John Sandford: Shock Wave

There had been no effort to hide it. If it worked in the infrared …

He was wearing a face mask, another standard bow-hunting accessory, but he disliked the idea of leaving the camera. He walked back to it, got behind it, and pried it off the wall. A wire led out of the bottom of it, and he traced it to a closet, and inside, found a computer server, which didn’t seem to have any connection going out.

The server was screwed to the floor, but the floor was weak, and he pried it up and carried both the server and the camera outside.

The rest of it had taken two minutes: he placed the bomb on the floor next to the door, reaching around the door, and then led the wires from the blasting cap under the door, and then closed the door.

The switch was a mousetrap, a method he’d read about on the Net. One wire was attached to the spring, the other to the top of the trap’s wooden base. A piece of fish line led from the trap’s trigger to the inside doorknob on the screen door. When the door was opened, the trap would snap, the two ends of the copper wire would slam together, completing the circuit, and boom.

Which was exactly what happened.

He remembered walking away from the trailer, thinking about the lottery aspect of it: Who would it be, who would open the door? Some minimum-wage asshole hired to pour the concrete? Or maybe the building architect?

He’d tracked through the night, enjoying himself, until he got to the river. The camera and server were awkward, carrying them with all the tools he’d brought for the break-in, pushing through the brush along the track. He listened for a minute, then threw the server and the camera out into the middle of the river, a nice deep pool, and continued through the dark to his car.

Hehad the technique, he had the equipment, he had the balls.

Thinking about the earlier missions, he smiled again.

This night would take perhaps even more balls, and he looked forward to it. Creeping through the dark, wiring it up…

One thing: if a single dog barked, he was out of there. The first target was on the edge of town, not many 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.

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 .