They were stronger, faster and cheaper to mass produce than comparable human soldiers. At least such was the hope. These were the field trials, he was the observer.

The Greens had clustered around something, watching with alert fascination. He strolled over to look. On the ground a raiding party of ants were locked in combat with a large beetle several times their size.

The beetle was massively armoured with huge jaws but it was doomed; the ants swarmed over it spraying formic acid.

Travis watched the reactions of the Greens closely. Bill-boy smiled and nodded happily, Carlo shook his head and walked away. Chad's face might have been carved from stone for all the expression it carried. Stef looked puzzled.

"Watch them," Saunders, the CIA man, had said back in the Camp. "Anything unusual, no matter how trivial, report it."

The ants had finished the beetle. Bill-boy stood up and looked around pleased. Then he brought his foot down and ground the ants under his heel.

He smiled.

"Let's eat," he said. Travis stared at him. A prototype, he reminded himself. He's just a prototype. A small, mocking voice inside his own head said just like you were. His feelings of unease increased.

The Sandinista never knew what hit them. They had been following the trail, straggling along in a line, three men on point. Travis had let them go ahead until the main body of troops were over the anti-personnel mines which he had seeded the trail with.

Travis detonated the mines himself because they were a weapon he hated, had done ever since Beirut.

Men were torn apart by the small explosives. The rest were shocked and disorganised. They fell to a hail of fire from the American assault rifles.

Some of those at the back escaped the mines and dived for cover, firing a fusillade of shots into where they thought the enemy were. They hit their own men for the most part. Travis and the Greens quickly flanked them and chopped them down.

In the confusion a young boy armed with a bayonet leapt on Travis from the undergrowth. Travis desperately deflected the blade with a sweep of his arm. He saw the look of horror on the boy's face when his knife bounced drawing no blood. Travis stood there looking at him, trying in that moment to forget the brief flash of human contact as their eyes met and bring his gun round. The boy drew his rifle back for a second swing.

The boy went down. Chad's long knife protruded between his shoulder blades. Chad showed him a wolf grin then turned to pursue the fleeing humans. Travis himself suddenly overcome with a berserk fury part guilt, part tear, part joy, charged into the jungle searching far prey.

Afterwards they surveyed the scene of the carnage. Twelve dead, many injured. The Greens took no prisoners. Travis and his men had an assortment of cuts and bruises. Only Carlo had taken a wound, a glancing shot along his temple. His head was swathed in a turban of bandages under his helmet.

Flies hovered over the bodies. A terrible stench filled the air. Travis and the four Greens stood in silence contemplating their handiwork. Travis was part appalled and part elated, his usual reaction to surviving a combat.

He could not tell what the Greens were thinking from the expression on their faces.

The patrol were wearing a motley assortment of uniforms. They had carried disparate weapons. Travis lifted a rifle from the hands of a dead girl.

She was no more than twelve. It was a Brazilian copy of a Soviet assault rifle. It had digital sights. Travis checked them. They were faulty. He crushed them with his armoured fist.

He hated this war. He decided that this was his last mission. No matter what the cost, once this was over, he was getting out.

The moon was full. The jungle floor was transformed by a wash of silver light. The Greens looked like goblins of the forest; their bodies wattled by pigment in disruptive patterns. They looked evil, lacking their usual androgynous beauty. Travis kept his eye on them as they moved.

The jungle was full of night-time noise. The air was warm and humid.

Travis called a brief halt. The joint where his arm met flesh was itching.

He took out a tube of fungicidal cream and sat down on the stump of a collapsed tree. Sweat sometimes pooled in the joints and could lead to a nasty rash. He applied the cream.

He was startled to feel a touch on his shoulder. He looked up to see Stef standing there. His approach had been so quiet that Travis had not heard him. He began to understand why Stef had been sent along. He was a new type even more heavily modified from basic human stock.

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.