Steve and Debbie Garrick drove into the parking lot beside the picnic area in Fern Dell at 12:15 p.m. on Saturday. They were in their Suburban, and when all the seats were installed and the kids were strapped in, they could carry both of them, six of the boys from the baseball team, their equipment, and the picnic supplies. Haley and Ron Steiner had the rest in their van, and they would be along in a few minutes.
They had been practicing all morning at a field in Griffith Park, and now they were all hungry. Debbie tugged at the big cooler of food she had made before dawn and pulled it toward the back door. Then she tapped it on top so the boys knew she wanted it out. As the two Morales boys and Henry Cooper lifted it, she watched her son, Dennis, try to help. He wasn’t as strong as those boys, but at least he had the alertness and hustle to get in on the work.
Debbie stifled the feelings that surfaced unexpectedly. She had been a star softball player in high school and college, and later she played in a women’s hardball league for three years. She had gotten used to keeping to herself the fact she was so much better at baseball than her husband, Steve, and now their son too. But that didn’t mean she’d forgotten.
The problem she faced had been being a woman. She had fallen in love with Steve at the age of twenty-four, and in a year Steve had passed the bar exam. He wanted to marry her, but she knew if she married him she would have to drop out of the league. She couldn’t be his wife and travel with a baseball team. Her team had played in a championship series in Venezuela the previous season, and there were signs that they were good enough to keep competing at a high level. But baseball was a game, and being Steve’s wife was a future. She tried various methods of putting him off. She told him she was perfectly happy to keep having sex with him regularly while she was home without getting married, and would even live with him for the entire off-season. She made an argument that this would probably be the future pattern for most male-female relationships. But he was a good lawyer. He lined up all his arguments and then marched them past her in review—children, house, financial security, shared risks and rewards, and the near certainty that if they remained single, one of them would meet someone else and move on.
She still had a better arm than Steve, and she was fairly sure she could still outrun him, maybe even by a larger margin than she could at twenty-six, because of her jogging and taking care of the kids every day. When she and Steve were coaching the baseball team she always took the secondary role. Steve would instruct and give pep talks and she would demonstrate. She pitched batting practice, popped fly balls into the outfield for the fielders to drop, and hit grounders for the infielders to bobble.
Her life had not been a disappointment. It was just that her hands still longed for the feel of the horsehide in the precise diameter of the regulation ball. She loved the smell of the glove leather, the grass, and the exact shade of reddish dust in the infield. None of those things had anything to do with Steve.
She was in her mid-thirties now and would have been at the end of her career, probably already a step slower toward first base. And women’s baseball had not grown into the sensation everyone used to assure each other it would be by now.
She moved close to the place where the cooler sat on the other table and reached to open it. Her glance passed over a shiny cylinder shape on the ground beyond the table, and she thought the boys must have knocked one of the stainless steel thermos bottles off the table or dropped it while unloading. As she walked around the table to pick it up, it looked less like one of hers. Then she saw wires and looked more closely.
“Okay, guys,” she called out. “I’d like you to step back to the car. Walk exactly the way you came, in a straight line, and then go to the side door and get in.”
She called out, “Steve, can you help me, please? We need to move the picnic to another spot.”
She could tell he heard something in her voice that nobody else’s ears would pick up and that something was off. And here he came.
The bomb truck arrived with a police cruiser in front and another about two hundred yards behind. Sergeant Ed Carmody got out of the passenger side of the truck and looked in each direction. He spotted a family of—no, too big to be just a family. There were three mothers and two fathers. All boys. Baseball.
He moved toward them smartly. He saw one mother in particular whose blond hair was in a ponytail that protruded through the back of her baseball cap. She had great legs and when she threw a ball to one of the boys at the far end of the lot she threw like a guy, with a little snap to the release at the end and a loud smack when it hit leather.
She saw him long before he got near, and trotted up to him. “Did you see it yet?” she said. “Is it a bomb?”
He read in her eyes a concern for the boys who were her responsibility. She looked along her shoulder at them like a pitcher holding runners on base.
He said, “I haven’t seen it yet. My men are taking a preliminary look before I go in and deal with it.” He hadn’t realized he was gong to deal with it until just then, but now he was.
“Do you go in with those big bomb suits?”
“That will depend on what we see. Sometimes there’s something to worry about, and sometimes there isn’t.” He looked into her eyes.
“How far should we pull back?”
He smiled. “Far enough so that if this weren’t LA, you’d be a couple of towns away, ma’am. I’d suggest you take the boys home now.”
“Really?”
“If you don’t, then later one of the mothers will take you to task for it, and I’ll bet you know just which one already.”
She smiled and cupped her right hand beside her mouth. “Steve!” she shouted. “Let’s round them up now. We’ve got to get out.”
