“And don’t you forget it,” she said, raising her eyebrows. Then her smile died. “So when James is being rude—like just now—ignore it. We do. He’s a good man, you’ll see.”
I was already re-evaluating my opinion of him. I couldn’t imagine what it was like to lose the love of your life, to have her ripped away from you. But I envied him a tiny bit, too. I’d never been in love. And I’d never been loved. Well, perhaps my mother had loved me, I was just too young to remember it. I liked to think she had.
I wanted to ask about Zada’s sister, but I sensed that this wasn’t the time, with their emotions already raw.
“How did James save that woman Maral today?”
It wasn’t the question I really wanted to ask.
“He stopped her from walking into a landmine,” Clay answered. “The way Yad, tells it, everyone was tired and wanting to push on to get back to the bus, but James has this sixth sense and he knew, he just knew there was something else out there. So he did a fingertip search of the area and found this MON-100 hanging in a darn tree. Another footstep forward, and Maral would have walked right into it.” Clay’s expression was serious. “If she had, it would have killed her and half the team, as well as injuring the others. James saved a lot of lives today. He’s that good at his job.”
I listened to the story open-mouthed. It was so unimaginable, being that close to death on a daily basis.
“Oh my God! That’s … wow, I don’t know what to say! I really don’t! Does … is … does that happen all the time?”
Clay shook his head.
“Thankfully, no. But it’s always a possibility. That’s why the work is so stressful. We train the teams as much as we can, given the timeframe, but James’s training can’t be equalled. He was in the British Army for 11 years; he trained for seven years to be a high threat bomb disposal operator.”
“You may as well tell her everything,” said Zada quietly.
Clay sighed and nodded.
“Did you hear about the Times Square bomb two years ago?”
I scoured my memory, vaguely remembering something about a bomb in Times Square that had gone off, but could have been much worse.
“Yes, it’s a little hazy, but I remember seeing something on the TV news,” I said hesitantly. “A woman had been kidnapped and put in a suicide vest. That’s right, isn’t it? Two off-duty soldiers rescued her. One of them got hurt, I think?”
“Pretty much, yeah.” Clay gave a sardonic smile as Zada reached out and held his hand. “The woman was Zada’s sister, Amira, and the two off-duty soldiers were me and James. He was the one in the bomb suit.” He shrugged. “He saved all our lives that day.”
My brain struggled to process what Clay had said, and when it finally did, I felt humbled just to sit in the same dining room with these people. Next time I saw James, it would definitely be with fresh eyes. I felt ashamed of how judgmental I’d been.
“I’m so sorry!”
My words were inadequate, but that was all I could think of to say.
People judged me all the time as a vapid blonde bimbo—of course, in that particular case, they weren’t wrong. Not that I was completely thick, whatever dear old Dad said. And the only reason I hadn’t received my Communications degree was to do with the little problem of having told the University Chancellor that he was a dickless wonder after drinking two bottles of Taittinger’s, but I swear I felt his hand on my arse and not the edge of the table like he claimed. Still, being sent down a week before graduation didn’t win me any Brownie points. Story of my life.
God, that all seemed so trivial compared with what I’d found in this forgotten corner of the world. I didn’t even know why this land was mined—some distant war that I’d never heard of, but why or when, who or how, I had no idea. The best thing I could do was keep my mouth shut and make myself useful.
But what if Dad didn’t come back for me? I shivered at the thought. No, no need to panic—Clay and Zada would help me, I was sure of that. Maybe James, too. That’s what he did, wasn’t it? Helped people?
I just wished I could turn off the need for people to like me. It got me into so much trouble, time and time again. I’d do pretty much anything if it meant that I earned people’s smiles or laughs. Pathetic, I know. And I didn’t need psychoanalysis to explain why—I had abandonment issues and Daddy issues by the bucket-load.
Anger flooded through me as it did every time I thought about Dad dumping me here. He’d meant it to punish me. Well, wouldn’t it be a kick in the pants if it was the thing that made me? If I went home stronger?
Maybe James was a miserable bastard, but he had good reason, and yet he was still here helping people. I was going to take a leaf out of his book. I’d drown my sorrows and selfish triviality in helping others. At least I could try.
That night, curled up in my uncomfortable bed in my concrete cell of a room, I promised myself that I’d do better, that I’d be better.
WAKING UP THE next day to the reality of cold showers, concrete floors, and dollops of ‘hearty’ stew for breakfast hadn’t become any easier, but a new determination to take it on the chin made me get my backside out of bed, queue for the lavatory, queue for the shower, smile agreeably at the other women who were obviously talking about me, and make myself useful.
I didn’t see Clay or James at breakfast. I already knew that Zada had left early to catch a ride down the mountain to the village with Turul, which left me alone at breakfast with the only other person who spoke English, the big bear of a man they called ‘Yad’.
“Ah, the English princess!” he said with a wide grin. “Turul has told me about you.”
I squinted at him, wondering if that was sarcasm or just a friendly greeting. I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and sat opposite him with my bowl of stew, staring down at it unenthusiastically.
It was slightly off-putting to see him spoon enormous portions into his cavernous mouth with bad teeth, pieces of meat and carrots caught by his untrimmed beard.
