Read The Gulf for Free Online Page B

father did. The counselor said that was important to him.”
    Gordon stared at his stocking feet. Finally he said, “I know.”
    â€œIt wouldn’t be easy, the two of us, with the haying and all—”
    â€œI know,” he said again. He tried to eat another mouthful of eggs, but he couldn’t.
    *   *   *
    The bedroom was cramped and dim. He bent, tugged a beat-up olive-drab box from under Ola’s old bedstead, and snapped open the padlock. In it were uniforms, faded but clean, blue paper banding their starched rectilinearity. He took out a khaki shirt and trousers and laid them out on the star quilting; found a web belt and threaded it thoughtfully through a Marine Corps-style buckle, flipped open a cigar box.
    He laid them on the bed and looked at them for a moment. The silver helmet of a first-class diver. The silver-and-gold fouled-anchor-and-star of a senior chief. A parkerized combat-modified nine-millimeter Browning. And the bomb-and-lightning of a master explosive-ordnance-disposal technician.
    From upstairs came rock music, played louder than it was allowed to be played.
    Gordon sighed, closed the box, put it back in the trunk. Though the world ended, a dairyman had to feed, had to clean, had to milk.
    Leaning forward over the quilt, he closed his eyes.
    *   *   *
    Two sweat-darkened backs ahead of him in a close, hot world of green. No sky overhead, only green, close and silent, as if this doomed country had been bagged and tagged and left to rot.
    â€œThere it is,” said the squad leader, stopping. He pointed down with the muzzle of his rifle at the piece of bamboo. Broken at right angles, the apex pointing ahead along the trail. “Good thing you guys come along. Can you check it out for us?”
    Gordon nodded. He turned to the man behind him. “Beaner, see that? That’s another one of their signs, like the three rocks, or the broken branch hanging down.”
    â€œRight.”
    â€œBetter move your troops back, Sarge. Beaner, come on up with me.”
    The third class nodded. He was new, just out of EOD school. This was his first time in the field. Gordon went ahead cautiously, looking at the ground for nails or depressions, to the side for launching pits, at the air for the faint glint of monofilament. He needed to shit bad. He’d had the runs for a week.
    To someone who didn’t know how to look, the device would have been invisible. Hanging in a tree at head level, with still-living branches lashed around it for camouflage. About the size, Gordon thought, of one of the Chinese-supplied pineapple mines. He put out his hand and stopped Beaner. He examined the surface of the ground very closely for perhaps five minutes, then moved off to the right, pulling out his knife. He scored lightly across the surface of the ground, digging a quarter of an inch deeper each time.
    â€œThere. See it? The wire?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œCut it one strand at a time. Use your nonconductive cutters. Don’t cut them both at once or you’ll complete the circuit.”
    Snip, snip, and he straightened. Ripped up the wire, up through leaf mold and dirt, until the homemade split-bamboo detonator and two PX-brand flashlight batteries came into sight.
    â€œDo you want to blow it?” Beaner whispered.
    â€œI’d like to take it back. If it’s Chinese, the intel people will want a look at it.”
    â€œIs it safe? Can I take it down now?”
    Of course it wasn’t, Gordon thought. Nothing was ever really “safe” in explosive disposal. Sometimes you had to accept a risk. But Beaner should know that. He’d had the training. “Should be,” he said. “Go ahead.”
    He’d been squatting with his pants down twenty feet away when the flat crack of high explosive sent fragments whipping through the leaves and scything down the bamboo above him. Beaner screamed for a long time before he