But the world didn’t end.
The world and the mountain held. We didn’t know how. All we knew was that the echoes of the blast finally dissipated and the shudder slowly subsided in the rock. Miraculously, the mountain and the molecules of our bodies all decided to stay happily together.
“We got it!” came over the radio. “Coming out!”
Twenty minutes after they had gone in, the EOD guys came out of the godforsaken cave in their green astronaut bomb suits. The last guy out was a tight-lipped bomb tech, a short and wiry Italian-looking fortysomething guy with dark, hooded eyes. His buddies helped him take off the tool smock hanging down the center of his chest and pull off his spaceman helmet. His sweat-soaked hair was plastered to his forehead as if he’d just gotten out of the shower.
He put down the red-and-black portable X-ray machine they used to check for booby traps, then rolled onto his back in his eighty-pound suit like a dusty upended turtle. One of his buddies handed him something, and he began expertly rolling a cigarette with his oversize, muscular mechanic’s hands.
His name was First Sergeant Matthew Battista of the 789th Explosive Ordnance Disposal Company. He taught at the EOD school at Eglin Air Force Base, near Destin, Florida, and was said to be the best and most technically proficient and experienced bomb tech in the army and perhaps the world.
“Okay, Mattie, what’s the story? If we all weren’t currently having heart attacks, the suspense would be killing us,” Commander Nate said, handing him a baby wipe.
Mattie wiped at his sweaty face as he lay against the rock, staring up at the cloudless sky. He smoked his cigarette in the corner of his mouth without touching it.
“The blast was from a disposal failure,” he finally said. “We were pulling out pieces of detcord through the ring bolts next to cables in the walls, and something must have screwed up—probably a bad piece of deteriorated cable. It’s the same really old Soviet shit we saw in Iraq. Bad cable coupled with some friction burn is my guess. Only a small piece went off, though. About four feet. Thank God we cut it up beforehand.”
“So you were able to defuse everything else?” said Emily. “Did you find the detonator? Was it on a cell-phone trigger? A mechanical timer?”
“That’s what I can’t figure out,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s all wired up, ready to go. We found this.”
He reached over and took two items out of his smock. He held up a small black box with some wires sticking out of it and a brown plastic device with three buttons on it.
“Is that a garage door opener?” I said, looking at it.
He nodded.
“And the black box is a garage door receiver,” he said. “Seen them before. You press the opener, and it sends a signal to the receiver, just like a cell-phone trigger. The whole daisy chain in there was wired up to this receiver except for one crucial detail. The receiver also has to be wired up to a battery in order for it to set off the detcord. There was no battery. Also, there was no battery for the opener, either.”
“So there was no way to set it off,” Emily said.
Battista shook his head.
“They left out the final piece. Makes sense in terms of safety. I wouldn’t want any juice within twenty square miles of this much explosive. Much safer to bring the final pieces together right when you want to blow it.”
“So what do you think, Mike? Rezende had the batteries on him?” Emily said. “Remember how he insisted on hitting his house and throwing on his hiking boots before getting on the bird? The first thing we need to do is retrieve Rezende’s body and begin scouring his records. He didn’t do this by himself.”
“No, that’s the second thing we do,” I said, taking out the satellite phone. “First we call New York City and cancel the evacuation.”