I fingered the bomb wires for several seconds more. The timer on the bomb still ticking away. 3 minutes, 30 seconds. I had time, plenty of it, to cut the wires, the question was…what wires needed to be cut? Time kept moving. 3 minutes. Usually red wires were detenation signal wires, which were the ones I needed to cut to stop the signal for detonation from sent. That’s on government owned bombs. This was a terrorist bomb, made by the bad guys, for the bad guys. 2 minutes, 20 seconds. For all I knew this bomb could be purposely switched from red wires to blue wires being the key wire. 1 minute, 40 seconds.

Most simple bombs like this one had two wires: a detonation wire, and a timer wire. If the timer wire stopped sending info then the detenation wre blew. Which is why it was criticalto not cut the timer wire. 1 minute. This bomb had 3 wires. When a terrorist bomb has 3 wires, then that 3rd wire is for one reason only. To confuse debombers like me. That yellow wire intwined in my hand did one of two things: 1: act as a secondary timer wire, which would blow the bomb just like the regular timer would, or 2: it would be a backup detonation wire, both were equally dangourous. 20 seconds. I went back over my options, cut blue wire, cut red wire, one of those two were the detenation wire for sure. Must decide. 10 seconds. Red wire! 9 seconds. No, this is a terrorist bomb. My thoughts were speeding up and it was getting hard to maintain control of my shaking hands. 7 seconds. I pulled the scissors up to the blue wire. 6 seconds. I fumbled and accidently cut the yellow wire. No! 5 seconds. Okay. Good, the yellow wire must have been a backup detonator. 4 seconds. I looked over the wires. 3 seconds. If just there was more time. I cut the blue wire. The timer instantly went to zero. It was the timer wire!

I gasped, knowing the bomb will blow. Nothing happened. I looked down at the digital clock that acted as the visual for the timer. 0 hours, 0 minutes, o seconds. This could mean only one thing. The red wire was not a detenation wire. It was also a timer wire. There was one option I had overlooked; the yellow wire was the only detenation wire. It was the only option that explained this situation. Both the red and blue wire were timer wires. The yellow: detenation. I had cut the correct wire by accident! I repeated the thought in my head several times before finally muttering,” God, I’m lucky.”