There were six of them, he the youngest, barely old enough to leave the base, sitting on logs around the covered pit.

The timber squad had not been through here yet, and they had to work around the downed trunks as they cut and burned the brash, their job to make a barren margin along the line so anyone who attempted to approach the pipe could more easily be seen.

It was midsummer. Bright light bounced off the pipeline’s flank. The thick rain had passed an hour ago. They took a break for lunch.

The spade went sharply into the soil with the sound of a hatchet into green wood.

As they dug a little deeper the soil got drier, and didn’t give that sound, and seemed, in drying out, to lose its earthy smell.

He was setting up a place to cut the muntjac up but turned at the noise the others made when they got to the charred grasses they’d packed around the meat.

Moments later the smell of the cooked deer reached him, and the feeling was so intense and primitive he wanted it to persist. Wished bizarrely that he had to wait a little longer.

The corporal picked the deer up with the spade because it was cooked so well it simply fell apart.

He put it on the makeshift table and they ate it with their fingers. A chunk of ration bread in one hand, and the other hand alternately lifting their canteens of clearwater and picking at the meat.

Look, said one of the men, fishing a partially flattened bullet from the muntjac’s flesh. I would have thought it would have gone straight through.

It was then the first device went off.

The first they knew of it was a ripple in the ground. He saw the bones they’d cast about – that they’d slid cleanly from the meat – bounce somehow, as if they had suddenly decided to reanimate. Then there was the sound of the explosion.

~

There were four teams in the area at the time, all within a click. The device had sundered the pipe exactly at the point where one of the teams were resting.

When they got there, the bodies of the team already looked long dead because the water that sluiced about them cleaned them of blood and bloated their skin. They knew some were alive only because of the noise they made, swallowed in the deafening crash of still-coming water.

The great wings of steel that had been blasted into the ground around the pipe hissed with heat. Brought steam up from the wet soil. Spat in the gathering water.

The earth rippled again, and he saw circles form on the surface of a shallow pool. Instinctively hit the ground.

Then the second bomb went off. Like a building crashing down.

Those that were not dead but badly injured began drowning in the water. Three of them still stood. Amongst them, him.