The Network - Jason Elliot [143]
There are several false alarms as the others strike stones, and we stop to probe the ground more closely. Then after about half an hour, which feels like a year, Momen announces quietly that he thinks he’s got something. I kneel beside him and take his bayonet and push it gently forward until it stops. The tip feels as if it’s moving against something smooth. I try from different angles and feel the same response at the correct distances. We’ve found one.
H comes up beside me. He’s sweating.
‘I’ll clear this one,’ I tell him. ‘Get everyone back inside the fort. Is the 82 ready?’ I don’t add the obvious ‘in case this doesn’t go quite the way we’re hoping’.
He looks down at the bayonet in the ground, then at me, and then nods as if he’s forgotten the question. He draws his forearm across his forehead.
‘Leave you to it,’ he says. ‘Try not to drop it on the way back.’
I hate to see him go. I find the perimeter of the mine and discover it’s circular and about a foot across. There don’t seem to be any others next to it or beneath it. It feels like it’s metal. I’m guessing it’s a Soviet TM-type because most of the other kinds have plastic outer housings, which feel different when you scrape against them with a probe. I calculate the centre and carefully begin to remove the earth until a portion of the dusty pressure plate appears.
There are six evenly spaced depressions on the plate. It occurs to me, at this unlikely moment, that they resemble the fingermarks that Italian bakers press into their dough when they’re making focaccia. Then I think how odd it would be to be blown up by this mine in particular after having come all the way to Afghanistan, because it’s not a Soviet mine. It’s a British-made Second World War-era Mark 7.
The body is made of sheet steel with a domed upper surface, and it uses a Number 5 single- or double-impulse fuse. It can be fitted with an anti-lift device, but they’re rare, which is good. The mine’s weight makes it easy to booby-trap, which is bad. It contains twenty pounds of high-explosive TNT, or roughly the equivalent of sixty hand grenades.
I scrape away the soil from the upper part, working slowly down, watching the drops of sweat from my forehead fall onto the plate to create dark stains in the dust. The drops fall as if in slow motion and seem unnaturally large, though I know they’re not. I reveal the circular upper edge of the mine. I want only to know what’s underneath it, as a man wants to know the future, which, although closer to him at every moment than he ever suspects, is impenetrable.
I have a strange feeling as if I’m passing through a door, beyond which time no longer behaves in the usual way. I see the point of the bayonet pushing into the dirt around the mine and my hands tugging at the loosened debris. I see the tiny particles of dust swirl across my skin and tumble down in microscopic spirals of air onto the hairs on the backs of my hands like drowning sailors clinging gratefully to wreckage. I see blood appear under my fingertips, creeping along the curve of my nails as I claw into the rocky soil, only it seems that the blood is a flash flood in high summer driving across a boulder-filled canyon. There is more life compressed into these microscopic worlds than I have ever suspected, and for a few moments I’ve been carried into the full drama of their existence.
I reach under the mine to feel whether there’s anything sinister there and sense the weight of the metallic structure resting patiently on the earth waiting to corrode into its component elements, and all the passions and mysteries that can ever be known seem to have let me into their invisible secrets. They are all there, like a silent film we can’t see or hear,