didn’t need much light.
I took out the camping stove and screwed in the fuel, then opened the Russian-doll nest of pans.
The bulkiest item of all was the aspirin. I’d picked up 320 tablets of the stuff, and was going to use them all - minus the two I’d already taken, the two I swallowed now, and a couple more for luck.
The red-hot poker perked up again, but I found myself grinning like an idiot. I was going to sort out the bastards who’d done those things to Lilian, Angeles and the kids I’d spotted in the green house, and I was going to use 314 aspirin to give those fuckers the world’s biggest headache. The kind of headache you got from an Improvised Explosive Device.
5
I didn’t need much high explosive to totally fuck up the silo and anyone in it. CNN and the BBC were going to end up with some great footage. Two lumps would do it: one of about a kilogram, to produce a kicking charge; and one half that size to produce a firebomb.
Picric acid is magic stuff, but a fucker to make. To get there, I was going to have to separate the acetyl- salicylic acid in the aspirin from its bulking agent, add a couple more ingredients, and do a bit of mixing and distilling. The trouble was I only had the kit to make it in small batches. The whole process was probably going to take me all night.
I knew it better as Explosive Mix No. 7. As part of my anti-terrorism experience, I’d had to learn to be a terrorist. A lot of the time I was doing pretty much the same as they were, infiltrating a country, buying everything I needed in corner shops and pharmacies, and mixing those items with others in my basket so I wouldn’t get noticed by the guy on the checkout. Then, like a terrorist, I’d go back to my hide, make and plant my device, and get out of the area before it went off.
The big difference nowadays is that we’re in the age of the suicide bomber. They go in and stay with the device to make sure it goes off. Sometimes they’re even wearing it. Neither of those things featured in my plans.
The first demolitions course I did when I joined the Regiment had lasted twelve weeks. I loved every minute of it. Even as a kid, I’d been fascinated by the TV footage of Fred Dibnah dropping power-station chimneys, and tower blocks imploding within their own perimeter. The principal task I trained for back then was to fuck up an enemy’s industrial base.
Their troops might be giving us the good news at the front line, but no army can function if it can’t get supplies. We might want to drop a bridge, railway line, hydroelectric power station or crude-oil refinery - or render docks useless, open floodgates, destroy military or civilian aircraft. So much damage can be done with just two pounds of plastic explosive. Why send in an air force to destroy a big industrial complex when the same result can be achieved by taking out its power source? It might be easier for a four-man team to infiltrate as civilians, do the reconnaissance, then buy ingredients over the counter to make the devices.
Destroying something doesn’t necessarily involve removing it from the face of the earth. A large factory or even a small town can be neutralized by taking out an electricity substation. It might just mean making a small penetration of about half an inch with explosives into a particular piece of machinery. That might be all that’s needed to disturb the momentum of the moving parts inside it. The machine then destroys itself. The skill is in identifying where the weak point is, getting in there to do it, and getting away again.
The problem is, you’re not going to have a notebook in your pocket with all your formulas and bomb-assembly instructions. We’d spent the first few weeks of the demolitions course having to learn them by heart. There were nine basic mixes: nine different types of explosive for nine different types of job, from low explosive - a lifting charge if you want to make a big crater in a runway or blow up a road or vehicle going along it - to high explosives, which can be used with enough precision to cut steel if you want to destroy a power station or drop a bridge or a couple of pylons. It’s horses for courses, different explosives for different attacks. High explosives were going to be perfect for me on this job.
I pressed forty aspirin tablets out of their foil and crushed them in the first of the three 5mm-thick juice glasses I’d bought in the market. I used the hard plastic spoon from the knife-fork-spoon camping set. It couldn’t be metal. I was making picric acid because it’s easy to detonate. The downside is that the slightest friction or percussion can set the stuff off. What’s more, it attacks metal, creating salts that are just as explosive. It can only be safely in contact with wood, glass or plastic.
I opened the little tap at the bottom of the container, poured some water into the largest of the cheap aluminium pans and put it on the gas. While I waited for it to come up to the same temperature as a hot bath, I added a little water to the powder in glass number one to make a paste, then added a splash of alcohol. I stirred until it liquefied.
Only now was there time for my stab wounds to get a little TLC. I pulled my jeans down and poured some of the alcohol between the wound and towel padding. It was like my skin was on fire.
I left the mix on the concrete floor and hobbled over to the Passat. Brogues wasn’t in complete rigor mortis yet. Everything but his eyelids was still soft and pliable. The process normally starts two to three hours after death and it can take maybe another four for all the muscles and organs to stiffen. It was cold in the loading bay, which would speed things up. The eyelids are among the first bits to go rigid, along with the jaw and neck. His eyes were no longer closed; he stared dully out of the boot. That was why the poor used to place coins over them to keep them closed.
His skin was already pale. The blood had settled in the parts of the body closest to the ground and had drained into the larger veins. The back of his head didn’t look as beaten about as I’d thought it would. I pulled off his handmade brown suede shoes. I needed the matching socks.
I tried to sit down while I shoved a sock over glass number two, but my buttock wasn’t at all keen. I had to stand and lean down instead. I poured the aspirin mix into the sock sieve. Cloudy liquid trickled through. After a while I removed the sock and wrung out the dregs. I didn’t want the rubbish that was left - that was just the bulking agent. What I needed was in the glass - or, rather, what was going to be left after I’d evaporated the water and alcohol out of the liquid. But that was still a few steps away.
Glass number two went into the simmering water. It was going to take about twenty minutes for the alcohol and moisture to evaporate and leave a residue of white powder.
The next stage was to add the acid. Concentrated sulphuric was a lot harder to come by, these days, because of anti-terrorist legislation. Unless you’re an industrial chemist, buying it arouses suspicion. My original plan had been to drain some of the Panda’s battery acid, but the Passat was a bonus. Or so I thought. There was more of it, but it was a fucker to get out. Everything under the bonnet was covered and sealed to make it look all nice and Gucci. Nobody serviced these things any more: they just plugged them into diagnostic machines.
I poured out a third of the contents of each cell into one of the smaller cooking pots. Even depleted, the battery would still work. The battery acid had to be boiled until all the white fumes had disappeared. It had to be seriously concentrated.
The method for making picric acid hadn’t changed for years. It was discovered in the late 1700s, and initially used as a yellow dye for silk and wool. Its explosive potential was discovered a hundred years later. The problem was, this stuff was so strong it attacked common metals like lead and copper to create even more dangerous salts, which were sensitive to shock. During the Boer War, the artillery boys threw shells into their guns and blew themselves up. There were some massive explosions in factories and ammunition ships. Tin and aluminium were the only metals picric acid didn’t corrode. Millions of tons of the stuff were used in bombs and grenades in the First World War. They were all coated with tin to prevent the acid contaminating the metallic shell. Even so, munitions factory workers were nicknamed canaries because of the way it stained their skin.
Then they discovered that picric acid was only a nightmare in powder form. Even these days, if the powder is stored in a glass or plastic bottle, you have to take enormous care not to trap grains of it in the threads of the bottle and cap. It’s so volatile that just unscrewing the top will make it detonate.
I was going to miss the kick of being able to get shit like this together and see the results. The payoff would be sitting on the flight to Russia with Anna on one side and somebody tapping away on his laptop on the other and me thinking, When you watch the news today you’ll see what I’ve been up to.
