sauce to take out a building and everything living inside it.'
'Your squad defuses bombs all the time.'
'When we're on an assigned case. Otherwise, we dispose of them.' McConnell's irritation was evident.
'Well, I'm on a case,” Cochrane said.
'Then you defuse it, chief.'
Cochrane looked at the truck. The driver waited. The vehicle's enormous diesel engine idled noisily in the cold night. 'You have a good lab?' Cochrane asked.
'Best within two hundred miles.'
'You got an extra suit and helmet?'
'If you're crazy enough.'
'Then I'll take it apart.'
'One hitch,' demanded McConnell. 'I need authorization to let you blow yourself up, Who's your superior?'
Cochrane reached to his pocket, pulled out a paper, and wrote out a telephone number.
'Richard Wheeler. Assistant Director, Special Operations. Call him at home.'
McConnell took the number and looked at Cochrane with something less than affection. 'F.B.I.!' he said. 'Always a hassle.' Then he instructed his driver to rush the thing in the sock over to the laboratory.
The bomb lab was a converted airplane hanger on the south end of the army base. The actual work area was a room within a room within a room, with extra steel plating against each wall. Cochrane dressed in the outer area, struggling into the unbearably warm anti-explosives suit and pulling on the helmet. He donned the iron-plated gloves, which weighed five pounds each, and passed through the final door to the work area.
The 'birthday cake,' as Lieutenant McConnell called it, was still in the iron basket, sitting on a long steel table.
The two men who had taken the bomb onto the truck were assigned to work with Cochrane. They, however, would be backups and would not handle the actual device.
'All right,' Cochrane told them, at 3:32 A.M. 'I'm ready.'
They entered the room as a team. There was a large tub of number ten lubricating oil beside the device. Gingerly, feeling the sweat roll beneath his uniform, Cochrane nodded as the other two men held the ends of the poles. Then Cochrane removed the steel lid of the basket and reached in with a five-foot pair of tongs. He lifted the device out and gently submerged it in the tub of oil. Immediately, one of the two assistants immersed the end of a stethoscope into the oil. All three men stepped back to a range of twenty feet and knelt.
The stethoscope had fifty feet of tubing and led behind a partition of four-inch-thick glass. There sat Lieutenant McConnell, who listened. The stethoscope also contained a miniaturized microphone. The oil acted as a sound conductor. If there were any noise from within the bomb, such as ticking and whirring- which could denote a live device-McConnell would hear it.
Cochrane squinted through the glass visor of his helmet. McConnell listened for an unbearably long time-at least ten seconds. Then he shook his head.
No noise. Either the device was dead or set to blow. There was a difference. Cochrane crept slowly forward again, signaling for one of the men to follow him.
The lubricating oil served a second purpose. If the bomb casing was not airtight, the oil would seep into it, clog whatever mechanism was involved, and possibly prevent a blast. Cochrane signaled for the tongs. His assistant picked them up, then reached for the bomb. The device came up out of the oil. Now Cochrane steadied his hands and drew his breath. This was the part that could kill.
He moved in close and touched Siegfried's device, fully aware that no one could survive a blast at that range. With large rubberized shears, he cut away the sock. The wool fell back into the oil. Cochrane saw a hefty section of pipe-potential shrapnel that would tear him and his assistant apart-sealed at each end by iron industrial plugs.
'Put it in the vise,' he said to his assistant. The third man left the lab.
Several yards from the worktable was a vise attached to an immovable iron base. The bomb was carried in the tongs to the vise. Cochrane moved quickly to the device, secured it in an upright position, and tightened a wrench horizontally to the upper plug on the bomb. He then threaded a heavy industrial wire through the end of the wrench. Both men retreated. Cochrane unraveled the wire to a distance of twenty feet.
'I got it now,' he said to his remaining assistant. The man withdrew from the lab. Cochrane stood across the room from Siegfried's concoction. Beneath his iron-plated gloves, his hands were soaked. The wire that linked him to the bomb was taut in his palms. He pulled until it was tight as piano wire.
His eyes were glued on the bomb. He half expected… at any moment…
He wondered if he were crazy. Why was he here? What did he hope to gain? It was the middle of the night and he had forgotten. Adrenaline was giving way to exhaustion. Slowly, Cochrane began to move. He took the first steps of a grand circle around the bomb. The wrench gave a slight tremor, then, pulled by the wire, followed. Cochrane moved cautiously but resolutely. He circled the device one full time. Then a second. Then a third. Lieutenant McConnell and his two squad members watched from behind the plate glass. Cochrane continued to move. Each step was an eternity. The route around the bomb seemed larger than the Bluebirds' fifty-mile radius on the map of New Jersey.
Midway through the seventh revolution, the plug came loose from the pipe. It fell with a horrible clatter onto the copper sheeting on the laboratory floor. Cochrane dropped the wire, turned toward the device, and crept forward, cautiously but quickly. No properly constructed bomb remained dormant forever.
Cochrane moved to within ten feet of the open pipe. Then five feet. Then two. Now speed was paramount, as long as he did not jar the thing into detonating.
He reached toward the bomb and unscrewed the vise. He turned and eased the bomb onto the copper sheeting of the floor. He lay flush to the ground and lifted the closed end of the bomb upward so that the mechanism slid out.
Behind his visor, his eyes widened. Before him was the craft of his homicidal madman: a charge of black TNT in a large capsule, a tiny wristwatch with one hand broken off, a flash bulb, a battery, and copper wire to form an electrical circuit.
Without looking, Cochrane knew what Siegfried had done: a small hole had been bored in the face of the watch and one end of the wire protruded through it. The other end of the wire was linked to the hour hand, with the TNT, the flash bulb, and the battery in between. Had the hour hand come around to the 2 on the watch, the circuit would have completed and the bomb would have detonated. Currently, the hour hand was seven-eighths of the way from 1 to 2.
Cochrane felt his heart in his mouth. He threw the lead pipe across the room and he reached for the rubberized shears. He poked the tip of them to the battery and he clipped the wires from both battery terminals. He took the battery in his hand and moved it five feet from the TNT and copper wire. The circuit was broken.
Then he leaned back. He reached to his helmet and pulled it off. It had to have been one hundred degrees within the suit. He looked to the plate-glass window and the four men-Dick Wheeler had arrived-who watched him through it.
'Done!' he said breathlessly. 'It’s defused. Get someone in here for fingerprints.'
As the four men came around from the window and entered the work lab, Cochrane looked down at what he had gained. A few ounces of powder. Some common bits of hardware. Some routine copper wire. Elements that added up to death, surely, but ordinary ingredients.
The bulb, the battery, the wire, and the watch could have come from anywhere. The TNT was untraceable. It could have been mixed in any of a thousand places in North America.
Cochrane glanced across the room to where he had tossed the pipe. Siegfried was no fool. Most assuredly the metal had been wiped clean of fingerprints. What had even possessed him to risk his life like this, Cochrane wondered.
He did not move. Wheeler and the bomb squad officers approached him. Sitting on the copper sheeting, his helmet beside him, he felt like some beached hard-hat diver from the 1920s.
He looked up.
'Fella,' said McConnell, 'you got balls the size of watermelons, you know that?'
'A lot of good it did,' Cochrane answered.
Dick Wheeler seemed very pale, with dark crescents under his eyes. He gazed down at Cochrane, then at the
