by Cliff Hedley
“Nice shooting, Isaac.”
Tucker responded, “What have you got, Renshi?”
“What’s left of an IED. Pressure plate rigged to a detonator on top of an old artillery shell. At least, those were the components, like I thought. Isaac has just disabled the whole thing. The pressure plate has been ripped away from the detonator, which went off. The shell has been shredded, so we won’t even need to take this one back to base to burn in the pit. It’s completely destroyed. The fuse is scrap and the primary explosive looks like it had been sitting for way too long and didn’t go off. Ditto the propellant. Probably had moisture in it but when the shell got shredded, the charge and propellant got spread everywhere, so there’s nothing left to burn. I’m going to check a little further ahead now but otherwise I think we can move the wreck and clear the road.”
Chase worked his way past the wreck and the rest of the road still looked clear. The explosion hadn’t uncovered anything fresh. Satisfied that there was nothing left to see, he called Tucker forward.
“Roadrunner One, move up. We can use the winch to pull the wreck off to the side, and that should give us room.”
“Copy that Renshi.”
Chase turned and walked part-way back towards the Humvee, which was slowly rumbling its way clear of the canyon road, out onto the exposed flat section. Chase held his hand up where he wanted them to stop and unhooked the heavy-duty winch hook from the front. The steel cable had pulled stuck Humvees clear of sand and rock numerous times before: the relatively light weight of the wreck wouldn’t cause too many problems. He walked slowly back towards it as the cable fed out and found a good place to hook on, where a section of the chassis was exposed. Low down, it wouldn’t try to topple over but should just drag smoothly out of the way. There was even a slight bend in the road, so all Roadrunner One had to do was drag it straight back and the wreck would pull off the road inside the bend. There would be plenty of space to move past it then.
“OK, Roadrunner One. I’ve got it hooked on, so let’s just pull it into the bend in the road. I think it should slip sideways a little as it goes as well. I’ll let you know when to stop. Wait for my go.”
“Copy that, Renshi.”
Just to be safe, Chase worked his way to the rear of Roadrunner One for extra cover. There could still be something underneath the twisted and charred pile of steel waiting to go off, so he wasn’t taking any chances.
“OK, reel it in. Slow and steady.”
The winch whirred to life and the wreck shuddered, slipping sideways slightly as it tried to grip the earth. The winch continued to pull and soon overcame the resistance, as the charred mess started to grind its way along the ground towards the Humvee. Chase was glad that moving it didn’t trigger off any more explosions and soon it was near where he wanted it. The road had a slight rise to it and just as he had predicted, the wreck slid slightly further off the road as it neared the bend, now neatly out of the way.
“OK, that’ll do it.”
The winch came to a stop and Chase ambled his way back to the wreck to unhook it. He was looking forward to getting out of the stifling suit but decided to take one last look at the road where the wreck had been sitting. There was nothing else there out of place so, comfortable that the job was done, he picked up the winch hook and started walking it back to the Humvee as the cable wound all the way back in. He clipped the winch hook back on and gave the hood of the Humvee a pat when he was done.
He was more than ready to take the suit off when he heard Tucker calling Collins in his earpiece.
“Hawkeye One, are we still all clear ahead?”
“Roger that, Roadrunner One. All clear. Primary objective is complete. We will hold while you move to secondary.”
Chase swung the front passenger door of the Humvee open and it offered a familiar metallic creak in response. He slumped into the seat and pulled the door shut with a reassuringly heavy clunk. Safe inside, he lifted his helmet off and sat it in his lap.
“Nice job out there, Chase,” Tucker offered from the back seat. “You keeping the suit on?”
“Thanks, LT. Yeah, I’ve got a funny feeling there might be some more tests out there for us. Call it an insurance policy.”
“Good call. I don’t like this either but let’s take it very slow and easy.”
Chase fell silent, his mind revisiting each of the devices he had come across. Each one different, each one with different parts and purpose. He figured he would spend some more time thinking on it later, once the rest of the job was done.
Tucker broke the silence. “All right, Corporal Winters, let’s finish the loop. Head for the village.”
Roadrunner One rumbled slowly forward, with the rest of the Roadrunners’ Humvees forming a column behind them. Chase stared intently at the road ahead but there was nothing out of place. They were moving slowly, which gave him more time to check everything out. Before long, they came to the same intersection that they had used the night before and made the turn towards the village. So far, so good.
Unlike last night, he had a better view of the road ahead as they made their way towards the village. He could see if there were any unusual lumps or rocks placed on the side of the road, or any churned up areas of the road. There was nothing out of the ordinary and the low-rise buildings of the village rose up to meet them from the horizon ahead. As they drew near the first lot of outlying buildings, Tucker keyed his radio.
“Roadrunners, take it nice and slow. Every angle. We check the road is clear and make sure we don’t see any unusual activity.”
Chase noticed the hum of the motor drop as Roadrunner One slowed before passing between the first buildings. He was looking left and right, scanning the road ahead. It was quiet, with no movement. He remembered the steps in the centre of the village that he had seen the little girl play on the evening before, and soon they were almost at that spot. There was nobody on the steps this time but as he swung his eyes back to the middle of the road he could see her standing there, about fifty metres ahead. Winters started slowing the Humvee in response, looking for a way around. There wasn’t enough room to squeeze past her, so he drew to a complete stop.
