Free Sergeant Dickinson by Jerome Gold Page B

inches down from the tie the bared tips of the wire faced each other on either side of a sliding knot. There was not as much distance between the tips as I remembered having left. Someone must have snagged it. The line must have slipped off his boot. He must have caught it with his heel and it slipped off, I thought.
    Oh Christ. I’ve forgotten my crimpers. I’ll have to cut the leads with my knife.
    I passed the flashlight to my left hand and took out my pocketknife.
    I stopped. I had intended to pull the blasting cap out of the TNT, then cut the leads to the battery. But maybe it would be better to cut the leads first. I did not want to try to pull the leads from the pole connections. I was cold, and my hands were cold, and I was afraid of shivering the leads together, completing the circuit. I decided to pull the blasting cap first.
    I squatted on my heels and set the flashlight on the ground. It was light enough now not to need it to see the tape securing the blasting cap in the capewell of the charge. Gingerly, I grasped the block of TNT in my left hand and cut the tape from around the capewell. I slid the TNT away from the blasting cap and tossed it underhand toward a tree about fifteen feet away. I let go of the blasting cap and sat down. I was sweating.
    I’ll take a break. just a minute or two. I’ll relax.
    When I set the booby trap the afternoon before I tried to ensure that no one would be hurt when it exploded. I placed the charge behind a tree at the top of the hill and strung the trip line down the slope. I took the wrapper off the TNT, for the ends of the wrapper were metal and I wanted to be certain that even if someone placed himself on the wrong side of the tree, the side the charge would explode out toward, there would be no fragmentation to injure him; the TNT itself would absorb the shrapnel from the blasting cap. I had used this device before, in Okinawa in war games with the Marines. The worst anyone had ever gotten from it was a bruised ankle, and that particular fool had had the bad luck to be standing beside it when someone else tripped it.
    The afternoon had gone fine, everything had gone as it had gone before. But that cartridge jammed in the machine gun’s chamber was a bad sign. And leaving my crimpers behind was another. I put this thought out of my mind.
    All that was left to do was disconnect the leads. I picked up the flashlight and inspected the poles of the battery again. I wanted to pull the leads out and be done with it, but I wascold, and there was too much copper showing below the insulation, and it would be too easy to touch the leads together accidentally.
    The blasting cap hung lightly from the wires. I took it in my left hand to ease off the tension between it and the battery connections. Fuck it, I thought. I’ll cut’em.
    When the blasting cap exploded it sounded like a large firecracker had gone off next to my ear. It gave off a peach-colored light and my mouth felt suddenly dry with the taste of adrenaline and I thought, this can’t be happening to me, and I sat down and then I lay down on my side.
    After a moment I made up my mind to get up, and I sat up and found the flashlight on the ground beside me and I shined the light on my left hand. I was not certain that the explosion and the falling down had not been simply a mistake of my mind, that my mind was not playing some malevolent trick on me. And when I shined the light on my hand and I could see no blood but only the puckered and shiny white, like the white of piano keys, of my split fingers, and the deeper obscene white of bone and tendon, and turned off the light and turned away from the hand and sat down again, I still did not entirely believe that it was not a hideous mistake of vision and memory. But then, turning the light again on my hand and seeing the shredded sleeve at my wrist and the welling of blood begin from what was left of the hand, I forced myself to believe that I was not