He pushed his way out the heavy door, then closed it behind him, snapping the balky lock shut. Five minutes later he was inside the second cavelike magazine, this one containing cases of dynamite and wooden spools of detonating cord. From an open case of dynamite, he took two sticks—more than he needed—and tucked them into a deep pocket, then turned to go. At the door, though, he hesitated, then turned back, irresistibly drawn to the spools of det cord: Primacord—500-and 1,000-and 2,000-foot spools of linear explosive, in a rainbow of colors: orange, yellow, red, green, purple, in solids and stripes, each color and pattern denoting a different load of explosive inside the bright plastic sleeve. Some of the cord was no thicker than clothesline; on one spool, though, the cord was nearly as fat as his pinky. PRIMALINE 85, read the label on that one, which meant that every meter of cord contained 85 grams of high-explosive PETN.
God, I love this shit, Satterfield thought. He loved Primacord for what it could do; hell, with that one spool of Primaline 85, he could probably take down every major bridge in Knoxville. He also loved Primacord for its neatness and precision. Dynamite was dirty and messy, though undeniably macho; Primacord was clean and neat. Consistent, too: No matter which spool you unwound, no matter which loading you used, you could be sure that the explosion would rip through the cord at 23,000 feet a second, 16,000 miles an hour: New York to L.A. in ten minutes. He’d done the math during his demo training at Coronado, working the problem three times to make sure he hadn’t misplaced the decimal. How the hell did they do that, extrude high-proof explosives with such perfection that the blast traveled through the cord ten times faster than a bullet, but precisely, reliably fast? You could set your watch—hell, you could set a damn atomic clock—by precision like that.
He wasn’t here for the Primacord, but the temptation was too strong to resist. Slipping the KA-BAR knife from its sheath, he unspooled ten feet of the Primaline 85, sliced it off, and then wound it around his waist, cinching it into three tight coils. He took a moment to imagine what would happen if something set it off while he was wearing it. Shit, he thought, shaking his head and grinning, your head would come down in Kentucky and your feet in Alabama; one hand in Maryland, the other in Oklahoma. Don’t get hit by lightning on the way home.
This bunker’s door was even harder to close than the other. Satterfield made a mental note to bring some WD-40 next time he came, to lube the hinges. Be a damned shame to throw out his back.
CHAPTER 36
Brockton
HOLDING MY BREATH TO protect my lungs, I jogged into the cloud of smoke that shrouded the entry to the Knoxville Police Department. The air was thick with carcinogens—at least a pack’s worth of secondhand smoke, judging by the throng of smokers loitering outside the grimy glass doors. The KPD was a squat, brooding fortress of putty-colored brick set atop Summit Hill Drive. The police shared the building with traffic court, and I suspected that most of the smokers were speeders and DUI defendants, taking advantage of the noon recess to calm their jitters with a jolt of nicotine.
“Excuse me, sir?” I was accosted by a disheveled young man whose stringy, greasy brown hair had been cut, at some point in the distant past, in a style that was named after a saltwater fish whose name I struggled to recall. I held up my hand to deflect his sob story and request for spare change. Instead of panhandling, though, he simply asked, “Could you tell me the time, please?” Ashamed of my brusque response, I stopped, one hand on the door handle, and checked my watch.
“Ten of one,” I croaked, expending as little of my lungful of air as possible.
“Dude,” he said as I tugged open the door. “What happened to your voice?”
“Throat cancer.” I clutched my larynx as I rasped out the brazen lie. “Smoking.” Before he had a chance to engage me further, I ducked through the door, hurrying toward the smoke-free air inside. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw the mullet-head scrutinizing the ashy end of his cigarette, his eyes narrowed with suspicion. Then he dropped it to the concrete and ground it out. Before he did, though, he took one long last drag.
Traffic court occupied a single floor on the left-hand side of the complex; the police department commanded a four-story wing to the right. I signed in with the receptionist, who made a quick phone call and then buzzed me in. “Crime lab. Take the elevator to the second floor.”