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.
He had also built in other ways of producing an explosion in a car bomb. He had connected the blasting caps in the bricks of Semtex to the car’s mechanical and electrical switches so they would complete a circuit if any one of several things happened—lifting the trunk lid, opening a door, starting the engine, turning on a light, stepping on the brake pedal. But the bomb technicians had resisted doing any of those things and evaded his traps.
He hadn’t needed ready-made blasting caps, really. He was good at making initiators too. They could be very simple—two wires soldered to the inner sides of a spent bullet casing, a small amount of explosive material between them—black powder or fulminate of mercury, maybe, and then a seal at the end. He had once even used a small Christmas lightbulb with the tip ground off so he could fill it with acetone peroxide and seal it again. All it took was a nine-volt charge to set it off.
But he wasn’t experimenting to amuse himself now. He was making bombs to kill people, so using homemade components was just vanity. That was why he had switched to using commercially made blasting caps. They were reliable and safe. They always required a current of 0.25 amp to set them off, not more—and even more important, not less. And he could use a variety of different power sources to produce that current.
He had plenty of blasting caps. Only a few months ago he’d taken a trip to replenish his supply. A person had to fill out Form 5400 and have a blaster’s license to buy them, so it was much safer to get them in other ways. He had begun by searching for trained and certified blasters who might need money.
Many blasters worked in coal mines. A few Internet searches gave him a list of coal mines that had closed in the past year or two. There were some in Boone County in western Kentucky; some in Wyoming County, West Virginia; and some in Knox and Pike counties, in Indiana.
He searched the online newspapers from coal-mining counties. He found his first three prospects by looking at ads placed by people offering themselves for employment. He found three more by looking up “blasting services”—road clearing, stump removal, demolition. They had clearly tried using their best skills on a freelance basis, but he was almost certain there couldn’t be enough work for the number of blasters living there now that the mines had closed.
When he had ten names of men who had placed ads saying they had blasting licenses and recent coal-mining experience, he flew east and drove into West Virginia. He started with a man named Carl Mazur, who lived in Wyoming County. He called Mazur and met him at a diner.
Mazur was a big man in his forties who wore a flannel shirt, Carhartt canvas work pants, and a pair of steel-toed boots to the meeting, so he looked like a lumberjack. He handed the bomb maker a neatly typed résumé when they sat down. The bomb maker glanced at it only long enough to see the blaster’s license and said, “I’ll read this later. Right now is our chance to talk.” Then he put the résumé into his briefcase and said, “How do you find yourself out of work?”
Mazur explained that the Dall River Mine had closed. He said the closing of the mine had been a gradual process. The number of tons shipped had been decreasing for years, and according to the company, so had the profit margin. Closing down had been discussed vaguely from time to time, but then it was brought up one year during contract negotiations. Many miners had insisted it was a hoax, a trick to get them to work for less. In the end, the union tried to save the jobs for a few more years by giving in on health insurance and pensions. All that accomplished was to give the owners a chance to slip in new clauses to make it easier to lay off everybody, starting with the men who had black lung or silicosis or cancer.
The bomb maker nodded in sympathy, then made his proposal. He said he was a successful developer who had planned to make more money by buying up some wild land in Missouri and building gated housing developments. In order to get started, he would need to clear and level several thousand-acre parcels and build access roads. The land was high and rocky, but beautiful and surrounded by thick forests. Three of the parcels even had lakes on them. The blasting job was big, and would probably take six months to a year. He offered to pay Mazur his regular fee plus an additional fifty percent bonus for working out of state.
Mazur asked, “Would I be an employee of your company?”
“Not unless you want to be. It’s always suited me fine if somebody wanted to be an independent contractor. That gives you a chance to get paid by the job, not the hour. I just want your assurance that you won’t be careless and endanger my men.”
“What kind of explosives are we talking about?” said Mazur.
“It’s basically a dynamite job. But I figure nearly all of these blasts can be done with nitrate fertilizer mixed with motor oil and set off with blasting caps. We have men to drill the holes for you wherever you say and clear the rock away after. I’ll leave the blasting details up to you, but we’d like to keep the costs down. We have investors, and once they hand me their money they start asking when payday is going to be.”
Mazur nodded. “I’ll do it.”
“Does your résumé have all the information I need? Your blaster’s license number and your contact phones and everything?”
“Yep,” said Mazur. They made a handshake agreement and the bomb maker gave Mazur twenty thousand dollars to start ordering the supplies he would need to clear the first parcels. Then he gave Mazur one of the business cards he’d made for this trip and they parted in the parking lot.
After a couple of weeks, Mazur called the cell phone number on the card and said he was nearly ready. He had purchased most of the supplies he would need.
The bomb maker arranged to meet him in a place called Little Blank Lake, Missouri, in four days. He said he had hired a crew to work on the clearance, and they would get started that Monday on the first parcel.
They met on a remote forest road on Sunday at noon to look the place over. The bomb maker chatted with Mazur about the project and waited until Mazur took out a key and opened the lock on the big built-in storage box on the left side of his pickup. Then he raised his pistol toward the back of Mazur’s head and shot him. The bullet went through and emerged from Mazur’s forehead, spattering the white truck with bright red blood.
Shooting Mazur had been a gamble, but he liked to make these small bets with himself about how people would behave in response to a stimulus he’d provided. If he’d been wrong, his penalty would have been to start over again on another licensed blaster. This time he had been right. When he looked inside the big storage box, he found the whole space was neatly packed with new boxes of number eight blasting caps. In the storage box along the other side of the truck bed were reels of insulated wire, a blasting generator, a multimeter, and a toolbox with insulated wire cutters, gloves, wire strippers, and connectors. A hard hat, ear protectors, goggles, one box of dynamite, and four more boxes of blasting caps took up the rest of the truck.
He left everything but the blasting caps, the dynamite, the money Mazur had left from the twenty thousand dollars he had given him, and the business card he had printed with the name of an imaginary developer.