But that wasn’t why I didn’t like him—there was something wild in his eyes, something dark and sly, and I didn’t like the way his gaze undressed me. Physically, he was very much like Turul, the local. But Yad had a careless cruelty that reminded me of my father.
I pushed the bowl towards him and stood up.
“Hey, where you go, English princess?”
“I don’t seem to have much of an appetite, but be my guest and finish it off.”
“I would like to be your guest,” he said with a leer, flicking his tongue between two fingers in an obscene gesture. “Any time, Ice Princess!”
Refusing to respond, I marched straight to the office, determined never to be alone with him if I could possibly help it.
At the office, I turned on the paraffin heater the way Clay had shown me, then rinsed out the coffee pot at the standpipe where James had washed his hands. My gel nails were standing up to the abuse well, but my hands were purple with cold. Who’d have thought I’d be pining for rubber washing-up gloves?
I hurried inside to make some of the foul coffee that Clay drank all day long. Maybe the bitterness offset the amount of sugar from the sweets and candy he ate continuously. I shuddered at the cost of his dental insurance.
He entered the office with James, their heads bent together in conversation, Clay’s dark skin and bright smile contrasting with James’s pale skin and dead expression.
“Tell me what you need, brother. You got enough det cord? Enough fuzes?”
“Always need more high explosives, det cord, plain dets and safety fuze. American pull igniters. Then electric dets and shrikes, if you can get them. And can you get another ceramic knife and a pair of ceramic scissors? And we need that bloody Gauss yesterday.”
Clay sucked his teeth.
“Shrikes? Oh yeah, electrical blasters, right? I’ll do my best. Got some contacts that I can ask for the Gauss. Official channels are slow,” and he sighed.
“We need it now.”
>
“But ya know, we’re not badly resourced compared to some de-miner ops.”
James’s lips tightened.
“Stop pissing in my cup and calling it tea.”
Clay laughed out loud.
“Okay, okay! I’ll get it. Somehow.” Then he looked up and saw me. “Hey, Harry, how’s it going?”
“Tickety-book, thanks, Clay. Hello, James.”
He nodded, meeting my eyes with a flash of pale blue, before glancing away.
Clay smiled.
“James is going to give you a list of the things he needs when he goes to do dems, okay?”
“Sure. Um, what’s dems?”
“Do you know anything about what we do here?” James growled.
“A little,” I said, lifting my chin. “Clay has filled me in.”
The two men exchanged a glance.
“There are three main methods used for humanitarian demining on land—which one you use depends on the type of mines, terrain, and local resources,” James explained, spitting the words out like bullets. “In wide open land, we’d use mechanical clearance—armoured vehicles fitted with flails so the mines would be safely detonated. Trained detection dogs are also used, but here, we use manual detection using metal detectors.”
I blinked at the influx of information, and Clay patted my arm reassuringly.
“You’ll get used to the jargon. Demolition of UXOs or mines—that’s unexploded ordnance.”
To me, ‘demolition’ meant blowing up an office block so it tumbled down in a cloud of dust, but somehow I didn’t think that was what Clay meant. James caught the uncertainty in my expression.
“I’m going to blow up all the mines we found on our last Task,” he said. “It’s the quickest and safest way to get rid of them. When we find small arms ordnance, we gather it together and transport it to a safe location to run a dems.”
“Is that dangerous?” I asked.
“There’s always danger,” Clay nodded. “But James will ensure that it’s done safely.”
James’s eyes flared suddenly.
“It’s never safe,” he snarled, his eyes narrowed. “Never.”
Clay lay a hand on his shoulder.
“I know, brother. But it is a lot safer if you take care of it than leaving it lying around, or even handing over the main charges to the local government officials and seeing them get stolen and re-used in other devices.”
James dropped his eyes, the sudden ignition of his anger already dying away. I wasn’t quite sure what had caused it. Understanding him was a minefield of its own.
He left the office after that, striding away across the mud.
Clay sighed and shook his head.
“Don’t mind him.”
I smiled blandly and hid my thoughts.
“No problem. It’s fine.”
James
THE SKY WAS heavy and threatening, shutting out the moonlight utterly. The locals were forecasting heavy snowfalls over the next few days. Time was not on our side.
It was four hours before dawn—or the middle of the night as far as Yad was concerned when I shook him awake and dragged him out of his blankets that stank of beer, cigarettes and cheap perfume. He’d better be bloody sober by the time he was needed.
I knelt on the concrete floor, facing East, head touching the ground. I couldn’t say for sure why I did it—to honour Amira? Not for God or Allah, because I didn’t believe in either of them. Not anymore.
I stood up and strode to the minibus.
“Everyone got their full PPE kit?” I snapped out impatiently, waiting for Yad to stumble through the translation for personal protection equipment. “Body armour vests, helmets, visors, boots, tools, food and water?”
They all nodded sleepily, yawning widely, then filed onto the minibus.
I’d chosen five of my most competent team members to come on this Task with me. By the time we reached the mined area up in the mountain, we’d have about six hours of indifferent daylight to neutralize all of the 44 mines we’d found during the last ascent.
