people around. He’d spotted a parking place, at the side of a low-end used-car lot, a block away from the target. There were no cameras at the lot; he’d scouted it carefully. He could park the car, making it look like one of the used cars, cross the road into a copse of trees, and sit there for a bit and watch. Then he’d walk through the trees and across a weedy vacant lot, right up to the target car.
And that’s what he did, at two o’clock in the morning, dressed in camo, with a bomb in a backpack, a gun in his pocket. He’d already killed, and if the owner of the house caught him planting the bomb, he’d shoot him and run for it. Nothing to lose.
The night was warm, for early June, when it could still get cold; but not this night. He left the car, as planned, sat in the trees and listened and watched: a small town, trucks braking on the highway, or speeding up as they headed out; the stars bright overhead; no sirens or dogs to break the silence.
He could see the target car, sitting across the vacant lot like Moby-Dick: there’d been no sign of activity from the house next to it. He gave it the full half hour, then began a slow stalk across the lot.
He was a deer hunter, a stalker rather than a sitter, and he knew how to move slowly. He took ten minutes to cross the hundred-foot lot. He was satisfied that even if there’d been a dog, it wouldn’t have heard him.
At the car, he sat and listened, one full minute, letting his senses extend into the night, and then he slid beneath it, next to the axle. He’d taped the end of a deer hunter’s LED flashlight, so only a single LED could shine through: a red one.
After looking the situation over, he decided the most reasonable thing would be to tape the bomb to the hydraulic line that led toward the back of the car. He did that, fumbling with the tape in the dark, until it was solid. He made sure that the thermostat bulb was hanging straight down, checked it twice-if he got it wrong, he’d be a rapidly expanding sphere of bloody cellular matter. When everything was right, he pulled the circuit wires down the car for a couple feet, looped them around another fluid line, then twisted together the wires that would complete the circuit.
The bomb was live.
He eased out from under the car and, once clear, looked up into the night sky at the billions and billions…
Felt comfortable there, in the smell of the night, the odor of gas and oil, the presence of death.
Like, he thought, Ka – boom.
TIME TO MOVE.
The second site wasn’t quite as big a deal, in terms of risk, though it was a lot more work. The site was in a warehouse district on the backside of town, and there was a spot where he could park his car, off the road, where it wouldn’t be seen. There was a fence, but he had the cutters with him. In his scouting trips, he’d seen no cameras.
He timed the traffic until he was alone, made the turnoff, pushed back into the trees. Got out and listened again. Nothing.
The construction yard was a two-minute walk through the brush to the back fence, but he had twenty-two bombs to move, and they were heavy. He took them five at a time, in a Duluth pack. He cut through the fence with the bolt cutters, and was in.
His target was the water and sewer pipe that would be used to feed the PyeMart.
The water pipe was stacked across the construction yard, in bundles, five pipes high, five pipes wide, made out of some kind of blue plastic stuff. The sewer pipe was reddish brown, and seemed to be of some kind of ceramic, though he could be wrong. He had the bombs in place after four trips, then made a fifth trip for the firing harness, the batteries, and the two bombs he’d use on the shovel and the pipelayer. He used lantern batteries for the heavy-equipment bombs, and an old car battery for the pipes. Three mechanical alarm clocks would serve as switches. The clocks were ready to go.
It took almost an hour before he was finished wiring up the bombs-longer than he’d expected, but within his planned limits: and he was very, very careful, tracing and retracing his work.
When he was done, he carefully, carefully set the three clocks to trip in two hours, which would be a little after five-thirty in the morning. Two of them would take out the heavy equipment, the third would wreck most of the pipe, he thought. He was a little unsure about that, so he made the bombs bigger than he might otherwise have. He would have liked to watch the handiwork, but that would be too risky.
When he was finished, he squatted next to the fence and thought about it for a minute, scanning the yard. Had he left anything behind? He inventoried his gear: everything was there. He’d probably have left footprints, but there were footprints all over the yard, and the area around the fence was covered with heavy weeds, so there wouldn’t be much for the police to work with.
Don’t go yet, he thought. What are you forgetting?
Thirty seconds later, satisfied that he was good, he walked out of the construction yard and back to his car. He took off the camo jacket and mask, threw them on the floor of the backseat. A minute after that, satisfied that no traffic was coming, he was back on the road.
He didn’t drive home-he worried that the neighbors might hear him come in. Instead, he drove down toward the Twin Cities, to an all-night diner off I-494, and had breakfast.
At five thirty-five, halfway through a stack of pancakes and sausage, he looked at his watch, smiled, and closed his eyes, and said to himself, for the second time that night,
Ka – boom.
5
The bombs in the two pieces of heavy equipment went off first, in quick sequence, boom… boom. A few seconds later, the pipes went, the whole bunch fired with a single impulse from the car battery: BOOM .
Virgil heard the motel windows flex and rattle, but barely woke up; from his bed, it might have been a motel door slamming. Instead, he rolled over, facedown, and fell deeper into sleep.
The bombs were heard by most of the people awake at that hour, but because there was nobody in the equipment yard, and the yard was away from any main streets, and no businesses were really open yet, nobody knew quite where the blasts had come from, until they saw the dust.
There was no fire, but there was a lot of dirt in the air. A cop drove down the street toward the dust cloud, which had formed a mushroom, not quite certain of where he was going until he got there. When he got there, he was not quite certain of what he was seeing. There was still a lot of dust in the air, but the corrugated-iron equipment building was still standing, and looked fine.
Not until he walked down the length of chain-link fence to peer into the yard, and saw the pipe strewn around like jackstraws, did he understand what had happened-and even then, he didn’t realize that the two large pieces of heavy equipment had been turned into a pile of scrap, frames bent, engines dismounted, transmissions ruined. He did see that two windows had been blown out on the back of the building, and when he looked across a narrow street, more seemed to be missing from a sign-company building.
The deputy called back to the city station. The duty officer woke up the sheriff, who said he’d be along, and said to call Virgil. A minute later, the sheriff called back and told the duty officer to call Barlow, as well.
A phone doesn’t ring before six in the morning unless there’s trouble. Virgil woke, checked the clock, said, “Man…” and picked up the phone. The duty officer said, “We’ve got a bomb out at the city equipment yard. Blew up some pipe. Agent Barlow is on his way out.”
“Anybody hurt?”
“Don’t know for sure, but I don’t think so. I don’t think anybody was out there.”
“How do you get there?” Virgil asked.
The duty officer gave him instructions, and he rolled out of bed, put on yesterday’s clothes, and then headed out. The morning was crisp, the sky was a flawless blue: a good day, not counting the bombing.
A bunch of patrol cars and a few civilian vehicles were lined up on the road beside the equipment yard when Virgil got there. He ID’d himself to the deputy standing by the entrance, then walked through the equipment building and out the back door, where he found the sheriff, Barlow, a couple of civilians, and two or three other
