Bombshell - Jane Harvey-Berrick Read online

  I pulled off my daypack, then made sure I had all my tools where I could easily reach them. The two red flags hung limply, and even the soft sounds of the forest fell silent.

  I crawled forwards on my belly, my plastic trowel and a long thin stick, my own personal weapons of mine destruction.

  Carefully, I scraped the snow and dirt from the first mine, a big fat fucker anti-personnel mine. I exposed one side carefully, cursing when I found a 200gm block of TNT sandwiched between two anti-lift mechanisms with the mine sitting on top.

  I held my torch between my teeth, blinking when I caught the glint of something thin and silvery.

  Damn it! A trip wire. So what the fuck was it attached to?

  Easing forward, I saw that the trip wire was attached to a tilt mast, with another bloody great MON-100 set into the muddy bank. And surrounding the whole friggin’ mess were three smaller PMAs, anti-personnel mines—not forgetting the tricky fucker wedged in the tree.

  Someone had done a very thorough job to make sure no one came through and lived to tell the tale.

  Six mines, all linked, and any one of them could kill me: at best, I’d lose my hand, maybe my sight.

  Civilians and soldiers outside the trade, they ask me how I do it. You don’t feel in moments like that. You do whatever instinct tells you.

  You survive by switching off the part that feels, by shutting down emotions. If I started to think about how very dead I could be, I couldn’t complete the mission. Instead, it was a Chess game—my logic and my skill against the bomb maker’s plan to destroy, and each time I made a move, I had to be sure it was the right one. Being wrong was not an option.

  I lay on my stomach in the snow and frozen mud, my body slowly going numb as I grappled with the bombs. I worked methodically, solving each puzzle one at a time.

  Identify.

  Expose.

  Extract.

  Lift here, cut there, drill here: analyze, neutralize, move on.

  But the cold was creeping through me and I began to lose feeling in my fingers—not a good sign; plus, the light was fading as twilight edged closer. I swore, needing something to go right. I couldn’t leave this set of mines half-finished; I needed to keep going.

  I yelled at Yad to bring me more light, but it was Maral who stood over me holding her flashlight—Maral who had five children.

  Sweating, enduring, fighting the pain in my shoulders and neck, keeping focus, staying one step ahead of the bomb maker…

  Scrape, expose, analyse, neturalize.

  Over and over again—each mine a new problem. My body felt detached from me, cold taking its toll. Every few minutes I had to stop and blow on my fingers, rub them together to keep the blood flowing. It was slowing me down and so fucking frustrating.

  When I removed the final det from the bomb propped in the tree, I was so exhausted that I fell to my knees then collapsed, lying face down in the mud. Maral shook my shoulder gently.

  “James-syr,” she said, her voice worried. “Okay, James-syr?”

  I rolled over, staring up at the dark branches hanging over me and her worried face haunted in the light of her torch.

  “Yeah, okay,” I replied hoarsely. “Okay.”

  She gave me a half-smile as I sat up and examined the six neutralized devices lying next to me.

  I stretched and groaned as my muscles tried to function. Maral smiled with relief and held out her hand to help me up. I moved like an old man, but there was still one further job to do.

  Even as I’d been working on that last device, another part of my brain had been worrying about another problem, chewing on it like a dog with a bone.

  I relied on my instinct, I had to, but it had been sharpened and honed by training. So what was it about this track through the forest? Why mine this path? It was steep and remote, so what was special about it?

  I studied the area around me carefully, peering through the gloom. But with the poor light and thin beam from the torch, there wasn’t much to see.

  Almost ready to give up, I finally noticed that there was another trail, maybe an animal trail, but so close to the booby-trapped area, which could mean…

  I followed the overgrown path, ignoring Yad’s shouts of annoyance as I moved further into the forest, ignoring everyone, until I seemed to come to a dead-end, a high escarpment soaring in front of me with no way through or around. But the path had to lead somewhere…

  And then I saw it, a narrow opening in the rock. I held the small torch in my mouth, turning sideways to fit through the crack to get inside, but it was worth the effort.

  As my torch illuminated the cave, I could see boxes and boxes of ammunition that had been stored in the cave—a weapons’ dump from the decades old conflict.

  Or maybe not.

  I looked closer—some of the crates were old and rotting, but others looked much newer.

  Yad pushed his bulk in beside me, swearing in his own language at what I’d found.

  “James-syr! You are magnificent!”

  I grunted. I was glad I’d found it, but it just meant more work when my team had already performed miracles.

  “We’ll carry this crap down the mountain and destory it with the other devices that we’ve found.”

  Yad’s expression crumpled.

  “But James-syr, we could sell this! It’s valuable! Bullets are expensive, even on the Black Market, I know this.”

  He backtracked hastily when he saw my frown.

  “My cousin is Chief of Police. He tells me this. We could sell the bullets to them—very safe.” He took one look at my face and changed his tactics again. “And the money could go to the charity. Save lots of children. Very fair!”

  “Yad, this weapons’ dump probably belongs to Black Marketeers—they’ll be very unhappy if you try to sell it—even if it’s to the police … especially to the police. They’ll hunt you down. And secondly, the crap that’s been lying here for seventeen, eighteen, maybe nineteen years? Some of the munitions could have decayed in that time, so it’s not safe. We’re going to do a burns instead and get rid of this shit.”

