Free The Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

been paying more attention. Watching the soil, stopping to test with the probe.
    “Careful and correct,” I said.
    “Correct,” Redes said. “Since you're the whiz kid, you've earned the prize of finishing this job off. The rest of you, out. Belk, finish exposing the bomb.”
    The rest of the gang climbed out, delighted to get away from the bomb and the sergeant's wrath.
    Sergeant Redes descended and watched me dig for a minute or two before he spoke. “I did the same thing, you know. ‘Clink.’” He looked up out of the hole and shook his head.
    I thought he would get mad if I stopped digging, but I did anyway. “Did your sergeant get mad?” I asked.
    “I was the sergeant,” he said. “Last day before I left France. Right in the middle of the town square. Ten yards, maybe, from the front door of the church, which was a thousand years old or something. Everybody from my lieutenant to the monsignor to some passing colonel looking on, watching the experienced sergeant do his work.
Clink”
    “What happened?”
    “Nothing. Same as here.” He bent down, ran his hands lightly over the bomb, and let out a long breath before muttering, “This is odd.” He studied it for a minute more, agreed with himself about something, and then said, “You know the lieutenant's got a sister?”
    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