“What is it, Winters?” Tucker leaned forward from the back seat.
“A girl, sir, standing in the middle of the road.”
“Can we get around?”
“I don’t think so, sir. Something’s not right. She’s not moving.”
Tucker turned to Chase. “Can you see anything?”
Chase raised his field glasses. He was close enough to make out something wasn’t right about her. As he focused them, he rapidly realised what was wrong. “Shit.”
“What is it?”
“I can see a harness of some kind around her waist and shoulders. She’s rigged with something.”
“Shit is right. This has to be a trap.”
“Agreed, sir. But that’s a little girl.”
Chase lifted the binoculars again and this time he locked eyes on her. He saw the same big brown eyes, weary with war, that he had seen yesterday. There were tears rolling down her cheeks, working their way through the dust on her skin. Either she couldn’t move, or she had been told of the consequences if she did.
“I have to check it out, sir.”
“OK. Let’s give the team a heads-up before you go. At the first sign of trouble, you get your ass back here.”
Tucker picked up the radio. “Roadrunners, we have a civilian rigged with possible explosives. Chase is going out to check it out but this stinks to high heaven like an ambush. I want gunners up and every angle. Be ready for a shit-storm.”
Chase flipped his helmet on and fastened it back in place. In the wing mirror he could see the roof hatch of each Humvee behind them open as a figure emerged and stood behind the roof-mounted machine gun. Isaac was already standing behind him in Roadrunner One, training the fifty-c
alibre on the buildings ahead of them, careful to raise the line of fire above the girl. Chase swung his door open and dropped to the ground. He was glad he still had the suit on. It would at least protect him from small-arms fire, if it came to that.
He moved forward, careful as he could be in his bulky suit. Ahead of him and all around, he saw nobody move. The hustle and bustle of life in the village had completely disappeared, apart from the small girl in the road ahead. As he moved past the buildings alongside the road, Chase continued to peer into every window, squinting to see into the relative darkness of each as the sun rose higher overhead. The suit was getting even hotter now, with the late morning heat starting to bake the road ahead. He could see heat waves rise off it but as he passed each building and looked beyond their corners, he saw nothing. Just the girl.
She stayed completely still, in the very centre of the road. Chase could make out her big brown eyes, filled with terror, as he moved closer. Her arms were at her sides and she was standing very still, almost like a statue, save for her tears.
“OK, just keep still. You’re doing a good job. I won’t hurt you, OK? I’m here to help.”
He wasn’t sure that she understood him but she stayed still all the same, her eyes pleading with him. Even if she didn’t speak English, he was sure she knew he was there to save her. He raised his hands in front of him to show that he was unarmed, palms out.
On her harness, Chase could see a row of sensors and he stopped in his tracks. They looked like proximity sensors. He had them in his car back home and they beeped whenever he got too close to something. He backed away carefully and circled around the girl, staying at least the same distance away. She stood perfectly still and as he made his way behind her, he could see more sensors on her back.
They were the kind that came from electronics stores, costing at the most five to ten dollars each. He circled all the way back around in front of the girl and figured that must have been why she was told to keep her hands at her side. She didn’t want to trip the sensors herself. Keeping the same distance, he studied the front of the harness, where there seemed to be some circuitry packed into a pouch and . . .
He froze. He saw two things he didn’t like. The first was that there was now a red LED light glowing on the top of the pouch. It hadn’t been glowing before. He chastised himself. Shit. The proximity sensors weren’t the trigger. They just armed it. Something else sets it off.
He now had less time. He had no way of knowing whether the detonation was on a timer, or if there was some other kind of trigger. Unlike in the movies, the bad guys didn’t do him the courtesy of providing a countdown clock out here.
The second thing that worried him was that he could see some of the material that was stuffed into the pouch. He only had a small glimpse but it was enough to know that it was something that scared him. A waxy-yellow rectangular bar, almost like a cake of soap. White phosphorus. There was probably more in each pouch looped around the rest of the harness.
There were a lot of documented cases of it being used against civilians in Afghanistan. The fumes alone could kill and the burns were horrific. In this concentration, it would burn human flesh — and wouldn’t stop. There had been controls put in place to tightly regulate its use, though he doubted that the kind of person who would attach it to a little girl would be very concerned about that.
Think. What next? What’s the trigger? He studied the harness again, tracing the wiring, considering his options. He wasn’t going to point a fifty-calibre at this little girl. No way would a water blast from a Bottler help here either. He needed to get the detonator away from the main charge before it went off. He couldn’t even tell if it was just the white phosphorus, or if it had been paired with something more explosive. There could even be shrapnel embedded in the pouches. That’s what I’d do if I were an asshole. The phosphorus would burn anyone near it but it wouldn’t take out a big radius without something more percussive to propel shrapnel further out. Standing this close, it would be the percussion that would most likely kill him, not the shrapnel. The suit would help a little with the shrapnel but if he was slammed at an incomprehensible speed by a blast, he would be dead before he hit the ground.
