The Bomb Maker Read online

  “That and keeping other people away from here,” Stahl said. “If he has a way to set it off remotely, he’ll wait until there are enough people to make it worth his trouble.”

  “So we’re on our own,” said Hines. “No reinforcements.”

  Stahl didn’t answer her question, which wasn’t really a question. “While we’re waiting for the word from Engle, let’s step back and try to understand what’s happening. He chose a gas station. If he blows up a car by a gas pump, there will be a fire. But a gas pump is like a faucet. The gasoline isn’t stored in the pump, it’s in the underground storage tanks.”

  They walked through the station, inspecting the round caps the gasoline delivery truck drivers opened to refill the storage tanks. Stahl said, “There are supposed to be three tanks in one place, and three in another place. The station has to be laid out so the fuel truck can come in, stop, fill the tanks, and drive off without ever backing up. And by law the tanks can’t be right below the pumps.”

  The radio came alive. “This is Twelve Mike Seventeen for Bomb Squad.”

  “Officer Engle. Did you check the tapes?”

  “The store across the street has its recordings on a computer,” she said. “I just watched what was happening while the other tape was blacked out. The man used two chains to chain the car to the pumps, then went to the trunk of the car, opened it, reached in, and then closed it. Then he drove off.”

  “How long did he reach into the trunk?”

  “Seven and a half seconds.”

  “Thank you. Great work, Engle.” He made a call to the captain at North Hollywood. “Hello, Captain. Stahl again. I’m afraid we’ve verified that the car is a bomb, and so we’ll need to keep the streets shut down for at least a few hours.”

  “Understood. Do you need anything else?”

  “Yes,” said Stahl. “I need a set of steel plates one inch thick, like the ones the DPW uses to cover holes in the road they make during underground repairs. Maybe four plates, each at least four by six. We’d also like a load of sandbags—enough to make a wall about six feet tall around a Chevy Malibu, and two car jacks.”

  “I’ll get the Department of Public Works going on that right away.”

  In less than an hour a truck arrived with the items Stahl had requested and a trailer carrying a forklift. The crew used the lift to unload the items, and then to help move them into place. They pushed two plates under the trunk of the car, and one in front of each of the two gas pumps to form a hard shell for the layer of sandbags they stacked against them. Then the DPW truck left.

  Stahl placed a pair of sandbags against the front and rear of each of the car’s tires so the car could not roll. Then he had Elliot set one car jack on the left side of the Malibu while he set one on the right. He had Hines count while he and Elliot raised the two jacks simultaneously so the car wouldn’t rock from side to side.

  Stahl opened radio contact with the Bomb Squad members at police headquarters while he, Hines, and Elliot put on the heavy bomb suits. “This is Stahl. Be sure what I say is recorded.”

  “Recorder running.”

  “All right. The car is chained to both pumps. I think that is mostly a deception, to make us think if we cut the chains we can move it. We can’t. We’re going to try to get a flexible closed-circuit television camera into the trunk of the car and see what it has inside that blows up. The floor of the trunk has a hole that’s blocked by something, so we’ve got to make another hole to inspect the trunk.”

  “Good luck.”

  “Thanks. We’ll report from time to time. If this doesn’t end well, send copies of the recording to the FBI and ATF, so they’ll know what we learned about this guy, and what we tried.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Sergeants Hines and Elliot are sending photographs of the car, the layout of the gas station, and the nearby buildings. We’ve stabilized the car, and now we’re going to drill into the trunk.”

  Hines had fitted an electric drill with a cylindrical bit with a wider diameter than the lighted camera. She said, “Where do you want me to drill?”

  “On the side away from the gas cap,” Stahl said. “He could have a circuit with an initiator inside the gas tank, and we don’t want to make contact with it.”

  “All right,” she said. She wrapped a bit of masking tape around the drill bit so she would know how deep she was drilling.

  “How deep are you going in?”

  “This is an eighth of an inch,” she said. “I’m hoping that won’t be too deep, but it should make a hole we can use to insert the camera.”

