by Kim Hughes
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Dedication to my friend and brother, FBI Supervisory Special Agent Bomb Technician, Sean Boyle.
People often ask us why we do what we do, why we walk forward as others withdraw. We are a brotherhood that grows st ronger with every passing day and cannot be broken. Rest brother, your job is done.
IN THE INTERESTS OF NATIONAL SECURITY CERTAIN PROCEDURES AND EQUIPMENT THAT ARE COMMON IN EXPLOSIVE ORDNANCE DISPOSAL HAVE BEEN ALTERED OR OMITTED.
FRIDAY
ONE
‘It’s the Rolls-Royce of IEDs.’
That was the first thing that went through my head when I pushed away the coarse sand with my paintbrush, exposing part of the pressure plate. The majority of the Improvised Explosive Devices we came across in this part of Helmand were crude to the point of caricature. ‘Chip shop bombs’, the Boss called them. I wanted to point out it should be ‘kebab shop’, but he hadn’t yet been on one of those cultural sensitivity courses the army had introduced. Something designed to help win the hearts and minds of the very people who were busy blowing the feet, legs and bollocks off our lads.
What he meant was that they were lashed-together devices, usually a couple of planks of wood held apart by rubber rings which would compress when stood on or driven over. This pressure brought together two pieces of metal – washers or parts of old hacksaw blades – which would complete an electrical circuit, thus causing the detonator to explode, which in turn would set off the main explosive charge buried beneath. Crude, as I said, but undeniably effective. And available in their thousands, thanks to the Taliban’s bomb-making factories.
But this one was a Rolls-Royce among Trabants. The wire – proper, heavily insulated stuff, not the usual Iranian crap that fell apart when you touched it – had been properly crimped using US-sourced 3M connectors. Christ, I thought, as I exposed a little more of the circuit, there was even a touch of solder. Unheard of. This was how one of those picture restorers must feel when they rub at a corner of a painting bought for five quid at a car boot sale and discover an Old Master. I was dealing with something by a maestro, the Leonardo da Vinci of the Taliban’s bomb-makers. I was almost impressed.
As often happened when I paused to take in a situation such as this – one involving a threat to life; my life – I had something akin to an out-of-body experience. From my new POV, I was hovering above the rough road where I was lying on the ground. A corridor of yellow lines, like the dashes in Morse code, ran behind me, broken railway tracks leading back to the Incident Control Point (ICP). The spray-painted path showed the route I had cleared with my mine detector, all the way up to where the IED had been buried. I would re-sweep it on my way back to the ICP, too, or the Boss would have my nuts faster than any explosion could.
To my right was a concrete culvert that gave off an horrendous lingering stench. Beyond that a field of fully grown maize sloped gently upwards and gave way to a series of pomegranate orchards. I could see the flash of silver as the sun glinted off the irrigation ditches that criss-crossed this terrain, the only way the local farmers could put some colour and life into the desert. A bird of some description patrolled over the fields. I squinted. A shrike. Possibly a red-tailed shrike. There were several species of these hunter-killers in Helmand. They were called ‘butcher birds’ because of their habit of impaling the body parts of their prey on thorny bushes. The Spanish call them El Verdugo – The Executioner. I always thought El Verdugo was a very apt avian symbol for Afghan (like all soldiers serving there, I tended to truncate the name of the country).
It was only two hours after dawn, but the sun was already blow-torching down on me. My back was sodden and sweat was pooling behind my ears. I never knew you could sweat there, or from many other weird nooks and crannies, until I came to Afghan. The precious moisture trickled down my jawline and puddled on my chin before dropping onto the sand, staining it dark for a second before the heat sucked the patch dry once more.
There were flies circling and landing on my lips and I spat them away with the tip of my tongue. These fat black bastards were coming from that ditch to my right that ran alongside the road. There were clouds of mosquitoes swarming over it and it gave off the inevitable smell of human shit, which was the signature fragrance of this part of the world. The ditch was probably used as a sewer by those who normally dwelled in the deserted mud-built compounds that lay ahead, just beyond the T-junction that the booby-trapped road led into. Danish soldiers also serving with ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) had declared the dwellings secure and empty at first light, but even so I felt like I was being watched through the ‘murder holes’, the firing slits carved into pretty much every wall of the complex. The feeling of being observed by the locals – ‘dicked’, as we said – was constant and it never left you once you were outside Camp Bastion or whichever Forward Operating Base you were deployed to.
Over to my left, beyond the three circles of red paint that marked other IEDs planted a stone’s throw from where I lay, was the Boss, my Staff Sergeant, working on the fifth and – we hoped – last of the cluster of IEDs for the day. He, too, was lying prone, ‘painting the sand’ with his brush to reveal a pressure plate. I could see he had laid his Sig pistol within easy reach, next to his bag of tricks. Most did that. I didn’t. A gun was one more thing to get in the way. I preferred to rely on the infantry that were watching over us for firepower.
