How would I manage three months in this strange place without an anchor?
James
MY TEAM WAS exhausted but we had another half-mile of tough terrain to navigate before we reached our transport; maybe another painstaking hour of searching for mines, as well. It wasn’t work that could be rushed.
It had been a hard slog all day, sometimes working our way through knee-deep snowdrifts which slowed us down even more. But now, with the light fading and conditions worsening by the minute, the threat increased incrementally.
It was Ohana and Maral’s turn to use the Vallons, the metal detectors that would tell us if a mine was buried on the narrow track. I had been keeping a close eye on both of them, making sure that their sweeps were intersecting arcs and that they were covering all the ground. But an hour ago, Ohana had slowed down even more, holding up the team who followed, so I’d taken over, swinging the Vallon in a wide arc across the path, working parallel to Maral.
It was boring, tiring work, listening in the headphones for the telltale beeping—exhausting to concentrate for so long.
If you stepped on a mine, you’d lose a limb as minimum collateral damage. It wasn’t like in the films where the heroic bomb disposal officer replaced a man’s weight with a large rock.
There were two ways of disarming it safely: blow it up with a small charge; or the second, more dangerous method, was by putting a pin on the safety hole of the trigger, then removing the detonator manually—then you had a harmless mine that could be easily transported.
Slushy piles of snow tugged at our boots, and it wasn’t easy to keep parallel because of the saplings that sprung up around us, or the boulders that tried to trip us, but it was important to work in tandem, because if the arcs didn’t intersect, that could be the point where a mine had been planted. And then someone, one of my team, could tread on it and be crippled in a spray of blood and bone.
I never wanted to see that again.
I knew that I’d never ease the guilt when I thought back to that day in Times Square where all our lives had changed forever. The day I’d found Amira gagged and handcuffed with a suicide vest strapped to her body. The day I’d held her life in my hands and begged a God I didn’t believe in to save us all.
We’d survived, although Clay had lost a leg.
But he never complained, even when his prosthetic was painful, or when the cold or altitude affected the blood supply to his stump. He had Zada to look after him and he didn’t need a moody bastard like me bugging him.
The teams here loved Clay, and his addiction to teeth-rotting sweets and candy. Hell, everyone who’d ever met him loved the crazy wanker. Even me. And I hated just about everyone. But to balance things out, no one here liked me, but they respected that I was good at my job. And that was enough. Each day I had to believe that we were saving lives.
At the same time, I couldn’t help wondering why the hell anyone would bother to lay mines in such a Godforsaken part of the world, but then again, God had forsaken me long ago, just like here. It didn’t make me special.
I’d definitely shaken up the health and safety protocols since I’d been here, rewriting the manual, so to speak. I wasn’t losing anyone else, not on my watch.
But changing the status quo through brute force didn’t breed many friends.
Sweep.
Identify.
Expose.
Extract.
That was the mantra that I tried to drill into my team.
My Vallon beeped, and I held up my hand so that everyone stopped. Silence crept through the forest and I listened intently to the beeping in my headphones.
Working in snow made it much harder. Not only did it mask the landscape, but the Vallons were less reliable with a couple of feet of snow between them and the mines; much harder to get a ground signal.
It meant more work had to be done by hand.
We needed a Gauss, a metal detector that could work at greater depths. It was on the wish list that I’d given to Clay. We needed it, but we didn’t have it. One of many things that would have made the job safer.
Instead, I lay on my belly and dug through the foot of snow with a plastic trowel. A metal one could potentially arm a device.
Lying in the snow was fucking freezing, the icy cold and wet seeping through my clothes, but it was safer this way. Explosive forces go upwards, so being at ground level was the way we worked; and using just my left hand, so that if the device was triggered, I’d only lose one hand.
When I was training, I used to think about the way those rules had been designed, the people who’d learned lessons the hard way, the deadly way.
Carefully, I scraped at the snow with my left hand as my fingers began to go numb, until I found a round, bowl-shaped object, and gave a satisfied grunt. It was an old Russian MON-100, one of several that we’d found on this trip.
It was an anti-personnel mine, which meant it was designed to wound or kill by fragmentation and had 2Kg of explosives in it. Big bugger.
It was also a directional type of mine, so it should never be approached from the front, always from the rear or side.
Ohana handed me a slim rod with a red flag attached, a warning to stay clear until we could come back and deal with the nasty bastard. Not only that, but the flags were a way of seeing if there was a pattern to the way the mines were positioned.
At least I didn’t have to risk my life neutralizing it today; later, we’d blow it to kingdom come. But not today.
Maral was about to step forward when my sixth sense told me something wasn’t right.
“Wait!” I yelled.
Maral gave a little gasp and froze on the spot, hardly daring to breathe, her eyes darting around.
I inched toward her, covering the ground with the Vallon.
There was another device here. I knew it, I just couldn’t find it.
I switched to a smaller handheld metal detector. I wished we had the version I’d used in the Army, a Hoodlum, but the Americans had donated us Garmins, so I used what I was given.
