Tick...Tick...Tick....

It Begins on a hot August morning with a dark-haired, mustachioed man in an orange ten-year-old Opel Rekord sedan, driving nervously through downtown Jerusalem, looking for a place to park.

He frequently checks the time and as the minutes pass, his perspiration has nothing to do with the morning sun.

He turns onto a side street that serves as a parking lot and a pedestrian short cut from a poor residential neighborhood to the downtown commercial district.

To his east, on the right, casting a deep shadow over the parking lot, is the tallest building downtown---the 19-story City Tower, an eyesore of dark glass and shiny marble in a city of rough-cut limestone, arches and wrought iron.

On the western side of the street, a lowslung public medical clinic has not yet opened for business, and about a dozen people---an elderly couple supporting each other, two young mothers with babies, some bandaged youngsters---mill about on the steps. Trucks are lined up on the department-store loading platform next to the City Tower.

The dark-haired man glances at his watch one more time and then looks around. In the cracked rearview mirror, he sees no vehicles behind him. There's an empty parking (continued on page 110) Tick ... Tick... (continued from page 86) space, but as he starts to back into it, his foot slips off the clutch, stalling the engine. He jerks his head in birdlike motions in all directions, sure that he's being watched. The street is quiet and there are no cars backed up behind him yet. For a moment, he sits there, thinking and sweating.

Then, his eyes closed as tightly as possible, his body tensed, he slides his hand into the sloppy wiring beneath the dashboard and flips a jury-rigged switch.

Nothing happens. He's relieved. And he knows that if all goes well, in exactly one hour he'll be a hero to his comrades.

In one smooth motion, the man takes the keys and opens the door, leaving the car as it is, parked halfway into the empty spot, with the door open.

At first, he walks fast, not glancing back. But after turning once to look at the car, he begins to run, at first a jog, then a sprint, finally a dash.

Passing a construction site a block away, he throws the keys over the fence, deep into the pit. Within two minutes, he has become one of the hundreds of morning shoppers crowding the alleyways of Mahane Yehuda, Jerusalem's open market, five blocks from where the orange sedan has begun to block traffic.

It's 9:03 A.M., according to an old but accurate Bulova watch connected by wires to three boxes full of explosives in the trunk of the car he left behind.

•

Suspicious vehicles and objects are not unusual in Jerusalem. In the terror-conscious Israeli capital, the citizenry's alertness keeps the bomb squad, whose experts are called sappers---the British term for bomb-disposal expert---busy answering upwards of 25 calls a day to check out suspicious packages or cars.

Since 1967, when Jerusalem's reunification in the Six Day War made it the top target for Arab terrorism against Israel, some 70 people have died and more than 700 have been wounded by bombs in the Holy City.

Two sappers have been killed and half a dozen wounded. Hundreds of bombs have been defused, neutralized, dismantled and destroyed by sappers, who were notified by alert citizens who had seen something strange and called the police.

Somebody notices a battered jalopy parked too long or in the wrong place; a driver behaves in a bizarre fashion when he gets out of his car; a truck parked in a residential area draws the attention of an old lady with nothing to do other than notice strangers in her neighborhood. Blue license plates, indicating that the vehicle is from the Arab West Bank or Gaza, the territories Israel has controversially controlled since 1967, are often enough to provoke a telephone call to 100, the emergency police number, especially if the car is illegally parked.

For a Jerusalemite, the phrase "Shel me zeh?"---"Whose is this?"---is a signal that perhaps that cardboard box in front of a kiosk, or this abandoned briefcase beneath a table in a sidewalk café, is a bomb.

An old refrigerator on a street corner draws attention. In the mid-Seventies, 13 people were killed when a refrigerator full of explosives blew up in downtown Jerusalem. A bicycle left too long in a crowded place runs the risk of being taken apart by sappers. In the early fall of 1979, just before the Jewish New Year, a bicycle, its tubular frame packed with plastique, blew up in the midst of a popular sidewalk café on the outdoor Ben Yehuda mall, the downtown shopping center. One person was killed and 36 wounded.

