“I think we need to know if we were right about the way it works,” Stahl said. “Let’s lay out a few hundred feet of rope. Then we’ll attach it to the containment vessel and give it a tug.”
The bomb truck had a rope on a reel near the rear doors. Elliot paid out rope as Hines drove along the riverbed. They came to the spot where the concrete LA River met the concrete bed of the Tujunga Wash and turned a corner. When they had gone another two hundred feet, they set the reel on the concrete surface of the wash and drove back to the containment vessel. They tied the rope to the tow hitch of the containment vessel, drove back, returned the reel to the truck, and then set the reel so it wouldn’t turn. Stahl got on the radio.
“This is Bomb Squad Team One. We’re ready to detonate the explosive device in the riverbed. We’d like to make our first attempt as soon as possible. Please alert all units in the vicinity of the river, and make sure they’re clear of this area. The vessel is seven hundred feet east of Laurel Canyon Boulevard, near the spot where the Tujunga Wash meets the riverbed. Please advise when all units have responded.”
In a moment they saw fire engines, ambulances, and police cars moving. From where they were they could see that the bridge was clear, Moorpark was empty, and Laurel Canyon to the south looked clear. Most of the official vehicles had gone north under the freeway overpass, where they couldn’t be seen from below the street. Five minutes later, the ranking police officer on the scene, the North Hollywood captain, said, “The scene is clear and vehicles are blocking any access to your location. You may detonate at will.”
“Roger.” Stahl looked ahead at Hines in the driver’s seat and Elliot in the seat beside her. “Are you both ready up there?”
“Ready,” she said. “How do you want this to happen?”
“I think as soon as the vessel moves an inch, the detonation will be instantaneous. When I say ‘fire in the hole,’ drive and take up the slack at fifteen miles an hour. Start the engine and stand by. And put your ear protectors on.”
Hines started the engine and the two fastened their seat belts, put their earphones on, and squared their backs against their seats.
Stahl said, “This is Bomb Squad Team One. We will attempt to detonate in five seconds.” He waited five seconds and then announced into the radio: “Fire in the hole. Fire in the hole.” He put on his ear protectors and sat back in his seat.
Hines drove, accelerating as she went. When they ran out of rope, they never felt the drag, or had time to see the rope snap taut. Instead, there was a deafening roar, and a shock wave that rose from the earth beneath the concrete and bounced their truck on its springs. They felt the shock in their bellies, like a punch.
Hines let the truck coast for a moment, holding the steering wheel straight, then braked to a full stop. She looked over her shoulder at Stahl. “Yep. Another mercury rocker switch.”
Stahl said, “The battery and the rest of the circuit were all under the cap where we couldn’t get at them. We’ll have to make sure everyone knows he does that.”
8
The maker watched the idiotic report on the eleven o’clock news. The commentary from the reporters was so ill informed and full of false authority that hearing it was like listening to a child trying to repeat an adult conversation he’d overheard from a distance.
The bomb maker muted the television set. He had no need of the report even if it had been accurate. He knew the mechanisms found in the car because he had built them.
But seeing the odd procession of vehicles with the one man carrying the shaped charge like a baby in a sling amused him a little. He wondered if that man had known exactly how sensitive the mercury switch had been, and how close he had been to becoming a whiff of smoke. Watching that one man walk alone down the street followed at a safe, cowardly distance by the enormous trucks and heavily armed cops made him laugh. What a fool that man was.
He was mesmerized and ecstatic watching the footage of the explosion when they detonated his device. There was a terrific blast that sent fragments of the containment vessel and pieces of shrapnel up and outward. The bomb technicians had turned his shaped charge into a standard bomb before they set it off, so the twenty-foot-deep concrete trench of the dry riverbed had caught the punishment. That was too bad, but the explosives had been great. He pressed the reverse button to watch the explosion again and again, slowing it down and watching objects in the background, the movement of the flying metal, the cracking of the concrete walls of the river.
The pictures of the windows blown inward in the buildings on Laurel Canyon and Moorpark Street, the bottles and cans shaken off shelves in the stores along Ventura Boulevard, and the incidental, comical things that had been swept over by the force of the blast—a few trees along the river, a stop sign, a couple of fences, some tables with umbrellas, a row of parked cars—delighted him.
When the reporter interviewed the locals about their reactions to his device, he couldn’t resist turning the volume up. Several people said they thought it had been an earthquake. They were from Los Angeles, so everything big and scary felt like an earthquake to them. Two of them thought a missile had hit nearby, and another thought a house with a gas leak had blown up.
Listening to these people lightened his mood. And even the fact that there had been no casualties didn’t depress him much. His car bomb had tied up a bomb team for a whole day, held thousands of cars in traffic for about nine hours, dominated the national news, and made the entire country aware that Los Angeles had a problem. And whether the general public knew it or not, the Bomb Squad knew they had survived only by making lucky guesses about twenty times in a row. Only one day ago he had killed half the LA Bomb Squad. He’d accomplished the largest police kill-off in history.
And today, just like yesterday, everything had worked. His plastic explosives hadn’t been manufactured by a company in the Czech Republic. He had made the whole supply himself—over two hundred pounds—and it had been as good as the factory-made version. It was stable, easy to detonate, powerful, uniform, and reliable.
He had made the PETN with nitric acid, pentaerythritol, lye, and acetone—measuring, mixing, cooling, heating, and filtering. He had fabricated the RDX crystals and crushed the two mixtures into powder with a wooden rolling pin and mixed them in a jar. Breaking them down and combining them any other way would have detonated them. He had made a paste of the powder with petroleum jelly, shaped the explosive paste into bricks, and wrapped them, leaving them to solidify further like bread in baking pans until he needed them.
Making the plastic explosive successfully had liberated him. He didn’t need anybody to make him powerful. He could make his perfect weapon himself. There were many men who had attempted these same procedures—mixing and agitating these highly explosive compounds to combine their power—who had died in the process.
He had built his own mercury switches to set off the shaped charge. During the day he had wondered if he had somehow botched the switches. But then, when the bomb technicians detonated the bomb by moving the containment vessel, he knew his workmanship wasn’t the problem. Still, he resolved to start using more ready-made components to avoid uncertainty. Mercury switches could be purchased, or he could take one from any of a number of junked machines—the trunk-lid lights and braking systems of cars built before 2003, the anti-tilt mechanisms in vending machines and pinball machines.