Captain Scott Mitchell, Ghost Team leader, lay prone on a ridgeline approximately fifty meters south of three mud-brick houses standing in sharp relief against a frozen hilltop. Smoke wafted from stone chimneys and fluttered like pennons before dissolving into the night air.

Somewhere in the valley below, within the snow-covered alleys between dozens more homes, a dog howled and firelight flickered from more windows. Then . . . it grew eerily quiet.

Up ahead, Staff Sergeant Joe Ramirez and Sergeant Marcus Brown shifted furtively toward the houses, following a gully that ran up near a lone, leafless tree.

Sergeant Alicia Diaz, the team's marksman, had darted off west toward the opposite hill overlooking the houses to select her sniper's perch.

Mitchell cleared his throat and tapped a button on his earpiece with integrated camera and microphone. "Cross-Com activated."

Attached to that same earpiece was a monocle that curved forward and glowed with screens displaying his uplink and downlink channels, icons representing his support elements, and his rifle's targeting reticle, among other bits of data. While the three-dimensional images seemed to appear in his head-up display (HUD), they were actually being produced by a low-intensity laser projecting them through his pupil and onto his retina. The laser scanned vertically and horizontally at high speed using a coherent beam of light, and all data was refreshed every second to continually update him.

In order to accomplish that task, the Cross-Com system connected via satellite to the entire military's local and wide area networks (LAN/WAN) so that in effect the commander in chief could see exactly what he was doing and speak to him directly on the battlefield. That level of network-centric warfare--all part of Mitchell's Integrated Warfighter System (IWS Beta Version)--was as significant as it was unnerving. No mistake ever escaped his superior's attention.

He thumbed a button on the wireless controller in his hand and switched his HUD to a view captured by the UAV3 Cypher drone hovering two hundred feet over the houses. The ring-shaped drone with central rotor and multiple cameras and imaging systems was small, barely two meters, and newly rigged to operate much more quietly than earlier models.

With his gloved finger, Mitchell shifted the controller's joystick, steering the drone toward the target while switching between infrared and thermal modes in an attempt to identify how many occupants were in each house.

Mitchell grinned in awe.