by Jason Elliot
‘Good piece of kit, that,’ says H, rubbing the stubble on his chin. ‘Seems a shame to blow it up.’
H and I work from opposite ends, photographing the serial numbers and logging the condition of the battery units in our notebooks. One by one our men return them to the room and pile them around a central open space. It takes us more than two hours. Then, as they look on, brushing the dust from their clothes, we unload the explosives from the G.
The layout of the explosives takes the form of a chain of two circuits, linked together. In the unlikely event that the primary circuit fails to detonate, the secondary will fire, detonating the first in the process by the power of the blast. Detcord firing systems with detcord priming are the safest, so we lay a long circular length of the bright orange cable over the pile for a ring main, and tie on six shorter lengths as branch lines leading to the individual charges. The plastic explosive is toxic so we leave the blocks in their paper covering, wrap each one with several turns of detcord and place them among the missiles. One of them will go into the central space that we’ve left open for the purpose. It’s probably not necessary but reassures us. The process reminds me faintly of arranging Christmas lights on a tree.
Then we repeat the same system, using the detonators, which we tape to the six ends of each branch line. Then we make a cut into each block of plastic so as to enclose the detonators in cosy beds of high explosive.
‘They call this the direct insertion method,’ says H.
‘Please don’t make me laugh,’ I say.
‘Case of beer would go down well after this.’
‘I’ll take the juice of a Kandahari pomegranate,’ I say, savouring the thought.
Then, as final back-up, we attach time pencils to the detcord. If the blasting fuse fails, the pencils will fire after thirty minutes. All that remains is to attach the two final detonators, one for each circuit, and the time fuse.
‘Time to get the vehicles out,’ says H, and begins unwinding the reel of fuse.
I start up the G and drive it out of the gates, and the others follow with the pickup. Our engines are running. The two guards clamber into the bed of the pickup and cling a little anxiously to the sides. Then I walk back to H as he lays out the fuse in a long trail around the deserted courtyard.
We calculate the length required by multiplying by sixty and dividing by the burning rate per foot. Twenty minutes of burning time will need forty feet of fuse. We check and double-check its length, make sure it doesn’t overlap, verify the position of the circuits and the plastic, and agree that everything looks ready.
‘Pencils,’ he says. ‘Pull them.’
I remove the safety clips and pull the rings in turn. We look at our watches. Then H holds up the end of the time fuse.
‘Got a light?’ he asks, running his hands absent-mindedly over his pockets. I know he doesn’t need one, because there’s already an igniter attached to the end of the fuse. We look at each other for a moment.
‘I insist,’ I say.
‘Allahu akbar,’ he replies, and pulls the ring. There’s a spluttering sound and the fuse bursts into flame. We resist the urge to run, heave on the gates, run the chain through the iron loops and fasten the padlock.
I’m wondering what to do with the key.
‘Keep it,’ says H. ‘Souvenir.’
I wave to Aref, who gives a thumbs up from the cab of the pickup. We climb into the G and lead the way at a good but restrained pace. Then we follow the track to the valley floor, and turn against the slope along the way we came. H is looking ahead and behind us.
‘Let’s get up to that ridge and stop,’ he says, pointing to the spot from which we made our final recce of the fort. We get there ten minutes later. Keeping the engines running we stop and wait for the explosion.
‘Thirteen minutes,’ I say. The other men get out and, taking their cue from us, look back in the direction of the fort.
‘Fifteen minutes.’
‘Wait for it,’ says H, quietly now.
It’s agony. I want to keep my eyes fixed on the fort, but they stray to the surrounding slopes and the valley beyond and then back again, but the explosion doesn’t come. I look at my watch and back to the fort again.
‘That’s twenty minutes,’ I tell H.
He’s running his tongue around the inside of his mouth. Another minute passes.
‘Might be a kink in the fuse cable. Give it a while. The time pencils will kick in in a few minutes.’
