Whose bright idea was it to send a new boy along on a deep penetration mission? Sometimes the stupidity of the higher command was breath taking.

"Everybody got everything?" Travis asked. The Greens nodded. Good. Let's hit the trail. Bill-boy, take point."

As his team left the clearing by the southward path Travis paused to take one last look around. The chopper was gone, back to the Contras' hidden camp in what had been Honduras when national boundaries had meant something in Central America. It had taken with it any promise of safety.

Travis shivered again. He had a bad feeling about this one.

2. Sniper.

The darkness was an ally not an obstacle. The team moved through it like ghosts. The Greens could see in the dark like cats. Their senses were razor keen. Travis had to rely on the infra-red sighting capability of his eyes.

Once Travis heard the scream of a large cat, a jaguar. For a second the whole patrol froze. He looked at Carlo, whose face was a mask of tension.

He smiled, Carlo smiled back. He waved Carlo on past, went back to talk to Stef who was standing frozen. Travis couldn't decide whether it was fear or anger. Some new Greens went berserk, a flaw that the bio-tech contractors hadn't yet identified the cause of.

For a brief moment it was unnaturally silent. Travis felt a crawling between his shoulder blades. He scanned the jungle, caught a faint hint of movement in a nearby tree. Reacting on instinct he shouted "get down" and flew himself flat.

Too late. The night was lit by the brief intense flash of automatic fire.

The muted staccato belching of an autosniper filled his ears. He cursed his luck. The humidity usually caused malfunctions in their sensitive robotics; the shadowy jungle usually interfered with the pattern recognition of their sighting programs. It was unfortunate that they had encountered a working one.

"Take it out," he ordered the Greens. He levelled his M-16 and sent a burst of fire to where he could perceive the heat signature of the killer robot. He missed it as it scuttled along the branches. A blaze of explosive bullets came flying back at him. One burst against the kevlar skin of his arm and sent his rifle flying. His arm shorted out, bionics malfunctioning temporarily.

Travis kept himself absolutely still.