Burying Roadside Bombs

The back entrance of the Laboratory Building. Chen Ge made a round through the rooms on patrol, then came to the back entrance to watch Kuzma lay the charges. Kuzma was kneeling on the ground, dragging over an ammunition box full of grenades, carefully threading the wire, focused and earnest, his hands moving fast and steady. Behind him stood a heavy, solid-steel security door, propped up with two lengths of angle iron to serve as a makeshift bulletproof shield. This guy looked fierce and brutish, wild and volatile, but in truth he was a coward—the kind who was both spineless and vicious, whose careful scheming always came out wrong, whose every calculation went to waste, who ran his mouth and let everything slip, who still put his foot in it even when trying to be cautious, and who always misread the room. A hopeless idiot. Sensing someone watching him, he raised his pig-like face, saw that it was Chen Ge, and greeted him with a fawning smile. "Commander..." Bang—a Ukrainian sniper hidden in the annex ruins aimed a UAR10 sniper rifle at Chen Ge and fired. At the same instant the shot rang out, Chen Ge tilted his head. The bullet grazed past the side of his helmet, struck the wall behind him, and blasted out a shallow crater. The Ukrainian sniper was dumbfounded, and Kuzma was stunned too, his ox-like eyes wide as he stared fixedly at Chen Ge, mouth agape. Not far from Chen Ge, the two barrier detachment members leaning behind the wall were equally slack-jawed, blinking hard, wondering if their eyes were playing tricks on them. They hadn't misseen—he really had tilted his head to dodge the bullet! How was that even possible? Boom-boom-boom—Bull on the second floor reacted fast, pinpointing the Ukrainian sniper's position from the gunshot, and swept the area with suppressive fire from the RG6 revolver grenade launcher, sending six 40mm grenades over. The Ukrainian sniper was killed on the spot by the collapsed bricks and concrete slabs crashing down on him. Chen Ge made a show of rolling his neck and said, fooling no one but himself, "My neck was a little stiff just now. To think a sniper would take a shot at me—how despicable." Kuzma: "..." The barrier detachment members: "..." The three of them looked at Chen Ge suspiciously, thinking, could it really have been a coincidence? Yeah, it had to be. After all, no matter how skilled Chen Ge was, he couldn't possibly dodge a bullet by tilting his head—unless he was Spider-Man, with a danger sense. Chen Ge cleared his throat lightly and said, "Kuzma, haul two boxes of explosives to both sides of the building and bury them, then get some scrap metal, iron nails, and the like to boost their lethality. Can you do it?" "Yes, yes, yes! I can! I guarantee I'll complete the task you assigned, Commander!" Kuzma nodded vigorously. He no longer bore Chen Ge any resentment; he only wanted to curry favor with this powerful Huaxia man. He'd even be willing to kneel and kowtow to him a few times—by any means necessary, he had to make the man forgive him. Otherwise, he probably wouldn't live to breathe tomorrow's foul air. "I can promise the Commander, the lethality will absolutely satisfy you. If it doesn't meet your standards, I'll go hug the explosives and fight those son-of-a-bitch Ukrainians myself... uh..." Kuzma, who was always running his mouth, caught himself and lowered his head guiltily, cursing himself for never being able to hold his tongue—wasn't he just digging his own grave? Chen Ge looked at Kuzma with a half-smile and said lightly, "Mm. Remember what you just said. If the lethality falls short, you'll strap on the explosives and blow yourself up." "You've got ten minutes. Get started." Kuzma was nearly in tears. He scrambled up in a panic, rushed in through the back entrance, hoisted a box of TNT in the stairwell, grabbed cable, electric detonators, and waterproof tape, and dashed toward the south corridor. These were engineering demolition TNT blocks stockpiled by the Ukrainian military, each block weighing 400 grams, fifty to a box, twenty-two kilograms with the box. Kuzma was very strong, or perhaps he was tapping his body's hidden potential to save his own skin—his running speed rivaled Bolt's. The walls at the ends of the ground-floor corridors had no windows, so Kuzma climbed out through the window of the southeast corner room, ran hunched over to the south wall, warily scanned his surroundings, and quickly scraped out a shallow pit in the brickwork. He set the box into the pit, opened the lid, pulled out a block of TNT, inserted an electric detonator, wrapped and bound it tight with waterproof tape, and stuffed it back in. Then he raked broken bricks and chunks of concrete over the box to cover it, rolled up the cable coil, and climbed back in through the window. The next step was boosting the