Jonas (Minnesota Marshalls #2)(6)
Author: Susan May Warren

 

“It’s best you wear the Kevlar, ma’am.” The bomb expert, standing behind her—unnecessarily far behind her—seemed to be sweating also, his voice shaking a little. Frankly, he almost whispered.

 

His name was Milovik, according to the nameplate on his BDUs. Young, maybe early twenties. No doubt saw his life flashing before his eyes. And hers.

 

“Ma’am, please—”

 

She held up her hand to stop him. “Listen. This suit is designed to protect me from shrapnel propelled at close range—say a grenade or even a land mine. But it’s hot and hard to move in and has a higher center of gravity, and I can barely see with my breath fogging up the visor, and frankly, gentlemen”—she turned to the group—“that mother goes off and this entire area is dust and vapor. So the best this suit will do is slow down the quick death that I deserve if I can’t disarm this thing.”

 

The air in the room evaporated as all the men simply stopped breathing.

 

They watched in silence as she climbed out of the suit and left it standing there, as if under its own power. She’d used the Kevlar mostly as a precaution in her first survey of the bomb, scanning for the faded numbers stamped on the fuze head and examining the remaining damaged tail fin. She’d taken dozens of pictures and now took a closer look through her phone.

 

More silence as they watched. But she was used to this sort of shock and awe and abject terror when working around civilians.

 

Finally, she put the phone down and opened the BDO box with all the kit inside to immunize the fuze. She quickly catalogued her tools, as if she hadn’t already checked the kit a dozen times, before and after every callout, then pulled out her BDO book of fuses. She flipped open to confirm that the directions on which fuze head to drill contained the type 15 early impact fuze specifications.

 

Then she slipped it into a satchel and hung it over her shoulder. Met the eyes of Vlasic and nodded. “Please get your men back and stay put. I’ll be in touch.” She lifted the radio.

 

He nodded. “Good luck, Sibba.”

 

She shook her head. “Nope. Just skill. Counting on luck will get me killed.” Then she walked out the front door.

 

The storm—a local weatherman called it a derecho—had taken off roofs as far south as her town of Cerkno, and frankly, she’d expected a call like this.

 

Over much of northern Slovenia, like other parts of Europe, unexploded ordnances littered the terrain, buried now after so many years. And not just German ordnance, like here, near the Austrian border, the hotbed of partisan resistance, but American and British ordnance in deeper Slovenia—once Yugoslavia, who had allied with the Third Reich.

 

So, despite their independence, Slovenia bore the scars of both sides of the war. Scars hidden deep beneath the rugged beauty of a flyover country until events like a derecho, or the wildfires of this summer, unearthed the hidden terrors.

 

Then the battles of the past revisited them, raking to life the old demons.

 

She blew out a breath and waited until Director Vlasic and his men got in their cars and drove down the road, parking some fifty meters away.

 

Might not be far enough, but really, she simply hadn’t wanted anyone watching her. She needed her entire focus on the device.

 

The bomb lay half exposed, a corpse, still lethal in its dormancy, the dirt around it fresh and raw. The smell of old iron mixed with the scent of yesterday’s rain, and for a moment, she was following a stranger to safety on a mountain during a rainstorm.

 

And not sure why, but still wishing he’d taken her up on her offer to fly off it together the next morning.

 

Maybe because, you know, you only have one life.

 

Focus.

 

The wind lifted the collar of her jacket, and she wasn’t sweating yet.

 

But her body had begun its familiar, focused buzz. She reached up then and pressed her finger against the cool gold cross at her neck. Closed her eyes.

 

If I should die…

 

Then she opened her eyes and knelt in front of the bomb.

 

She took out the book and again opened it to the right diagram. Checked it twice against the fuze and markings, then took a felt pen and drew on the fuze.

 

Then she picked up the hand drill.

 

She was a surgeon, her own life in her hands.

 

Keeping perfectly vertical, with just the right pressure to cut through the alloy head, she drilled slowly with continued pressure to the correct depth.

 

Then she blew out the metal shards to keep any litter from falling into the hole and withdrew the bit.

 

The screw-threaded hollow needle with a valve went next, creating an airtight seal in the gap. She pulled out the plastic tubing from her kit, along with a bottle of saline solution. This was the tricky bit—connecting the tubing to the needle, then using a bicycle pump to create a vacuum with one hand and with the other, flipping open the valve to release the saline into the fuze.

 

Then she had to pressurize it with the pump to neutralize the fuze.

 

The wind tumbled a few broken leaves down the road, lifted her braided hair from her neck, her breath steady, her work practiced.

 

In her exams, she’d completed this test with three minutes to spare.

 

But it wasn’t a race. Just a pass/fail.

 

And this time, she passed.

 

She let out a breath, finally, as she stepped back, packing her tools into her kit. Then she raised her hand.

 

Triumph. With the fuze immunized, the ordnance could be moved, the payload extracted, and the bomb destroyed.

 

No lives lost.

 

Now sweat trickled down her spine, but she unzipped her jacket and turned, lifting her radio. “All clear, Director.”

 

He was already on the move down the road, but he confirmed anyway.

 

She didn’t wait for them to arrive but headed back inside the house.

 

Nice place. Homey, with a compact dining table set into a banquette against the wall, and a massive, tiled stove in the corner, not unlike her grandfather’s place.

 

So, an older home, and probably it had a couple attic bedrooms and a living room, although children lived here—evident from the drawings taped to the refrigerator in the small kitchen.

 

Through the west-facing window, the snow-capped Mount Triglav rose in the distance.

 

“Keep your eyes on me, and you’ll be fine. I won’t let you get hurt.”

 

And there he was, Spidey, back in her head, still, after a month.