Ghost Watch by David Rollins

Author:David Rollins [Rollins, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Thrillers, Suspense, Fiction
ISBN: 9780857892690
Google: O6d_R5xBupkC
Amazon: 1848875088
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 2011-03-31T23:00:00+00:00

I SAW THE TRIPWIRE at knee height, just in time to avoid breaking through it. I thrust my palm back and stopped Ryder before he walked past me and set off whatever was attached to it. I hit him a little too hard and he was about to object, so I put my hand over his mouth to muf-fe any sounds that might attract attention, and set him down on the ground. Once he stopped struggling, I nodded at him and he nodded back, so I took my hand away and signed that danger lay just ahead.

‘Jesus, Cooper!’ he whispered before I could gag him again.

I grabbed a fist full of his webbing, pulled him up to my face and put my finger against my lips. He nodded again, finally getting the picture and shutting the fuck up. Okay, so he was pissed at me for pushing him around, but it was better than being dead. I let him go, got down on all fours and crawled forward till my eyes again picked up the thin line strung through the bush. It took me a while to find it a second time. Seeing it in the first place had been pure luck. I happened to focus on it rather than on a leaf or a frond or just the ground. It was a little after four pm, and the light was disappearing like someone was turning down a dimmer switch, the undergrowth starting to lose its colors to the monochrome of twilight.

I found the line again. It was fine and green, the pressure of it against my hand. I was familiar with this type of tripwire; had set a few of my own over the years. I ran the line lightly through my fingers till they found the business end, an M18A1, otherwise known as a Claymore; the raised words ‘Front towards enemy’ clearly visible on the anti- personnel mine’s plastic, curved olive-drab face. Behind it was one and a half pounds of C4 embedded with the manufacturer’s warranted seven hundred steel balls designed to explode outward in an arc of sixty degrees. In open terrain, the thing was a killer within a radius of fifty meters, potentially lethal out to a hundred meters, and just plain bad news to anything with a heartbeat out to two hundred and fifty meters. It would’ve detonated six meters from Ryder and me had we strolled through that tripwire, though we wouldn’t have known about it till we were tuning our harps. I carefully felt around the mine, my fingertips finding some good news: a couple of cotter pins hanging from the corner of the mine on a piece of wire. Someone was going to come back and recover this device if it didn’t detonate and he’d need those pins.

So, the mine looked brand new. Its presence told me we’d arrived at the FARDC’s perimeter defenses. One hundred and eighty combat veterans were bivouacked somewhere close, probably scattered around the crown of the hill ahead.

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