"Da Bomb! (or all in a day's work)" for the PicFic Tuesday Challenge

[mrua7.livejournal.com]

The Prompt:

He crouched there studying the explosive device that had been left sitting on the floor beside a wastebin.

It had been deposited (no pun intended for once) there inside the First National Bank; his bank. He’d simply walked inside to cash a check when all hell broke loose.

People went out the door screaming as he yelled one word…

”Bomb!”

No one had left a note demanding cash. Whether the device was meant to blow up the vault, or the building, he wasn’t sure. Though either way it exploding would result in scads of money flying up into the air. That would be one heck of a trick.

Six sticks of dynamite, too many connections, and wires; it made him stop again for a second and reassess the situation.

That much TNT could take out over 13,000 pounds of rock or in this case a small building...no this wasn’t good at all.

No visible timer that he could see, and he supposed that was a good thing; no time limits on disarming this mess.

He counted the wires...one red, one purple, one yellow and a blue one. No wait, wait wait. There was a copper one, bare with no insulation.

His head raced. A black wire was always the hot wire, a white one was the neutral wire. It provided the return path for the current provided by the hot wire, but there was no white one. The neutral wire was connected to the ground wire.

Usually in electronics a bare copper one meant that was the ground wire, but he was certain this was not the case here.

Whoever built this thing avoided the typical color coding of red, blue black and white used for most bombs...no this fellow had to be creative.

Well there was always the old tried and true method of ‘when in doubt...run,” but no, that wouldn’t do either.

He moved his hands around the device with the utmost care, lifting two flat grey metal plates that were held together with pieces of red tape.

Slicing the tape with his pocketknife, he separated them to-find-a-timer embedded in those grey plates that were cleverly molded out of C-4. This just went from bad to worse.

“Damn!”

Of course there was one minute left and counting on that red flashing digital timer.

It was too late to run and besides, there were probably a lot of innocents still in the vicinity. He had to disarm this thing  right now as too many lives were at stake, including his own.

Should he just throw himself on the device and hope his body helped deflect some of the impact when it when off? With six sticks of dynamite, and C-4, who was he kidding?

“Hell no,” he mumbled to himself. He was going to disarm this thing somehow.

He stared at the beast as the seconds ticked away; a bead of sweat trickling down his nose, coming to a stop, suspended there at its tip.

The only thing he could do was guess. Grabbing the purple wire, he folded it over his knife blade and counted out loud.

“One, two, three.” He closed his eyes as he sliced it in half.

Nothing happened. No boom.

He opened his eyes, one at a time and saw the timer had stopped its countdown.

Napoleon pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his brow with a sigh of relief.

He suddenly smiled, thinking Illya would have been proud of him. Shame the Russian wasn’t here to witness his triumph.

Then again, Kuryakin would have taken over diffusing the bomb if he had been here. It was his ‘thing.’

Napoleon disconnected the yellow wire from the dynamite. It was a done deal.

Still he had bragging rights to this one.

Comments

[laurose8.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this very good read. The suspense and the pov are top rate - the bit about the sweat drop is good. And I love the twist at the end.

[mrua7.livejournal.com]

Thank you thank you! So glad you enjoyed it. The bit about the sweat was one of my favorite parts while writing it. I needed something very visual, and I imagined that anyone (even Illya) might sweat under such unexpected circumstances. "D

[pfrye.livejournal.com]

Very good visuals and internal dialogue.

[mrua7.livejournal.com]

Thank you and glad you enjoyed it!

[threecee.livejournal.com]

Well done to both Napoleon and you! Very visual.

(Possibly a bit too vivid with the bomb description if Homeland Security is monitoring LJ.)

[mrua7.livejournal.com]

Thank you! The bomb is just as it looked in the picture...which was a scene from the TV show. U would home HS is monitoring more important places than a MFU writing site.

Gee I wonder if all the research done over the years has gotten us UNCLE writers flagged. Eeeek!

[threecee.livejournal.com]

Some of the participants are from foreign countries, we regularly talk about espionage, shooting people, and bombs... Sounds like it should trip some automatic monitoring program somewhere.

[mrua7.livejournal.com]

Well hopefully when the powers that be see that it's Man from UNCLE fan fiction, they just move along. Nothing to see here.

[lindafishes8.livejournal.com]

Oh no! You caught me thinking it was Illya doing the defusing. I'm off my game with this one. Skillfully suspenseful.

[mrua7.livejournal.com]

Ha ha! Gotcha! Glad you liked it and thanks!