The Cloud Atlas

I didn't, but I knew enough about army life to brace myself for something coarse.

“Redhead,” he said. “So I hear. Showed me her picture, black and white. Pretty. I suppose the lieutenant's a little red up top, too.” He turned to look at me. “That's the thing of it. They were twins, he tells me. Boy-girl twins. Whaddya call that?”

I shook my head, and he turned back to the bomb.

“So she's a WAC nurse,” he said. “Was. Died Monday. Italy. Jeep. Land mine.”

“That's-hard,” I said, and Redes waited for me to say something more, something adequate.

When I didn't, he turned back to the bomb. “They're not giving him leave till the end of the month. That's hard. Now give me a hand here.” Redes had both hands on the bomb and was trying to roll it back toward him. We steadied it, and then he paused and looked out of the hole.

“You're my best student, you know,” he said. “Or were.” He smiled. Then the lieutenant called his name, and Redes told me to wait. He climbed up to the lip of the hole and told the lieutenant that he needed just a few more minutes to finish clearing the site. Then he came back down to the bottom of the pit, excited.

“So let's finish your training, whaddya think?” he said quickly. “What do we do next?”

“We, well, let's see. I go and get a couple of sticks of C2 or C3, run some blasting wire back clear of the fragmentation zone, hook it up to the blasting machine.” I could see the little pages of my training manual flutter past in my head.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Redes said.

“I'm sorry, the, uh, fifty-cap blasting machine,” I said. “I think.”

“The what? Let's call it what it is, soldier. You're talking about the little box, with the plunger you push down and make everything go boom?” I nodded my head. “That's the hell box, right? Don't bother telling me they taught you something else in your fancy little school.” I nodded again. “Okay,” he said. “That's a lovely plan. But what's the problem with it?”

I was still stuck on hell box, so his question caught me off guard. “Not enough wire?”

Redes looked at me and then rubbed his hands together, slowly. “Right, not enough wire. Belk, there's not enough wire in the world for this job. The problem with that plan is, we blow this bomb where it is, we flatten the camp, which, since it looks like it's built with balsa wood, we could probably level with a couple of lit farts, for that matter. In any case, that all means we take care of the problem here.” He pointed to the bomb. “So let's get started. There's something extremely strange about this bomb. What is it?”

I looked at it for a long time. It didn't look strange. It looked just like the bombs in the manual, markings and all. I shrugged.

“Where's the fuze pocket?”

I relaxed, glad to be back on familiar ground. This question was easy. Like most guys, I'd come into the bomb disposal squad thinking the business end of the bomb was always the nose, but that wasn't the case. Sometimes the fuze was in a cylinder, or pocket, embedded in the middle, as it was here.

“Right there,” I said, pointing to the middle. “Transverse fuzing. German specialty.” Sergeant Redes looked at me and waited. I waited, too, pleased with my vocabulary. And then I gasped. “This is a German bomb, Sergeant? The Nazis are- Sergeant? Oh my God.” I was breathless; a German air raid over California?

Only now did Redes look concerned. “Not so loud, Belk. You already tried to set the bomb off, let's not try to set the camp gossips off, too.” He squatted. “The truth-according to the lieutenant, who radioed the airfield-is that they've been using some captured Nazi ordnance out on the test range. Why waste good American ammo, and so on. Though the lieutenant doesn't quite buy that, and neither do I- for starters, they'd have the wrong damn charging shackles, though that's probably a good thing, because the condensers wouldn't-well. I'm guessing there's a pilot and crew who are going to have a hell of an interesting debriefing.”

A German bomb. I stared at it. I read the papers; we had the Germans on the run. We'd landed in Normandy that June. We were going to win in Europe; I knew it. I thought everyone did. And yet here I was, in the middle of California, staring at a German bomb.

“But this is good news,” said Redes. “Right? Because this is all I've seen for the past year or so, and it was probably all over your classroom, too, right?”

It certainly was. I could see the training films in my head.

If you had the right tool-and Redes did, I was surprised to see, a funny kind of two-pin wrench-you could unscrew the keep ring and access the fuze pocket. Then you could remove the fuze. You weren't quite done, of course. The fuze was its own kind of mini-bomb; screwed onto one end of it was a doughnut-shaped gaine, which was what provided the initial charge. Once you'd unscrewed the gaine, you could breathe a little easier. The fuze without the gaine was a like a gun without a trigger, and a bomb without a fuze was basically a mess of explosives in a handy carrying case. Dangerous, sure, but disassembled, you could toss the parts (maybe toss isn't the right word) into the back of a truck and cart it all off to some lonely pit and blow it up.

But you couldn't do any of that unless you removed or disabled the fuze, and only an officer could do that. Which is why I was surprised to see Sergeant Redes start in on the job, narrating what he was doing the whole time.

“Say what you will about your Nazis, they build a good bomb. Don't repeat that, there's no such thing as a good bomb. And every now and then, they get sneaky. That's not good, either. But the thing is, they're well made”-here he strained with a little effort as he got into a better position-“for the most part. Built tough.”

He fitted the spanner wrench to the keep ring. I swear I could see him tense and hold his breath. I was already holding mine. Then he did something incredible: he turned the wrench. The ring resisted. He put a second hand to it, grunted, held his breath again, tried again. This time, the ring scraped open an eighth of a turn. He exhaled and smiled. “No, she's not going to give us trouble. Normally, you'd give a listen, but we know this animal, right? Hell, I've worked on lots more German bombs than American ones.”

“That's good,” I whispered, because that was as much voice as I could muster.

“Well, we'll see.” He turned the tool again, and the ring scraped around a bit more. Finally, it began to move more freely. He turned it around and around until it was completely loose.

Now I was really scared. Not just because the most dangerous part of the bomb was almost in our hands, but because what we were doing was clearly against the rules as I knew them. One, the officer defuses the bomb. Two, only one man does the job, to minimize potential loss of life. I looked up. What if the lieutenant decided to peer over the side now? I felt around for my shovel. I was just digging.

Redes rocked back on his haunches for a second and surveyed his progress. “Now, American bombs. Fuze in the nose or the tail. Honest piece of business, for the most part. But you know what? I'm glad it's the enemy that's got to defuse them. Most of them, anyway.” He looked at me. “Belk? What's next?”

“British bombs?” I squeaked.

“My whiz kid,” he said. “No, what's next to do here?”

“Call for the lieutenant?”

Redes looked at me. “I thought I explained,” he said.

I thought about the lieutenant's red-haired sister, tried to imagine what she looked like. His twin? I looked back up to the top of the hole, and then back to Redes. “Pull out, well, pull out the