Recoil - Andy McNab [85]
Crucial screamed at the miners and the ANFO mixers behind me. Sam bounced from sangar to sangar checking arcs. Once done, the guys would stand down, but stay in their positions, with all their kit on, ready for an instant stand-to.
I passed the re-entrant where the Nuka mob were huddled. There was no sign of Tim but I was sure he’d be running around in there with the rest of his crew. A bunch of porters had now joined the gathering, some with their families. It looked like the walking wounded were being coaxed into taking cover in the mine shafts; the switched-on ones were already there, like Londoners down the tube during the Blitz. They weren’t protesting: they knew as well as we did that the shit was about to hit the fan.
Sam’s kids looked much the same as they had when I first saw them. They sat together, wrapped in blankets. Like Sunday, they stared at everything going on around them, but their expressionless eyes told me they were on another planet. Whatever it was called, it must have been a dull and scary place.
My claymore plan was simple – it had to be, because there was no time. And simple equals it’s more likely to work.
I was going to make just two giant claymores with the ANFO and as much metal as I could muster, then site them so that anyone coming along or across the river would get the good news early.
There’s nothing sophisticated about a claymore. Even the nice factory-made American ones are just an explosive charge shaped to direct a mass of steel ball-bearings to the front of the HE like shotgun pellets. They are rated as small anti-personnel mines, but the ones I had in mind were going to be big anti-everything mines.
I kept on towards the valley entrance, fighting the lethargy in my legs and the pain in my head. Maybe it wasn’t down to dehydration. Maybe it was because I couldn’t get out of my head what Sam had said about Standish’s big Swiss cheese and the Chinese connection.
4
Behind me, a human train was forming, each truck loaded with plastic fertilizer sacks of ANFO.
I shouted up at the guys in the sangars as I made my way to the valley mouth. I wanted them to know exactly who was moving into their arcs. ‘I’m going there, over there!’ I gave them a thumbs-up and a couple waved.
I wanted two holes, not too deep, one on each side. The theory was that when the claymores were detonated, a shallow pit would contain the majority of the main force of the explosion, and send the shrapnel that had been packed in front scything into the advancing enemy.
Problem was, ANFO is low explosive. The combustion rate is slow, under six thousand metres per second, which is why it is used in mines and to make craters. High explosives, like the stuff in the box I had under my arm, has almost instantaneous combustion, with a shockwave that can be directed at the enemy.
With more HE, I could have built the claymores with oil drums – placed the HE at the bottom, packed the metal on top, and pointed them towards the killing area. But with low explosive, I had to try to contain the detonation and focus it in one direction. It would still take a huge lump out of the hill, but with luck I could direct most of the blast forward – smack into the LRA.
I had never made one of these things with low explosives before – it had always been HE. But it seemed logical that there still had to be a buffer between the explosive and the metal I hoped to be piling in front of it – in this case a mud wall at least a foot thick. Without one, the high detonation temperatures would just melt the metal in front of it, producing a big blob of white-hot molten alloy – great if you wanted to penetrate a tank, but not if you wanted to devastate an area.
My hope was that a buffer would give the claymore’s gases a nanosecond to build pressure before they broke through and blasted bits of metal into LRA flesh and bone across the killing ground. Of course, some of the energy would be converted into a fucking big crater as well, but I hoped I’d direct at least