Mac is choking—maybe has been for a while—on a thick cloud of dust that seems to clog his entire respiratory system with every inhale. His cheek scrapes against cement as he curls around a series of gagging coughs. His eyes are a sticky, damp mess, like he's literally coughing up tears as well as what feels like his actual lungs and it takes him a moment to register that he's lying in darkness.
It's much darker than it should be at noon on a sunny day in the desert; darker even than midnight in this hell hole. When he can move, he wipes his eyes. It feels like he's just smearing wet dust around on his face, and does nothing to improve his vision.
The only light is from the ever-changing red clockface numbers inches from his face. For a moment, he's confused. He doesn't have a clock by his bunk.
He stares at the numbers until it occurs to him that he's lying on the ground in this small, dark, dusty space, watching the numbers on the bomb count down.
Right. The bomb. The one he was defusing.
The one with thirty-one minutes left on it.
That's less time than he remembers. He's been out for a while.
He tries to roll and realizes he can't because something is holding his left foot down. He tugs at it a few times before he skims his fingers down his legs to feel for what he can't see, and his fingers meet something hard and rough and chunky.
It's concrete. It's chunks of the building's former upper floor, crumbly and rough-edged where they're broken. His foot is pressed sideways against the floor, pinned down by the weight of the blocks. If he can find something to use as a lever, he can shift the block, maybe, he thinks, although that could be dangerous. It would be unwise to tamper with anything he can't see, because the concrete could fall toward him instead of away. He's stuck like this until he has better information or tools.
It would help if he could see, but his flashlight must have rolled away. He feels around the floor to the edges of his bubble of space and his fingers find the cold metal cylinder under the edge of the bomb. The light doesn't come on when he clicks the button or thumps it against his palm. The bulb is probably broken.
He continues feeling around him, banging his fingers into objects where he expects to find air, until he gets the mental picture of what he can't see in the dusty dark.
He's still under the table, which is miraculously still standing although he's not entirely sure how because a lot of concrete seems to have come down on top. The wall he was next to is still partially standing, and the cabinets, but the rest of the room is gone. It's all just blocks of concrete piled against each other.
He's trapped under here, with no way out, his foot pinned by the rubble.
With a bomb.
And it is going to explode in this small space in twenty-nine minutes.
Mac isn't usually afraid of bombs. He understands how they work, how the chemicals combine to make an explosive reaction, how the circuit board controls the triggering event, how it's all connected. How to take it all apart.
But usually he feels like he has some control over the situation. Usually, if he comes across a device that he honestly can't defuse, he can walk away. He almost never does that, but it's always an option.
Except not right now. He drags himself backwards until his back is against a table leg, as far from the bomb as he can get in the small space without moving his foot. He's still within an arm's reach of the malevolent, shrinking numbers.
He reaches up to his ear; no earpiece. It must have gotten knocked out. He feels around near the rubble and finds the cord. The earpiece is on the floor near it, but the other end of the cable stretches into the rubble, back to his vest, most of which is under debris. It's pinned down well enough he can't tug it loose. But the cord stretches far enough he can put the earpiece back in his ear.
"Jack?" He pauses, coughs and gags. "Jack?" Everything is dead silence except the ringing in his ears, and the way he can't hear his own voice just makes his anxiety burgeon. He is alone here. Jack probably thinks he's dead. Jack's probably retreated back to the truck, which is the smart thing to do when terrorists haul out a second bomb after you've already swept the place.
He's not usually one to freak out, but he can't help himself. He is absolutely not okay right now. He is panicking, his breath fast and shallow, his heart racing in his chest, and even if he can't hear anything yet he can't keep himself from yelling into the comms. "Jack. Jack! JACK!" He only stops yelling when his hyperventilating stirs up enough dust that he falls into another coughing fit and doesn't have the breath to speak through it.
He can't hear the reply, if there is one, because his ears still feel like they've been stuffed with cotton. He can faintly hear his own voice but he can't even tell how loud he's talking. He can't tell if the radio is even working. Given that the unit was attached to his vest, which is now inaccessible, there's a good chance it isn't.
Twenty-six minutes left on the bomb. Why is it even here? What's the point of exploding a bomb that will bring down the building on top of another bomb?
Unless the point is just to kill whoever got sent to deal with the first bomb.
If so, it seems to be working. Mac could defuse this bomb if he could see it. But it's too dark. The ever-changing red lights on the timer are the only light in this little pocket, and they don't shine on the bomb's guts, even if they were bright enough to work with.
He can't defuse a bomb in the dark.
Twenty-five minutes left.
At least the dust has settled enough that he's not coughing until he gags. He breathes slowly, trying not to bring on another fit, and glares at the clockface.
This going to be the bomb that kills him, and the irony is, it won't be because he screwed up. He was still looking at it when the building came down on top of him. And he's sure he didn't miss any other bombs laying around, which means somebody planted the second one after they entered the building to sweep it.
