This posting is late again. I've been crawling up and down mountains working with the landowner of a beautiful mountain ranch to mark where the new fence lines should go. The old fences wander a bit; even though I started with an offset line to avoid them we've crossed two twice. The terrain is best described as rugged. We took the quad out several days, but one place has such a steep sidehill the quad needs a crew person hanging off the uphill side to keep it from rolling down the mountain. The family and the hired man generally get about on horseback.

I must own to have been quite pathetic climbing the grades – which stop me breathless every thirty or forty feet gain in elevation. However we are almost halfway through the job – certainly in distance, and hopefully in difficulty.

Deadly Enterprise will soon be available as a paperback on Amazon. It has been available as a large print paperback from Lulu, but the cost is such in Canada that I can only sell them to the very rich. I'm yet to find out what the cost per copy will be when I order a batch directly through my publisher, but I'm very hopeful that it will be low enough I can sell a few at book signings.

If any of you have been over-awed by the Lulu price, I'm hopeful that my novel will be available from Amazon at a bargain price. Of course the e-book instant download, my publisher's primary method of operation, has the novel in many formats for $5.99. All at http://www.double-dragon-ebooks.com/single.php?ISBN=1-55404-466-9

And now to more tales from the Oil Gypsy.

OG 9

I have an earlier story here about blowing up an unexploded bomb in the Libyan Desert, and it doesn't reflect well on part-time bomb disposal teams. Actually the professionals could be quite squirrely as well.

I found three thermos mines laying on the surface . . . maybe that's not exactly true. I walked unseeing between them and Old Man Salah, my head Libyan survey helper, began waving his arms at me. Thermos mines were nasty WWII devices that became live once the Luftwaffe dropped them from an aircraft and they hit the ground. Then the trembler switches activated and merely walking past them could set them off. Obviously, the ones I found . . . or Salah found . . . had become a mite sticky in the fuse after 25 years.

So we radioed to town to have someone come out to deal with them. In due course an expert arrived, a German national who had experience with mine clearance. We chatted all the way from camp as I drove him to the mines – finding plenty of interests in common.

When we arrived at the site, I parked a short distance away and we walked over, still talking. We hardly quit jawing the whole time we stood looking at them; my expert looking at them from all directions and then crouching down to look even closer.

I don't remember quite what I was gabbing about when he reached out and gently lifted one of the mines into the air. What to do? Turn and run? Obviously flying shrapnel could travel quite a bit faster than I could. Since I was already as good as dead, I might as well carry on with my conversation. Expert raised the mine in his hands until it was above his head and scanned the underside.

I felt quite proud of keeping a stiff upper lip the whole time the mine was in the air, but I felt a lot better when he set it gently back on the ground. Nothing else was said about the mines until we were driving away. Expert looked at me and said, "I don't believe in taking chances in this business."

I don't know what I answered, but that was a motto I would have been quite pleased to see carried out.

The crew I worked on had once had a mine clearance crew attached but the oil company took it away from us when they decided we wouldn't meet very much unexploded ordnance. That was a pity as Paul, our head mine clearer, had served in the Hitler Youth in WWII as part of the crew of an anti-aircraft gun on the Russian front. He was widely experienced in treating all kinds of nasty injuries, and almost as good as having a doctor on site.

One time the crew came across a blown up ammunition truck. Actually, they drove past the strange dust-covered hump for several days before investigating it. When they found a great pile of live artillery shells lying in the wreckage they called for Paul to take care of them.

It so happened that Paul's brother-in-law was visiting him at the time and quite interested to see him in action. The artillery shells were carefully excavated and piled in a dynamite primed heap, a long firing line stretched away several hundred metres to the blasting machine, placed behind the Land Rover. Paul and his brother-in-law crouched behind the vehicle's cover and set off the explosives.

A wonderful succession of booms and blasts followed – like several 4th of July firework displays going off together. Then there was a slight pause in the explosions. In the relative silence they heard a strange thumpety thump approaching, like a one legged runner. Looking up, they saw an artillery shell bouncing across the desert toward them – a remarkably intact artillery shell, but probably one quite agitated inside.

As the shell bounced along to land beside the front tire of the Land Rover, right under their noses, the quiet time in the explosion ceased and all the shells that had had their internal fuses activated by the explosion began going off.

Bits of flying metal came whistling past and several metallic clanks sounded as the Land Rover collected a few hits. What to do? Stay behind the Land Rover with their puppy dog shell, or run away out into the open – where more shrapnel was flying? I suspect they were too frozen with alarm to do either – just lay flat until the din of explosions ended. Then they jumped in the Land Rover and dashed away before the shell reached its fuze setting.

As the tale was told, the errant shell didn't explode. It just wanted to be blown up on its own pyre, which was done as soon as the mine clearing crew's nerves settled down.