JJ stood there for 20 minutes as Jasper, humming for God’s sake, disconnected the drive belt, took out a pully housing, and with much hammering and pounding, jammed it into the end of the lifting arm.
“Hell, he’s making a saw,” Mountie said in awe.
He’s right! JJ said, stepping forward to help.
Between the two of them, they managed to set up an ugly, but possibly working contraption.
“I thought you said we needed a remote,” JJ said as the thought hit him.
“To drive it, aye-yah. But not to turn it on,” Jasper told him as he started to attach the blade.
“Uh, let’s see if it works, first, before we put that thing on,” JJ said.
“Hah! Right on that. Well, then, here it goes!”
He pushed a red button, and the Walker immediately came to life. The belt drove the pully.”
“It works!” JJ shouted just before the pully started to screech in protest. Jasper lunged for the stop button when with a snap, the pully broke off and flew away, almost hitting Mountie.
“Sorry about that!” Jasper shouted as he chased down the offending piece.
The two huddled over the pully and the crane arm, discussing what went wrong. After another ten minutes, the pully was mounted once again, and this time, when the engine was turned on, it ran smoothly.
“You ready?” JJ asked Jasper.
“Let’s do it.”
JJ felt adrenaline pumping through his body as Jasper pushed the start button. At the end of the lifting arm, the round saw blade started spinning.
“Ooh-fucking-rah!” he shouted, high-fiving Jasper.
Part of him tried to calm him down, to remind him that they were still behind enemy lines in pretty dire straits. But it had felt good to have his mind occupied for half-an-hour, focusing on simple engineering instead of walking point.
He rushed back to pick up the cylinder and brought it back under the spinning blade. Holding it up to the blade, he pressed it home, only to have it skitter off the blade and to the side. A cero-tungsten blade should have no problem with any normal plastisteel, and for a moment, JJ wondered if this was some sort of exotic material. But then he realized that the problem was that he wasn’t holding it still. With a vise, it would be child’s play.
Calling Mountie forward, and with a little experimentation, they managed to find a way to cut into the cylinder, scoring it a few millimeters deep. They made five lengthwise furrows, each one with about 15 score lines. It was ugly as sin with wavering lines, but it should work. With arms trembling—more from mental than physical exhaustion—JJ finally deemed it enough.
The three returned to the chemshed, the sweet smell of the glucose still heavy in the air—which was welcomed as it hid most of the underlying scent of decaying bodies.
JJ insisted on mixing the chemicals himself, with both Mountie and Jasper 20 meters away. The ammonium nitrate and HPP were harmless without a detonator, but he was worried about the V60. It wasn’t kept in a cocoon box for nothing. JJ stripped naked to do the mix. He knew it was gross overkill, but he didn’t want any possible emission that could set the V60 off.
To his surprise, he was able to stuff over 13 kilograms into the cylinder. If it detonated correctly, it should be able to set off any standard munitions within five or ten meters, and some of the more volatile at even greater distances.
Now he had a cylinder full of explosives, but the top was open. Luckily, it was a standard size opening, and JJ’s E22’s had sleeves that could be used to attach it to several munitions.
“Nice look,” Mountie said as JJ came back to get dressed.
JJ considered giving him the finger, but nicknames aside, he was still a lieutenant. He finished dressing and went back to the cylinder. He pulled out an E22 and threaded into a CC ring. Satisfied that it was tight, he started to screw the entire detonator housing into the neck of the cylinder.
What the . . .?
The housing slipped right in. He pulled, and it slipped right out. Looking inside, he could see it wasn’t grooved for screw connections.
“Jasper, what’s this shit?” he called out.
Both Jasper and Mountie rushed forward.
“I can’t screw this!” he said, frustration taking over.
“No, you need a tongue-in-slot fitting,” Jasper said.
“Who the hell uses tongue-in-slot?” JJ asked, his voice rising.