And since 1967, there have been six car bombs planted in Jerusalem. But so far, only the first one---parked in the open-market Mahane Yehuda shuk in the spring of 1968---exploded. Twenty-two people were killed. More than 100 were wounded. All the other car bombs were discovered in time.

Car bombs are a particularly dangerous piece of business. The trunk, back seat or undercarriage of the vehicle can be loaded with enough explosives to destroy several buildings and kill hundreds.

About 2200 kilos packed into a truck driven by a suicidal Shiite Moslem destroyed the Beirut headquarters of the U.S. Marines, killed more than 200 U.S. Servicemen and put a serious chink in the Reagan Administration's Lebanon policy.

That vehicle was driven into its target, and that's almost impossible to prevent. A parked car bomb can, at least, be treated. But car bombs are put together in such a way that the only tools the sapper can use to neutralize them are his own hands or, at most, a knife.

Maishe is in the tiny office the sappers call "the cage" when the police walkie-talkie he carries with him everywhere squawks the first report of the suspicious car in downtown Jerusalem.

Despite the fact that there are several such calls a day, this one gives Maishe the feeling, a sensation that tells him that this call is different. Some of the men on the squad explain that the feeling occurs in the small of your back; others say it's the back of your neck or your palms. But for Maishe, it's between his legs; and when it's there, he knows that soon, someplace in town, he's going to sweat, because life or death for him and possibly hundreds of other people will become a matter of his skills and nerve.

He crosses the narrow corridor between his office and the dispatchers' switchboard room, where half a dozen men and women handle incoming calls and send out patrol cars and jeeps.

There's a heat wave this summer of 1984, but it's cool down here in the basement of the rambling, ivy-covered police headquarters, which 100 years ago was a hostel for Russian Orthodox pilgrims to the Holy City.

Maishe is impatient during the agonizingly slow response from the main computer at national headquarters on whether or not the suspicious car is stolen. He's eager to be out on the street, looking forward to seeing the device and feeling the crowds behind the police lines, hundreds or thousands of people holding their breath for the few minutes of silence and tension in which the sapper works.

"I can't wait here," Maishe says to nobody in particular. "I'm going." The duty officer puts out the word to the patrol cars already on the scene that the sapper is on his way.

Maishe climbs the worn marble stairs out of the basement and to the police parking lot two at a time. He gets into a blue jeep and takes it out of the courtyard and into the street. There, he turns on the siren; but even though the City Tower is barely a dozen blocks from police headquarters, he curses traffic for nearly five minutes before reaching the scene.

It's 9:10 when he first sees the suspicious car. By then, the computer has reported that the orange Opel was once yellow and has, indeed, been stolen.

Six months earlier, Maishe had been given command of the Jerusalem bomb squad, which handles about 10,000 calls a year and, as the sappers say, "treats" about 75 bombs in a hot year of political conflict translated into terror.

That's more than any other bomb squad in the world, and the experience of the Jerusalem squad has made its reputation as the best in the profession. So, as the boss of the squad, Maishe, at the age of 35, can be called the best sapper in the world---a superstar.

Maishe wanted the command job for the money that went with it---an extra $90 a month, which would bring his monthly take-home pay to slightly more than $500. He liked being in charge but despised the paperwork; the written reports reminded him why, after he left the army, he had never made it past the first year of college.

His meaty hands and linebacker's body belonged on the streets, and his superior (continued on page 131) Tick ... Tick ...(continued from page 110) officers at national headquarters always complained about the quality of his paperwork. But they knew that his skills as a sapper were irreplaceable.

Traffic is snarled for blocks around the area, and while the sirens and loudspeakers scream and shout the emergency, demanding that pedestrians clear the streets, Maishe listens to a senior officer on the scene explaining how long it could yet take to clear the streets in the vicinity of the car bomb. "You can't do it any faster?" he asks, calculating the few minutes he'd have to work.

"We're going as fast as we can," the officer answers, knowing that it doesn't matter that he outranks Maishe by four career ranks. Until Maishe and any other sappers on the scene finish their work, they will outrank everyone.

