“I would be proud to assist my country, but it will not be easy,” he said. “I must take my best men away from their current assignments. They will need equipment. And of course we must all get to the property as fast as possible. A helicopter will be the fastest method. The French make one called a Dauphin. It will easily seat six men and take us all the way there, right to the front door, with just one refueling stop. If I can charter one this morning, I can be at this place by early afternoon.”
As it turned out, Platon’s takeoff was delayed. The chopper he hired had technical problems. It was not until lunchtime that the Eurocopter Dauphin left the Paris heliport and began the three-hour flight south.
67
There had been a number of problems confronting Carver as he tried to work out how to get the document Vermulen wanted from the house where Bagrat Baladze was keeping it. For a start, he was not a professional thief, unlike Kenny Wynter, the man he was impersonating. He did not know where in the building the document was hidden, and the only method he knew of opening a safe was blowing it up: not such a smart idea if you wanted to preserve a flimsy cardboard folder filled with bits of paper. And, of course, there were six potential opponents- because he couldn’t assume that the women would be useless in combat-and only one of him.
Of these considerations, the last was the least significant. Given the element of surprise and a properly planned assault, he could soon even the odds. He’d done it often enough before. But he wasn’t there to kill people. He was there to steal. So he worked through the problem logically, considering all the possible permutations, until he came to a solution that made sense. Which was why he needed his shopping list. That, and a working knowledge of basic chemistry as it applied to the art of sabotage.
The logic was simple. The simplest way of getting the document out of the house was to make Bagrat Baladze do the work for him. Pondering that led Craver inexorably to the chemical properties of the substances on his list.
Linseed oil, for example, is prone to spontaneous combustion, as painters and decorators-not to mention their clients-sometimes learn, at their own cost. When the oil is exposed to air, it oxidizes and releases heat. The greater the exposure, the greater the heat generated. If the linseed is spread thinly across a relatively large area of cotton rag, that maximizes exposure, and so the heat rises. Over a period of approximately six hours, the rags can reach a temperature of more than 430 degrees Centigrade, some 800 degrees Fahrenheit, which is enough to produce a flame.
But there’s a catch. If there’s too little ventilation, the oxidation process is greatly reduced. If there’s too much, the flow of air around the rags simply disperses any heat it creates. It’s just like blowing on a fire. Stifle it and it dies. Blow too hard and you blow it right out. You’ve got to get the balance just right.
The ideal between too much and too little air is to place linseed-soaked rags in an open container. An empty paint can is perfect.
Aquarium pellets have equally potent chemical properties. Their job is to freshen up water by producing oxygen, and their active ingredient is potassium chlorate, an extremely efficient oxidizing agent. Just as with linseed oil, this oxidization produces energy in the form of heat. If the release of energy is sufficiently powerful, it creates an explosion. Potassium chlorate is a very effective oxidizer, which explains why it is also an active ingredient in many homemade explosives, whether formulated by fireworks hobbyists or homicidal terrorists. Carver had ground down the tablets using a pestle and mortar and then mixed the resulting powder with sugar, which would burn to produce a bigger, brighter bang.
He had poured the mix into the bottom of an opened, emptied bag of potato chips, replaced the chips, and glued the bag back together. Then he prepared the bottle of “orange juice,” which actually consisted of acetone- bought from the same hardware store where he’d found the rest of the painter’s supplies-orange food dye, and, once again, sugar. Acetone is an extremely highly flammable liquid whose vapors can explode on exposure to a spark. Among sugar’s properties is that it caramelizes under heat, becoming extremely sticky. So the addition of sugar to this sort of bottle bomb, or Molotov cocktail, causes the flame to adhere to its target, much like napalm.
Carver didn’t have to add anything to the paint thinner or the oil paint. They would be fine just as they were.
His painter’s bag and its contents were, essentially, a self-detonating incendiary bomb. Once they were in place, Carver had ridden back to the village in the baker’s van, checked out of his hotel, and driven back up the mountain, this time by the scenic route. He made a second trek across the mountainside to his observation post, now carrying the equipment that Vermulen’s people had delivered to the poste restante, as per instructions. After that, he’d just waited.
By midday, the air temperature had risen into the high seventies. The women sunned themselves with the gratitude of northern Europeans released at the end of a cold, dark winter. The men went shirtless, revealing torsos covered in the tattoos that are an essential mark of status in Russian gangland culture. The dogs lazed in their cage, their laid-back demeanor caused less by the hot sun on their fur than the large quantities of Valium-fifty milligrams crushed and mixed with the pate in each of their sandwiches-coursing through their bloodstreams.
The humans lunched late, at around two in the afternoon. They drank heavily with their meal. By half past three, George had taken over sentry duty by the gate. Bagrat and Linda had gone back indoors for sex and a snooze. Everyone else was flopped semicomatose by the pool. That was when Carver saw the first wisps of smoke coming from his canvas bag.
He texted Vermulen’s number: “Delivery 19:00 in bar as planned.” Carver spelled the words in full. He regarded text-speak as infantile twaddle and presumed a retired general would feel the same way. Thinking about it, he doubted whether Vermulen had ever before in his life been obliged to use text at all.
By the time he’d finished, a flame was clearly visible. He’d painted the inside of his bag with linseed, too, just to add to the effect. Once the spark caught, it would quickly spread.
There was a sudden, sharp crack, a shattering of glass, and a whoosh of flame as the bottle of cleanser cracked open and its contents ignited. From there it was a chain reaction. The flame from the cleanser lit the bag of chips, which then went off with an explosive fizz, like a Roman candle. That shattered the drink bottle, releasing a fireball of acetone and sugar, which in turn set the bone-dry logs aflame.
Carver was already wearing his bulletproof vest, with his pistol holstered below it. The loaded grenade launcher was slung around his back. The baton was in his hip pocket. The wax plugs had been stuffed deep into his ears. His hands, encased in tight leather gloves, were holding his gas mask. It would be the last thing to go on.