I glanced over to see how Staff was getting on with his IED. It was extremely unusual to have two ATOs – Ammunition Technical Officers – in a bomb disposal team. Ours (codename: Blackrock 22) was a pilot scheme to see if splitting the burden of defusing the endless stream of IEDs between a pair of operatives helped alleviate some of the stresses and strains that built up over weeks and months of lying inches from sudden death. It had caused something of an outcry, because it meant other ATOs were stretched very thin indeed. It took seven years or so to train up an ATO. The truth was, as with many things, the army just did not have enough to go around.
‘What you got, Boss?’ I shouted over to him. He was close enough that I didn’t have to use my PRR – Personal Role Radio.
‘Same old shit,’ he replied. ‘You?’
‘Yeah. Same old, same old.’
Best not to break his concentration while he dealt with his own device. He would find out soon enough that the mine wasn’t that at all.
Not only would I take photographs of the device once I had uncovered more of it, but I’d also try to recover any bits that would prove useful for analysis by our Intelligence people. DNA samples were extracted from any hair or sweat left on the constituent parts and added to our burgeoning database. The Weapons Intelligence Section was particularly interested in anything new or novel and this, my forty-third IED, was certainly that.
I wondered if I’d make the half-century mark. In bombs, not years. But maybe I’d get to celebrate both. It was the end game now. We were leaving, letting the Afghans get on with it. I doubted the IEDs would stop. We just wouldn’t be there to defuse them. I’d be at home with Tracey-Jane and the kids. And perhaps I’d come out of the army altogether. Although none of us ATOs were sure exactly how the skills and drills of Explosive Ordnance Disposal could be applied in Civvie Street.
I thought about the bomb-maker again as I continued to brush the sand away. Many of the builders were kids, their small
, dextrous fingers deftly putting together pressure plates, filling old shell cases or palm oil cans with homemade explosives. Then crawling out in the dark of night and digging these lethal devices into the ground, when actually they should have been tucked up in bed. The good ones did a great job of making sure the bombs were well covered, that the excess soil was disposed of and that the earth was a uniform colour once again, so the bomb couldn’t be spotted with the naked eye.
Something told me this particular technician wasn’t a kid though. Staff always said that every bomb had a personality. Or, at least, it reflected the personality of the man – it was usually a man – who had assembled it. This one was neat, fastidious, considered. An adult had put this device together. Someone who took pride in his work, even if that work was to kill the British, Danish and Estonian soldiers who were working this part of the province.
And, apparently, the IED-builders’ new job description was to take out the army’s bomb-disposal specialists. ATOs had been declared the prime enemy. We were cats to their mice. Or was it the other way around? Anyway, we were told there was a bounty out on us, a reward for the first bomb-maker to kill an ATO. It was hardly a reassuring thought, lying there in the sun, brain boiling beneath my helmet, that there was a price on my very hot head. Operation Certain Death, that’s what we ATOs called a tricky situation. But, given the bounty on us, everything was tricky now.
Stay focused.
Skills and drills, remember. They keep you alive. I looked over at the Boss again. He was concentrating too hard to have spoken. It was in my mind, a replay of the phrase he used over and over again, along with: The bomb isn’t your enemy. Complacency is.
Even though sudden death was mere inches away, I felt the familiar tingle of excitement, not fear, as I worked at exposing the business end of the IED. Well, maybe there were a few grace notes of dread, the ones that kept you sharp. This was why we signed up for the High Threat bomb-disposal course. We do this because it saves lives, we tell ourselves, it is how we make a difference. The truth is we also do it because it is the biggest fucking buzz on the planet. Until it becomes routine, boring, easy. That’s when you die.
I took a deep breath and puffed a little air out to shift the salt-craving flies. I glanced back at the ICP, which had been set up between the two Mastiff Protected Patrol Vehicles that had brought us here. Carl, our Electronic Counter Measures man, who was busy jamming any signals that might detonate the bomb, was also taking notes of what we were up to. Around him stood our infantry escort, SA80s at the ready. Lost among them, crouching in the shadow of one of the vehicles, was the slight figure of Moe, our young interpreter or ‘terp’. It was hard to tell how young he was because, like all interpreters in Afghan, his face was almost permanently covered by a scarf, so he couldn’t be recognised by any Taliban scanning us through binoculars or sniper scope. Recognition would mean certain death for him and his family. That very morning the Boss had given the lad his own shemagh scarf, just to make certain he was properly masked up. Now only his dark, sad eyes were visible.
The Boss had told a story about Moe as we bounced to this spot in our Mastiff PPV. This wasn’t uncommon. Moe the terp was the butt of many jokes. They made the kid laugh and gave him a sense of belonging to Blackrock 22, rather than just being a mouth-for-hire. You knew you were accepted in the team when everyone took the piss out of you. Sick humour, insults and practical jokes were the glue that held us together.
‘So, Moe comes into the FOB and the Captain says to him: Where’ve you come from? I came down the Pharmacy Road comes the reply. Are you mad? the officer asks. It’s full of IEDs and Waheed, the warlord, is out there. Did you see him? I did, admits Moe. I was about three kilometres away from here when he stepped out and put an AK-47 to my chest. He accused me of being a terp. I denied it. So, he said, drop your pants. I did. Now, take a shit. What could I do? He had the AK-47. I took a shit. Now eat it. What? Eat it? What could I do? He had the AK-47. So, I ate it. He started laughing, but as he did so I jumped on him and wrestled the AK-47 from him. Drop your pants, I said. What could he do? I had the gun. He did so. Take a shit. What could he do? I had the AK-47. Now, eat it. He did so. You ask me if I have seen Waheed the Warlord? We just had lunch together!’