“Walker Agricultural Machines does, for one.”
“Well, the Marine Corps doesn’t!”
“Calm down, JJ,” Mountie said. “There’s got to be some way to secure it, at least enough so we can use the bomb.”
“No, we can’t just ‘secure it.’ If the detonator blows before the cylinder breaks apart, it’ll be the rocket I told you about. We need it to be stronger than the casing itself.”
He’d been so pleased with himself, somehow making a viable device out of nothing, and now, to see it fail because Walker Fucking Agricultural Machines had their own proprietary connection, well, that was freaking ridiculous!
“Can’t you attached it to the outside, then close off the opening with the top of it?” Mountie asked.
“No. The detonator can’t penetrate the cylinder walls. It has to be attached in the opening.”
“How strong does it have to be?” Jasper asked. “The connection.”
“Fucking stronger than the rest of the casing. It cannot give out first,” JJ shouted.
Jasper flinched, and JJ felt a twinge of guilt, but he couldn’t calm down. All the frustrations of the last five days had pushed him to his breaking point. Sergeant Go would probably solve the problem, but he was dead, killed by a freaking truck driver, and now it was up to him. Only, he was at his wit’s end.
Jasper spun around and ran off, and for a moment, JJ thought he’d driven the militiaman away. But Jasper ran into the chemshed.
“Get ahold of yourself, JJ. I can’t have you losing it,” Mountie said.
Mountie hadn’t yelled, nor was there any obvious condemnation in his voice, but the tone of command was evident. It was the proverbial slap across the face.
He’s right. Pull it together!
“Sorry, sir. I’m OK.”
Jasper darted out of the shed, one hand held high with a tube of some sort in it. He ran back and handed the tube to JJ.
“Will this do?”
JJ looked at the label. It was “Buffalo Lock,” a brand with which he was unfamiliar. But then the “molecular bonding” caught his attention. He turned it over, and in the product blurb, he read the magic word, “metals.” Molecular bonding did not merely slap two surfaces together. The active agents “sunk” into each surface, passing through the molecular space before locking in. They didn’t penetrate far, but the connections were extremely strong.
Different molecular bonding products worked on different materials. One for plastics might not work for ceramics. But this Buffalo Lock, this beautiful Buffalo Lock, was made for metallics. It would work!
JJ put an arm around the anxious Jasper’s neck and pulled him in where he gave him a big kiss on the forehead.
“I was right. You’re a gyver, the best fucking gyver I’ve met. Hell, yeah, this’ll work!”
He released Jasper, who stumbled back, but with a smile on his face. Reading the instructions, he wiped down the detonator sleeve and inside the cylinder neck. Turning the nozzle to the right, he squeezed out a paste and applied it liberally to the sleeve. He was tempted to apply it to the neck as well, but he thought it prudent not to introduce any of it to the explosive mixture in the cylinder.
On second thought, with both hands occupied, he asked Jasper to reach into his engineer kit and pull out a pad pack. These had many uses, most for which they were not designed, from reheating a food-pack to being emergency toilet paper, but their main use was as padding when emplacing charges in structures. He walked Jasper through opening the pack, then stuffing three of them down the neck of the cylinder, creating a barrier betwe
en the mix and the detonator—and the Buffalo Lock.
With that ready, he thumbed over the nozzle lever and squeezed out the activator. He coated the paste, rubbing it in deep. He had limited time, but he couldn’t afford a gap in the connection, so he checked twice that every square centimeter of the sleeve was covered with both the connecting paste and the activator. With a sure hand, he pushed the detonator home. An unbroken ring of Buffalo Lock gushed up and out. JJ didn’t let go, holding the detonator firm for three minutes, twice the time required.
Slowly, he pulled back on the detonator. To his relief, it held firm. It had worked.
“Gentlemen,” he said, laying the cylinder flat. “It seems we have ourselves here a thermobaric bomb. What say we go out now and blow up something?”