While Maishe listens, he thinks about what he heard in the jeep about the origin of the report of the suspicious car. An unidentified woman called the police emergency number and said she had seen "Somebody who looks like an Arab" running from the car "and leaving the door open."

The remark about the Arab doesn't make much of an impression on Maishe, who also looks like an Arab---his mother is Iraqi, his father Bulgarian---but the facts that somebody was seen running away from an old car in such a place, the car wasn't parked but abandoned, with the driver's door wide-open, and it was stolen are all strong indications of danger.

He approaches the car but doesn't yet open the trunk or the hood. Looking inside, he sees aluminum balloons of cooking gas in the back seat. Brown-paper bags full of penny nails are piled around the gas bottles. The penny nails are another sign, for they make the best shrapnel.

Maishe goes back to his jeep, parked at the end of the street facing the Opel. He decides to wait for Danny, the other sapper on duty that morning. A car bomb is a two-man job.

Meanwhile, patrolmen and soldiers on the scene work to get the people away from danger. A soldier trying to help the police clear the crowds that gathered along the sidewalks gets too close to the car, and Maishe shouts for him to "move ass." The soldier, an M-16 slapping against his thigh, runs away.

Danny arrives in a blue-and-white patrol van used by the sappers, who get chauffeured by drivers specially trained for bomb-squad duty.

While Maishe is all military precision packed into a fire-hydrant body, Danny is tall and lanky, his hair always a little too fashionable and long for a police officer. Maishe rarely puts together more than a dozen words and can remain still for hours, while Danny rarely stops moving, using his hands to describe everything, shifting from foot to foot as he listens to Maishe's assessment of the situation.

They make their plans for action---Maishe to the trunk, Danny to the hood---and the two of them walk slowly toward the car, to look for detonators and to find out where the explosives are hidden.

On elbows and thighs, they crawl under the car, turning onto their backs to look for telltale wiring or grease and dirt that doesn't match the rest of the undercarriage. Finding nothing there, they get up and turn to the closed trunk and hood.

Maishe goes to the trunk, carefully and gingerly using a knife to inch open the lock. They are well practiced at breaking into closed cars and sometimes joke that they could make a much better living stealing Mercedes.

Danny opens the hood. When he raises it, everybody within viewing distance can see the scrawled Arabic written on the underside: Fatah! Remember Sabra and Shatila!, referring, of course, to the massacre of Palestinians that took place in September 1982, while Israeli troops were occupying Beirut. In two weeks, it will be the anniversary of the murders committed by Phalangist allies of the Israelis during Israel's ill-fated invasion of its northern neighbor.

While Maishe studies the timing device and detonator connected to what he estimates to be at least 25 kilograms of TNT in the trunk of the car, Danny looks for a booby trap, a backup detonator devised to set off the bomb if the car is restarted, even if the timer is disconnected.

Maishe calls Danny to the back of the car. The two men study the detonation system and synchronize their watches to the old Bulova. All three now read 9:17 A.M. The device is set so that the bomb will explode at ten.

Even if Danny hadn't been on duty, Maishe would have called him. For if Maishe is the commander of the squad, Danny, at 38 its oldest member, is its inspiration.

He has more gray above the sideburns than anybody else in a group in which 25-year-olds are often grayer than their 50-year-old fathers. And Maishe has the job that a lot of people thought should have gone to Danny.

But Danny never wanted to be the officer in charge, not in the army and not in the police. Danny didn't want to have to wrestle with the paperwork---or, worse, the responsibility. Even after getting a promotion from policeman to inspector, he still writes Policeman where he could write the higher rank on all the paperwork he does.

"Call it luck if you want," he tells new drivers who ask why he doesn't advertise his rank. "As long as I've been in the business, I've written Policeman, and nothing's happened to me yet. Why should I change things?"

Superstition and almost ritualistic routine are part of the sapper's job. One of Danny's superstitions and rituals involves not using the siren unless it's absolutely necessary---or absolutely unnecessary. If he doesn't have the feeling on a routine call to a suspicious object, he doesn't want the siren blaring or the tires squealing on his way to the scene.

