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Wesley worked days on his project. The compounding was easy—a four-to-one mixture of ammonium nitrate and TNT produces a good facsimile of Amatol, the best military-industrial explosive for large-scale demolition work. He made the mercury-fulminate detonators himself, packing each one inside a sealed aluminum tube about the size of a mechanical pencil. The explosives were hermetically sealed inside zinc boxes, then packed into wooden crates. Pet had drilled each of the boxes so that the mercury-fulminate pencils snapped into position instantly.
Nights, Wesley spent on the roof. Alone. There was a lot to think about. But first the area had to be clean. There were already too many cops around during the day—junkies were a magnetic force to them.
Wesley finally admitted to himself that he had expected Pet to check himself out in the gas chamber they had built. But he hadn’t let the old man go....
He waited patiently until the rehab of the building on Houston was nearly complete. Then he and the kid went to the site in broad daylight, each carrying two of the wooden crates. He had made the kid practice until he could handle thirty-five pounds on each shoulder like it wasn’t much of anything. The crates were clearly marked GENERATOR PARTS: THIS SIDE UP! and they had no trouble placing all four of them in corners of the top floor.
They made the same trip several more times, until there were twenty boxes of the mixture in place.
The last night, they returned again—this time with the Doberman. They left the dog near the door and went downstairs. The place was ready-made for junkies, alright—as easy to break into as a glass vault. They planted sixty sticks of fuseless dynamite in the basement. Harmless, unless there was a massive explosion in the immediate vicinity. On the top floor, Wesley rigged a magnesium fuse from each of the fulminate of mercury pencils. The trails crossed at several points and met in the center of the empty floor, forming a giant spider’s web.
As they went down the back stairs with the dog, Wesley reflected that it wasn’t much use writing slogans on a wall if you planned to total the building. The tiny propane torch had been placed with its tip pointing right into the middle of the spider’s web, joined by seven others exactly the same. The hard part had been the trip mechanism, but the salesman at Willoughby-Peerless had been only too happy to demonstrate how the motor-driven Nikon F could be activated at distances up to a full mile with a radio transmitter, especially when he spotted Wesley for the kind of chump who would pay retail. The whole tab came to over three grand and the salesman went home happy. Wesley went home with exactly what
That night, he and the kid set up the Nikon so that its mirror mechanism flipped the series-wired little torches into action. Then they closed the door behind them, and Wesley smeared several tubes of Permabond back and forth across the seams which they had hand-sanded to the smoothness of glass. They knew that a single drop would hold a car door shut against a man trying desperately to get out—what they applied would hold against anything short of an explosion. They stuck the aluminum sign with its skull-and-crossbones in black on a white background on the door and left. In bright-red lettering, it said:
KEEP OUT! DANGER! POISON GAS USED FOR EXTERMINATION!
The papers promised a “gala event” at the new methadone clinic. All the public supporters of methadone maintenance—actors, politicians, anyone wealthy enough or famous enough to rate a photo-op—would be hosted to a superb lunch prepared by the addicts themselves. It was widely hailed by the
The gala was scheduled for noon on Thursday, a slow news day. Extensive press coverage was expected.
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Thursday, 12:35 p.m. The newly christened Methadone Maintenance Center was open for business and the joint was packed. In an attempt to “involve the community,” as the
The range was right—but if it didn’t fire, he’d just have to move it closer. Wesley pressed the switch. There was a dead silence in his head. He mentally counted backwards from one hundred, like the time they’d operated on his leg in the Army and they had pumped the Sodium Pentothal into him.
He was all the way down to eighty-two when a dull, booming roar rose out of Houston Street and swept across town toward the river in thundering waves. A much larger explosion followed—the sound deeper, resonating at a different harmonic. All the sounds that followed were indistinguishable from the general madness that came close behind.
Surviving spectators said that the roof of the building had literally jumped into the air—then the entire front of the building had simply vanished in smoke. TV programs were interrupted with horror-struck announcers saying there was nothing but rubble where the Center had been. Seven different precincts responded to the fire calls. Squad cars were clogging traffic on the street until well past dark. A roving reporter interviewed a long-haired young man just back from gunner duty on a helicopter in Vietnam—he asked if the young man had ever seen anything like that before. The young man just shrugged: “There’s more bodies, that’s all.”
The papers were full of estimated body counts and the FBI was invited to participate in the case by an anguished mayor. In spite of the fire trucks, the ruins smoldered for several days—water pressure was low in the area, due to all the open hydrants. The blast had blown several buildings completely apart and had thrown death- dealing chunks of concrete and steel as far as a hundred yards. Ninety-three persons were known dead by the third day of counting.
The mayor dismissed persistent rumors that the bombing was the work of some group that was opposed to a methadone clinic in their neighborhood. “There have been minor incidents elsewhere, but the people of my city know they can always get a redress of their grievances at City Hall.”
The