He didn’t get any more time to think — a bullet put him on his back. It came like a massive blow to the chest, knocking the wind out of him. The impact pushed him to the ground, falling away from the girl as a fire-fight erupted around him. Dazed, he tried to gasp for breath. The simple act of inhaling was excruciating — his ribs were no doubt now broken in a couple of places. He rolled his head to the side and from his position on the ground saw the Humvees fanned out. Their fifty-calibre machine guns were blazing. In return, muzzle flashes came from dark windows all around the village and more still blazed from the single-storey rooftops.
It was all like a fog, a kind of slow-motion haze that he was somehow not really connected to. Overhead, bullets ripped through the air and the fall backwards had made him hit his head on the ground as he landed. Helmet or no, he had hit the ground hard. His head was swimming but it was the pain in his chest that snapped him back to reality as he struggled to breathe.
He blinked his eyes. Concentrate. Shake it off. He did a quick mental assessment. Broken ribs, concussion. Basically OK.
The girl.
He tried to roll himself up and realised that she was still standing there, bullets flying all around her. She was still too scared to move, or thinking about the consequences of what would happen if she did. He looked down at her feet and couldn’t see anything that looked like a pressure plate might be there. Have to take a risk. If I don’t move her, she catches a bullet and she’s dead anyway. Or worse, she catches a bullet and that vest goes off.
Chase rolled to his feet and grabbed her by the hand, pulling her towards the side of the road. She resisted at first, trying to pull back but he was too strong for her. Once she realised that she was still alive, she moved with him. He hurried her towards one of the buildings, where they could gain cover from the furious hail of lead.
He moved her so that she was standing well off the road, with her back to the wall of a house. He knelt down in front of her, desperate to figure out how to disarm the device. He hadn’t seen any other detonators on the back of her harness, so he focused his attention on the front, where the pouches were. He had no choice. He didn’t want to touch anything but he could see just enough to make out the wires that ran into the middle pouch. If he could clip those, he might be able to kill the detonator. He just hoped that it was the only one, or that the circuit wasn’t collapsible, making it explode anyway if he cut the wires. He would have to break the golden rule. Never try to disarm anything by hand, never get close enough to even think about cutting wires. But he had to try to save the girl.
He fished in one of his pockets for his pliers. His hand felt the handles and pulled them out, without ever shifting his eyes from the vest. He carefully slipped them around the back of the pouch, where the wires seemed to terminate. There would be a detonator in there, just beyond where he could see. He knew he was basically screwed. The vest would go off if he didn’t figure out how to disarm it now and he had no luxury of time. His thoughts were punctuated as bullets ripped into the side of the house a few feet away. The girl recoiled in panic and he gave her hand a squeeze to reassure her. She was sobbing but understood that she needed to stand still.
Chase pushed the plier handles together, grateful that nothing went off in his face. Instead, the glow of the red LED dimmed on the pouch. He carefully lifted the flap, and inside was the small detonator he expected to see, right next to the cake of white phosphor. He realised that he had been holding his breath, so he let go, wincing at the pain as his ribs moved. He couldn’t see any more detonators, so he took another breath and held it.
More bullets ripped through the house that sheltered them. Chase could hear the sound of shattering glass on the far side, followed by the staccato rap-r
ap-rap as they embedded into the other side of the wall just beside them. He reached for what looked like a clip on the side of the harness, touching it with his bare hands for the first time.
That was his mistake.
It erupted. Exploded in a blinding flash as the white phosphor burned to life like a brilliant sun. He had been looking at the clip on the side of the belt, which was the only thing that stopped his retinas being fried immediately. He fell backwards, as the girl was incinerated before him. The blast was small but the burning was intense. He was on his back again and all he knew was burning. He was screaming, his vocal cords nearly tearing in his throat.
The suit had saved him, most of him… but he was burning. His nerves hadn’t had a chance to fully kick in, the shock was too great but he knew the phosphor would keep burning until there was nothing left to burn. He tried to push himself up, to roll away. Every time he tried, he fell back, only able to thrash on the ground. He tried to see the girl but she was gone. Only the burning, the bright sun of the phosphor flash remained.
After what seemed like an eternity in hell, he felt a strong set of hands on his shoulders. Tucker and Isaac. Chase wasn’t sure if the firefight was still happening around him but they had somehow made their way to him. As the shock started to wear off, the burning grew more intense. The agony became almost unbearable, yet still he remained on the edge of consciousness. He could hear Tucker barking orders.
“Hold him down!”
Isaac was on top of him. “Sorry, Chase.”
Tucker . . . a knife in his hand . . .
Then nothing.
Chapter 3
Tucker kept an eye on Chase while directing his men to target the insurgents firing at the convoy from the buildings ahead of them. Bullets ripped into the side of Roadrunner One and pinged across the hood as he barked orders into the radio. He was trying to make himself heard over the ruckus when a boom and bright flash off to the side caught his attention, temporarily drowning out all the gunfire.
