Pandora's grave

The man called “Vic” sighed. “Call the rest of the team and tell them to rendevous with us in Falls Church. Time for Plan B.”

“Plan B?”

“Sit tight and wait,” came the terse reply.

3:25 A.M.

The village

Iran

They drifted into the village from the north, a pair of strange, misshapen figures shuffling awkwardly forward.

The thick biosuits made communication difficult, so the two men communicated largely by hand signals, punctuated by an occasional hissed instruction.

Death hung over the village like a cloud as they moved forward, picking their way through the detritus of human life. Mutants in the land of the dead.

A girl of perhaps five years of age lay across the threshold of her home, her face still distorted in the agony of death, her body bloated from a day in the sun. Thomas looked down for a moment in pity, then passed on. He could hear Sirvan whispering a prayer behind him.

They both stopped beside the body of a middle-aged Kurdish man, lying on his belly in the dust of the street. His arm was splayed out from his side, the flesh ridged with black veins of blood.

Thomas looked over at Sirvan and saw the Kurd nod through the helmet of his biosuit. The two men knelt by the body and Thomas drew his combat knife, laying it beside him as he moved to roll the body over.

Suddenly, Sirvan’s hand descended on his arm with a grasp of iron as a gasp broke from the Kurd’s lips.

“Stop!” he hissed, never slackening his grip.

“What?” Thomas demanded in surprise.

Sirvan’s index finger shot out, pointing below the dead man’s armpit. There, stretching from beneath the bloated body, barely visible in the shadow, was a thin wire.

The corpse was booby-trapped.

“A pressure trigger,” Sirvan whispered, struggling to make himself understood. “If we roll the body from off the mine…”

He didn’t need to finish. Thomas knew all too well what he was talking about. A bouncing betty. Once the pressure came off the trigger, the mine would bounce two or three feet into the air and detonate, spraying shrapnel in every direction.

His skin crawled at the thought. They wouldn’t have stood a chance.

“Why the wire?” he asked at length, unsure as to whether it was simply a back-up mechanism, or something more sinister.

Having apparently wondered the same thing himself, Sirvan’s fingers were already tracing their way along the wire, careful not to touch the thin strand separating them from death.

“More explosives,” he hissed a moment later, pointing to the house on the other side of the street, pantomiming an explosion from its walls. “A trip-wire,” Sirvan announced, coming back to Thomas’s side. “Tension-sensitive.”

Thomas nodded, understanding what he meant perfectly. Trip wires were often activated by pressure against them, essentially pulling a trigger. This was a dead man switch at its most basic. Whether tension was applied or relieved, the end result was the same.

Annihilation.

“Can it be disarmed?” Thomas asked. He already knew the answer, so it didn’t surprise him when Sirvan shook his head “no”.

“We do not have the time,” the Kurd replied. “Given daylight, I could try. Now-no. I was ordered to bring you back in one piece, remember?”

Thomas laughed, the tension broken for a bare moment in time. “Then, we move on?”

Sirvan looked ahead, his eyes probing the dust of the street. “No. Look there-and there. Claymores.”

Something was wrong. Very wrong. Thomas could feel his skin crawl, and his eyes searched the darkness for an unseen enemy. This had been prepared-for them, for someone…

He picked up his knife and thrust it back into its ankle sheath. “Then that leaves us with the child,” he said slowly.

Sirvan nodded with equal reluctance.

The two men moved cautiously back to where the little girl lay, their eyes on the ground now, watching ever so carefully for the telltale signs of disturbed earth.

Thomas knelt by the corpse, an unspoken question in his eyes as he glanced over at Sirvan. Was the child’s body mined?

Sirvan extracted a thin, wicked-looking knife from a sheath under his armpit and slid it under the girl’s body, probing gently.

“A grenade,” he announced a moment later, his voice curiously emotionless. “She’s lying on the spoon of a hand grenade. The pin’s gone.”

Thomas nodded, his mind running through their options, considering and rejecting each scenario in turn.

Finally he drew his combat knife and motioned to Sirvan. “Hold the body still.”

There was pain in the Kurd’s eyes as he took his place at the girl’s head, pinning her arms tight to hold the corpse completely still.

Thomas reached up with the knife in his hand, gently slicing away her garments until the thin, malnourished torso lay exposed in the moonlight, the flesh blackened by the spread of the plague.

A muffled curse broke from Sirvan’s lips and Thomas took a deep breath, the oppressive heat of the biosuit suddenly closing in upon him.