The Zero Hour

Etienne Charreyron reacted as if he’d seen a ghastly apparition. “What-you-I thought you were dead!” he gasped.

Baumann, who had quickly gained an outward semblance of composure, smiled. “Sometimes I feel that way, but I’m very much alive.”

“But you-Luanda-Christ Almighty-!”

For the next ten seconds or so, Charreyron did little more than babble and stare in horror and incomprehension. His secretary stood in the doorway, uncertain what to do, until he dismissed her with a wave of his pudgy hand.

Ten years earlier, Charreyron and Baumann had served together in Angola. A former Portuguese colony, Angola had since 1976 been racked by civil war, with the Cuban-supported, Marxist MPLA battling the pro-Western UNITA forces, aided by South Africa.

Baumann’s employers had sent him there to help orchestrate a covert campaign of terrorism. There he had met a bomb-disposal specialist who went by the nom de guerre Hercule, a mere who had once worked for the Belgian police.

Back in the 1960s, Baumann later learned, this Hercule had built bombs for the legendary mercenary leader Mike O’Hore, the South African leader of the Fifth Commando, nicknamed the Wild Geese. Baumann had always considered O’Hore, whose exploits were world-famous, something of a slacker, a slob whose greatest skill was getting himself good press. But his bomb makers were always the best.

When it became necessary for Baumann to disappear from Angola, he had arranged an “accident” outside the capital city, Luanda, in which it appeared that he had been ambushed and killed. All the other mercs, including, no doubt, Hercule-who knew Baumann only under another name-had always believed that he was dead, one of the many casualties of war.

Bomb-disposal experts are a strange breed. They do their harrowing work in odd corners of the world, traveling to where the work is, often on contract for various governments. Many of them were brought in to clear land mines in Cambodia in the 1970s; in Angola, most of the land mines were cleared by Germans, although a few Belgians were brought in as well. After the Gulf War, the Kuwaiti government contracted with Royal Ordnance for an enormous number of bomb-disposal specialists to clear the leftover munitions. Their work is so stressful that many of them-those who escape unharmed-retire as soon as they can find good work elsewhere. Baumann now learned that this Hercule/Charreyron had left this hazardous line of work in the early eighties, when he was hired by the small Belgian firm Carabine Automatique of Liège.

“My God, it’s great to see you,” Charreyron at last exclaimed. “This is-this is just amazing! Please, sit.”

“And you too,” Baumann said, sinking into a chair.

“Yes,” Charreyron said, as he sat behind his desk. “How marvelous it is to see you again!” He was brave, genial, and clearly terrified. “But I don’t understand. You-well, the report of your death was some sort of disinformation, is that right?”

Baumann nodded, seemingly pleased to be sharing this secret with his old comrade in arms.

“I take it Rhys-Davies is a cover name, then?”

“Exactly,” Baumann said. He confided to the Belgian a fabricated, though plausible, story of his defection from South Africa to Australia and eventually to England, his hush-hush security work on behalf of a London-based sheik. “Now, this client of mine has asked me to undertake a highly sensitive project,” he went on, and explained the fusing mechanism that he needed to have built.

“But really, I haven’t done that sort of work for a few years now,” Charreyron protested mildly.

“I suspect it’s like riding a bicycle,” Baumann said. “You never forget. And the technology has changed little if at all in the last few years.”

“Yes, but…” His voice trailed off as he listened to Baumann, taking notes all the while.

“The relay,” Baumann said, “must be attached to a pocket pager. When the pager receives a signal, it will cause the relay to close, which will close the circuit between battery and detonator.”

“Won’t you need some means of disabling it?”

“Yes, but I want to set the electronic timer to go off automatically if it’s not disabled.”

Charreyron, his composure returned, simply shrugged nonchalantly.

“One more thing,” Baumann said. “There must also be a microwave sensor built into the mechanism that will set off the bomb if anyone approaches.”

Charreyron nodded again, arching his brows in mild surprise.

“I will need three of them,” Baumann said. “One for testing purposes, and the other two to be sent, separately.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Now, as to price.”

“Yes,” the Belgian said. He did some rapid calculations and then announced a large sum in Belgian francs.

Baumann arched his eyebrows in surprise. Fusing mechanisms of such complexity generally went for about ten thousand dollars apiece, and he did not like to be cheated.