The Network - Jason Elliot [142]
‘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