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.
“Twelve.” He picked the next one out and his fingers trembled in a fine reaction. He steadied his hand and cut the wire. The timer stopped its deathly countdown. And he placed the pressure mechanism detonator down as carefully as if it was still alive.
He pushed the earbud on once.
“Hot load is cold. I repeat, hot load is cold. Coming out now. How’s the girl? She all right?”
There was no answer from the other end for a minute. And he waited, while sweat poured off his face in rivulets, even though the temperature inside the cave was close to five degrees. The black paint he’d worn had run off, washed by his perspiration and his hand was steady again as he pushed the pliers back into his Army knife kit and shoved it into his pocket.
“Boss?”
“Yeah?”
“Get the fuck out of there. Now.”
Krivi chuckled, a strange ghostly sound in a tomb.
“Yeah. Roger that.”
Then he slung his weapon on again and walked out, as calmly as he had come in. In the five minutes that he had told his teammates he would.
The team was lodged in Holiday Inn, paid for by a very grateful Mr. Gujjar who was probably placing an armored tank around his kid round about now. The whiskey was flowing freely in John’s room, which was Party Central. And the sounds of raucous male laughter could be heard two floors down. John walked out of his room and rapped on a door two doors down. The door opened a crack. Krivi still in his fatigues, with the shirt off, stood at the entrance.
“Come on out to the land of the living,” he invited.
“No,” Krivi said. “Thank you.”
“You did a good thing there today, Boss.”
Krivi’s face remained impassive. “We all did our jobs, John. Now go. Have some fun.” His lips twitched but his eyes remained the same. Black and flat, with not much to read in them. In fact, nothing at all to read in them. “Go on out to the land of the living.”
John smiled and tipping his head once, went back the way he’d come. It was a futile hope to think the boss would come and join in the revelry when he hadn’t done so once in all the years that John had