says we're not supposed to be scared, Sarge. We're created different, better."
Travis smiled nastily. "Bill-boy would know, wouldn't he? Being scared is being smart, son. Shows you're aware of what can happen to you. You can't allow the fear to control you. You've gotta control it."
Travis had gotten so used to the creeping terror of being in the jungle that he almost didn't notice it. It formed part of his normal awareness, only erupting in moments of extreme stress.
"Why are we here, Sarge?" You're here to die, you poor dumb son of a bitch, thought Travis. You're here to be tested to destruction so the Pentagon can decide whether to go ahead and batch produce green soldiers.
"We're gonna blow up a power station," Travis said eventually.
"No, why are we here in Nicaragua? The US isn't even at war with the Sandinistas. Bill-boy says nobody back home even knows we're here."
Good for Bill-Boy thought Travis, keeping his ears open to camp gossip.
And what was that about the folk back home? What have they been teaching you? This jungle is your home, kid. No way are you ever going back to the States. You're being created so that the folk back home won't have to send their sons and daughters overseas to be killed. They'll send you instead.
"Sarge, why are we here?"
"We're helping to stop to spread of communism."
Stef nodded. Communism was the gospel of evil to the Greens. It was the way they had been programmed. Why hadn't Stef remembered? Was this some pitiful attempt at independent thought by the new boy?
Why don't I tell you the truth, he thought. That this war is a convenient place to test new weapons. Weapons like you and me. All of Central America, from Belize to Panama, has gone to hell. The area, unstable for too long, is a cockpit of warring factions, destroyed economies and refugee populations. We fit right into the madness.
"Sarge, is it true that you were once a normo, like Saunders?" Travis nodded.
"Did you really have your arm and eyes changed to make you more like us?"
Travis laughed bitterly. "Shut the hell up will you, Stef? You're making my head hurt with all these questions."
Stef retreated diffidently away. Like kids, Travis thought. Like kids. He shook his head and tried not to think about his daughter.
Marianne was twelve now, living with her mother in Oregon. Lisa had left him four years ago, called into the hospital where he lay with an amputated leg and a face like a halloween mask to tell him she was leaving. She was crying as she told him she couldn't take it anymore. She took little Man with her. At the time it was just one more thing the world had taken from him. Like his arm and his sight.
When the army had asked him to volunteer for cyborgisation he had nodded numbly. They thought they were doing him a favour. He shook his head. I died when that mine ripped me apart in Beirut. It's just taken me a little while to know I was dead.
He laughed softly as he got up from the stump and gestured for the Greens to get moving. That was his answer. Keep moving. Never give up. Don't let the fear take over.
Man was twelve, same age as the girl soldier they had left unburied down the trail. He shook his head and tried not to think about it.
6. The Power Station.
They lay on the rocks and looked down on a field of metal flowers. When the Soviets had started to build this power station it had been far from the frontline. The frontline had moved but the Russians had kept building.
This was what they had come to destroy. The dishes picked up power beamed down by the infra-red lasers of the Soviet solar power satellites. It was not to be allowed, quite literally soviet power in America's backyard.
Travis looked at it. The power station could return this area to stability, keep hospitals running, let civilisation return. For a brief second he entertained the fantasy of disobeying his orders. In the end it was not respect for regulations that decided him. It was the knowledge that the power station was doomed anyway.
It was too tempting a prize for the wandering bandit armies who picked at the bones of Central America. Sooner or later one of them would take it and, lacking the expertise to run it, would destroy it. Still it did have a certain beauty, as it glistened in the noon day sun. That night it would be smouldering wreckage.
7. Raid.
Flowers of fire blossomed where the demo charges detonated. Thunder roared through the quiet night. Where the receivers had been were large craters.
In the distance from the east came the sound of helicopter gun ships.
Travis watched as Stef raced towards cover. He was the last to return from planting the explosives. He moved easily, in a half crouch, a slight smile was on his face. Suddenly he was cut down by a burst of bullets from out of the trees. His midriff exploded. His entrails were the same as any other man's.
At first Travis thought it was an autosniper, that they had missed one of the sentry devices. Then he heard the sounds of a firefight erupt too close. The bad feeling he had had when he watched the Sikorsky depart returned, intensified.
Carlo emerged from the trees bleeding from an arm wound. His blood was red. He stumbled over to where Travis lay. "They snuck up on us, Sarge," he said.
Travis was overwhelmed by a sense of unreality. "Impossible," he muttered.
Who could sneak up on greens?