Kingdom Come

“Go back,” he repeated, as if she was a five-year-old.

Noor’s eyes were streaming and she screamed, “Sam. Sameth! Answer me if you’re here.”

Krivi closed his eyes as the crowd parted and turned as one to look at the two females and one male who’d intruded on their party. Then, Sam came forward, walking fast and then with every step running towards Noor. She couldn’t be held back even by Krivi’s hard arms as she ran towards him and he caught her up in a bruising embrace.

“Go back,” he yelled, as soon as he’d taken his lips off hers.

“No.” She shook her long hair back, her Jackie O glasses on the ground somewhere, naked fear in her eyes. “Not without you.”

“Nuria—” He closed his eyes.

Ziya sighed and shook herself free from Krivi’s tight hold. Her skin hurt with the force of his fingers on her. He didn’t look all that happy with the way she surreptitiously rubbed her shaking fingers over her upper arm.

“Noor, maybe we should—”

“No.”

Sam looked at Krivi who shrugged; a movement that Ziya felt because she was still standing way too close for comfort.

“IED? Insurgents?” Was what he asked.

Sam nodded, hooked his glasses up. “IED. Found in a child’s backpack. The tourist admins were not sure at first, and by the time they reported it the thing was live. BDS is ten minutes out.” BDS was the Bomb Disposal Squad of the Indian Army that handled, well, disarmament of hot loads.

“IED?” Noor shrieked.

“Stop the hysterics,” Ziya said firmly, taking her friend by the arm. And shooting a fulminating look at Sam at the same time. “Sam’s Army guys are going to disarm the thing before we know it. It’s his job, isn’t it, Sam?”

“Yes.” Sam nodded reassurance emphatically, but his expression was very grave. He looked at Krivi.

“Can you make it out of here, pronto?”

Krivi walked forward and removed his wallet. He flipped open the worn, black leather which was torn at the edges and flashed a badge at Sam, whose eyes widened when he saw it. And severe speculation and respect filled them a second later.

“I could take a look,” he offered quietly. “If you can tell me the specs.”

Ziya’s stomach did a slow, nauseating roll as she heard the casual words. She suddenly understood Noor’s hysteria a lot better than she had five seconds ago. Her fists clenched at her sides as Sam spoke about a standard Iraq-style IED.

Cylindrical container with suspected C4 and an initiator pin that held the mouth of the container closed. Trigger mechanism was probably det cords, and there seemed to be no timer, except the tourist fools had moved the backpack and the load had jostled and gone live. Power source was a tiny switch that had been hidden in a side-zipper that had flipped on when the fool admin guy had handled the package.

Krivi nodded as if he understood all these terms.

Then he said, “Standard disarmament procedure isn’t it? Works with pliers, cutting off the PS is first priority.”

Sam nodded. “Yeah. I’ll talk to my superiors. Give me sixty.”

Ziya swallowed as he went back in and Noor went after him. She was stopped by the guards and her gestures became threatening.

“Krivi?” Ziya asked, trying to even her tone.

He didn’t turn to look at her. “Yeah?”

“You’re going to defuse that bomb?”

He shrugged and her stomach pitched violently. She reached out and caught his arm which made him turn to look at her. Her eyes were shadowed, her quietly lovely face was composed but with the vivid red of her shirt blowing against her slim form he became aware of a terrible fragility in her.

“Don’t blow us all up to kingdom come, OK?”

He smiled. A real genuine smile that made her heart clench with sudden, appalling fear. And he disengaged from her light hold. “I won’t. I promise.”

Then he disappeared inside the perimeter, which of course, let him in and not Noor, moving with lethal grace and the absolute promise of using it.

As Krivi suited up inside the five-hundred-pound bomb suit they had on emergency supply, all he could focus on was the mission. His breathing slowed, evened out in time with the beat of his heart. Back when he’d been a rookie, one of his instructors had spoken about adrenalin and how it affected your responses and actions. When a split second was all you got to save your teams’ and your own life.

