Dead or Alive - Tom Clancy [278]
A hundred yards from where he’d planted the mine, he could not see that his plan was unraveling, and it would only be later, after he was captured, that the police would explain how he’d failed.
For the past five hours, as the Claymore sat first in the rain and then in the early morning sun, the candle wax Kaseke had used to cement the rat-poison pellets to the ball bearings and their resin base began to crack. This alone wouldn’t have interfered with the mine’s function, but what Kaseke didn’t know was that this particular Claymore mine and eight others were more than two decades old and had spent the last eight years improperly stored either in a wooden box in a damp cave or buried in the sun-baked soil of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province.
As the candle wax cracked inside the casing, the resin, far past its effective lifespan and as brittle as a fortune cookie, also cracked, but only a few millimeters. It was enough, however, to loosen the sockets in which fourteen of the ball bearings rested. With overlapping metallic tinks that no one on the church steps would hear over the babble of voices, the fourteen ball bearings broke free and dropped against the shell’s lower casing. If not for ten hours of rain that had fallen since the previous afternoon, this, too, wouldn’t have hindered the mine’s detonation, but the legs holding it upright in the soil, now softened to a mudlike consistency, succumbed to the weight of the fallen ball bearings. At 8:49:36, twenty-four seconds before detonation, Kaseke’s carefully aimed Claymore tipped forward and came to a rest at a forty-five-degree angle, half its face pointing at the dirt, the other half pointing at the concrete.
When she would awake later that day in the hospital, Katie Alvey’s first thoughts would be, My husband’s dead and I think my children are alive, followed by the realization that dumb luck probably played a big part in both those outcomes.
As Kaseke’s mine was tipping forward, the Alvey family mounted the front steps along with dozens of other late arrivals and started upward. Hank walked closest to the hedges bordering the steps, with Josh and Amanda to his left, then Katie and Jeremy, who was holding his mom’s hand.
Witnesses would later describe the explosion as a whoosh followed by the hailstorm from hell. Katie neither saw nor heard these things but had for some reason turned her head to look at Hank when the Claymore went off. Of the seven hundred bearings inside the mine, four hundred or so struck the dirt, cratering the bed and taking a yard-wide chunk out of the concrete. The remainder of the bearings either skittered along the concrete, punching through feet and calves, shattering bones and ripping away whole chunks of flesh, or bounced off the concrete and tore across the steps at various angles and trajectories. Those unlucky enough to be struck by these were either killed instantly or suffered horrific limb injuries. Hank Alvey, his body protecting his oldest boy and his daughter, caught a ball bearing beneath the left jaw, effectively cleaving his head into three portions. Katie saw this but had no time to react, no time to grab any of the children or to shield Jeremy with her body. As it turned out, none of it had been necessary.
Katie stood blinking, her ears ringing and her brain failing to immediately register the carnage around her. On either side of her, Josh, Jeremy, and Amanda were similarly stunned, but that passed quickly, and then the tears started to flow. The steps were awash in blood and littered with arms and legs and unidentifiable chunks of … who? She recognized no one. Dozens of people lay strewn across the concrete. Some weren’t moving, while others writhed in pain or tried to crawl away or toward loved ones, their mouths moving but no sound coming out.
Then Katie’s ears cleared and she heard the screaming. And sirens.
86
AFTER MAKING SURE all the drapes were closed, they turned on lights around the house, then Jack called Pasternak and had him pull the van into the garage. The doctor