"Our hearts will be beating fast enough when I've finished doing the job," he tells new drivers, who have to learn quickly about all the superstitions in the group if they want to remain with the squad.

Another superstition involves photographs. The two sappers who died in Jerusalem in the Seventies agreed to be photographed for newspaper stories, and each was killed within a month of those photo sessions. Since then, sappers don't like having their pictures taken.

Nor do they want their proper names mentioned in public. Newspapers and TV newscasts are prohibited by the military censor from using their photographs or names. Even if they are among the most celebrated people in Israel, they remain anonymous, hidden for their own good behind pseudonyms.

They never break routines---not the normal routines of life, such as getting up every day at the same time, nor the small routines involved in putting on protective gear. The leggings are pulled on first, and only then do they don the flak vest.

When in the company of sappers, never make a casual comment about how "things have been quiet lately." Mentioning a period of quiet can break the spell. And never call it a bomb; call it a device.

The sappers always refer to the object as a device. To call it a bomb, it seems, would be a kind of admission that the thing could explode. By calling it a device, they make it mechanical, technical, professional, undramatic; yet as they discuss the work, they always reach a point where the science of the job is best explained by the feeling, by gut instinct. And, of course, by luck. And when somebody is hurt---or worse---luck, not the sapper, is blamed.

The luckiest of them all was also the unluckiest.

Itzik, a pudgy, soft-spoken sapper, once had "50 grams of TNT get past his ugly face," as Danny describes it.

Itzik had been working on a small device in which a matchbox had been packed with TNT and connected to a watch. The bomb exploded in his face, but (continued on page 158) Tick ... Tick ... (continued from page 131) somehow he emerged from the cloud of smoke and dust without a scratch.

But ever since then, he's had this strange, slightly ironic smile that never lets go. Even when his eyes go cold with concentration, the thin-lipped smile remains. When he overhears Danny telling the story, the smile is on his face, and when he shows a journalist how he can take a land mine apart with his eyes closed, the smile is still there.

•

The police are having a difficult time trying to move the crowds, which are reluctant to back up out of viewing distance from the sappers and the orange car. A huge crowd continues to fill the top of the Ben Yehuda mall, a block from the City Tower parking lot. They can see the sappers and the other policemen standing at the end of the street, looking at the booby-trapped sedan, but the car itself is on the far side of the tower.

Overlooking the parking lot, the City Tower patio café is already empty. The canvas umbrellas over the white tables flap in the morning breeze.

High above, from windows in the tall white-marble-and-dark-glass building, a television camera crew is aiming a lens down at the Opel. In a few hours, the scene will be broadcast on news shows throughout the world. If the car explodes and nothing more sensational happens elsewhere, the car bomb will be the top story of the day. Foreign ministries will condemn the cycle of violence in the Middle East---an Israeli retaliation is likely if the bomb explodes---and one of the half-dozen splinter groups in the Palestine Liberation Organization will take credit for the bombing.

Police-car loud-speakers call on people throughout the downtown area to open windows so that the shock wave from the blast won't send glass slivers flying through the air. Windows are flung open in the three-and four-story buildings, and policemen urge people to either leave the buildings or get away from outer walls.

Dressed in their dark-green flak leggings and vests, the two sappers sit on their helmets and hold their goggles in their hands, playing with them like an Arab handling amber worry beads. The two men are actors at center stage, with a supporting cast of thousands watching them wait for their cue.

Both men know that the heavy gear will be no help if anything goes wrong; indeed, the weighty and cumbersome leggings, vest and helmet are a hindrance while they work. They are cursed by a police policy that doesn't want the public to know that there's no such thing as safety for a man who's about to deal with enough explosives to make him---and half the buildings within 50 meters---disappear.

So the sweating begins. Sweat is the measure, the means by which they feel.

"If you don't sweat when you're doing it, you're doing something wrong," Maishe always says. "Not the sweat of working out---the sweat of concentration."

