Late in the night he woke to a phone call. They'd found a device and it was unstable. They'd thrown a cordon and evacuated. The cool courage of bomb squad officers He walked through the glass doors dressed in a flak-suit. The silence was deafening. It was so acute. He unscrewed the back-plate revealing the circuit. The cool courage of bomb squad officers He tried to defuse it, tasting the salt sweat. The striped resistors; a nest of insects. He touched a component, it started ticking. The cool courage of bomb squad officers The cool courage of bomb squad officers