  “Okay,” said Stahl. “Not a lot of pressure, and stop every few seconds to cool the bit in water.” He brought a large bottle of water and a bucket from the squad truck, and poured some water in. “Lots of drilling, not much pushing.”

  She nodded and began drilling. She would take the drill off the car now and then, and immerse the bit in water so it wouldn’t get hot enough to set off an explosive. After the second break she poured some water on the car’s surface. She said, “Are we filming this?”

  “Yes,” said Stahl. “The camera in the truck is on.”

  “Maybe it will pick up this guy watching,” said Elliot.

  “I hope it does,” Stahl said. “The smart ones don’t come in person, but maybe he’s got a weakness.”

  Hines stopped and pulled back. “There it is. We’re through.” She dipped the drill bit and then poured water around the hole she had drilled without letting any into the hole. Then she pried out the small disk of metal she’d cut out.

  “I’ll get the scope in and take a look,” said Elliot.

  “Okay,” Stahl said. “Just don’t get impatient. If you can’t see we can try something else.”

  Elliot put on his helmet and tugged it down so his face appeared behind the Plexiglas front. Elliot inserted the end of the flexible scope into the trunk and began to move it around. From his helmet radio the others could hear his breathing, and the fan that kept the helmet’s window clear of condensation. They listened to his breaths, trying to guess what he was seeing.

  Stahl hadn’t been in a suit in years. It felt familiar, but not pleasant. The suit weighed eighty-five pounds, and the armor plates in it made it stiff. He watched Elliot kneeling, looking down at the closed-circuit television monitor as he held the flexible cable to move the camera and its light.

  Elliot’s voice in the radio said, “It’s a mess.”

  Hines said, “What do you mean?”

  “The trunk is full of what look like plastic explosives. I think it’s homemade Semtex or C-4. There are bricks of it, each one about a foot long by four inches by four inches, but they’re not even close to identical. Probably each one was a batch. There are wires going to each one, so it’s like a rat’s nest. Each pair of wires I see looks like the leads of a blasting cap. If only one circuit works, it will set off everything. At the center of the pile is a vertical tube about ten inches in diameter. It seems to be right above the hole that was cut into the bottom of the trunk.”

  “Shaped charge,” said Stahl.

  “That’s what it looks like,” Elliot said. “I think it’s set up to do what you said—blow downward through the pavement to breach the gas tank below.”

  “We’ve put two inches of steel between the trunk and the pavement, but if a shaped charge that size is made correctly, it might still blow through the pavement under it and set off a tank. The rule of thumb is that a shaped charge can penetrate through steel plate seven times its own diameter. That might be why the car is chained there—so the trunk will extend over that set of tanks.”

  “The tanks under the station could make a hell of an explosion.”

  “Look at the trunk itself,” Stahl said. “Is the lid rigged?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Elliot. “But he’s built in lots of ways to set this off. He must have fifteen or twenty sets of blasting cap leads, and they don’t seem to be wired to one power source. They run in every di
rection.”

  “One more thing. Is there any ceiling space between the top of the explosives and the underside of the trunk lid?”

  “Just a second.” There was more shallow breathing, and then: “It amounts to about three inches in most places, but only about an inch above the shaped charge.”

  “Mark the spot on top of the trunk directly above the shaped charge.”

  Elliot stood, still holding the screen, moved the cable a little, and then took off one of his gloves and set it on the trunk lid. He went down on his back and looked at the hole under the trunk. Then he stood up and moved the glove an inch back. After a moment Elliot said, “Done. The shaped charge is directly below my glove.”

  “Come back.”

  When the three were standing on the far side of the truck from the booby-trapped car, they all removed their helmets. Their faces were covered with sweat. Elliot and Hines stared at Stahl, who seemed deep in thought. After a moment he looked up at them and noticed they looked worried, apprehensive, scared. “Don’t worry. We can do this.”

  Hines said to Stahl, “How do you want to go about this part?”

