Lie down with lions - Ken Follett [71]
He felt oddly happy as he worked. There was something soothing about mechanical tasks and the dispassionate calculation of poundage of explosive. And now that Masud had shown up at last, he could get on with his mission.
He trailed the Primacord through the water so that it was less visible—it would burn perfectly well underwater—and brought it out onto the riverbank. He attached a blasting cap to the end of the Primacord, then added a four-minute length of ordinary, slow-burning blasting fuse.
“Ready?” he said to Masud.
Masud said: “Yes.”
Ellis lit the fuse.
They all walked away briskly, heading upstream along the riverbank. Ellis felt a certain secret boyish glee about the enormous bang he was about to create. The others seemed excited, too, and he wondered whether he was as bad at concealing his enthusiasm as they were. It was while he was looking at them in this way that their expressions altered dramatically, and they all became alert suddenly, like birds listening for worms in the ground; and then Ellis heard it—the distant rumble of tank tracks.
The road was not visible from where they were, but one of the guerrillas quickly shinnied up a tree. “Two,” he reported.
Masud took Ellis’s arm. “Can you destroy the bridge while the tanks are on it?” he said.
Oh, shit, thought Ellis, this is a test. “Yes,” he said rashly.
Masud nodded, smiling faintly. “Good.”
Ellis scrambled up the tree alongside the guerrilla and looked across the fields. There were two black tanks trundling heavily along the narrow stony road from Kabul. He felt very tense: this was his first sight of the enemy. With their armor plating and their enormous guns they looked invulnerable, especially by contrast with the ragged guerrillas and their rifles; and yet the Valley was littered with the remains of tanks the guerrillas had destroyed with homemade mines, well-placed grenades and stolen rockets.
There were no other vehicles with the tanks. It was not a patrol, then, or a raiding party; the tanks were probably being delivered to Rokha after being repaired at Bagram, or perhaps they had just arrived from the Soviet Union.
He began calculating.
The tanks were going at about ten miles per hour, so they would reach the bridge in a minute and a half. The fuse had been burning for less than a minute: it had at least three minutes to go. At present the tanks would be across the bridge and a safe distance away before the explosion. He had to shorten the fuse.
He dropped from the tree and started to run, thinking: How the hell many years is it since the last time I was in a combat zone?
He heard footsteps behind him and glanced back. Ali was running right behind him, grinning horribly, and two more men were close on his heels. The others were taking cover along the riverbank.
A moment later he reached the bridge and dropped to one knee beside his slow-burning fuse, slipping the kit bag off his shoulder as he did so. He continued to calculate while he fumbled the bag open and rooted around for his pocketknife. The tanks were now a minute away, he thought. Blasting fuse burned at the rate of a foot every thirty to forty-five seconds. Was this particular reel slow, average or fast? He seemed to recall that it was fast. Say a foot, then, for a thirty-second delay. In thirty seconds he could run about a hundred and fifty yards—enough for safety, just barely.
He opened the pocketknife and handed it to Ali, who had knelt down beside him. Ellis grabbed the fuse wire at a point a foot from where it was joined to the blasting cap, and held it with both hands for Ali to cut. He held the severed end in his left hand and the burning fuse in his right. He was not sure whether it was time yet to relight the severed end.