The bomb maker drove his van into his garage and closed the door with the remote control. He cleared his AK-47 rifles to be sure there were no forgotten rounds in any of the chambers, and then he examined them closely and carefully. They had all been cleaned and covered with a thin protective layer of gun oil, and at least ten of the nineteen had never even been fired. He locked them up, then carried his suitcase into the house.
He went to sleep and got up early the next day to begin work on the next stage. His clients had never said anything about the serial numbers of the weapons. Why would they care? They seemed to be terrorists, and if their guns were ever in the hands of the authorities, they would already be dead. Tracing the weapons could not harm them. But tracing any of the guns to a previous owner might lead to a description of the bomb maker, and maybe a surveillance shot of him, or even his van.
The next stage of the bomb maker’s work was purely for his own protection. An AK-47’s serial number was stamped on the lower receiver. He put on latex gloves, took the first AK-47 apart, clamped the lower receiver on his new drill press, aimed the bit at the right spot, and turned on the power.
Removing a serial number was difficult, because the process of stamping the number into the steel made microscopic changes deep in the metal. After filing or buffing it was still possible to bring back the number. The only way that really worked was to set a drill on the surface and drill all the way through. There had to be nothing left to read.
When he finished the first rifle, he put it in a fresh, clean metal box and began to work on the next one. Removing the numbers took two days. In the end he had fifteen AK-47 rifles with no serial numbers.
He cleaned another steel storage box and went to work on the .45 ACP pistols. The Beretta numbers were on the left side of the receiver. The Springfield, Smith and Wesson, and Sig Sauer pistols had a variety of locations—either side of the receivers or on the underside. He went about the work patiently and drilled all of them off.
At the gun show in Houston he had bought a fully functional replica of the original trigger and sear mechanism for the AK-47. Now he went to work duplicating enough of these parts for all nineteen rifles.
Ten days later, when he had finished modifying all of the weapons, he went back to cleaning. In the end he had nineteen fully automatic AK-47s with no serial numbers, each loaded with a clean thirty-round magazine and supplied with two more, and fifteen loaded .45 pistols with two spare magazines each. Every magazine and bullet had been touched only with rubber gloves, and each weapon had been cleaned and kept free of his fingerprints.
The day after he completed the weapons, he returned to his work on his explosive devices. He had already decided not to tell his clients the guns were ready. He had to be in control this time, but his clients were not controllable people. If he turned the guns over to them right away, they would begin to pressure him. As soon as they had weapons, they would be impatient to launch their attack. He didn’t even know what they intended to attack.
He thought about them again. They never seemed to give him any information that would make it easy to identify them. They never complained about a specific grievance, a hatred that would tell him where in the world they had originated. They were all young, tan-skinned males who could be from a wide variety of places, and they spoke with practically no accent. They never spoke a language to each other besides English, or addressed any of their companions by name. There was no Jose, no Raj, no Ahmed, no Singh, no Zog, no Chou, no Pepe. Everything they wore or used seemed to have been bought in the same American stores where everybody else shopped. They had taken to paying him regularly since they’d arrived, and it was always in American hundred-dollar bills. The money had made him trust them, but it had not given him any information about them.
He knew he needed more time to work now. He would delay the revelation that he had the guns and return to work on his bombs.
Before he had been sent off to buy weapons, he had been engaged in making a supply of explosives and detonators. The hospital batch had been as good as, and maybe better than, the others. One quality of a good mix was stability, and another was power. The bomb he delivered to the hospital had been intended to cause total destruction to one patient room inhabited by Diane Hines and about a dozen visitors.
Instead, the head nurse and an orderly had taken the cake bomb into a break room to cut and plate it. The bombing had been a failure, but the explosive charge had been magnificent. It had blown through both walls of the break room, including an outer wall made of structural concrete, steel I beams, and an outer shell of bricks and mortar. He had failed in his mission, but his bomb was much better than he expected, and it was the first use of the newest batch. It was wonderful stuff. Over the next few weeks he would incorporate as much of it as he could in devices and then get started on making more. He couldn’t expect to get paid until he fulfilled his promise to kill off the Bomb Squad. He needed to make something they didn’t expect.
The exceptional power of the new batch of Semtex gave him the idea of building a few small antipersonnel bombs. He began to plan and make drawings for the new designs. He drew a few bounding mines, based on the Bouncing Betty bombs the Germans made in World War II. After the war, the Soviet Union, China, and the United States all made their own versions. They had a trigger that freed a spring beneath the bomb. When the spring was free the bomb would fly upward about five feet and detonate, sending steel balls outward in a ring with a kill zone of about twenty feet.
He needed some other designs. Now that he had a new drill press and a new lathe, he went to work on a set of antiwithdrawal fuzes. He based one on the M123 fuze the air force used. The fuze had a set of exterior threads that fitted into a threaded receptacle on the bomb. The original fuze had two ball bearings embedded in the thread. In the original, when the fuze was screwed in, the bearings slipped into two recesses, making it impossible to unscrew. Instead of the ball bearings, he used a moving collar, which a bomb technician would try to unscrew. Once the fuze was in, the collar would unscrew one turn and then free a spring-loaded pin to stab against the detonator and initiate an explosion in the main charge. He devised an improved hiding system for antipersonnel mines by inserting a bounding mine into a tube and burying the tube so it hid the mine below ground level and then acted as a launcher.
He devised antipersonnel weapons as systems. He could install one mine alone, but each one had the capability of being connected to one or more others, so touching one bomb would set off others nearby.
Each day he would pursue new ideas, some of them his own, others adaptations of devices used in wars. He was particularly pleased whenever he was able to make a device that looked like an old classic design but build in a trigger that worked differently from the original. He loved to imagine a bomb technician following the procedures in an old military manual to render a device safe, then blowing himself to pieces.
While he worked he recorded the local television news reports. One night after a long and productive day he returned to the house, showered and changed his clothes, sat down, put the VTR on fastforward, and began to speed through the reports. He could be fairly certain that if the image on the screen was a crowd of children, a bear in a swimming pool, a group of people in front of a movie theater, or anyone smiling, it had nothing to do with him. When he saw the chief of police on a podium he stopped the speeding image and backed up.
He was feeling mildly optimistic. Had some other cop died without the bomb maker’s help? As he backed the sequence to its start, he kept wondering. The beginning was a pretty blond woman in her forties asking a question. Then he saw that the person answering was Captain Stahl. Had he been the one to die? Was it possible?
The bomb maker pushed Play when the police chief appeared. “It’s my sad duty today to announce that I’ve had to accept the resignation of one of the finest police officers and bravest men I’ve ever known. Captain Richard Stahl has served with the highest distinction every organization he’s joined in his adult life. In just the past two months he has been personally responsible for saving the lives of many citizens and police officers. We thank him for his service. Thank you for coming.”
The blond woman with the smirk looked suddenly desperate. He saw her begin to talk without producing any sound. In the background another reporter could be heard yelling, “Can you tell us the woman’s name?” Another called out, “Will the woman be fired too?” But the chief was a master at evading a follow-up question. He was out the door by then.
The blond woman was now standing close to the camera, facing it. “The chief of police appears to have followed up on our interview of Captain Stahl yesterday afternoon.” She was taking credit for what had happened. “This is Gloria Hedlund, Channel Ten News.”
The bomb maker pressed the remote control to freeze the image and study the blond reporter’s face. Her expression—triumphant and vengeful—reminded him a little of his ex-wife, Carla.