I chuckled to myself. The last time he had told that joke, it had been Pedro the Bandit. Sometimes I wondered if sending the Boss on a cultural sensitivity course would be a waste of time.
Back in the moment, I used the point of my trowel to break up a tennis-ball-sized sphere of hard sand and swept it away. As I did so, I exposed part of the battery assembly. Now I could see the set-up quite clearly. Still very neat in execution, but still the same basic principles. Switch, detonator… boom.
It wasn’t quite time to start cutting wires, though. Sometimes there was a collapsing circuit, a second system piggy-backed onto the first. So, if you cut the primary or main circuit, the back-up activated and fired the detonator and it was All Over Now, Baby Blue. To be fair, the majority of IEDs I had come across in Afghan didn’t have anything quite so sophisticated as a collapsing circuit – the IRA ones in Northern Ireland were a different matter, because those fuckers were always trying to catch us out – but it was worth checking. My life was worth it. I continued to brush, sweep and excavate further. Stopped. There was something else down there. Something new. More cable. Running through a buried plastic conduit. That was new, too. No, not cable. String.
It’s a command-pull IED.
That was the last thing that went through my head.
* * *
‘And how does that make you feel?’
TWO
And he was back in the room.
It was suddenly very cold and he shivered, missing the sun on his neck. He felt a surge of resentment, as if he had been woken during a particularly pleasant dream, even though what he had been experiencing was more like a waking nightmare. It was one he always hoped would end differently. It never did. Nick always died.
Even so, it was good to hear his old friend’s voice, despite Riley knowing it wasn’t real, just some part of his brain unwilling to let Nick go completely. The pain of reliving that day, now more than four years in the past, was almost worth it, just to spend some time with him.
Riley looked around the room, confident he was in the real world once again. Rather than lying in a fly-flecked corner of Helmand, he was sitting in the Psychological Assessment Suite on the third floor of what used to be, in Leicester’s glory days, one of the city’s many shoe factories. Now it was a series of offices, including the one he was in, which was rented to PAS – Psychological Assessment Services – which specialised in providing detailed reports to employers about a subject’s state of mind. Employers like the army.
Outside, the sun had finally replaced the wind-driven rain squalls that had swept over the central part of England for the best part of a week, which had made spring seem like a very distant prospect indeed. Now, with the gales departed and the sky blue, it looked far more inviting than the rather sterile consulting room, with its retro van der Rohe furniture and one of those curved Arco lamps that people thought turned them into Don Draper.
Staff Sergeant Dom Riley pulled his gaze from the Crittal window and sniffed, trying to clear his sinuses, but the smell was still there. Shit, sand and blood. This olfactory reminder of Helmand could strike at any time. Many a meal had been ruined by an unbidden taste of the foul, penetrating dust that swirled around Afghanistan and the iron tang of the red mist that bombs tended to leave hanging in the air when some poor fucker trod on an IED.
His ears were still ringing, as if the blast that had taken Nick had happened moments ago. Riley realised that the woman sitting in the chair beside him had spoken. Ms Carver. The ‘Ms’ being very important. Late twenties. Probably very attractive when she didn’t wear unflattering black suits and scrape her dark hair back and leave her face looking so scrubbed it was as if she had had one of those derma-peels. Still, Riley supposed she had to have some
line of defence against the parade of horny squaddies who came into her office for ‘assessment’. Except he wasn’t there for any routine mind games. He was there fighting for his job.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘How does that make you feel?’ she repeated.
How the fuck do you think it makes him feel?
Nick, still in his head, still mouthing off. But his dead friend was right. It was a waste of a good man. And it made Riley furious. This, though, wasn’t the time or the place to vent his anger. He managed to keep a lid on it, which wasn’t always the case. He was a soldier, he reminded himself. Suck it up, leave the politics to others. You fought for your mates, not the big picture. And you sometimes lost your mates in the process.
He was there because of an incident at the Felix Centre at Marlborough Barracks in Warwickshire, where he had been giving a briefing to a group of trainees on the Improvised Explosive Device Disposal course. The students were in the middle of analysing two famous cases, the Pizza Bomber and the Harvey’s Resort device, but with Riley having returned from operations in Northern Ireland they were equally keen to learn from real-life experiences in the field. The general public thought that, since the peace process, Ireland was a bomb-free, if not riot-free, zone. They couldn’t be more wrong. Old habits die hard. The ‘New IRA’ bombs in a hijacked pizza delivery van outside the Londonderry courthouse in January 2019 demonstrated that. However, not all the attendees on the course were willing to take his advice. Some were convinced they had nothing to learn from old hands like him. It was because of one of those smart arses that he was having to answer stupid questions in an old shoe factory.
He decided to give Ms Carver what he suspected she wanted to hear. ‘I feel scared. Angry. Frustrated. Sad. It’s weird. Being inside his head.’