  His expression became ugly.

  “No! We tell police! They’ll be very happy.”

  I took a step back from him and rested my hand on the Smith & Wesson M&P 9 at my hip.

  “This is my call, Yad, and I’m saying all this is going to be demolished. So get this shit down the hill. Now.”

  His eyes narrowed.

  “If a man pulls a gun, he should be prepared to shoot.”

  “Not a problem, Yad. Not a problem. Now back the fuck away.”

  For a moment, he looked enraged and I thought he was going to charge at me, but then his shoulders sagged in defeat and he turned away muttering to himself.

  We carried the final neutralized MON-100 mines down the mountain, the PMAs, and the boxes of munitions, Yad still warbling on about their value. I tried to keep him in eyesight the entire time because I didn’t trust the bastard, but there was too much to do and too little time, and several times he disappeared from view. My spidey senses were on high alert.

  Our muscles strained under the weight we carried, awkward as well as dangerous, and our head torches cast blobs of light in the darkness, following our well-trodden path, until we reached the dems pit.

  I watched as the devices and boxes of bullets were placed alongside the Russian anti-personnel mines, then planned where to put the command wires.

  I automatically counted the mines as I worked, but something didn’t add up.

  “Wait!” I shouted, turning my accusing gaze on my team. “There are only 44 MON-100 mines here. With the extra one I found today, there should be 45, so one’s missing. Yad, what the fuck?”

  He stared at me with calculated blankness.

  “Don’t know, James-syr.”

  He translated quickly and the team stared back at me, exhausted and empty-eyed as they muttered amongst themselves.

  “Jesus, have we missed one?” I asked. “Check your log b
ooks. How many have each of you cleared today?”

  Grumbling and obviously unhappy, the five women pulled out their logbooks. I couldn’t understand their writing, but the number of marks in the mines cleared column was easy to read. I checked three times: 45 MON-100 mines found and carried down the hill, including the new devices and UXO that I’d found today.

  But now, one mine was missing.

  My suspicious gaze fell on Yad. He was the one who’d been absent when I’d called for light earlier, the one who’d argued about selling the munitions on the Black Market, but I also knew that I’d get nowhere accusing him now. Besides, I hadn’t missed his boastful connection to the local Chief of Police.

  And it was possible that one of the women had miscounted, but I didn’t think so. They were my most trusted workers, on this Task for a reason.

  Swearing uselessly, I finished laying the command wires then pulled everyone back from the perimeter, checked the position of my team twice, before detonating over 80Kg of high explosives, bullets exploding wildly, as if the Gunfight at the OK Corral was being re-enacted.

  The blast would have been heard over four miles away.

  We drove back to the base camp in darkness, my mind full of suspicion, the worm of mistrust burrowing through my brain.

  Arabella

  SNOW FELL IN thick swirls, covering the buildings in a blanket that softened the ugly concrete, making it almost pretty.

  It was the end of my second week in Nagorno Karabakh and we were snowed in for the third day running.

  I’d already tidied up the office and whipped the filing into shape, but with no Tasks running, there wasn’t much for me to do. But I did have a question for Clay.

  He stared at me in shock.

  “You want to do what?!”

  I’d woken up early, anxious to make the most of the day and my determination to do good, to make a difference. So I’d decided that I needed to see what the Task teams did—I wanted to see James at work.

  “You can’t go on a Task,” said Clay flatly. “It’s too dangerous.”

  I stared at him mulishly.

  “You send the women from the teams out—how is it different for them?”

  “They’re trained,” he said patiently. “They’ve been doing this for months now.”

  “Then train me!”

  “It’s James who does the training,” he said gently, “and he doesn’t have time to teach you. Taking you out with him as an observer would slow them all down and potentially make things more dangerous.”

  “Oh,” I said, deflating. “I don’t want to make things harder—I just want to understand.”

  He smiled at me sympathetically.

  “I know what you mean, I get it. It’s tough being the one left behind, right? But you can help me a lot in the office, Harry. There’s always a ton of paperwork and it might seem meaningless compared to what the Task teams are doing, but it’s not. It gets everyone where they need to be with the equipment to keep them safe as they do their jobs.” He paused then sighed. “If you really want to know what James does, I’ll send you out with a Task team when we move bases in a couple of weeks. We’ll be moving down to the flatlands where the risks are different—mountain terrain is too dangerous for you. But yeah, when we move on, you can go and observe.” He paused, eyeing me warily. “But that does not mean you’ll be doing anything other than paperwork!”

  “Really?” I said, scared and excited at the same time.

  “Yup. If that’s what you want.”

  I wasn’t sure it was, but it would be incredible to find out.

  “Yes, please! Not that I don’t enjoy spending time with you, Clay.”

  He laughed.

  “Yeah, right. All that sexy paperwork—can’t beat it. But you’ve had enough of office work—I guess you want to see the grass roots, what it’s really all about.”

  “Well, yes. And James is kind of hot, too,” I teased.

  Clay’s forehead crinkled.

