John Sandford: Shock Wave

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 deputies looking at the wreckage.

Virgil asked Barlow, “Anybody hurt?”

Barlow shook his head. One of the civilians, who apparently was with the public works department, said, “Our budget took a hit. I gotta look at our insurance. We’ll get most of the money back, but not all of it. He blew up our shovel and the pipelayer, along with the pipe. I don’t think the pipe can be saved; it’s all screwed up.”

Virgil stepped over to a pile of the blue pipe: some kind of plastic, he thought. Most of the pipes had been blown in half and had split lengthwise. Somebody said to his back, “I was outside and heard it. It sounded like an atom bomb.”

“At least he wasn’t going after people,” Ahlquist said.

Barlow said to Virgil, “This is something new, though. We’ve counted at least sixteen separate explosions, and there are probably more than that. They went off more or less simultaneously, so he was working a seriously complicated firing apparatus. He’s getting more sophisticated.”

“The practical effect is… what?” Virgil asked the civilian. “If you guys got insurance, he delays you for a week or two?”

“Longer than that. More like a couple of months,” the civilian said. “Even if we go with emergency bid procedures, there’s a lot of bureaucracy to go through. Then, we’ve got to get the stuff shipped in from Ohio, and we’ve got to retrain the operators on the new equipment… It’ll be a while.”

“But it won’t stop the building.”

The civilian shook his head. “No. Not unless everybody gets too scared to work. I’ve got to tell you, I’m getting a little nervous, and so are the other guys.”

They stood around and talked about it for a while, and Barlow said that he was going to ask for another technician.

“How’s it going at the trailer?” Virgil asked. “Find anything?”

“Finding all kinds of things, just nothing that’ll get us to the bomber,” the ATF agent said. “Not so far, anyway. There supposedly was some kind of security system, but it either got torn apart in the explosion, or the bomber took it with him.”

“Huh. If he took it with him, he’d have had to spend some time inside.”

Barlow nodded. “Be pretty bold. And you’d have to ask, why? If you’re sneaking around with a big goddamned bomb under your arm, it’s not like you’d be more noticeable if you wore a mask. So why not wear a mask?”

“You think there might have been something else that was identifiable?”

“Could be,” Barlow said. “Maybe something about his size, like he’s really fat, or maybe he’s got a disability, a limp or a missing arm, or maybe he’s six-eight or something. But if we don’t find that camera, and we haven’t found anything like it, then we sort of wonder why.”

“How about a camera mount?”

“Should be one, can’t find it,” Barlow said. “We were hoping the video was cycled out to the Internet, but it wasn’t that sophisticated. It apparently was fed through a wire to a digital server, which cycled every twenty-four hours. The recorder might still be there, somewhere, but we haven’t found it yet. Now we got this one to work…”

Virgil looked around at the mess, shook his head. “Good luck with that.”

Barlow gestured toward the metal building, and they stepped away from the group looking at the blown shovel. Barlow said, quietly, “Listen… I spent some time talking to the sheriff last night, and he says you’re pretty much the BCA’s golden boy. That’s fine with me. I’ve got no connections with the locals. I can do all the technical stuff, but nobody’s gonna sit around and eat macaroni and cheese with me and tell me what’s what. So I gotta lean on you.”

“I can work with that,” Virgil said. “If you could get me what you find…”

“You’ll know in ten minutes,” Barlow said.

“Good. I’ve already got some people I need to talk to-I’m going to do that now.”

“Keep me up,” Barlow said. “The trailer bomb was a big break, though that sounds awful, with the dead guy and all. If the bomber had kept trying up in Michigan, we’d have never figured out where he was from. Hell, an hour after the bomb went off, we were ankledeep in Homeland Security and FBI guys. They wanted to investigate every Arab in the state, and there are something like a half million of them. This is a little more manageable.”

Virgil nodded. “Yeah. Not a hell of a lot of Arabs around here. Maybe a few, but a lot more Latinos.”

“I’ll tell you something else, Virgil. These guys do one or two bombs, and it gives them a serious sense of importance,” Barlow said. “We see it when we catch them and debrief them. They’re usually people who feel like they should be important, but they aren’t. When the bomb goes off, they get all kinds of attention, and they’re all kinds of important… and they don’t want to quit. It’s like cocaine: the high goes away after a while, and they want another hit.”

“You’re telling me he’s going to do it again,” Virgil said.

“He made a whole batch of bombs for this attack. I wouldn’t be surprised if we got another one tonight. Something else: he’s got enough material to blow up a building. If he decides to go big, he could turn the city hall into a pile of brick dust.”