  “Popping the trunk lid will probably set off a trap initiator, but we just found something else we can do to get into it,” said Stahl. “We take part of the trunk lid off, so we can reach the explosives.” He took a black grease pencil from the tool kit in the truck, and then walked to the trunk of the car. He drew a ten-inch circle around Elliot’s glove, then made a two-foot square centered on it. He picked up Elliot’s glove, carried it back to the truck, and handed it to him.

  “Thanks.”

  Stahl said, “Before we do this, we’ve got to think of a way to cut into the lid without throwing sparks into the trunk full of explosives.”

  Hines said, “I think I know how to do that. An electric saw can open a hole in the trunk. But first, we use the hole we drilled to insert a layer of something over the explosive.”

  “A layer of what?” said Stahl.

  “I was thinking of that foam insulation they use in attics. They spray it into walls and things.”

  He looked at her. “That’s not a bad idea. Call Engle and see if she can find us some.”

  In a half hour, Officer Engle drove up without her partner and opened the trunk of her patrol car. “A hardware store on Ventura had it.” She lifted a tank out of the trunk and handed the box of attachments to Elliot.

  “Thank you, Officer Engle,” Stahl said. “Now you’d better pull back.”

  Stahl, Elliot, and Hines went through the procedure of drilling a second hole through the other side of the trunk, cooling the bit and the car over and over. When the second hole was finished, Elliot inserted the flexible video camera into the trunk again, then the small hose from the insulation tank, and began to spray. The foam came out steadily, but not too quickly as he applied a layer of polyurethane foam over the surfaces of the bricks of explosives. The insulation expanded to fill the available space. Elliot had to pull out the camera quickly to keep it from being covered. He repeated the procedure on the other side of the trunk to be sure all of the explosives were protected.

  “Is everything ready?” said Hines.

  Elliot looked at her and then Stahl, his expression tense. “Let’s hope that stuff works.”

  Hines drilled a hole at the edge of the square Stahl had drawn, then picked up the electric hacksaw and began to cut along the outline. Every few seconds she stopped to cool the blade in water, but the work went quickly. In time there was a square of the trunk lid ready to be lifted out. They pried one edge up so Elliot and Stahl could get their gloved hands under it. They paused for a second, their eyes meeting. Stahl said, “Lift.”

  The metal square was out. They set it down near the bomb truck and came back to the now open trunk and began carefully lifting out pieces of foam insulation to reveal what was beneath. They all saw the switch, but Hines got the words out first. “Mercury rocker switch.”

  The switch was resting on the off-white layer of explosive bricks in a handmade wooden frame about six inches long. The frame held a glass tube tilted at a twenty-degree angle. Inside the tube were two copper wires glued on opposite sides of the upper end. An inch of silvery mercury pooled on the lower end. If the tube were tilted, the mercury would, for an instant, connect the two contacts.

  Elliot said, “If we hadn’t stabilized the car before we went to work on it, we’d be dead.”

  Hines touched his arm. “But we did.”

  Stahl said, “Let’s get the best and closest possible look at the switch and the frame to be sure it’s not wired to another switch before we remove it.”

  They examined the device with flashlights and magnifiers. Then Stahl reached down and cut the wire to one of the contacts. “Wrap that, will you, Hines?”

  She leaned close, took an insulated cap, twisted it over the wire, and then waited while he cut the other wire and capped that one too, so they couldn’t come together and complete the circuit accidentally.

  Stahl put the mercury switch in an evidence bag, took it to the truck, and then returned.

  “What’s next?” Hines asked Stahl.

  “Now we start taking away some of its muscle. As we remove the Semtex, keep running your flashlight along the edges of the bricks. If there’s another tilt switch or pressure switch somewhere, find it before it finds us. Look for springs, any thin piece of metal that might touch another if you move a brick. I’ll do the first one, and we’ll take turns.”