The spine tingled as the hormones shot up and down, energized your body, giving you renewed strength and vigor making you capable of almost superhuman feats that included, but was not limited to, throwing cars off mothers and children. Your senses came on ultra-alert and you were superhuman for the few seconds it took for you to do the impossible.

The instructor had called this the Moment of Absolute Clarity. Krivi’s adrenalin worked the other way around. When he needed to make the hard choices, like today, getting into a bomb suit, his heart rate slowed down to well below the prescribed resting rate. His vision didn’t get sharper; it just narrowed to the next step, just the next step in front of him. He didn’t catalog the big picture or his surroundings and his hand was steady as a rock. He was all purpose, all mission. And nothing else.

He clipped on the communication unit and spoke into it, “Alpha Two, this is Alpha One. Radio check.”

“Read loud and clear, Alpha One.”

He flipped on the protective webbing that covered almost the whole helmet and slowly, painstakingly walked forward. A hulk of a man wearing five hundred pounds of body armor that would do him no good if the explosive he was going to disarm was disturbed in the wrong way.

The child’s backpack was a red one, from the brand Jansport. It had three zippers, and two of them were open. A small iron cylinder peeked out of the last opening.

The IED.

There was a steel pin on the mouth of the cylinder that he would have to carefully remove, without disturbing the integrity of the explosives inside or setting off the fuse. He got down on his knees, pliers at the ready. And gently, as if he was handling the most exquisite woman, lifted the firing pin out. A tangle of wires came out with it, and all he heard was his own breathing. Measured, steady, calm as if he was meditating. Which he supposed in a way, he was. He peered inside and saw the C4, three stacks of them all lined up inside like swaddled babies. Beneath he saw the shrapnel apparatus. Razor blades. He sucked in a breath and murmured into the comm unit, “Clear out all unnecessary personnel, right now. This is dangerous.”

“What have you found, Alpha One?”

“Razor blades as shrapnel. Enough C4 to level this place right up to the parking lot. And a fuse that I am going to need some time to figure out, because I have to switch off the power supply first. Clear them out, pronto.”

He was inspecting the outside zipper pocket where a tiny black device jutted out. It looked like a remote control but with the parts all exposed, so there was just a jumble of wires and circuits. Krivi removed the heavy protection-lined gloves and threw them on the ground. He continued probing the circuits, trying to find the one that would lead him to the battery. Nickle-Iron (NiFe) cells that he could see stuck on to the side of the remote. He tried to visually trace the wire out, but he couldn’t, so he again stuck his fingers inside the mess and murmured into the comm unit, “Hope the area is cleared, boys.”

“BDS is en route. ETA five minutes.”

“Awesome.”

But he continued inching his way into the tangle of wires until he found the one he was looking for. Delicately, with the precision of a surgeon, he stripped the insulation and looked at the tungsten length inside. It would burn inside of a second with the proper spark. He touched the wire end that was attached to the NiFe cells and gently shook it. When nothing happened, he decided to brave the fate again and yanked the cells out of the remote, along with the tungsten length.

Still nothing happened. Then, he set the power source aside and turned his attention to the bomb. He’d disconnected the initiator firing pin but there was still the main fuse that needed to be clipped off. He looked critically at the wires that were attached to the steel pin and began running his hands over each of them. Finally, he struck gold with the fourth one which led into the cylinder, and he reached inside, his palm hitting the C4 bundles. His heart thudded once, hard. He reached and yanked the wire away from the C4 and it came out easily. Krivi looked at the length of det cord in his hand and let it dangle in mid-air.

“Alpha Two,” he said clearly into the microphone at his mouth. “Hot load defused. I repeat, hot load defused.”

For extra measure, he took his palm out and smashed the power source into tiny pieces and watched the tungsten wire embed itself into the gravel. Then he stood up, his legs creaking under the weight of Kevlar, rubber and his own aching bones.

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