"Don't move, and don't be afraid, stay calm!"
Song Heping tried to comfort Jiang Feng with a calm tone.
"I learned how to dismantle various bombs and landmines when I was in the army. I'm an expert, you have to trust ."
"Old squad leader... really..."
Jiang Feng looked down at his foot.
His foot was in the yellow sand.
He felt that he had stepped on sothing but wasn't sure what it was.
After all, he had served in the military and also worked as a rcenary abroad. He had so experience and was quite familiar with the structure of landmines.
So he roughly guessed that he had stepped on a landmine.
"Maybe it's not a landmine... it's sothing else..."
As he spoke, he wanted to lift his foot.
"Idiot! Don't move!"
Song Heping, who was scanning the surroundings, stopped Jiang Feng with a shout.
"It's a landmine!"
He pointed about ten ters to their left.
Jiang Feng looked in the direction he pointed and saw a dark mass.
Upon closer inspection, it was a rusted tal surface.
Another look, and his heart jumped to his throat.
A heavy anti-tank landmine!
Only the top surface was exposed by the recent sandstorm, revealing its true form.
"Damn... I'm so unlucky..."
Jiang Feng's voice sounded like he was about to cry.
"Don't move, I'll help you dismantle it."
Song Heping drew the bayonet he had just taken from the British Army corpse and carefully approached Jiang Feng, stepping on Jiang Feng's footprints.
The sound of sand grains sliding over the fabric suddenly stopped.
The whole world seed to co to a standstill.
Jiang Feng's right foot trembled slightly above the sand pit, with the sole of his hiking boot just half an inch from the rusted tal disc.
Song Heping could see the veins bulging in his neck.
"Don't breathe."
Song Heping pulled down his scarf and unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt; the midday desert heat made the tal fasteners burn.
He took out the old British Army bayonet and lightly scraped the edge of the landmine with the tip of the knife, brushing away the yellow sand covering it.
Soon, the object under Jiang Feng's foot was finally exposed, with the oxidized layer on the brass shell peeling away, revealing the English-etched "WD 1942."
"Damn!"
Cold sweat instantly broke out on Song Heping's forehead.
This was a World War II British Army Mk VII anti-personnel mine, but the sand had ground its originally disc-shaped shell into an oval over three-quarters of a century.
What shocked him was that this anti-personnel mine was a pressure-activated mine!
In other words, Jiang Feng should have already had his leg blown off under normal circumstances.
"Old squad leader, what's wrong?"
Hearing Song Heping's low exclamation, Jiang Feng beca a bit uneasy.
"It's nothing, a minor issue."
Song Heping forced himself to calm down and comfort Jiang Feng.
"It's an old British anti-lift mine. I can dismantle it."
"Really?"
"Really, why would I lie to you?"
Under the shadow of Jiang Feng's boot, at least three of the six star-shaped rusted fuse holes still had dark green copper trigger pins inserted in them.
After studying it for a while, Song Heping discovered that the copper trigger pins had rusted over the years and had beco stuck. Originally, the trigger pressure was 5-16KG, and Jiang Feng's weight was enough to set it off.
But because of the rust and Jiang Feng's quick reaction to stop when he stepped on it, it didn't explode.
Now the problem was, although it was rusted, releasing it might still cause an explosion.
However, old mines were notoriously unstable and highly unpredictable.
The internal structure was already in an unstable state, and external force could cause unforeseen changes inside.
Stepping on it might not trigger it, but releasing it might.
Such mines were completely unpredictable and required extre caution.
"Old squad leader..." Jiang Feng's Adam's apple made a sound like sandpaper scraping: "This thing is unstable, it might explode at any mont... Maybe you should go first, I'll run later, so if it explodes, we won't both die..."
"Stop the damn nonsense! Damn it!"
Song Heping growled softly in anger.
He was already upset, and the Mossad was undoubtedly closing in.
Ti was running out.
Song Heping was already crawling and scraping away thirty centiters of the sand layer around the mine with his dagger.
Between the ultraviolet-bleached cal thorn roots, three copper wires radiated into the sand—this was a typical "trident" trap mine layout, a deadly trap modified by the Nazi Africa Corps.
