Nightwatch

Chapter 44

They set up their tentative ORP inside the clearing where they had discovered the bodies of the young man and the German shepherd dog. Jody Glickman identified the unfortunate victim as a local named C.J. He’d been a close friend of the Stoddard family, and Thomas could only hope that Vince and the Vice President hadn’t shared his fate.

Captain Christian’s MPs discovered signs of a struggle, and a trail covered with footprints leading farther down into the hollow.

They also found the green plastic claymore fragment that had most likely cut down C.J. Thus when they began their way down this promising new trail, it was with the utmost caution.

Thomas volunteered to be part of the point unit, a five-person Sapper team that would be conducting the initial route-sweeping operation. His responsibility was security, and he stayed right on the heels of their RTO, Sergeant Reed, and the two mine-detector operators.

Their NVGs lit up the night with a ghostly green tint. Thomas fought back the natural urge to hold his breath as they slowly inched their way forward. It was eerily quiet, with not even the barest of breezes present to rustle the limbs of the overhanging oaks.

While one of the mine-detector operators checked the trail for trip wires with a grappling hook that had fifty feet of rope attached to it, his co-worker crawled forth on his stomach, poking the earth with a ten-inch-long, stiff plastic probe. It was slow, tedious work, and just when Thomas began wondering if it was worth all the bother, the grappling hook snagged the first trip wire.

The taut nylon wire was all but invisible to the naked eye. It was set up to be triggered by either a foot or an ankle, and Sergeant Reed carefully followed it into the brush by the side of the trail.

Thomas was surprised when Reed beckoned him and pointed toward the device to which the trip wire was tied.

“What do you make of it. Special Agent?”

Illuminated in the red-tinted beam of Reed’s flashlight was a fist-sized metallic object, anchored into the ground on a wooden stake. It looked much like a large hand grenade, with the trip wire attached to a firing pin that was set into the top portion of the device. It definitely wasn’t a claymore, and the doughnut shaped rings that encircled the object’s body, were unlike anything that Thomas had ever seen before.

“Perhaps Colonel Callahan can help us identify it,” he suggested.

Ted Callahan had been following in the next team, and it didn’t take him long to join them. Only a single glance on his part caused him to audibly gasp, and when he spoke, it was with shocked reverence.

“That, my friends, is a Yugoslavian Type PMR-2A antipersonnel mine. It’s got a kill radius of fifteen meters, and is designed to kill and maim by fragmentation. Our units in Bosnia were the first to encounter it, and, I’m afraid to say, it appears we’ve finally found one of the mines that were stolen from Leonard Wood.”