I climbed into the minibus with the driver Clay had hired, a miserable looking bad tempered bastard, who cursed in Azeri and Armenian. The five women of the team were sitting at the back, chatting quietly before falling asleep. Yad sprawled across two seats and belched loudly.
When the bus settled into silence, all I could hear was the asthmatic drone of the engine as it churned up the steep mountainsides, the noise becoming part of the background.
My mind whirled chaotically until I forced myself to focus on the Task ahead and the problems we were likely to encounter.
Given the choice, I’d have sniped most of the mines rather than moving them. Not always everyone’s choice but for me it was in the armoury of responses—and I’d enjoy the shooting. But MON-100 anti-personnel mines had 2Kg of explosives in each of them, and were usually mounted above ground as a shrapnel mine. The blast radius was wide and we’d been told that locals hunted in the woods, so that option was out.
The plan was to collect the mines, take them to a more secure location—a fairly deep depression in the ground that I’d already identified—then blow in stacks from a command wire.
If possible, I initiated each explosion at the same time of day so the locals wouldn’t be scared shitless by a dirty great bang.
The process would be to identify the means of initiation, take control of the firing point a safe distance from the mine, twist the wires together to ensure I had electrical safety of the detonation. The Russian demolition dets had a screw thread on them, so usually I just unscrewed them.
As we trundled through the grey landscape, my mind drifted, as it often did, and Amira’s face swam before my eyes.
She’d chosen to go to Syria without me, despite the way I’d begged her like a dog, and she’d died there. I’d loved her and I’d hated her but I couldn’t let her go. I saw her in my mind all the time, I heard her voice, and I saw over and over again the moment she’d died in my arms. And in every dream and every nightmare, I could never ever save her, no matter how hard I tried—she always died.
The world was a darker place without her.
Clay’s new volunteer, Arabella, was her polar opposite: vain, shallow, privileged. I’d known a lot of women like her—before I knew better, before I’d had better. She was such a stereotype—the golden girl who shopped at Harrods and only worried about her next manicure. She wore candy pink clothes and half-inch long nails. She wore false eyelashes while we were up to our knees in mud, and she smiled too much.
I thought she’d have been on the first plane home within 24 hours, but I had to admit that she’d surprised us.
I frowned, irritated that I’d been thinking about her at all.
Dawn filtered grudgingly through the minibus’s dirty windows, and we ground to a halt at our mountain base camp. From here, we were hiking.
I zipped up my coat and pulled a beanie over my head, then slung my day pack over my shoulders, hitching up the fifty pounds of equipment with practised ease.
My breath steamed in the frigid air, and the team mumbled and stamped their feet.
“We know what we’ve got to do today,” I said slowly, waiting for Yad to translate. “We’re dealing 99% with ground-placed mines, so if we’re lucky, there will just be a det-cord link between two mines. But if we aren’t lucky, we have to expect some sort of trap switch, which will mean excavating the mine. It’s possible that two or even three could be stacked on top of each other, so be extra careful.”
I stared at each of them, hoping like hell they’d understood.
Military booby trap switches were usually easy to pin, which was why I let my local team do them.
But mines could be initiated by a number of fuzes, so the threat would come from VP13 seismic controller or even tripwires. And then it would be up to me.
I ran through the process, seeing it all in my mind.
We’d already marked out the safe path through the woods, so we hiked
upwards, climbing steadily into the mountains as Yad gasped for breath at the back. After 20 minutes, we stopped and put on the body armour and helmets—the first red flag was just yards ahead of us.
Time to go to work.
Fazila and Gunay went first, locating and neutralizing the mines, then Ohana and Yad carried them down the mountain to our designated dems pit, while Maral and Hamida went for the next pair.
I kept an eye on all of them at each stage, but especially when they took out the fuze. Sometimes it was rusted, so I added some muscle to the process of unscrewing the damn things.
Even though the temperature was hovering just below freezing, we worked up a sweat: up and down the mountain to the dems pit, climbing higher and scrambling further with each red flag.
By the time we came to the pair of mines that had nearly killed Maral, the team needed a breather and it was time for me to earn my keep.
My gut told me that there was more to this mine than I’d seen so far—and I’d saved this nasty bastard for myself.
After I’d taken this charity job, I’d been surprised to find that the contractor world was worse resourced than the military: something I hadn’t expected. Where I might have commented on being sent to war by the British Army in what amounted to an unarmoured bread van, with body armour held together by duct-tape, with half an EOD robot that worked half of the time, low ammo and no radio, it was still better organised than the NGO world.
I had the impression that Clay didn’t believe me when I’d told him that, but then again, the Americans always had the best quality kit and resources—that’s why my muckers had spent half our deployment thinking of ways to nick it—aka ‘borrow’ it with no intention of returning.
I’d been paid £35,000 a year to neutralize IEDs in a number of countries—less than the salary earned by a London Tube driver.
The pay here was a few grand more, but the likes of Maral and Ohana earned just £12,000 annually for their work. They said that was good wages.
Clay had been working his arse off to get the teams here better equipped.
Bombshell - Jane Harvey-Berrick Page 7