As the seconds flick past on Danny's digital watch, showing that they now have less than 25 minutes before the device does its evil work, he plucks at his damp T-shirt.

When a newcomer to the squad's team of drivers becomes savvy enough to know without asking when Danny thinks the siren and overdrive are necessary, the lanky sapper introduces him to one of their favorite places for a cup of coffee.

He directs the van or jeep to Hashem's, a tiny café tucked away in the lobby of the Arab East Jerusalem building, where in an upstairs office, Alfred Habash, a relative of George Habash, one of the archterrorists of the Palestinian movement, has a dental practice.

They drink Hashem's sweet Turkish coffee, which is delivered to the van by a young boy carrying the cups and glasses of cold water on a copper tray. And after sipping from the minuscule porcelain cups brought out from a tiny kitchenette in the lobby, Danny asks the driver to pay.

But ever since the sappers took care of a bomb placed in the hallway by a Palestinian group trying to rival George Habash's organization---even though Alfred had never been involved in politics---Hashem's doesn't take money from sappers.

If the driver hasn't noticed it, Danny points out the sign bearing the Habash family name---a name known to every Israeli---and Danny explains that the sappers had treated a device aimed at Alfred.

Only then does Danny fill the new man in on the real secret of the squad. The secret that they keep to themselves is that the rhetoric, ceremonies and citations that the politicians lay on them with thick, saccharine-sweet measures of hero worship mean little to them.

The sapper approach to terrorism is single-mindedly pacifist, not caring who might be the victim of a bomb, caring only that there be no victims.

Danny would be happier with a ping-pong table in the squad room than with another certificate of appreciation from city hall---except that the office isn't much bigger than such a table.

"At least then, on a quiet day, I could let off steam and relax," he says. But politicians don't see any profit in a ping-pong table. City hall has tried raising money for a special club for the sappers; but so far, that money hasn't been turned into a building large enough for Danny's ping-pong table. A local news story about his dream resulted in three contributions of tables but not enough money to build---or even rent---a room for one.

•

When a job's done, the sappers like to add particularly interesting neutralized bombs, like trophies on exhibit, to the bizarre collection of devices of death already on display in the office.

There are dozens of objects on the gray-metal shelves, all disguises for a bomb: a carton of eggs, a doll, a loaf of bread, a high school yearbook, an old black-and-white television set, an attaché case, a flowerpot---they've all been bombs.

Some of the objects remind the sappers of past incidents---this saccharine bottle cost Dudik Ivgy his fingers; this Soviet-made katyusha rocket, leaning casually against the wall in a corner, was found just after dawn on the Mount of Olives, pointing down at the Jewish quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem.

On a wall above Maishe's desk are two photographs framed cheaply in plastic. Between them is a plastic electric eternal lamp, flickering its pale orange light. One photo shows a young, sharp-featured blond man staring coolly at the camera, as if it were yet another enemy. That's Steve Hilmes, an American who moved to Israel to become a sapper. He survived two tours in Vietnam, only to be killed in 1979 when an Arab's bomb tore apart his chest.

The other picture shows dark-skinned Albert Levy, his mournful eyes staring over the shoulder of the photographer. In the tilt of his head, you can see pride. The picture was taken at a ceremony at which the minister of police pinned the commander's oak leaf on his shoulders, giving him the job that Maishe now holds. Albert was killed in 1976 by a device that also claimed a patrolman's life.

On the bulletin board just to the left of the photographs are a work schedule, a picture of Madonna in the nude and a postcard of a snow-topped-mountain scene in Switzerland, sent by Itzik when he took a vacation from which he came back insisting that he had learned about skiing and snow bunnies.

Also tacked to the board is a dog-eared card with the inscription Fear of failure is the Key to Success, in coffee-cup-motto archaic print.

Few have been as successful as Danny, for success in this job is measured by the length of time you've survived. He has been doing it for almost seven years, not counting the two years and one war he spent with the army.