  “Are you crushing on my buddy?”

  “No, just appreciating the scenery.”

  He couldn’t stop himself grinning.

  “Yeah, okay, you got me. Even I know that he’s a good looking bastard.”

  “Do you have a crush on your buddy?”

  “I’m a happily married man,” he grinned. “So it’s strictly a bromance with James.”

  BUT LATER THAT afternoon, Clay came up with a new plan for our third snow-day.

  “The weather is too bad for the teams to go out, as you know, so I’m going down to the village school with James and Zada to talk to them about mine safety. We’ve de-mined all the areas we know about up here in the mountains, but there’s always a chance of something being missed. This has been a very heavily mined area, so we need to teach the kids how to be safety conscious. Would you like to come?”

  “Oh, a field trip! Yes, please. That would be fantastic. I’m going stir crazy up here.”

  I winced and smiled at him apologetically.

  “Eesh, that came out worse than I meant. It’s not that bad…”

  My words petered out as I realized that I was only digging myself in deeper.

  “It’s okay,” he laughed. “I get what you’re saying. Yep, field trip in 20 minutes. Meet us at the minibus.”

  I hurried back to my tiny cell, slipping and sliding on the compacted ice. I wasn’t keen on children—understatement—but the chance to escape our little grey fortress for a few hours was not to be missed.

  I changed out of my coral snowsuit and into jeans and a thick sweater with a fleece over the top. Not my most alluring look, but at least it was warm.

  Zada was also wearing jeans, but looser and less booty-hugging than mine, and her colourful silk headscarf was in place, as always.

  Clay hadn’t changed and wore his ever-present smile, watching, always watching as James strode to the minibus, avoiding eye-contact, as usual.

  We didn’t have an interpreter with us since one of the nurses at the health centre spoke good enough English to translate, Zada said, and was coming to the school to help us this afternoon.

  On the drive down the mountain, Clay explained a few facts to me.

  “A landmine costs between three and ten dollars, but a hundred times that to remove it. That’s why so many are left behind after conflicts. No army, no government ever budgets for their removal when they lay them: they should, but they don’t. Landmines inhibit refugees from returning home and prevent land being used for the country’s economic regrowth in agriculture or minerals mining or whatever.” His face was grim. “So the mines are left, which means that almost 10,000 children are injured by landmines every year. They go out to play with their friends and…”

  He left the sentence unfinished.

  “Adults are affected, too, of course, about 16,000 every year across 64 different countries around the world.”

  “How many landmines are we talking about?” I asked cautiously, trying to be sensitive to the appalling situation, unsure if I had the right words.

  “Seventy or eighty million,” Zada answered, her face tight with emotion. “Although that’s really just an estimate.”

  I swallowed. That was a far higher figure than I would have ever guessed. James and Clay would have enough work to last ten lifetimes.

  Clay sighed.

  “Three years ago, a number of countries signed up to the Maputo +5 Declaration, pledging to try and make the world landmine-free by 2025. But that will take money and political will. The world is kind of short on both.”

  A shiver ran through me at the thought.

  “Um, this is probably a stupid question,” I said, biting my lip, “but why don’t you just drive a tank through a minefield and blow up everything like that? I mean, I see why you can’t do that in the forest, but, well, it just seems safer,” I finished lamely.

  Clay nodded.

  “There are devices similar to that which are used sometimes, but none has 100% reliability. You still nee
d a human element. Unfortunately. And there’s a difference between a minefield which has been laid by professionals, and a ‘mined area’. Those are rarely mapped and we have to rely on local knowledge to locate the target area.”

  “What about sniffer dogs?” I asked.

  “Yes, canine units can be used to good effect.”

  I thought about the fat and lazy Labradors that I’d had as a child, and then the lean and hungry hounds used on the local Hunt.

  “Dogs can detect vapours emitted by mines and UXO under difficult conditions and cover large areas faster than standard manual searching methods or where metal-detecting technologies fall short, but creating a man-dog team can take up to six months.” He tugged at his short beard. “Most of the methods for mine detection are pretty much unchanged since the Second World War, but new methods are desperately needed. And something that had 100% reliability—that would be awesome news. I've read about all sorts of voodoo where they use bees, even rodents, both able to detect mines using scent. They’re even developing bacteria that glows a fluorescent colour when it comes into contact with small amounts of explosive vapour in the soil above the landmines. That would be seriously amazing if it aids the ability to clear large areas with 100% certainty.” He paused. “There are 10 million landmines in Afghanistan alone.” He sighed. “Not sure any of that would work in the Falklands Isles, for example, because of vapours emitted by the peat cycle. That’s probably a bridge too far right now.”

  James spoke for the first time.

  “Humans are quicker to train. Lives are cheap.”

  I fell silent, beaten by the economics of the whole horrible business. I despised my father, but at least his business interests had led him here, to this lonely place, with the intention of ridding them of landmines for good, and I couldn’t despise that. I understood that his sort of investment was welcome here, no matter the shaky ethics behind it.

  “MRE—mine risk education—that’s something I want to develop out here,” said Clay. “And James is just the man for the job. Taught me everything I know,” and he grinned widely.