Gauntlet

Richard Aaron Gauntlet

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO…

Ping, Doon, Bubbles, Foxy Lady, and my very own “Turbee.” I love you all.

1

So just how big a crater will it make if we blow up 660 tons of Semtex?” Richard Lawrence asked Sergeant Jason McMurray.

“No clue,” replied the taciturn McMurray, scratching his chin. “There’s no precedent for something like this. It’s an unconfined explosion, and it’s gonna be a damned dangerous one. But if I can’t handle it, no one can.” McMurray was from the Army’s 184th Ordnance Battalion stationed in Fort Gilles, Georgia. He’d had more than 15 years of training in the disposal of conventional, chemical/biological, and nuclear weapons. He had defused or disposed of bombs, warheads, mortar shells, and land mines, and had a pronounced scar on his left cheek as a daily reminder of the danger of his vocation. He was the best of the best. And he was already planning a 30-day leave after he’d wrapped up this particular circus. Cold beer, family, and golf.

Now he looked around the place once again, this time with annoyance. What had started as a solid, common-sense idea had turned into a carnival. The Islamic Republic of Libya had fallen apart into a series of warring factions, all vying for the throne. Europe and the USA had finally convinced the remnants of the Libyan Army that, if it wished aid and assistance from the west, it had to give up its enormous stockpile of the Czechoslovakian plastic explosive known as Semtex. The question had quickly become how the United States would dispose of the explosive once it was surrendered. Then some bright executive in the Pentagon had come up with the perfect solution. Cart the explosive to the middle of the Sahara Desert and blow it up, where it wouldn’t hurt anyone.

Sergeant McMurray was in charge of a crew of 20 soldiers from the 184th — men who had been handpicked to take care of the mess. At the moment they were busy receiving, counting, packaging, and then transporting the packets of Semtex from an abandoned landing strip near Bazemah, which was nothing more than a tiny town adjacent to an oasis in the eastern Libyan Sahara. A strange base for such a large operation, but it had been the best they could do. Most of the Semtex had been delivered by air, in a variety of planes. Some had also come by Jeep, and, amazingly, some by camel. Most came in the cellophane wrapped “bricks” that had been sold by Czechoslovakia in the ’70s; each ten inches in length, four inches in width, and two inches in depth. There was 660 tons of the stuff — approximately 600,000 kilos. Each brick was measured for size, weight, and contribution to total, and turned over to the Army for transport to the detonation site.

Richard Lawrence was the CIA’s contribution to the field trip. He was a trained pilot who had flown for the Navy, then retired his wings to become a Federal field agent. He didn’t know anything about explosions, and was demonstrating his ignorance at every turn.

“And we’re looking at what, about twenty thousand bricks?” he asked.

“Yup,” came the terse reply.

Richard performed a few calculations. “Have I got it right, McMurray?” he asked. “The pile’s going to be twenty feet wide; twenty-five long and eleven high feet wide, 25 feet long, and 11 feet high, more or less?”

“Well more or less,” replied McMurray. “The thing you have to realize, though, is that you can’t blow it up cartoon style, with one fuse running to the pile. If you did that, a fair amount of the material would be blown free through the kinetic forces. Not all of the Semtex would be destroyed.”

“So what are we doing instead?” pressed Richard.

“Multiple blasting caps and fuses, together with Amtec timers, so that separate electrical signals are transmitted to the pile at precisely the same instant,” said McMurray. “And by ’precisely,’ I mean within a nanosecond. It’s actually not that different from detonating a whopping big pile of C4. These bricks are a little larger, but the characteristics are similar.”

“Oh obviously,” said Richard, flicking a fly off his clipboard. “How big will the blast be?”

“We’re looking at two thirds of a kiloton, but this is Semtex, not TNT. I’d say we’re looking at the equivalent of a kiloton of TNT. That will make the explosion, if things are fused properly, the equivalent of a small nuclear blast.”

Richard reflected on that for a minute. “How far back should they be?” he asked, referring to the pack of reporters that appeared to be growing by the hour.

“I would say at least two miles,” responded McMurray. “Maybe more.” Richard hadn’t counted on the growing crowd of reporters, journalists, and gawkers that had started to assemble around them. But August was a slow news month, and the destruction of Libya’s Semtex stash was starting to make the front pages.

He’d also overlooked the political wile of Libya’s new leader, General Minyar, who had assembled a large tent near the center of operations. He could barely control the many factions and armed bands that roamed Libya after the “Green Revolution.” He barely controlled the country, but at least he represented a figure of leadership that the West could deal with.

This had further motivated the news stations, which were there in force. News Corp was setting up a camp, and CNN, BBC, and Al Jazeera were also there to record the fireworks. The official moment of detonation was still two days away, but Bazemah had already seen a substantial increase in tourists, all waiting to see the “big bang.” Several movie studios had sent crews and cameras, for the sole purpose of shooting footage of such a large explosion, to be used in some future high-budget action film. A festive atmosphere prevailed. The overriding concern shared by the news crews was that they would run out of cold beer before the explosion occurred. A fitting worry, since the explosion was taking place in the heart of the great Sahara; it was, by early afternoon, 120 degrees in the shade.

The question about the size of the explosion, and specifically the size of the crater it would create, was starting to tease the airwaves. There were many predictions, and there was even a Las Vegas betting agency setting odds on calling the crater size. What would it be… 500 feet across? Maybe 600?

Richard already had a throbbing headache from the pressure. He tried to ignore it, continuing to review the inventory counts that arrived with each new shipment, counting again and again the number of bricks, and entering them into a spreadsheet on his laptop. “God-damned bean counter now,” he muttered aloud, the corners of his mouth drawing down in a grimace. He longed for a return to his Navy days, when he was landing Tomcats on what, from a short distance out, appeared to be postage stamp‒sized aircraft carriers. He had taken pride in his skills, and was devastated when, in his early 30s, his vision started to deteriorate, and he could no longer meet the Navy’s requirements. Of course he hadn’t told anyone what was going on at the time, and had continued to do his job as best he could. Everything had been fine until one night, when he splashed a Tomcat in the course of a difficult nighttime carrier landing. It hadn’t been a mistake the Navy was willing to forgive. After that he had taken a lateral transfer to the SEAL program and had served in the second Gulf War as a special operations officer.

He had grown up in Islamabad, Pakistan, where his parents had worked at the US Embassy. When he was 16, both his mother and father had died in a car crash, and he’d moved to California to live with the Goldbergs, a family that had also been stationed at the Islamabad Embassy, and who had known Richard’s parents well. On his nineteenth birthday, he signed with the Navy. When he’d been forced to leave after the carrier crash, his background and his skill with languages, especially Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu, had made him a natural choice for the CIA’s very busy Middle East operation. His dark complexion didn’t hurt either.