“How do you know?”
“It’s armed. Don’t touch it again.” Hunter pointed to the slanted grooves cut into the copper rotating band around the base of the shell.
“But it will work. I know it will. Amir, may Allah’s blessings be upon him, used to make them work for us until-”
“Until he did something stupid like you just did and blew himself up? I can make it work for you, but only if you promise me you won’t touch any of the explosives. I want to be in one piece when I meet Allah.”
One of the twins helped Hunter place the tools he needed in a flimsy cardboard box while the other twin stood guard a good ten feet away. Jackie’s hoarse cries from when he was on top of her haunted him and he knew he would have to figure out a way to take out the tangos and save her. The bastards were going to pay, insh’allah.
At Hunter’s insistence, the twins off-loaded the blue plastic gas cans and the wooden skid. He wanted as large a working space as possible and his body odor had grown so strong, he didn’t want to hassle his nose anymore by adding gasoline fumes to the mix. Sweat poured down his face as he squatted in the back of the truck bed, hunched over the unexploded ordnance. He said a quick prayer to the real god, then checked to make sure a weapon was still pointed at him. It was. Then he said a second prayer. His explosives courses had been long ago and making truck bombs from old Russian shells was not on the standard curriculum. He knew some Russian and could make out the Cyrillic lettering-OF412-but didn’t have a clue whether it meant it was a fragmentation high explosive or even an armor piercing round. This is why EOD guys had manuals. For all he could tell, the shells could contain propaganda leaflets.
The most explosive parts were at the tip and the least explosive at the base-that much he did remember as he tapped the metal at the bottom with his finger to determine its temperature. Bacon would fry on it. Nice, crispy, haram bacon. He could almost taste it.
“I am watching you.” Fazul waved his finger at Hunter. “I have seen Amir build many bombs and I know what it should look like. If you try to deceive me, I will know and I will kill you.”
“Don’t worry, my friend. I’ll make it right, insh’allah.” Hunter waved his hand, while in his mind, he had only his middle finger sticking up.
He considered smashing the Semtex between the 122 rounds, but was afraid such a crude detonator might not do the trick. He would have to build a proper bomb. He picked up a monkey wrench and adjusted it. Trembling, he reached for the fuse. It contained the highest velocity explosive in the round and the most unstable. He stopped himself short of touching it.
Breathe, man. Steady.
He stared at his arm and tensed his muscles. All he could think about was his friend Demo Dave, may Allah bless his soul, who accidentally threw a wrench down on a fuse. Without letting himself think about it anymore, he took the wrench, placed it around the fuse and adjusted it to fit. He turned his hand in the air as if unscrewing a light bulb to make sure he would turn in the right direction, then he pushed down on the wrench. It didn’t move, so he pushed a little harder.
No movement.
If the thing went off, the blast would be so large he figured it really didn’t matter which body part was closest to it, so he shifted his position and straddled the 122 millimeter round. He ratcheted up the force, but it was stuck. The damn thing had come out of the gun spinning like crazy in the opposite direction, tightening the fuse even more as it had soared through the air. He didn’t think he would ever get it to budge.
The sun burned the back of his neck. He took a deep breath and let out a curse in Arabic which was not nearly as satisfying as an English one. The blood vessels in his neck felt like they were going to burst. When he thought he had it, the wrench slipped. He picked it up and banged on the shell, cursing it in Russian. That felt better. The Russians knew how to curse.
He pushed harder than he thought he could, harder than he would’ve dared a few moments earlier, then he pounded the damn thing with the wrench and tried again. It turned. He removed it and set it aside in the truck bed, but felt no relief. If the second shell went off, it would detonate the first one, too-not that it mattered. One was more than enough to take out him, the tangos and a good chunk of their safe house. Apparently, one already had.
He sat down beside the shell and wiped the sweat from his forehead and waited for his breath to steady.
The second one was no less of a struggle, only a shorter one because he started at it with more force. He unscrewed the second fuse and pulled it from the shell. The bottom of it cleared the round, but something was attached. A six-inch cylinder was stuck to the bottom of the fuse. Hunter didn’t have a clue what it was.
“You broke it!” Fazul pounded his fist on the side of the truck.
“Stop! A jolt can set these things off.” Hunter wrapped them in his headscarf to keep them from knocking against one another as he climbed from the truck, then he placed them in the sand at the base of a date palm.
“Where are you going? You must finish.” Fazul pointed a pistol at him.
Hunter ignored him, stayed in the spotty shade of the palm and began drawing a wiring diagram in the sand. Two footprints represented the Russian rounds and a handprint the cell phone. Hunter rested his chin on his hand as he stared at the desert floor. The sand burned as he raked his finger through it, connecting the two footprints and the handprint in a single big loop. Linking the ordnance in a series like that meant that the entire circuit had to be good or nothing would go off. Hunter wanted it to go off. The tangos were going to pay for what they had done to Jackie Nelson-and for what they made him do to her.
The faded, kinked wires of the old blasting caps did not inspire trust. A break in one of them could prevent the entire circuit from closing and the IED would be a dud. He kicked the sand and made two new footprints and a new handprint. They had to be wired parallel so that only one circuit needed to be completed to initiate a detonation. He pursed his chapped lips as he tried to remember how to do it. As he traced a line with his finger, he thought of Stella and wished things were different. Something about explosions brought her to mind. If only things between them were less volatile.
Careful not to shake the truck too much, Hunter sat on the tailgate and swung his feet up into the back. He took two blasting caps and twisted their yellow leads together, then repeated the procedure with their red ones. He checked the time on the cell phone. It was running out-only thirty minutes until the phone’s timer would call the muj to prayer and complete the circuit, well before they arrived at the wedding.
With a few twists of a screwdriver, the back of the phone came off. Working as quickly as he could, he fastened blue and green wires to each side of the chip that controlled the ringer. He then completed the loop, connecting the blue wire to the two yellow leads and he saved the green wire-the color of the Prophet-to connect with the red wires. He wrapped the phone in tape to hold everything in place.
Returning to the centerpiece of his creation, he studied the fuse well at the top of the 122s, then pinched off a tennis-ball sized chunk of Semtex. The pink substance had the consistency of bread dough and some of it rubbed off on his hand. He made a mental note not to eat anything or touch his hand to his mouth until he got a chance to clean off the residue. If the Czech-made plastic explosive was anything like its American counterpart, ingestion of it could cause a different kind of explosion.
He stuffed Semtex into the cavities in the top of each 122 and shoved a blasting cap into each mass of the plastic explosive, praying that his plan would work. His improvised explosive device was now armed. The blast would be enough to rip the truck apart. Hunter climbed from the truck and waved his arm, presenting his work to Fazul. He knew he shouldn’t be, but he was proud of his very first truck bomb. He was even prouder of his choice of victims. But the real beauty was that the bomb would detonate when the cell phone played the call to afternoon prayers.