Most leave within five years. Some go to the police-training base to teach their skills to the next generation; others move to the police labs, where devices are discovered and neutralized and the remnants of bombs that have exploded are analyzed to reveal the latest level of ingenuity reached by terrorists. Some go to work for construction companies that need demolition experts able to create precise holes in the granite and limestone on which Jerusalem is built.

Many get offers from the criminal underworld to bring their skills to crime, but none is known to have taken up the opportunity, despite the obvious material benefits to be gained.

•

Danny and Maishe wait at the end of the parking lot, staring at the orange Opel, accepting as a fact of life that the basic rule of Israeli bomb disposal is to neutralize the bomb on the scene, rather than do as the British do in Ireland---get the people away and blow the thing up or take the risk of moving the device.

Treating the bomb where it is found, a policy developed by Israeli sappers in the mid-Seventies after too many devices exploded when they were moved elsewhere for treatment---one of them killed Albert---means that all the danger is faced by one or two people, the sappers.

Since 1979, when Steve died, the squad has had a couple of robots to provide an edge of safety. Each robot is equipped with a video camera connected to a monitor in the van and travels on caterpillar treads. It has long flapper arms that can maneuver explosive packages into more convenient locations for what the sappers call treatment.

Fixed along the length of the robot is a shotgun that can be aimed via the TV monitor. The shotgun is used to fire a cartridge of double-ought pellets into the TNT. That disperses the explosive material faster than it can ignite, destroying the bomb without causing it to explode. The procedure is no more damaging than a shotgun blast, which is a lot less destructive than what a kilo or two of explosive can do if detonated. Thus, a sapper never blows up a device, he destroys it.

Unfortunately for Maishe and Danny, the robot is useless on a car bomb.

As they sit shifting their glances from the crowds to their watches, then to the car, they know that when they begin working, they'll have less time to work than it takes for Danny to hum one of the innumerable Fifties and early Sixties Motown songs from which he learned his minimal English. And as they sit on their helmets and wait, they talk.

They don't talk about the politics of terrorism, for, as Maishe once said, "I only care about how the device is put together, not about who put it there or why."

Maishe says you have to think like a terrorist in order to beat a terrorist. He quickly adds that he can't understand the reason for putting a bomb anyplace where innocent people can be hurt. "If they attacked soldiers---well, that's war. But kids?"

But Maishe's thinking like a terrorist is technical: Why did he use this kind of explosive? Park the car next to this building? Use this kind of detonator?

And, finally, how would I do it?

They also don't talk about the other side of the politics of Arab terrorism, terror that is aimed against Arabs by Israelis who are frustrated by what appears to them to be government impotence in the face of the Arab attack.

A group of 25 Jewish settlers from the West Bank had been arrested earlier in 1984, and their trial on charges ranging from membership in a terrorist organization to murder was to begin the next week. The group, which had become known as "the underground," had confessed to crippling two West Bank mayors and blinding a sapper who was trying to dismantle a bomb at a third mayor's house; plotting to blow up the Moslem holy sites on the Temple Mount; attempting to sabotage five Arab buses; and assaulting an Arab religious college with automatic-weapons fire and hand grenades, killing three and wounding 36. Only a year later would the group, which had found large measures of political support from the right wing of Israeli politics, be convicted for its professionally plotted---and sometimes accomplished---terrorism against Arabs.

It was the competence of the 25 accused members of the underground, all of whom had been highly trained members of combat units in the army, that spooked the sappers. A sapper working for the border patrol, a military department inside the police force, was called in June 1980 to deal with one of the devices planted by the underground at the garage of Ibrahim Tawil, then the mayor of Al Birah, a West Bank town. Sulemein Hirbawe found out just how professional the Jewish terrorist can be. He was blinded when the bomb exploded and now works as a switchboard operator in a small police station not far from his Galilee home.

Since then, whenever Danny gets philosophical, he says, "I don't want to end up a switchboard operator."

And when Maishe, Danny and Itzik were called to dismantle the large bombs hidden by underground members on the undercarriages of five Arab buses, they encountered the finest handiwork they had ever seen, handiwork that seemed sickeningly familiar to some of them. As Maishe sometimes says, "The truth of the matter is that the Arabs just aren't very good at making bombs." Graduates of Israel Defense Force commando and engineering courses are much better.