We wait. Half an hour passes. The other men begin to talk in whispers. We take the Kite sight and look over the fort in turn. There’s no sign of life. No one can have tampered with the charges. I ask the guards whether there could have been anyone else hiding inside the fort. They shake their heads.
Forty-five minutes has passed. Then an hour.
‘Misfire,’ says H quietly. ‘Fuck it. Let’s go back.’
It’s a depressing feeling to be returning. None of us is very happy about it. The unexpected delay is acting like a silent poison on our nerves. We know we can’t give up on the task, but it’s as if fate itself has suddenly and personally turned against us. I know I mustn’t give in to this feeling, but as we drive up once again under the looming walls of the fort it seems a wounded place, resentful at our having abandoned it to destruction and planning sullenly to punish us in turn.
I retrieve the key to the padlock, pull out the chain, and we heave the gates open. There’s a long scorch mark on the ground where the time fuse has burned. Gently we pull open the second door onto the missiles. Everything is intact.
Carefully, H unties the primary detonator from the detcord and examines it. He hands it to me. It hasn’t fired. The open rim is scorched where the fuse has burned it. It also has a faint but distinct smell, which it shouldn’t have.
‘Wax,’ I say. ‘Smells like some kind of sealing wax.’
We disconnect the time pencils. They’ve fired as they’re supposed to, but the detonators attached to them are intact, as are all the others. H takes a short length of fuse and fits it into the open end of one of them, lights it and stands back. The fuse burns perfectly, but the detonator remains stubbornly inert.
‘These dets are all fucked,’ says H.
The news is particularly bad because the detonator is arguably the most crucial component of an explosive chain, and our plastic explosive cannot be initiated without one.
‘Sattar,’ I say. ‘In Kabul.’
H nods. ‘Crafty fucker. Must have switched them before we left. We’ve been stitched up.’
For a few moments there is only silence. We look at each other. It’s a long way to have come to be thwarted at the final moment.
‘Right, let’s deal with it. Options.’
The other men are lingering on the far side of the courtyard, looking a bit let down but too polite to ask what the problem is. I wave them over, and we explain the challenge and listen to their suggestions in turn.
‘Fire an RPG into the room,’ suggests one of the men.
‘Bollocks,’ says H. ‘That’s suicide. Who’s going to do that?’
Someone else asks whether a piece of detcord, pushed into an emptied 7.62-millimetre round, could be made to detonate when the round fires.
‘Doubt it,’ I say. ‘But you still have the problem of how to fire the round from a safe distance and make it reliable. There are dets in the Stingers, but we’d have to take them apart first. There are dets in the mortar rounds too, but even if we got them out we’d still have the problem of how to prime them.’
‘What about the 82?’ asks H, meaning the Russian mortar. ‘If we can get it up on a ridge we can drop a round right through the roof of the room. We could drive it up, past where that APC is.’
I translate the idea to the others. Firing an ageing Soviet mortar into the fort from a distance isn’t the most reliable solution. H is silent for a few minutes, and the men break into a heated discussion. Turning away from them, one of the guards puts his hand gently on my
forearm to get my attention.
‘Ba motor bala rafte nemishe,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘You can’t drive up there.’
‘We have a motor that can get there,’ I reassure him.
‘No,’ he says, ‘it’s not that. You can’t go up there because of the mines. Mayeen hast.’
‘What kind of mines?’
‘Big Russian ones,’ he says, his hands describing a plate-sized circle. ‘They’re for tanks. From the time of the jihad. I can show you where they are if you want.’
It’s a long shot, but we’re getting accustomed to long shots. Any Soviet anti-tank mine will contain a powerful detonator. If it’s a TM-type mine, which is the most common, it won’t be difficult to remove and attach to our own explosive chain. We agree that we have to try. If the effort fails, we’ll bombard the fort from a distance with the 82, and keep firing until something happens.
