Chuck Logan - After the Rain

“Nothing goes boom without me,” Dale reminded him.

If it was up to him, Joe would shoot him and leave him in the driveway. But, in the end, practicality won out. The fat fool was right.

George Khari, driving north from Grand Forks, was thinking numbers. When he looked up, the night sky sparkled with numbers instead of stars. Endless random numbers. It was like a big lottery, see, because, George was thinking, out there in the darkness, millions of people were touching numbers at this very moment. Pressing buttons on wireless telephones, sending signals to towers. Connecting.

Why had he listened to Joe and wired the blasting caps to telephone pagers? Didn’t he have enough problems?

The American agents were virtually on top of Dale and Joe. So close yet so blind, because they’d focused on Ace as a target. So George had told Joe to make a point of mentioning his meet with Ace in front of the female agent. He would draw the agents toward himself. He doubted they’d be interested in tonight’s petty contraband. If his plan worked, he’d be off the hook. It might even collapse their operation.

George smiled. It was like the weapon itself; sometimes it was best to hide in plain sight.

He’d know pretty soon. The van he’d spotted in his neighborhood and around his store was following him right now, at a discreet distance.

George grinned and shook his head. As a youth he had commanded respect in the Bekaa Valley. Now he was down to running two killers, both difficult to control. He hunched forward and tightened his grip on the steering wheel.

I can do this thing.

The lights, traffic, and general clutter of Grand Forks had faded behind him, and now he was alone with the huge sky and the empty ribbon of road. For more than two decades he had dwelled among these spoiled children; envying and despising them as they ignored the suffering of Arab peoples. Watching them as they busied themselves watching O.J. and Monica, eating bigger portions, driving bigger cars with bigger gas tanks.

But 9/11 got their attention. Though they still didn’t really understand. That now it was their turn. For decades they had channel-surfed over mass graves filled with Rwandans, Bosnians, Chechens. A million Afghans. Now viewers in the Middle East would get to recline in their living rooms and watch Americans fester and die slowly on satellite TV for a change. Just like the children in the camps. Or burn fast, like his parents, like his own baby and his wife, who met their end in the Israeli napalm…manufactured in Midland, Michigan, U.S.A.

It wasn’t just about the money.

He turned left off the interstate onto State 5, the road to Langdon. An expanse of night sky now showed through the tattered clouds. The wind streamlined the clouds and gave the exposed heavens the appearance of a long, ragged black flag dotted with thousands of stars and a haunting crescent moon.

He had never believed.

Allah and Jesus were just two more storybook characters for the instruction of children and fanatics, like the people in the caves along the Afghan-Pakistani border. Or Mr. Ashcroft in his marble cavern at the Justice Department. Their faith reminded him of the Solomon Islanders who formed the cargo cults, who still believed building fires on their jungle mountaintops they could summon the jet airliners down from the stratosphere to land in their midst and deliver wondrous presents.

The jihadists, for their part, believed that if they started a big enough fire in America, it would bring back the Middle Ages. In the end, they would fail. And when they failed, people would want rational answers again, and men like himself-like George Khari-would come back into style. Until then, he would watch for opportunities to make himself useful.

If the price was right. Without the incentive of a payday, he wouldn’t be traveling this road. He wondered who would be there. FBI? Local police? Maybe the military? The woman Joe had mentioned, the one Dale coveted-would she be there?

Getting closer; less than half an hour. George shook his head. He hoped Joe was getting Dale out of town. Dale. The brilliant, invaluable fool. He had picked the target. Anyone remotely Middle Eastern could never gain this sort of access.

Parts of Dale were clearly missing. George believed that he was the real fundamentalist, the way he took Holy Writ literally and quoted the Koran to them: So what’s the difference if I kill one person or a million? Huh?

Dale came up with the idea to put the explosives in one of his machines.

At first the task had seemed impossible, how to make it work? Specifically-how to design the explosives? The answer was in the big tires. They didn’t inflate with air. They were injected with antipuncture foam that hardened. It didn’t go in an air nipple, like on a car tire, but in a large valve, about five inches across.

So when Dale bought the machine at auction in Winnipeg he also bought a new set of tires. Because they were cheaper in Canada. The tires were empty when they came off the shelf.

It had been one bitch of a job that took them most of a week, working in a rented garage in Winnipeg. The charges had to be configured in a symmetrical pattern. They’d used cheap garden hose, slit it down the middle and opened it up. Then they stuffed it with the Semtex in a continuous chain, taped up the hose, connected the pagers and blasting caps, and fed it in with this big glob of epoxy on the end so it’d stay anchored to the wheel hub. Then they’d jack up a tire, spin it on the hub, and reel the hose inside. They did that four times. Then they programmed the pagers, inflated the tires with foam, and capped them up.

Eventually there were six separate charges, placed to avoid detection. All rigged to detonate simultaneously.

He looked up at the sky. And the crazy sensation came back: that he was trapped inside the biggest slot machine in the world. Spinning round and round with millions of numbers.

Those six separate pagers would be activated by a single group number he had committed to memory.

He just had to laugh. He was a ruthlessly pragmatic man hoist on the petard of the thing he most dreaded: chance.

The pagers were in place, activated, awaiting his call. All he had to do was press seven digits into his satellite phone. But not until the weapon was in position.

And it wasn’t in position.

What were the chances of some fool out in the big American night accidently tapping in the wrong number?

His number.

The weapon would detonate prematurely. In which case, there would be no grand reward. No triumphant story attached to his name. He would just be a nobody again, a nobody who had failed.

So he had to hurry this thing along. He had to take Dale in hand himself and make it happen. George stepped on the gas.

They were taking one-hour shifts, perched on top of the pile of air conditioners, keeping watch on the Missile Park. Gordy’s blue F-150 arrived at the bar and parked around back. Nina and Broker marked time, sitting side by side in a mist of mosquito repellent. She lit a cigarette to discourage the bugs. He got out his rough wraps.

“When did you start smoking again?” he asked.

“About the time this thing picked up speed.” She put out her hand in the graying light and squashed a mosquito on his cheek. It left a small dot of blood. Then she patted his waist. “So, where’s your club?”

Personal joke. He was at best a competent shot with a handgun, and usually packed a.45 for its utility as a hefty “tamer,” for close-in thumping. “Don’t say anything,” he said softly, “but I think your Indian lifted it from under the front seat when I was parked across from the bar.”