landmine

"Not sure we can," Kincaid said. "The beam is rigged up to an antipersonnel mine."
"Well," I said. "Can't we just... can't you put a weight on a land mine and leave it there? So long as the weight holds the trigger down, it doesn't explode, right?"
"Right," Kincaid said. "But that's assuming we've gone back in time to World War Two." He shook his head. "Modern mines are pretty good at killing people, Dresden. This one's British, pretty recent."
"How can you tell?"
He tapped his nose. "The Brits use a different chemical priming charge than most. It's probably a bouncer, very nasty."
"Bouncer?"
"Yeah. If something interrupts the beam, the charge activates. Several individual submunitions get blown up into the air, or sideways, or however they want to set it up, in a pattern. Then they explode maybe five or six feet in the air. Sends a couple of thousand steel balls out in a big cloud. Kills everything in thirty, maybe forty meters if you're in the open, maybe a lot farther in a tight space like this. If it was me, I'd have set the charges up to get thrown straight down this hall. All these stone walls, the shrapnel would shred everything real good."
"I could hex down whatever is sending the beam," I said.
"Thus interrupting it," Kincaid said. "Thus kablowie. Thus death."

Blood Rites Chapter 32, Page 266


"Mavra?" I asked.
He shook his head. "That whole end of the hall looks like a chop shop for a black market organ bank. The vampire took that blast from the mine right in the kisser. You'd need her dental records and a jigsaw puzzle all-star to get a positive ID."
Kincaid didn't see Mavra flicker into sight. She rose out of the smoke behind him, horribly torn and mangled, badly burned, and angry as hell. She was missing her lower jaw, half of an arm, a basketball-sized section of lower abdomen, and one of her legs was attached by only a scrap of flesh and her black tights. For all of that, she moved no less swiftly, and her eyes burned with dead fire.
Kincaid saw the look on my face. He dropped flat.

Blood Rites Chapter 33, Page 278-279