  Stahl lifted an end of one of the bricks from the left side a quarter inch, used his flashlight to look under and around it, then cut the lead wires and extracted the blasting cap from the claylike object. He then carried the brick of explosive to the containment vessel and placed it inside.

  The next brick had no lead wires for a blasting cap, and Elliot carried it to the containment vessel. The third one was the same, and Hines carried that one. They were beginning to feel hopeful. They were decreasing the size of the potential explosion with each brick they removed. They removed six and set them in the round vessel. The vessel had two relief valves for venting the gases from an explosion slowly, and he checked to be sure they were both open before he closed the hatch.

  Stahl said, “We’d better stop now. This is a lot of high explosive for one load, and somebody’s got to drive it out to the range and detonate it. Hines, can you call to tell the nearest squad to get somebody out here to pick it up and bring us another containment vessel? If they’ve got two, they’d better bring them both.”

  “Yes, sir.” She took off her helmet, went to the driver’s seat of the truck, and made the call.

  In ten minutes, Team Three’s truck came and took away the first load.

  Team One restored their helmets and went to work again. Stahl said to Hines and Elliot: “I want to get everything else out before we touch the shaped charge. That means every brick of plastic and all the wires we can see before we move the big one.”

  They followed the same procedure as before, using lights and mirrors in the trunk to be sure there was nothing to actuate a detonator, no spring or metal clip ready to move and bridge a gap in a firing circuit. Whenever they had a sufficient number of bricks free of the trunk they called for a pickup and started on the next containment vessel. After an hour there was a radio call from headquarters. Stahl went to listen.

  He said, “Stahl.”

  “Bomb Unit Three just called in from the range. They set off the first few bricks of explosive. There were no duds. The plastic is well made, very high power.”

  “Thank you,” said Stahl. “Ask them to come back and pick up the next load.” He went back to work on the trunk of the car.

  “Anything we need to know?” asked Elliot.

  “No,” said Stahl. “You know how it is. If you’re not the one downrange, you get impatient and want to chat.”

  “Right,” said Elliot.

  A few minutes later, they reached the last four bricks around the shaped charge. One by o
ne, they removed each explosive brick and replaced it with a sandbag to hold the shaped charge in place. The last bricks were now in the containment vessel.

  The three stood back and studied the device in the trunk. It was a ten-inch pipe with a funnel-shaped cone of metal welded on the lower end, aimed down through the hole that had been cut in the floor of the trunk. The pipe had been held upright by a frame consisting of circular pieces of plywood with four legs, and by the weight of the plastic explosives wedged around it. There was a matching cap on the top end like what a plumber would use to cap a pipe, with two holes drilled into it for the leads of a blasting cap. The two leads were spliced to a pair of wires that led to a hole drilled in the forward end of the trunk. The wires would lead under the car’s seats and the carpet toward the dashboard, engine, and battery.

  Stahl said, “Let’s cut those leads.”

  Hines leaned into the trunk and clipped one of the wires with wire cutters, capped it, cut and capped the other, then stepped back.

  The three looked at the structure, and then Stahl said, “The frame is anchored with screws to keep the charge vertical. But the guy didn’t build the frame around the bomb. He prefitted it to the pipe, and after he built the bomb he just set the bomb down into it. I’ll bet we could lift it straight up if we wanted to.”

  “Do we want to?” said Hines.

  “Not yet. I’m a little more interested in the cone right now. It’s just a steel cone with air inside and some kind of liner—probably copper, maybe tin and lead—but it’s designed to focus the force of the blast straight downward through the pavement to the gasoline storage tanks. If the cone is built right, the liner will become a jet of molten metal and blow downward through the steel plates we put under the truck, the pavement, and a few feet of ground without any trouble.”

  “Should we take the cone off?” said Elliot. “If we take the cone away, the rest of it is just a bomb. If it goes off, it’ll blow up unfocused, in all directions.”

  “True,” said Stahl. “Removing it won’t change much for us. Look at the size of the charge. But if the cone is gone, it’s less likely to set off all that gasoline. We might be the only ones killed.”