Time ticked past and I ignored the restless grumbles behind me from the rest of the team who were tired and cold, and believed that I was the only thing between them and a warm bus back to barracks. Maybe I was wrong.
No, I was never wrong—not about this.
I’d spent my adult life listening to my gut instincts.
Slowly, I raised my eyes, searching the foliage around us.
And then I spotted it, in the trees—a det cord link rising upwards directly above Maral’s head … and another anti-personnel mine. One more step and she’d have been killed along with at least three people following behind her.
I pointed, putting my finger to my lips. Her face paled as she tilted her head upwards and muttered something that could have been a prayer.
Shaking, she sank into a crouch, then scuttled sideways on her hands and knees until she was out of the danger zone.
Slow tears of shock from the near miss leaked from her eyes but I didn’t have time for that. I held my hand out for another red flag, then looped it around a small branch so it hung near the device, but not close enough to touch it, even if the wind picked up.
Normally, I’d neutralize these UXOs on the spot—who doesn’t like fireworks? But I needed to pass on the skills to others so they could carry on the work when I was gone. For that, I needed good light and a place where I could do show-and-tell in safety—never during a Task.
Breathing a sigh of relief, we circled past the small pennants, trudging on, eyes gritty with tiredness as dusk descended.
“James-syr,” said Yadigar the terp, slapping my shoulder. “The bus is just over that rise, below the tree-line. We’ll be drinking Xirdalan and sleeping in our beds tonight.” He paused, lowering his voice. “Maybe Maral will show you her thanks later in bed,” and he wiggled his thick eyebrows like a cheap, music hall villain.
He’d done this before, trying to hook me up with one of the women from the team which was annoying an
d unprofessional. But there was no use trying to explain that to him. I’d begun to wonder if he received money for pimping on the side. It was a theory I hadn’t tested yet, but if I came across any evidence…
I just shook my head, my expression stony.
I had no intention of drinking, and hadn’t touched any alcohol since the night Clay had found me in the Nag’s Head over two months ago. Besides, Xirdalan, the local beer, was a light lager the colour and taste of piss. But it was cheap and therefore popular.
Yad knew that I stayed away from it and stuck to chai, the sweet black tea everyone drank, but there were times when I still longed for the numbing relief of alcohol. Yad was sure that I’d give in one day. I was sure he was right.
We were all looking forward to being back at the compound tonight. Exacting work and sleeping rough weren’t an ideal combination, especially in sub-zero temperatures, so the thought of tepid showers and our own beds was something we were all ready for.
Even so, being back at base also meant being around Zada. I still had mixed feelings about that. It was getting easier. Never easy, but easier.
I was mostly over the shock of how much she looked and sounded like Amira, but at least their personalities were totally different: Amira had been fiery and emotional; Zada was slower to anger, more likely to think before acting.
Each evening, over dinner, she talked and I listened. Gradually, she told me all the things about Amira that I hadn’t known before: what she was like as a child, what she was like at high school and as a nurse, how she was before their brother Karam’s death, when the person that she’d been had died with her grief.
I’d known Amira in fear and definitely intensity. Would that have translated into a relationship in ordinary life?
I smiled wryly—there was nothing ordinary about my life.
I pushed the thought away, swinging the Vallon across the remaining yards that led to the bus, and unclipping the battery pack with a sigh.
Another mission completed. Mines located: 23. Deaths/injuries: 0.
Released from concentration, the team became vocal, laughing and talking among themselves, leaving me to my thoughts as I settled into a seat near the front of the bus and they crowded into the back.
“A good day, James-syr,” said Yadigar as he passed me to join the others.
“Yep, a win for the good guys,” I agreed.
He smiled broadly at this.
“I am good guy!”
IT WAS A five-hour drive along hairpin bends and thousand-foot drops to HQ but we were used to this. We’d already cleared large areas of the roadsides, tracks and pathways around the compound, so now we had to travel farther afield. Clay thought that we had another two weeks’ work before we’d be forced to move the base. And that meant that not all of the team would travel with us. Mostly, they were women with families who did this difficult and dangerous work because it paid well, compared to poorly paid positions in the declining oil industry, which was the only alternative employment.
A few would travel with us, prepared not to see their families during the next four months because this was the only way they could earn the money to feed them. But when we moved, we’d have to recruit at least four new members, maybe more, and that meant losing precious time to train them.
Time wasn’t precious to me, of course, but with a finite budget to get the work done, Clay was on a time crunch. The Halo Trust was a charity, but much of their funding came from the UN who never had enough to go around, and businesses who were only generous because it got the land cleared of mines and UXOs at a cut price. I despised the people who skimped on resources, who gave us five people when we needed ten, who thought that local people were expendable, because they were cheap—women who cleared landmines for a living were very cheap. Yeah, very expendable.
Bastards.
I let my eyes drift closed, falling into an uneasy sleep with violent dreams.
I jerked awake when I heard screaming, wondering if we were under attack, and Yadigar shook my shoulder so roughly, I nearly fell off the bench seat of the bus.
