Doug’s got a big knife, he being that kind of guy, and Amy has her kris. Randy pulls the lightweight aluminum frame of his backpack apart to produce a couple of tubes; this takes a while but, as Doug said, everything is happening slowly now. Randy tosses one of the tubes to Enoch Root, who snatches a basically poorly aimed throw out of the air. Now that everyone is equipped, Doug Shaftoe gives them a tutorial on how to probe one’s way through a minefield. Like every other lesson Randy’s ever imbibed, this one is sort of interesting, but only until Doug divulges the main point, which is that you can poke a mine from the side and it won’t blow up; you just can’t poke it vertically. "The water is bad because it makes it hard to see what the hell we’re doing," he says. Indeed, the water has a milky look, probably from suspended volcanic ash; you can see clearly for a foot, hazily for another foot, and below that you can see vague, greenish shapes at best; everything is covered in a uniform brown jacket of silt. "On the other hand, it’s good because if a mine gets detonated by something other than your foot, the water’s going to absorb some of the blast by flashing into steam. Now: tactically our problem is that we are exposed to an ambush from above left: the west bank. Poor old Jackie Woo is down and he can’t protect that flank anymore. You can bet that John Wayne is covering things on the right as best as he can. Since it is the left bank that’s most vulnerable, we will now head for the bank on that side, and try to reach the protection of the overhang. We should not all converge on the same point; we spread out so that if one of us detonates a mine it won’t hit anyone else."