The US government is engaged in a South American war and losing badly. After years of standard and non-standard strategies and tactics failing, the government entertains an often-made suggestion: create supersoldiers. The suggestion is about to be dismissed when (then) Captain James Donaldson adds an outrageous modification: use horribly abused and already traumatized children as the source material. These individuals, Donaldson argues, are already hardened against anything they’ll experience on the battlefield and anything we’ll ask them to do.
But what to do when it’s time to bring them home? These individuals were turned into physical monsters, essentially government sanctioned socio-psychopaths. They can’t be unaugmented, brought back and released into society.
The solution was to dispose of them by sabotaging their last mission. They were caught, captured and killed as a hidden but understood condition of the negotiated peace.
The enemy did kill eight of them. One, Nicholas Trailer, they kept alive. But he escaped, destroying his tormenters in the process. A Combined Reconnaissance and Intelligence detail find him in the jungle and bring him back to the States, back to (now) Major Donaldson.
It had been ten years. Everyone thought the Augmenteds were dead. Now one appears and too many people had seen him for such a creature to disappear unquestioned.
Trailer is flown to the base where the Augments were created and Donaldson begins working with him. However, Trailer knows that Donaldson agreed to the Augmenteds’ betrayal and capture and, when the opportunity arises, he escapes.
Another ten years go by. Nicholas Trailer has disappeared on his own. Nobody knows where he is and again, the great hope is that he died somewhere and his body, if found, considered some kind of cryptozoic oddity.
But he is alive and he’s found love.
The only options he has now is to die.
You can read more here.