Chapter 20
Jasper
“So, any bright ideas?” Mountie asked as the three were back at their position with eyes on the target.
The sun had gone down before they’d made it back, and the lieutenant had said he’d hoped that would make it easy to slip in and set their bomb. But even without decent binos, Jasper could see that there were more mercs, if anything, working at a fevered pitch. He got the strong impression that they were rushing to finish the task before whatever was planned went down. For all he knew, a major Tenner operation could be just hours away.
He'd been pretty overjoyed when they’d managed to make the bomb. Evidently, though, none of them had actually thought through the mechanics of delivering it. The mercs running back and forth up there weren’t going to let them march right up and leave it.
He glanced over at Mountie, wondering what the lieutenant was going to do. Jasper still felt guilty for allowing Mountie to go forward on his aborted suicide mission to call for air. It hadn’t been his decision, but to watch the man calmly go to his death had been an awakening. He’d been so damned determined to get to Spirit Lake that nothing else had mattered. Then Mountie had shown him what sacrifice looked like. When he hadn’t been able to send out his message, Jasper had been overjoyed. But he also realized he had to capitalize on that. Keela could wait—if she were even at the lake. Jasper had no proof that she was.
So, when he realized that they could make a home-made bomb, he’d hesitated only a moment before volunteering the information. And then to see it become a reality had filled him with satisfaction.
But it was all coming to naught unless they could figure out a way to get it inside the cave.
“What if we jump one of the mercs, take his uniform, and then just walk in?” JJ said.
“Harbin Accords, JJ. We can’t put on an enemy’s uniform,” Mountie told him.
“Shit, sir. It’s not like it’ll matter, right?”
Jasper realized that JJ was saying someone would go into a cave, but not come back out. Both of his companions seemed willing to die to get this mission accomplished. He realized on an intellectual level that by doing so, many Marine lives would probably be saved. And Jasper understood the concept. Hell, he’d do it to save his family. But for unknown strangers? He wasn’t sure he had that kind of courage.
He pulled up the loupe and glassed the area. Mercs in their fighting gear were emptying a truck with long, rectangular boxes and hauling them up the hill. He idly wondered if they were artillery rounds or anti-armor missiles, not that it made that much of a difference.
“What if we found some civilian clothes? Would that work?” JJ asked.
Jasper’s heart fell. The closest set of civilian clothes were on the dead farmer. He didn’t want to go back and strip the body.
“No. Same thing. We need to be in a uniform, and even with yours, it might work at a distance, but as soon as you got closer, they’d know you for a Marine.”
Jasper had to agree. The Marine combat uniform was bulkier than the merc uniforms. If JJ casually walked up to them, the mercs might not notice at first, but they’d catch on before he got close. No, that was a dead line of thought. And it wasn’t as if they had a closet of uniforms to select one that looked more like the mercs’. As far as he knew, none of the Federation uniforms were similar.
All are different, but from what? he wondered not quite sure of where his thoughts were taking him.
He looked back at the mercs. Almost all were in their combat uniforms. In the darkness, his loupe couldn’t discern colors, but he had to think that they were the same. Something tickled at the back of his mind, crying for attention. Then he remembered. Four mercs in what looked like overalls had hauled a squat square case up the hill shortly before. He glassed for a few moments and was rewarded when two of them came back down to stand by a small utility truck that looked like it had been confiscated from a farm.
“Hey, who are the two guys in overalls by the civilian truck, to the far left?” he asked.
Mountie shifted his binos, then said, “I don’t know. Some contractors, I guess.”
“The Tenners use contractors?”
“Of course. The mercenaries cost too much with the hazard pay, so they hire contractors for maintenance and such. I can’t tell from here, but if those are orange overalls, I’d say they’re aviation techs. We’ve used them ourselves sometimes on training exercises.”
Jasper knew the answer was there somewhere, but he couldn’t make it gel. His mind scrambled, trying to put together the pieces.
