Reynolds winked. From another man, it might have been a friendly gesture, but Cook saw a coldness in his face that spoke of anything but friendliness. Reynolds fished in his pocket for a box of matches and lit up.
‘You got Beaumont out of his burrow,’ Reynolds said, nodding back to the end of the road, where a crowd was gathering behind the ARP man.
‘You should go back and join him,’ Cook said. ‘This thing could go off any minute.’
‘Could do,’ Reynolds said. ‘Could go off instantly, or after a minute, or any time after that.’
But Cook stayed, and Reynolds stayed with him. Bloody-mindedness, perhaps.
‘So what’s your plan?’ Reynolds asked.
‘Try and defuse it,’ Cook said. ‘Must be some kind of detonator. Failing that, dig it out, carry it further away from the hospital.’
‘You might not get very far.’
‘Every yard’s a few less dead civilians,’ Cook said.
‘You done this kind of thing before?’
‘No,’ Cook said.
‘Fancy your chances, do you?’
‘It’s designed to be armed by someone in a dark aeroplane, flying miles up in the sky. I gather it’s cold up there. You’d be wearing gloves. Fumbling around. So there’s going to be some kind of arming mechanism that’s pretty accessible. If they can arm it, we can disarm it.’
‘Got any tools?’ Reynolds asked.
Cook shook his head.
‘Blow the whole place up if you get it wrong,’ Reynolds said, looking at the hospital.
‘Got any better ideas?’ Cook asked.
‘Not much of an ideas man,’ Reynolds said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a roll of fabric. He opened it, like a magic trick – turning the roll into eighteen inches of material, packed with tools, each tool held in place by a loop of elastic. Pliers. Screwdrivers. Things that looked like dental implements.
‘Royal Essex,’ Reynolds said. ‘Sappers. Four years of mucking about in the mud, messing about with these kinds of things. Putting them places. Taking them away from other places.’
‘So what’s the plan?’ Cook asked.
‘Plan?’ Reynolds replied. ‘There’s no plan. Like as not this thing goes off as soon as we touch it.’
Cook looked into the hole. The bomb looked back.
‘Best get it over with then,’ Cook said.
27
The bomb was even bigger up close. Reynolds was underneath it. He’d gone in first, dug himself a hole to the side of the bomb. He had his cheek pressed against the casing, his arms stretched around it. From the expression on his face, he was trying to locate something on its far side.
‘Where’d you put it, you fucking Kraut bastard?’
Cook slid down into the hole after Reynolds.
Reynolds looked back at Cook – awkward in this cramped position. He smiled, tilted his head as he performed some kind of operation with the hand hidden on the far side of the bomb. There was a scrape of metal, then a tinkle of glass.
Reynolds froze.
‘That’s not good,’ he said.