Her husband made a couple of arm-swing herding gestures and the boys scrambled in the open door of the Suburban and the sliding door of the van. They began the business of buckling seat belts and settling in.
The woman said, “Good luck with that thing.”
“Thanks,” Carmody said. “Good luck with the team. What’s their record?”
“Four and six, but we’re building.”
He watched her trot off to join her husband. He waited while the three vehicles took a slow turn like elephants forming trunk-to-tail into a caravan and then lurched up the gravel incline to the road and headed for Los Feliz. This time when they reached the city street, the second police car moved across the opening in the gate and stayed there.
Carmody was over forty, and he had been in uniforms most of his life. He had been a marine until he was wounded in Fallujah in the Iraq War. Then he went to EOD school and served two more tours, which was what he’d calculated he owed the country in exchange for the training. After that he became a Los Angeles police officer.
He’d had a theory once that he would be happy if he married a good woman. But when he became a civilian, he tried it three times and it never worked out. He kept throwing his marriages away, and then being surprised that he’d been so easily distracted.
He would run into a woman who was very pretty, usually married, but had that small spark of interest anyway. He would try to charm her, succeed, get caught by his wife, and end up signing papers. He’d been much happier, but for shorter periods of time, since then.
These days most of the women were like that baseball mom, except that they had been interested in Ed Carmody, which she wasn’t. But who knew? Maybe the sight and sound of him would grow on her too. It had happened before. The ones who didn’t seem interested would show up in a day, a month, or even a year, having experienced a change of some kind, and be in a playful mood.
There was still the bomb—if it was a bomb. Carmody made his way to the end of the parking lot near the picnic tables where the vans must have originally parked, and watched his two teammates study the device from about ten yards away. Marshall was carrying the video camera and documenting the scene, using the zoom lens to get a better look.
Carmody got into the truck and watched the video screen to see what had caused all the concern. When he saw it, the image was more than familiar. The object looked just like an M904 nose fuze for a five-hundred-pound aerial bomb. He knew all about that model. When he was in the military it had been the standard fuze for the standard bomb dropped by fixed-wing aircraft. The M904 held a powerful explosive charge for initiating the trinitrotoluene, but it was safe and reliable.
He said, “Okay, you guys. Do you recognize the fuze?”
Marshall said, “It looks like an M904 nose fuze.”
“What’s it attached to?”
“It looks like it’s inserted into a canister about the size of a big thermos.”
“As long as it’s not screwed into an Mk 82 five hundred pounder, we ought to be able to take it out.”
Rogers said, “Maybe we ought to just blow it up, like Captain Stahl said in his e-mail. This isn’t a bad place to do it. Nothing but trees and a parking lot.”
“There’s no need to scare the crap out of everybody in Los Feliz. I’ll suit up and disconnect it. Come on back.”
He was already breaking out his suit, and Rogers and Marshall returned and helped him get it on. They helped lift the helmet up and over his head, and Carmody heard the small ventilator fan begin to whirr to clear his vision screen and cool his head and face. He walked to the place where the others had been looking.
Now that he was in the suit he had to communicate by radio. He knelt down and said to the transmitter, “It looks just like an M904. I’m going to take it out and then render the device safe. Please double-check to be sure the area is clear of bystanders.”
“Check,” said Rogers.
“Is the road clear? No cars allowed in or out?”
“Clear,” said Marshall.
“Code Five Edward called?”
“Code Five Edward in effect.”
Ed Carmody turned his body to bring the clear plate in front of his eyes around to sweep the parking lot and the foliage surrounding it. The three bomb technicians were alone in this beautiful, quiet place. “I’m going to remove the fuze.”
He knelt and touched the fuze. It wasn’t screwed in, just inserted and taped to stay there. He looked at it closely. It wasn’t quite the way he remembered the M904. Was its housing a lighter metal? He cut the tape that held it to the canister, and then lifted the fuze away. There was a sudden resistance. It was only then that he saw the thin lines of wire under the fuze, like a spiderweb gleaming in the sunlight that leaked through the canopy of the tree above him. He realized that the fuze was a decoy. The canister was too.
He set it back down, but lifting the wires had set something off. He saw a small disk fly up from the dusty ground a few feet away, spinning like a flipped coin and revealing a round hole in the ground. A cylinder shape shot out of the tube in the hole. It rose six feet into the air and then hung, poised there for a second before it would fall.
Carmody half turned and shouted, “Get down!”
Then, at the top of its arc, the bounding charge detonated. There were nine bounding charges in the air, each wrapped in tape that held ball bearings in place until its charge made them fly outward in all directions.
The nine bounding charges had been made by hand, and they were intentionally not uniform in weight, size, or power. Some rose only three feet, others seven, and the charges detonated over a period of nearly two seconds as Carmody saw light for the last time.