“What the fuck?” I snarled, turning to him angrily.
His face was carefully neutral, hiding his real feelings, his disdain.
“You were screaming, James-syr. Very bad. You scare the women.”
I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and dropped my gaze to my boots so I wouldn’t have to see the scorn in his expression.
“Ah, fuck. Sorry, Yad,” I mumbled.
“You okay? You want beer? I have some?”
I gave him a furious look and he retreated hastily back to his seat.
He knew the rules—no alcohol on a Task. It was too risky. If I reported him to Clay, he’d be off the team instantly. But we’d scoured the area for competent English speakers and they were hard to find. You couldn’t make-do when people’s lives depended on it.
I rubbed my face again and glanced around, curious eyes flitting away as soon as they met mine. It was one of the reasons people stayed away from—because I scared the fuck out of them.
Better not fall asleep again. It was why I had a room to myself at the compound.
As we approached the motley collection of ugly buildings that I currently called home, a wave of tiredness came over me. It was always the same at the end of an op, the relief of surviving another one, the letting go of all the awareness, all the tension of responsibility to not get anyone killed.
But before I could do anything else, I had to report to Clay and decide what to do about Yad.
I dragged my weary arse toward the prefab building that was the Trust’s office, and stopped.
Why do we want what we can’t have?
That was my first thought when the woman walked into the prefab hut ahead of me.
My second thought was, what the fuck is she doing in a flea-infested shithole like this?
I was in the armpit of the world, one of the most dangerous and corrupt territories to come out of the ex-Soviet Union, and she was wearing a luminous pink ski suit, with blonde hair tumbling over her shoulders.
Am I hallucinating? Have I finally gone completely crazy?
But if not, what the hell was she doing in the middle of landmine country, with Russia to the north, Iran to the south, and hell on earth all around?
I knew what I was doing here.
Penance. I was doing penance.
But this woman?
My head started to swivel when I saw her, and if I’d been a cartoon character, my tongue would have been drooling on my mud-caked boots.
She was stunning. No other word for it. A real bombshell. Tiny waist, nice tits, rounded hips, and long, long legs. Her hair was waist-length, curling in silky blonde waves. It seemed unreal against the backdrop of mud and grey.
But when she turned and her eyes caught me looking at her, there was no light of triumph, no recognition that she was God’s gift to man. Instead, the dark blue irises were emotionless. Her gaze flicked up and down my tatty, dirt-stained clothes without interest, her expression of weary resignation and an untouchable, impenetrable isolation.
There was something old in her eyes, something that said she’d seen enough, even though she couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. For the first time in a long while, I wanted to understand, wanted to know what she’d seen, what she’d experienced—and that was a scary thought. I didn’t like being scared and I didn’t like feeling guilty—it made me angry. I should stay the hell away from her.
But I got it, I did. She was the kind of woman that men fought over. She probably started wars. She was a goddam Helen of Troy.
And you know what happened to the Trojans…
Arabella
MY INSTINCT WAS to take a step backwards, but instead I held my ground and stared straight ahead, meeting the stranger’s angry gaze.
With his shaved head and blazing eyes, he looked dangerous, as if volcanic violence was coiled inside him waiting to be released.
But after a few seconds, his eyes
iced over, and I couldn’t hold his intense glare any longer, so I let my gaze drop to the rest of him. There was a streak of mud across his forehead and his clothes were filthy but functional. Then my eyes widened as they came to rest on the gun strapped to his hip.
The only guns I’d been around were shotguns when we had a pheasant shoot on the family estate—not handguns. Not squat, black, deadly-looking pistols.
Who was this man?
Was he one of the mercenaries that Clay had warned me about? One of those men with allegiances to no one except the highest bidder? Or was he a bandit, one of many who haunted these mountains, preying on the weak and unprotected for food, clothes or weapons.
I swallowed uneasily and could have cried with relief when I saw Clay striding across the muddy compound towards me.
“Yo, James!” he called out, waving a bright green lollipop. “You’re back earlier than I expected. How’d it go? I just saw Yad. He says you saved Maral’s life today. Nice work, brother.”
Brother?
I stared in surprise. Clay’s skin was dark, almost ebony, but this man had an unhealthy pallor, his skin chalky with dark circles under his eyes, almost disguising the good genes that had blessed him with a strong, handsome face, if somewhat unsettling eyes of pale blue.
Of course! He’d called him ‘James’—I’d just been too flustered to take it in. This was Clay’s co-worker, the only English speaker in the camp that I hadn’t encountered so far.
“Did you meet Harry yet?” Clay continued.
The man swung his pale blue gaze to Clay.
“Who?”
Clay laughed, tilting his head back, his eyes creasing with amusement.
“Yeah, sorry about that. I’d better do the introductions right. Arabella, this is my friend and co-worker James Spears, our EOD operator and Project Manager. James, this is Arabella Forsythe, our new volunteer, also known as Harry.”
The man’s fierce gaze swung back to me but didn’t soften. If anything, his gaze hardened.
Bombshell - Jane Harvey-Berrick Page 5