Hunting for the mine itself isn’t dangerous. At least at first it isn’t. Anti-tank mines have an actuation pressure of a hundred kilograms or more, so a single man’s weight can’t set one off. The danger comes when you try to move one from its original position. There’s no way of telling whether the mine has been booby-trapped by another, smaller mine laid beneath it, which actuates when the main mine is lifted, setting both off. In some mines there’s even an extra fuse well underneath or on the side, made for an anti-lift device, which will detonate if it’s moved. There’s a charge of several kilograms of TNT in most anti-tank mines, so the prospect of failure is at least unambiguous. The blast will kill us all.
The guards stay in the fort. We work four abreast on our knees, probing the ground at intervals of a few inches while Sher Del acts as a kind of marshaller a few yards ahead of us, keeping us in line. A thin metal rod with a pointed tip is best, but we’re using what we’ve got: one knife, a long bayonet from the guards’ machine gun and the oil dipsticks from the G and the pickup, which are improbably ideal. Glancing across at the others I can’t help feeling it’s a strange symmetry of fate that they are professional mine clearers, and that’s exactly what we’ve ended up doing to save the operation. I’m glad it’s them.
There are several false alarms as the others strike stones, and we stop to probe the ground more closely. Then after about half an hour, which feels like a year, Momen announces quietly that he thinks he’s got something. I kneel beside him and take his bayonet and push it gently forward until it stops. The tip feels as if it’s moving against something smooth. I try from different angles and feel the same response at the correct distances. We’ve found one.
H comes up beside me. He’s sweating.
‘I’ll clear this one,’ I tell him. ‘Get everyone back inside the fort. Is the 82 ready?’ I don’t add the obvious ‘in case this doesn’t go quite the way we’re hoping’.
He looks down at the bayonet in the ground, then at me, and then nods as if he’s forgotten the question. He draws his forearm across his forehead.
‘Leave you to it,’ he says. ‘Try not to drop it on the way back.’
I hate to see him go. I find the perimeter of the mine and discover it’s circular and about a foot across. There don’t seem to be any others next to it or beneath it. It feels like it’s metal. I’m guessing it’s a Soviet TM-type because most of the other kinds have plastic outer housings, which feel different when you scrape against them with a probe. I calculate the centre and carefully begin to remove the earth until a portion of the dusty pressure plate appears.
There are six evenly spaced depressions on the plate. It occurs to me, at this unlikely moment, that they resemble the fingermarks that Italian bakers press into their dough when they’re making focaccia. Then I think how odd it would be to be blown up by this mine in particular after having come all the way to Afghanistan, because it’s not a Soviet mine. It’s a British-made Second World War-era Mark 7.
The body is made of sheet steel with a domed upper surface, and it uses a Number 5 single- or double-impulse fuse. It can be fitted with an anti-lift device, but they’re rare, which is good. The mine’s weight makes it easy to booby-trap, which is bad. It contains twenty pounds of high-explosive TNT, or roughly the equivalent of sixty hand grenades.
I scrape away the soil from the upper part, working slowly down, watching the drops of sweat from my forehead fall onto the plate to create dark stains in the dust. The drops fall as if in slow motion and seem unnaturally large, though I know they’re not. I reveal the circular upper edge of the mine. I want only to know what’s underneath it, as a man wants to know the future, which, although closer to him at every moment than he ever suspects, is impenetrable.
I have a strange feeling as if I’m passing through a door, beyond which time no longer behaves in the usual way. I see the point of the bayonet pushing into the dirt around the mine and my hands tugging at the loosened debris. I see the tiny particles of dust swirl across my skin and tumble down in microscopic spirals of air onto the hairs on the backs of my hands like drowning sailors clinging gratefully to wreckage. I see blood appear under my fingertips, creeping along the curve of my nails as I claw into the rocky soil, only it seems that the blood is a flash flood in high summer driving across a boulder-filled canyon. There is more life compressed into these microscopic worlds than I have ever suspected, and for a few moments I’ve been carried into the full drama of their existence.
I reach under the mine to feel whether there’s anything sinister there and sense the weight of the metallic structure resting patiently on the earth waiting to corrode into its component elements, and all the passions and mysteries that can ever be known seem to have let me into their invisible secrets. They are all there, like a silent film we can’t see or hear, but they’re there all the same.