Itzik said he had never seen such "quality work."

Maishe said he had---in the army sabotage course from which he had graduated.

And Danny said it didn't matter where they had seen such work. All that matters, he said, is that the devices are neutralized in time.

•

It's 9:49, according to their watches---and the Bulova is ticking away inside the trunk of the car.

Maishe uses his walkie-talkie to inform the police commander on the scene that "ready or not, we have to start working."

The commander asks for another minute, and Danny nods. The extra minute becomes 90 seconds, and then the two men begin waddling in their heavy gear through the parking lot to the car. Maishe goes to the trunk; Danny goes to the engine.

There is a booby trap, Danny discovers. As he leans over the engine, his tall frame in its heavy gear gives him the look of a college basketball player in dark-green cowboy chaps who has found work as a mechanic.

The wiring in the rear of the car also includes a secondary booby trap deep inside the trunk, so Maishe first works around the wrist watch and the detonator, leaning so far into the gaping mouth of the trunk that all that can be seen are his legs, hanging over the top of the faded chrome bumpers.

The crowds go silent while the sappers work. It's as if the entire city is holding its breath.

The only sound is the wind, whistling through the alley between City Tower and the squat department store next to the tall, ugly building. The flapping umbrellas shading the tables of the empty café crack and slap a nonsensical rhythm.

Suddenly, a young boy on a bicycle, who somehow slipped past the police lines, rides into the empty street. A border policeman gives a shout and runs out into the road, knocking the bewildered boy off the bike. Danny seems to hear the incident. For a moment, he looks up from his work; but then he bends quickly down again.

The border policeman drags the boy into a shop opening and the boy, startled with the sudden awareness of what's happening, starts to cry. His bicycle lies in the middle of the street, the spokes of the spinning front wheel reflecting the bright sun.

Maishe finishes first, holding a detonator attached to a wire over his head. A moment later, Danny is done, and he, too, like an athlete raising a championship trophy, waves a fistful of wires over his head.

Danny speaks into the microphone attached to his lapel. "We're done, but don't release the crowds yet."

The two sappers compare devices. Danny looks into the trunk. Maishe looks at Danny's work under the hood.

Then, taking off their helmets and tucking their foreheads into their biceps to wipe the sweat from their brows, they walk slowly back to the van and the jeep. Maishe carries the explosives, while Danny carries the wiring and the watch.

A policeman starts the applause, and the crowds at each of the police lines around the area join in. Some 3000 people applaud the two men, who laugh as they compare their sweaty blue T-shirts under the flak jackets. Duvid, the driver, who brought Danny to the scene in the blue-and-white van, helps them off with their gear.

"How much time was left on the clock?" a high-ranking officer asks as he approaches the sappers.

"You really want to know?" Maishe asks, smiling at Danny.

"Plenty of time," answers Danny, smiling sarcastically. "Here, look." The officer eagerly looks at the watch and quickly glances away, his face white.

"See?" Maishe says. "Plenty of time."

A tow truck pulls the neutralized car bomb out of the parking lot and past the crowd still behind the police lines. The city goes silent again, except for the murmurs of the people behind the front row, who push forward to get a better look.

Maishe and Danny finally finish packing up their gear and make an initial report to the investigators on the scene.

From inside the jeep, they watch as the crowd dissolves back into the normal pedestrian traffic of downtown Jerusalem in midweek.

"Let's get to the cage; I got to change this shirt," Danny says to Maishe. "Look at it!" The navy-blue T-shirt is a clinging dark purple on Danny's torso.

Maishe smiles, sends Duvid back to headquarters with the van and then starts the jeep. Danny gives a whoop and a laugh and leans forward to turn on the siren.

"The bomb exploded in his face, but somehow he emerged from the smoke and dust without a scratch."

"His body tensed with fear, he slides his hand into the sloppy wiring beneath the dashboard."