Aarti Raman - Kingdom Come

“Detonation cord,” he said, nodding at the girl’s feet.

“Shit.”

“I’ll look into it. You get the girl out. Now.”

“Roger that.”

Krivi moved away from the girl but she screamed and he turned back and said, “I am here, Alina. This is my friend, John. He’s going to untie your hands. If you stay still, it won’t hurt at all. Can you do that?”

“Kri … Krivi,” she whispered, a small whisper of a terrified girl.

Krivi smiled, even though it felt like stretching taffy. “Yes?”

“There’s a lock. On my neck. There’s a lock.”

His smile faded and he looked at recon one, who had already removed a small wire cutter that could run through steel nylon rope if it needed to. And it had on three separate occasions.

“I am going to unlock it and you’re going to be out of here right now.”

Her lips trembled as she looked at the calm, rock-like face of the man kneeling before her, but she refused to cry again. And Krivi gave her points for that. It took a lot of cojones to not give in when the situation went FUBAR.

“Promise?” she asked.

He nodded and held out his hand. She took it with trembling fingers and just held on. Krivi squeezed once and then barked, “Scoot her forward. Give me specs. I am going to look at that.”

He turned to the gunnysack-covered contraption where the wire that had tied Alina’s legs disappeared under. He removed the gunnysack carefully knowing any movement could be fatal, trickily fatal.

Bombs were like that.

It wasn’t a very smartly made IED (improvised explosive device). There was a black cylinder with three different wires protruding out of it, and a small pin held the mouth of the cylinder shut. A few sticks of C4 were strapped to the outer body of the cylinder, as if to underline the point of an explosion and the three wires, all yellow, ran to a point under the wall and then disappeared.

“Now we know why they left no guards,” he murmured, almost to himself.

“Yeah,” Recon one, John, agreed.

He smiled reassuringly at the girl and said something too low for Krivi to hear. But Alina smiled and let him reach for a clean piece of cloth and wipe her face with it.

Krivi focused all his attention on the IED. It was a pretty standard bomb, with a decent-sized blast radius given the amount of C4 wrapped around the cylinder and det cord that were designed to confuse and fluster and a trigger mechanism that was probably pressure-controlled, rather than remote-controlled.

Hence, the lock on the girl.

He unsnapped a pair of pliers and carefully removed the main firing pin from the mouth of the cylinder and laid it on the floor. He looked at the wire that disappeared into the wall and knew there was no way they could remove it all out without setting off the pressure mechanism on the trigger, even though he hadn’t even seen the trigger yet.

There was no other way to it.

Krivi unsnapped his throwing knife, a tiny thing with a blade so sharp it could slice the hide of an elephant, and started severing the C4 from the cylinder. It took moments, because they’d just tied the packets to the outside with cords. That done, he carefully wrapped the explosive in tarp and placed it in his backpack that recon two took away immediately.

Half the firepower was gone right there.

Now he turned his attention to the girl, who was somehow miraculously calm.

“Alina.”

She looked at him with a small smile and he froze infinitesimally. A girl in her position should not have been smiling. It was why he couldn’t understand humans at all, any more.

“Will you let me look at the lock now?”

She nodded and John, recon one, carefully pushed all her hair to the front while she presented him with her nape.

It was taped to her neck. The three wires came out of the wall and ended in a tiny device that was locked together with a padlock. The reading on the device read forty-five kgs. The girl’s weight. Any more and she would blow them all up. He couldn’t touch the thing without setting it off. And he couldn’t touch the wires without setting it off.

“The lock,” recon one said.

Krivi looked up, nodded approval. The lock could be reached from the top. If he was careful enough and steady enough, he could then, maybe, gain the three seconds required to sever the connection from the girl.

Big maybe.

“All right. Get out,” he said.

Recon one shook his head.

“That’s an order.”

“Not following it, Boss.”

“Bastard.” But it was said without any heat and made Alina smile. Krivi smiled at her too, a flash of white on a betel-brown face and said, “That’s a bad word. Don’t use that in front of your dad, OK? And don’t tell him I used it either.”

“OK.” She smiled again.

“I need you to hold absolutely still, Alina. Totally still.”

“Like the statue, right?”

He nodded.

Krivi unfolded to a kneeling position and crawled right beside Alina. Recon one stood back and watched as his leader inspected the tiny device and the lock over it.

It was going to be delicate as a surgery, getting to the lock without touching the trigger mechanism or the wires. But John also knew if there was any man alive who could do it, it was Krivi. The man had ice water for blood and a brain that was blade-sharp and just as deadly under pressure.

Krivi removed a cigarette from his pocket and looked at it for a second. He smiled, a strange, weird smile and put it back in his pocket.

John watched as Krivi stooped over Alina’s head, his breathing rock-steady and his hands steadier as he used a pair of picks and went to work on the lock. He twisted one, and it stuck in the place of the key, then he used the other one, without moving the position of the lock which wasn’t easy at all, to snick the lock open.

It worked after three seconds of quiet breathing and absolute, deafening silence.

The lock opened with an audible snick and the pressure mechanism moved. Alina breathed deeply, her shoulders shaking and Krivi snapped the lock back, but not all the way back to lock it.

Recon one breathed easy and shared a grim look with Krivi.

“Alina?” Krivi said.

“Yes, Krivi?”

“I am going to remove the lock now, all the way out and I want you to leap into John’s strong arms and just hold on, OK? He’s going to run really, really fast and take you out of here. Can you do that?”

“Yeah.”

“John, you ready to take my girl out?”

John’s lips tightened but he said easily, “Alina’s my girl, Krivi. Don’t poach.”

“We’ll see, Johnny Boy. We’ll let Alina decide. Right, Alina?”

She giggled, but didn’t nod her head. She was aware of the lock on the back of her head.

“On the count of three,” he said quietly, looking at recon one. Recon one nodded slightly, because he got it. There was a growing chance that Krivi was not going to make it out in time, but there was not a damn thing he could do about it right now.

“Boss,” was all he said.

“One.” Krivi’s steady hand went to the lock. “Two.” He flicked it open, sliding it out and pushing Alina away in one motion.

“Three.”

John snatched the girl and ran straight and true, without a backward glance.

Krivi didn’t spare them a glance either, he held the pressure mechanism gingerly as a timer started counting down the seconds. He had twenty seconds before he cut the wrong wire and blew himself to kingdom come.

“Five,” he murmured, measuring the position of the wires from the detonator. All three yellow wires ended in a tangle, so he wasn’t sure anyway that he wasn’t going to be blown up.

“Eight.”

He picked one out and held his pliers over it.