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by Edward Ahern
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The bastard had been creative. Cooked up from spare parts and stolen military C4. No attempt at making it pretty, just a bomb magnetically attached to an automated comm center, one critical to our operations; one that I couldn’t just blow the explosive in place and tell the gold bars and stars to write off the electronics.
We were a kilometer off road in a country that was nominally one of our besties, but was also a training ground for people like my bomber. The bomb wasn’t all that well concealed and the timing mechanism had a bright display. He wanted a two-fer, the comm gear and whoever tries to remove the device. Like me.
There were extra wires. I hate extra wires. They’re almost always rigged up as anti-disturbance triggers. And he’d cooked this up on his own, so no manual was going to tell me how to get into and out of it without detonation. Shit.
We were supposed to be a three-man team. One died from a stray round during our last disarm, and the other was fresh out of EOD school and had learned everything about the last war’s bombs and nothing about this war’s goodies. That left me. I made a call.
“Sir, it’s booby trapped to prevent disarming it. It’s about two pounds of plastic explosive. Non-standard construction, it’s whatever the bomber dreamed up. I recommend we BIP it. Ah, sorry sir, that stands for blow-in-place…
“I understand sir. I could put a shaped charge next to it and try and blow it off the comm gear before it explodes. We might be able to salvage some of the components…
“I see. Yes, Sir, I understand how critical this equipment is for us. The timer on the ordnance gives us about an hour. I’ll take another look at it.”
Shelby, the newbie was next to me, and could hear most of what I was being ordered to do. His face had kept wrinkling as the conversation went on. “Son,” I said, “go get the castrator.”
“Really?”
“Our bomb maker isn’t the only clever one on scene. We’ll use my own toy.” Cassie looks like a metal octopus with wire snips where its mouth should be, and works, mostly.
“Huh?”
“Just get it. Once you see it, you’ll understand how it works.”
The newbie, all twenty years of him, went to our panel truck, found my gadget and brought it over to me.
“Thanks. Open up your comm channel to me and set it to record. I’ll take things step by step so in case the big bang theory wins, you’ll know what not to do next time.”
I brought Cassie and a battery powered drill back to the comm center and the bomb. I put Cassie and her drill down and re-looked at the device’s wiring. I ignored the colors of the wires, that was the first thing he’d switch. It’s was a paper-scissors-rock game. Or, if you prefer, a game played with red herrings. Four wires went from the timing mechanism to the explosive, at least two more than were needed to just blow things up.
If he or she were clever they’d have one current flow keeping a switch open, so cutting the wrong wire would close the switch and blow the bomb. Eeny Meeny Miney Moe, which of the vagrant wires won’t blow.
Time was wasting. I started talking aloud for the recording, took my best guess, drilled holes for the castrator legs, mounted it in missionary position over the maybe right wire, and set up the snips and remotely activated closure clamp. Then I backed away. Well away.
I handed the trigger to Shelby. “Do the honors, son. Time to lose your virginity.”
He did, and we stood like idiots waiting for an explosion that didn’t happen while listening to the distant noise of road traffic.
“Should we go in?” he hissed.
“Don’t be overly stupid, we’ve still got fourteen minutes before the bomb’s timer runs out.”
We waited twenty minutes and I went back in to the site. The timer had stopped. “Shelby,” I said, comms still on, “I’m going to strip this down one component at a time until we’ve got nothing left but explosive and a frame. Then the explosive comes off.”
“Why not pull the bomb off the unit?”
I sighed. Good help was so hard to find. “Because, dummy, it may still be on a magnetic circuit set to detonate if it’s removed.”
“Oh.”
The disassembly took twenty-five minutes and our overpriced, blissfully unaware communications device had been happily humming throughout. I called the brass. “It’s done. But he’s going to change his wiring once he learns that the bomb was defused…
“Yes, sir, thank you.”
I hung up and Shelby insisted on shaking my hand. “That’s a hell of a bomb disarmer you’ve got. You and the device will be famous.”
“No, we won’t. I don’t want anyone knowing about. And it’s only as good as its operator. The first two castrators blew up when I guessed wrong.”
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Ed Ahern resumed writing after forty odd years, first as a Naval officer, then in foreign intelligence and international sales. He’s had four hundred stories and poems published so far, and six books. Ed works the other side of writing at Bewildering Stories, where he sits on the review board and manages a posse of seven review editors. You can follow him on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
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