Then it hit him with almost a physical force. He almost blurted it out before he grasped the ramifications. Looking at Mountie, he almost decided to keep quiet, but he knew he couldn’t. The decision should be Mountie’s, not his.
“I think there might be a way,” he said.
“How?” JJ asked.
“The Tenners have pilots, right?”
“Sure. Of course,” Mountie answered.
“And what do they wear? I mean as a uniform?”
“Like our Service Dress? I don’t know. I guess they have something ginned up.”
“No, I mean out here, in combat.”
“Oh. Well, they don’t have any orbital planes in their fleets, at least here. So, they’d be in flight suits. Why?”
“Like yours, right?”
“Well, yes.”
He hesitated again. He could still back out, but once he said it, things would be out of his hands.
“It’s like this. When I saw you, back on the hill, I didn’t know who you were. I’ve seen enough war flicks, but you know, with a pilot, it’s usually the deep space pilots, or you’re in a cockpit. I had to ask if you were Federation or a merc.”
“Yeah. . .” he said, sounding like he was beginning to see where Jasper was going with that.
“So, what if a Federation pilot, in his Federation flight suit, marched up there and demanded entrance, you know, to check out some bombs or something. Especially in the dark, would they notice that?”
“That’s crazy, Jasper,” JJ said. “They’d just let an enemy walk into a sensitive area like that? No freaking way!”
Jasper felt a wave of relief. It had been a stupid suggestion, and now it could be forgotten.
“Erik Roelfzema,” Mountie said quietly.
“Who?” JJ asked as Jasper’s heart fell.
Jasper realized why he’d thought of his idea.
“Earth, World War II. A Dutch pilot in the RAF, a resistance fighter, and a spy. He was given orders to gain access into a shore installation before the invasion of the European mainland, so he donned a full British dress uniform, and he walked right past the installation’s German guards.”
There had been a remake of the old film movie Soldaat van Oranje, “Soldier of Orange,” that had made the rounds of various Dutch diaspora communities around the Federation about 12 years prior. It hadn’t gained much traction among the general viewing public, but Jasper was not surprised that Mountie had seen it.
“So, what does that do for us?”
“What Jasper means is that if I walked right up there as if I belonged, I might be able to pass through all the mercs and get into the cave.”
&n
bsp; “Bullshit, sir. With all due respect, I mean. I don’t buy it first, and even if they somehow didn’t notice the big Federation patch on your shoulder, you’re just going to carry a bomb right past them?”
“Probably not. But do you have a better idea?”
“No, sir. But give us some time. We can think of something.”
“I don’t think we have time, JJ. We need to do something quick, and so far, Jasper’s the only one of us to come up with anything with even a remote possibility of working.”
JJ glared at Jasper as if he’d done something wrong.
Jasper half-agreed with that and refused to meet the Marine’s eyes.
Mountie had agreed upon a suicide mission before, only to be granted a reprieve. Now he was facing the same thing. It was too much to ask of a man.
But as he noted before, the decision wasn’t his to make.
“We’re doing it,” Mountie said with finality.
“But—” JJ started.
“No buts. That’s an order.”
Jasper swallowed hard. He was sure his bright idea had just sentenced his friend to death.
Chapter 21
Mountie
Four hours later, Mountie crouched at the side of the road, building up his nerve. His flight suit was still damp after a semi-successful attempt to get the worst of the last four days’ grime off of it. Jasper had taken the Federation patch off the shoulder after they concluded that doing so would still keep him within the accords. He felt naked, but still a little less conspicuous than with the big white and red patch shouting out “United Federation.”
He knew his operation had three possible outcomes. First, he’d get in, set the bomb, and get out, all in one piece. Second, he’d get in, set the bomb, then die in the explosion. Third, he’d get captured by the mercs and held for ransom after the war ended. He was praying for number one, but he hadn’t decided if number two or three was worse.
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