Somebody who meant to kill them both in here.
On the upside, Jack might not be dead, all because Mac sent him to the truck. Jack was outside when he spotted the bomb, and it doesn't seem like he had enough time to do anything other than yell at Mac. He probably didn't run into the building before the explosion. That's a relief.
The rubble pile shifts and a fresh puff of dust fills the air, along with a grinding noise that he can actually hear. Mac curls into himself, sure the building is going to collapse the rest of the way. But it doesn't. Not yet, anyway. After a few seconds, the noises stop and eerie silence resumes.
Twenty-three minutes until this bomb kills him, assuming the table continues to hold up the ceiling that long. Not a lot of time even if he could see. Even if he had his EOD tech kit, which he remembers laying on the ground near where his foot is trapped. He recalls laying his knife right on the kit, which means both are under feet of rubble, along with his vest with all its pouches of handy items.
No light, no kit, no knife. And twenty-two minutes left on the timer.
But he's hearing something other than his own ears ringing. He takes the earpiece out of his ear, dusts it off, and puts it back in. "Jack?"
"MAC!" Jack's whoop is faint in his ears. "MAC? You're really alive in there? You stopped talking and you weren't replying—"
"Yeah." He looks at the bomb, licks his lips. "My foot's pinned but I'm okay. There's a pocket of space under the table with the bomb."
"Okay, no problem, that's great. We're going to dig you out, we just gotta be careful so the pile doesn't collapse any more. It's going to take a bit. Don't have any heavy machinery here, but I've got some locals—"
"Jack." Mac cuts through the excited babbling. "Jack, how long is a bit exactly? Because—" he hesitates, has to take a long, shaky breath before he continues. "There are twenty-one minutes left on the timer on this IED."
The silence from the other end of the line stretches on too long. "But you can disarm it, right? I don't want to be a downer, homie, but there's a lot of building bits on top of you and if it all shifts the wrong way…"
"I know. It might come down the rest of the way."
"And that would be bad," Jack says, speaking in a slow, measured tone that makes his alarm clear. Mac has only known Jack a few months, although at this very moment in time it seems like forever, but they've been in enough tense situations that he knows that Jack is only really serious when there's real trouble. Jack's voice is very serious as he continues. "So you can disarm it, right?"
The tension in Jack's voice makes Mac's shoulders hunch. "I—it's dark. I can't even see the guts of the device. The flashlight broke and I can't get to my kit. It's under something. And my knife. It's gone, too." The line is so silent that Mac knows, just knows, that Jack has muted it and is cussing vigorously where Mac can't hear him. Because there's no way they're going to dig Mac out in—he checks the timer—the next twenty minutes, and they both know it.
He is stuck in this hole with this bomb until it goes off and there isn't anything Jack can do about it.
That fact isn't going to sit well with Jack, who only stuck around in this hellhole to keep Mac safe. As scared as Mac is of the bomb, he's equally upset to know how hard Jack is going to take losing his bomb nerd. He won't be able to tell his next EOD that he's kept all his EODs safe.
"Jack," he says, when the silence stretches. "You should look around and make sure whoever planted that second bomb didn't plant a third one. If you find another one, I can walk you through disarming it—"
The line unmutes to the sound of Jack cussing heatedly. "How about you worry about disarming the bomb you got and let me worry about the ones I don't got."
There's a slight quaver in Jack's voice that makes it clear he's not really angry, so Mac just waits, smiling a bit.
"You can't fix that flashlight? I've seen you fix things that are way more complicated. Or make a light some other way?"
He might be able to use the flashlight's batteries and its coil wire to set up a short circuit that would start a fire–-maybe set a piece of clothing on fire, though his uniform isn't really the right fabric for it. A fire would also burn up his oxygen supply while providing poor light. Even if it made better light, even if the rubble isn't airtight enough that he'd actually suffocate from lack of oxygen, the small space would quickly fill with smoke. "I don't think so."
Jack's line goes dead silent again for several seconds. The stillness makes Mac's skin crawl. There may be a hundred people standing ten feet away on the outside of the rubble, but he's surrounded by darkness and a sense of muffled weight looming over him, faintly lit by the red-hued, ever-shrinking numbers counting down the rest of his life. It feels like he's all alone, miles from anyone. "Jack?"
"Yeah, kid?"
"It's really quiet in here." Mac's voice isn't exactly steady. "Would you just–just leave the line open? Please."
"Yeah, okay. I gotcha. No more muting." Jack sighs. "You're just always telling me to be quiet so you can focus, and I do need you to really focus on figuring out what you can do about that bomb."
