Shadows Beneath by Brandon Sanderson

Author:Brandon Sanderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-938570-04-9
Publisher: Dragonsteel Entertainment, LLC
Published: 2014-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

SECOND DRAFT: I.E.DEMON

DAN WELLS

They called it the BSE-7, but they didn’t tell us what it stood for. We were just the grunts, after all, and they were the engineers: they created the technology, and we had to test it. And that was fine; that’s the way it had been since I’d been stationed in Afghanistan six months earlier, and that’s the way it had been for years—for centuries—before that.

“What kind of test do you want?”

“The BSE-7 is an explosives nullification device,” said the engineer. “We’ve installed it in an up-armored Humvee, and we need you take that Humvee through hostile territory and see if it works.”

“‘See if it works?’”

“If nothing blows up, it works,” said the engineer. “We’ll follow you with a bomb squad to see if we can find anything the BSE-7 nullifies.”

“And how exactly does it ‘nullify’ IEDs?”

“I’m afraid you’re not cleared for that information,” said the engineer, so I kept a civil expression and got in the Humvee and headed out into the desert. I wasn’t cleared to know what I was driving, but I was cleared to drive it through Taliban Central hoping somebody tried to blow us up. The glamorous life of a soldier.

The first IED turned up in a spot called The Brambles, about an hour north of our firebase and some of the worst terrain in Afghanistan. We didn’t see anything, but the minesweeper behind us called an all-stop because their detectors had turned up a broken one—not so much broken, once we looked at it, as it was just built wrong from the beginning. I’d never seen an IED so poorly put together; it looked like a broken clock in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, with wires and bits hanging off it in all directions. I told the two engineers I was sorry we hadn’t found a real IED to test their device on, but they seemed just as excited with the broken one as you could possibly imagine, like it was the most thrilling damn thing dug out of the desert since King Tut. I rolled my eyes and got back in the Humvee, and my crew drove on through the Brambles for about 20 more minutes before the engineers called another all-stop. I got out to look at the new find.

“Useless,” said the bomb tech, examining the new mine we’d driven over. “Better than the last one, but still hopelessly broken. The fuse isn’t connected to anything.”

“This is wonderful!” said the lead engineer.

“Two IEDs inside half an hour,” I said gravely. “There’s active insurgents in the area, no question.”

“Grossly incompetent insurgents,” said my driver.

“They only have to get lucky once,” I said, but the engineers insisted we keep going, and my orders were to follow them, so I did. The third IED was only 15 minutes down the road, and the bomb tech practically took the thing apart before he let any of us get close.

“This one was live,” he said, showing us the disassembled pieces. “You drove right over it, and it could have gone off, and as far as I can tell it should have gone off, but it didn’t.

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