There’s no second mine or anti-lift device. As I lift the mine and it comes free I hear the sound of my own breath, and the world is back to its ordinary self. I have no idea how much time has passed and look back to the fort, where H is standing on the nearest turret, giving me an on-the-double hand signal like a steam-train driver pulling frantically on his whistle.
I run back and the men greet me like a long-lost friend with pats on my back.
‘It’s like working for the United Nations,’ I say. ‘We drive a German car to an Afghan fort to blow up American missiles with a British mine.’
‘And decide on it by a Chinese parliament,’ says H, using the SAS term for a meeting that involves all ranks. ‘Can you get the det out?’
‘One does rather hope so,’ I say in my best officer’s accent.
There’s a depression on the cover plate like the head of a screw, which I now attempt to loosen with the screwdriver on the Leatherman which Grace gave me. The plate doesn’t budge, so I add a little pressure, and the body of the mine slips along the ground. H sinks to his knees and holds it firm while I try again.
I’m fairly sure that I can’t exert enough force on the plate to set off the mine, but it’s not a pleasant feeling. It would be a shame to have come this far only to blow ourselves up by pushing too hard. I lean over the mine and grip the Leatherman with both hands and turn as hard as I can, while H uses his forearms to push in the opposite direction. I hear a strange growl of exasperation escape my mouth, and I’m almost oblivious now to the consequence of pushing against the plate with all my strength.
Then there’s a sudden metallic cracking noise as the screwdriver snaps. Our heads knock together with such force that my vision darkens for a second, and little sparks seem to be spilling in front of my eyes, prompting me to wonder whether we’ve been killed. Then the light pours in again, and we’re both staring at the top of the mine. The pressure plate is free.
I’ve never known such a roller coaster of emotions. We’re alive, but as I lift the mine fuse free I realise it’s integral to the plate and can’t be separated.
‘I don’t think this is going to work,’ I say.
‘Tell me you’re joking,’ says H quietly.
We can’t spend more ti
me hoping to improvise a solution. It’s six hours since we released the Talib guard, and we must assume that before long he’ll make it back to the post where he originally joined us and report to his commander. We make a brutal calculation. We have already passed our cut-off time.
I feel sick.
‘Then let’s get the mortar on the truck,’ says H grimly.
And just as our hopes fall to their lowest ebb, with a precision that renews and affirms a private notion that all things are inevitably connected a shout goes up from the guard who’s keeping watch in the southern turret. We turn and see him waving frantically, so H and I run up and join him in the curve of the wall, which resembles the conning tower of a submarine, and follow the line of his outstretched arm to the floor of the valley.
‘We’ve got company,’ says H, reaching for the Kite sight in his map pocket. He flips open the covers, rests it on the dusty lip of the wall and brings his eye forward. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he says. ‘I thought you said he was only going to bring his bodyguards.’
‘That’s what he told me.’
‘That’s a lot of bodyguards.’ He hands me the Kite.
‘We might need to revise the plan,’ I agree because not even in the emergency plan that I made with Manny is there a scenario like this one. For a moment I can’t prevent the thought that perhaps Manny has betrayed us, and involuntarily picture myself having to shoot him. Then I hear the voice of the Baronness and the story of Ali and the knight, and the feeling of dread is lifted.
Below us, at the mouth of the valley about a mile away, there are six pickup trucks travelling at speed, throwing up pale clouds of dust in their wakes. There are at least half a dozen armed men in the back of each one. It won’t take them more than fifteen minutes to reach us. I pass the Kite to the guard, who peers intently into the viewfinder then turns back to us.
‘By God,’ he says, ‘those men are no Afghans.’ And a look of relish spreads slowly across his face.
H calls down to the others, who are looking up at us expectantly. ‘I need an ammo count. Everything we’ve got.’ He pats the metal ammunition box that’s fixed to the PK belt-fed machine gun at our feet.
