The Cloud Atlas

“We, well, let's see. I go and get a couple of sticks of C2 or C3, run some blasting wire back clear of the fragmentation zone, hook it up to the blasting machine.” I could see the little pages of my training manual flutter past in my head.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Redes said.

“I'm sorry, the, uh, fifty-cap blasting machine,” I said. “I think.”

“The what? Let's call it what it is, soldier. You're talking about the little box, with the plunger you push down and make everything go boom?” I nodded my head. “That's the hell box, right? Don't bother telling me they taught you something else in your fancy little school.” I nodded again. “Okay,” he said. “That's a lovely plan. But what's the problem with it?”

I was still stuck on hell box, so his question caught me off guard. “Not enough wire?”

Redes looked at me and then rubbed his hands together, slowly. “Right, not enough wire. Belk, there's not enough wire in the world for this job. The problem with that plan is, we blow this bomb where it is, we flatten the camp, which, since it looks like it's built with balsa wood, we could probably level with a couple of lit farts, for that matter. In any case, that all means we take care of the problem here.” He pointed to the bomb. “So let's get started. There's something extremely strange about this bomb. What is it?”

I looked at it for a long time. It didn't look strange. It looked just like the bombs in the manual, markings and all. I shrugged.

“Where's the fuze pocket?”

I relaxed, glad to be back on familiar ground. This question was easy. Like most guys, I'd come into the bomb disposal squad thinking the business end of the bomb was always the nose, but that wasn't the case. Sometimes the fuze was in a cylinder, or pocket, embedded in the middle, as it was here.

“Right there,” I said, pointing to the middle. “Transverse fuzing. German specialty.” Sergeant Redes looked at me and waited. I waited, too, pleased with my vocabulary. And then I gasped. “This is a German bomb, Sergeant? The Nazis are- Sergeant? Oh my God.” I was breathless; a German air raid over California?

Only now did Redes look concerned. “Not so loud, Belk. You already tried to set the bomb off, let's not try to set the camp gossips off, too.” He squatted. “The truth-according to the lieutenant, who radioed the airfield-is that they've been using some captured Nazi ordnance out on the test range. Why waste good American ammo, and so on. Though the lieutenant doesn't quite buy that, and neither do I- for starters, they'd have the wrong damn charging shackles, though that's probably a good thing, because the condensers wouldn't-well. I'm guessing there's a pilot and crew who are going to have a hell of an interesting debriefing.”

A German bomb. I stared at it. I read the papers; we had the Germans on the run. We'd landed in Normandy that June. We were going to win in Europe; I knew it. I thought everyone did. And yet here I was, in the middle of California, staring at a German bomb.

“But this is good news,” said Redes. “Right? Because this is all I've seen for the past year or so, and it was probably all over your classroom, too, right?”

It certainly was. I could see the training films in my head.

If you had the right tool-and Redes did, I was surprised to see, a funny kind of two-pin wrench-you could unscrew the keep ring and access the fuze pocket. Then you could remove the fuze. You weren't quite done, of course. The fuze was its own kind of mini-bomb; screwed onto one end of it was a doughnut-shaped gaine, which was what provided the initial charge. Once you'd unscrewed the gaine, you could breathe a little easier. The fuze without the gaine was a like a gun without a trigger, and a bomb without a fuze was basically a mess of explosives in a handy carrying case. Dangerous, sure, but disassembled, you could toss the parts (maybe toss isn't the right word) into the back of a truck and cart it all off to some lonely pit and blow it up.

But you couldn't do any of that unless you removed or disabled the fuze, and only an officer could do that. Which is why I was surprised to see Sergeant Redes start in on the job, narrating what he was doing the whole time.

“Say what you will about your Nazis, they build a good bomb. Don't repeat that, there's no such thing as a good bomb. And every now and then, they get sneaky. That's not good, either. But the thing is, they're well made”-here he strained with a little effort as he got into a better position-“for the most part. Built tough.”