lethality. He casually grabbed an empty ammunition box and collected scrap metal fragments from the rooms and corridors. In the Laboratory Building, which had seen fierce fighting, the one thing there was no shortage of was scrap iron and steel shards, blasted apart by grenades and rockets or shattered by bullets. Kuzma even found a box of bearing steel balls—the kind the Ukrainian military used to modify RPG warheads—in the corner of one room. Stick the steel balls on a warhead with tape, and its lethality at least triples; the steel balls blasted outward are terrifyingly powerful. After gathering a whole box of metal fragments and dumping in half a box of steel balls, he climbed back out the window and poured them all over the box of explosives, then smeared mud mixed with broken bricks over it with both hands to camouflage it. Having finished, he let out a breath of relief, then felt it wasn't secure enough, so he gathered bricks and chunks of concrete from around and piled them up, crazily heaping them into a big mound. When the charge went off, the bricks, stones, metal fragments, and steel balls would blast out in all directions—anyone within a hundred meters, without exception, would be turned into a sieve. Satisfied with his masterpiece, Kuzma chuckled, patted the mud off his hands, and turned to run back. Just then, a Ukrainian machine gunner on the roof of the mixing plant to the northeast spotted him and swung his PKM around, letting loose a burst. Kuzma's foot slipped and he took a hard face-first tumble. The bullets that would have hit him squarely in the chest instead struck the ground behind him, splashing up mud. Ukrainian machine gunner: ??? What the hell? A coincidence? Gritting his teeth, the Ukrainian machine gunner fired three short bursts—one at his chest, one low at his legs, and one leading ahead of him. One aimed at the chest, one at the legs, and one leading the target in prediction—after all, Kuzma had already scrambled up and kept running. But then came a scene he could scarcely believe. A light rain was drizzling down, the ground was slick and muddy, and Kuzma actually slipped again—falling sideways this time, tumbling with a yelp into a large shell crater nearby. Rat-tat-tat—the bullets flew wide again, all of them hitting the ground. Ukrainian machine gunner: ??? Suka—what the hell! The Ukrainian machine gunner cursed in fury and emptied the whole belt. Rat-tat-tat—the bullets struck the edge of the crater, and the splashed mud sprayed all over Kuzma's head and face. Only then did it dawn on him—those bullets weren't stray rounds; the Ukrainian military had him targeted. But he didn't panic in the slightest. Seizing the gap while the machine gunner reloaded, he sprang out, sprinted to the window, grabbed the exposed rebar, and climbed back in. Thump—he collapsed onto the floor, gasping for breath. Igor, the veteran in charge of this room, had watched the whole bizarre scene from the window, and asked curiously, "My call sign is Igor. What's your number? Did you spot the machine gunner before he found you? To actually dodge bullets!" Kuzma got up and said, meekly and honestly, "Brother Igor, my number is 520. I just happened to slip and fall, and dodged the bullets by accident." "..." Igor was deeply disappointed. He'd taken this guy for an expert, but it turned out he'd just been lucky. "Brother, the Commander told me to set up booby traps, so I'll get back to work." With that, Kuzma grabbed the cable coil and ran off. Wagner had no military ranks. The contract soldiers—that is, the veterans—all went by codenames, while the convict soldiers went by numbers. In daily life, when a convict soldier addressed a veteran, he was required to prefix it with "brother"—the first honorific a convict soldier used for a veteran. Back in the stairwell hall, Kuzma returned, hauling the cable. He set down the cable, hoisted a box of explosives, and headed for the north wall. Chen Ge leaned against the doorframe of a laboratory, watching Kuzma's back, a flicker of astonishment in his eyes. He'd overheard the exchange between Igor and Kuzma just now, and it had sparked a strong interest in Kuzma. He'd heard from Tombstone that Kuzma had already survived a full nineteen days in Bakhmut!!! What an incredible, what an unbelievable number! Ever since October 8, when Wagner officially launched its urban assault operation and convict soldiers were sent to the front in droves, the Russian commander General Armageddon Surovikin had designed the wave-assault tactic, the Cook had refined and implemented it, and the casualty rate among the convict soldiers had shot straight up. Any convict soldier who could survive more than half a month in Bakhmut, that bloody, brutal meat grinder, had to have some real skill to his name! Had Kuzma really survived nineteen days on nothing but luck?