Cold sweat seeped into his Arab square scarf as he rembered the model of a Roml engineer blown to bits by wire-linked mines in the military museum.
"Bite down on the hemostatic belt." Song Heping threw a rubber tube from the first aid kit to Jiang Feng and pulled out a hemostatic forceps from the kit.
The fifty-degree heat caused the tal parts to expand slightly, and the safety pin, which should have been stuck, was now possibly in a critical state.
When his forceps touched the main fuse ring, a blast of sand-laden wind suddenly lifted Jiang Feng's trouser leg, revealing the hiking boot's explosion-proof layer corroded by acid.
Sure enough!
The mine had cracked, its internal components were unstable, and the explosives had deteriorated, leading to a leak.
Song Heping had seen this phenonon many tis while following the border mine-clearing team in the southern border; once a leak occurred, a chemical reaction inside the mine would cause high temperatures and lead to an explosion. Imdiate evacuation was necessary!
Ti was too pressing!
Jiang Feng suddenly trembled violently, and his boot scraped out an excruciating squeak on the mine's surface. Song Heping's temples throbbed as he saw the rust on the three trigger pins flaking away at a visible rate—this wasn't ordinary oxidation, but electrochemical corrosion unique to desert salt-alkali soil. The copper pins might have welded to the spring in the fuse chamber.
"Think about the money in your bank card, think about how you don't have a wife yet..." Song Heping suddenly reminded Jiang Feng out of nowhere.
As Jiang Feng's pupils refocused, he traced three indentations along the mine's shell with the probe—these were fingerprint locks designed by the British Army to prevent German dismantling, only soone who knew the specific press sequence could open it.
But seventy years of wind and sand had smoothed out the positioning grooves. Song Heping's fingers wandered over the scorching tal surface and suddenly touched a fine scratch.
It was the tail hook of the Arabic nural "7," a mark left by a British engineer with a bayonet back then.
He counted the notches and simultaneously pressed the 2, 4, and 5 points on the third heartbeat.
As the brass shell popped open, the sll of twenty grams of Black Explosive mixed with the acid of ammonium nitrate assailed his nose.
Song Heping's pupils contracted sharply—the spring in the fuse chamber had been replaced with an Italian-made V42 device, the unique serpentine spring of Mussolini's forces glimring under the rust.
The British engineer who laid this minefield had probably used local materials and was a master!
At this mont, Song Heping was essentially crossing ti to engage in a life-and-death battle with a British engineer from decades ago!
"Damn Axis mixed." He squeezed out the words through clenched jaws as the tweezers hovered above the serpentine spring latch. Sweat slid down his nose and evaporated into white steam just three milliters from the explosive surface. The twitching of Jiang Feng's calf muscles transmitted through the ground, creating chaotic grooves with the mine detection needle in the sand.
When the ceramic tweezers finally clamped the fifth coil of the spring, a vulture's cry suddenly echoed from the northwest.
Song Heping was distracted for 0.3 seconds—enough for his little finger to touch the verdigris on the cross-wired copper wire.
A reflection flickered on the sand dune four hundred ters away; the observation scope of the Mossad sniper was scanning the area.
"Old squad leader, I think I saw the sniper scope's reflection... 5 o'clock direction..." Jiang Feng's voice was muffled by the hemostatic belt in his mouth.
"Don't speak..."
Song Heping tasted blood on his tongue; his molars had torn the inside of his mouth.
At the seventh kink of the serpentine spring, the copper rust and sand had ford a crystalline cluster, reminiscent of the training mine he shattered in bomb disposal school.
His instructor had once said, "The Grim Reaper likes to turn back on the seventh step."
He pulled out a signal mirror with his left hand and cast a light spot onto a sand dune to the southeast.
When the observation scope's reflection tilted towards the decoy direction, he suddenly exerted force with his right hand's tweezers. The snapping sound of the spring breaking was swallowed by the rising sandstorm, sparks flew off the fractured copper wire inside the explosive chamber.
Jiang Feng's scream and the sound of tal clashing erupted simultaneously.
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