"I recently changed my mind about you being quiet. But I still can't do anything about the bomb. I can barely see the bomb—" But barely isn't the same as can't. His eyes must have adjusted, and the dust has fallen from the air, because when he reaches out he thinks he can tell his hand from the rest of the darkness. He squints at it, trying to decide if it's his imagination.
"Now, don't you go telling me lies. Just because I can't see you doesn't mean I'm gonna believe everything you say. I know you can do something. Ain't nothing worse going to happen if you try to defuse that bomb right now than will happen if you let it do its thing. And here's the good news. At least we know for sure it doesn't have any sort of motion trigger, right?"
Mac huffs a breath of air in response. "Sure. At least we know that." But Jack's got a point. The device was built to detonate when the timer counts all the way down to zero. It would probably be pretty simple to defuse if he could see it. He could easily do it within the eighteen remaining minutes in any other circumstances. "I did get a look at it before but only for a minute."
"So get to work, kid. No slacking off in there. You're on duty."
"Yeah, okay. I'm going to work on it." Mac sucks in a deep breath and lets it out slowly. "But no promises."
"Good. Good. You've done a lot of bombs. You know how they work. Don't need to see it to know it."
Mac doesn't bother replying, but Jack still leaves the line open. His hearing is getting clearer, because Mac hears more distant voices in the background now, people standing near Jack, but not too close. Something about pulling apart the rubble.
He has to shift to be able to reach into the bomb, which is a problem with his foot still trapped. He ends up twisted like a pretzel, his left leg pinned to the floor, right twisted around to hold his weight and steady him. But at least he can reach it now.
He almost wishes he didn't know how bad the explosion will be when the bomb is triggered and could pretend like putting his helmut over the bomb would save him. But it won't. There is nothing that's going to save him from the pressure wave that will rip through the enclosed space.
He knows motion shouldn't set it off, but it still takes him too many lost seconds before he can bring himself to touch the bomb. Slowly and carefully, almost holding his breath, he runs his fingers along the back of the timer plate, feeling where the wires are connected.
The timer itself with its fourteen minutes is a distraction, so he closes his eyes.
The wires were different colors, he remembers that from what he managed to see of it before the second bomb exploded, but he doesn't which wire is which. He was waiting on the flashlights from the truck to figure that out. So it's like working on a bomb where all the wires are black, or all red, or all green. He's defused bombs like that before. They require extra care to make sure you're not getting any wires mixed up.
He traces each wire back into the guts of the thing, one wire at a time, feeling carefully around where they connect. It wouldn't be good if he accidentally dislodged one, and it's possible that the first explosion could have loosened something.
This bomb really isn't a very complicated device. Fortunately, because if it had a lot of wires he'd really be sunk. But even with only a few, it's hard to know what to do.
He opens his eyes. Nine minutes and a few seconds remain on the timer.
"Jack," he says, cutting through whatever conversation Jack is having with someone else on the other end of the comms. Jack's been talking the whole time, but not to him, so he hasn't really been listening to what Jack's saying.
"Yeah, Mac?"
Mac squeezes his hands into fists. "Did you set a stopwatch? Because you need to make sure nobody's digging around here nine minutes from now."
"How about you keep worrying about your end of this business and I'll keep worrying about mine, huh?"
It's not a good answer because it leaves open the possibility of someone else getting hurt and he did not become an EOD just to let people get hurt by bombs. "Jack. Promise me you'll clear everyone out. Promise it." He swallows against the dryness in his throat.
"Mac—"
"In fact, you should really just clear them away now."
"Mac—"
"Jack. I don't know which of these wires to cut. And I don't have anything to cut them with." All he's got is the damn broken flashlight. He picks it up, fiddling with it. Twisting the head because he has nowhere else to put his nervous energy except into the joints of this one tool. It only moves half a turn, for focusing, before it stops. But he can roll it back and forth, back and forth between his fingers.
Jack is quiet for a moment and Mac's sure he's holding in a pile of cusses. "You're going to have to just do your best, Mac."
"I will. But you still–you still need to clear the area. My best guess is still going to be a guess. I could be wrong."
"Your guesses are pretty good," Jack says, and he sighs. "Okay, I'll get everyone cleared out."
Seven minutes. Jack hasn't muted the comms but he's pretty sure Jack did put a hand over the microphone, because he can tell Jack is hollering, but it's muffled.
He's wasted a lot of time arguing with Jack, but it wasn't really wasted. What he's wasted was all the time not talking to Jack. He regrets that. He'll regret it for the next six and a half minutes, give or take.
Jack's back on the line. "So how are you going to cut that wire?"
"What?" Mac shakes himself, forcing his eyes away from the timer. He switches the flashlight around in his hands and twists the tailcap around and around until it comes off. That's better. He's always liked taking things apart.
"You said you don't have any way to cut the wire. Can't you just unwind it from the thingy?"
"That's really not the safest option." He could go on, but time is running short. "Did you get everyone away from this building?"
There's a pause. "Yeah. Yeah, everyone's cleared back fifty feet, hoss. And I don't think there's much time left on that timer so maybe you'd better get back to disarming it pronto, yeah?" Jack barely leaves a breath for him to reply. "Look, just pull that wire off if you have to. Just, you know, whatever gets it disconnected. There's no time to be a perfectionist here."
It would still be better to cut it, but he needs a tool for that.
The end of the flashlight casing, where the tailcap screws on, ends in a rim that isn't sharp, but almost. It wouldn't cut through a wire. But the flashlight body is aluminum and aluminum is soft, easy to sharpen. It won't take all of the four minutes he has left.
He angles it against the floor and drags the casing against the cement, then three more times before he tests the edge against the tips of his finger. It's sharper. Almost sharp enough, as long as he can press the wire against another surface. He scrapes it a few more times and then disassembles the head of the flashlight. The tempered glass of the wide, flat lens should be hard enough.
But which wire to cut? He's disarmed enough bombs that he's narrowed his choices down to two likely candidates. Maybe he could figure out which one is right if he had more time, but the timer's down to just over ninety seconds on the timer. He is flat out of time.
He wishes he had known this morning where this day was going to go. He would have written a reply to Bozer's last letter. He tucked it under his pillow this morning so he'd remember it after supper. But there's a good chance it's too late now. Jack will find it when he cleans out Mac's stuff. He thinks about asking Jack to reply to the letter for him, but the thing is, he knows Jack will. Jack will do that without Mac having to ask.
With his foot pinned, he has to squirm around to get his hands into the right place. He slides the flashlight lens under the wire that's nearer to him because it's easiest to reach. There's no other reason to favor it over the second wire. It's just in the right place. Then he fingers the edge of the flashlight casing with his right index finger until he finds the sharp edge he just made and positions it on top of the wire.
"Jack?"
"Yeah?"
Mac tries to untangle the thoughts swirling in his brain. He wants to say something like thank you or take care of yourself or this isn't your fault, or some other words of parting because there's at least a fifty percent chance he's cutting the wrong wire. There's a fifty percent chance, at best, that he isn't about to die from the supersonic, over-pressured wave of a high-order explosion. A fifty percent chance, at best, that Jack isn't going to be digging the pulverized pieces of him out from under the broke bits of this table and everything on top of it tomorrow.
Really, the chances of him surviving are probably less than fifty percent, because there's a decent chance the two wires he's choosing between are both wrong. So maybe the odds of him cutting the right wire are more like twenty-five percent.
Those odds aren't that great, but they're better than letting the timer run out.
He takes a deep breath. "I'm going to cut the wire now."
"Good," Jack says. He's in full cheerleader mode, Mac can tell by the too-confident tone of his voice. But even though it's fake confidence, it makes Mac feel a little better. "That's good. That's what you gotta do to get out of there."
"Okay," Mac says.
He takes another breath and shoves the barrel of the flashlight against the wire, jamming it against the lens.
The wire springs loose against his fingers. The timer stops at 14 seconds.
He sits frozen, staring at it, waiting. Watching, his chest pumping short, shallow breaths that are too fast.
"Mac?" Jack's voice is thin and hesitant.
The flashlight falls from his suddenly unsteady hands. He's shaking like a leaf as he collapses to the ground and lays there in a darkness that no longer flickers in time with the changing numbers.
"Mac?"
"I cut the wire." His voice breaks like he's a teenager again. "I cut it."
"It's safe?"
Mac's eyes fill with tears, which is ridiculous because he did not just get killed in a violent explosion. He's not safe, either, because he's still one table between being alive and being flattened by the building's former roof. But he's not dead.
Somehow, the table is holding up. The cabinets that it stands up against is probably helping. Without the bomb to bring more rubble down, his chances of being dead today are so much lower. That means Jack is not going to have to dig him up and carry him out of this building the way Pena was carried out, burned and bloody from an explosion, and his brain just can't take the threat of being squashed seriously and he's fresh out of adrenaline. He sniffles as a tear escapes. "Yeah. It's safe."
"That's good. That's great. Then all you gotta do is sit tight and we're gonna get you out of there." Jack's voice vibrates with excitement. He shouts some things to someone other than Mac; there's a quick conversation Mac can't hear—partly because he's full-out crying now, sucking in big breaths and shaking, tears making a river across his face and falling into the dust–and partly because Jack is talking near the comms but not into it.
Jack comes back on the line after a chaotic minute. "I've got half a village here ready to dig you out. And they've got a plan to do it safely that I'm feeling pretty good about. You're going to be okay, okay? You hear me?"
"Yeah." Mac sniffles, and he knows that Jack can hear every ridiculous noise he's making. "I'm fine."
"That's at least half a lie, but we can discuss it later."
Mac chokes on a laugh.