“Now we start taking away some of its muscle. As we remove the Semtex, keep running your flashlight along the edges of the bricks. If there’s another tilt switch or pressure switch somewhere, find it before it finds us. Look for springs, any thin piece of metal that might touch another if you move a brick. I’ll do the first one, and we’ll take turns.”
Stahl lifted an end of one of the bricks from the left side a quarter inch, used his flashlight to look under and around it, then cut the lead wires and extracted the blasting cap from the claylike object. He then carried the brick of explosive to the containment vessel and placed it inside.
The next brick had no lead wires for a blasting cap, and Elliot carried it to the containment vessel. The third one was the same, and Hines carried that one. They were beginning to feel hopeful. They were decreasing the size of the potential explosion with each brick they removed. They removed six and set them in the round vessel. The vessel had two relief valves for venting the gases from an explosion slowly, and he checked to be sure they were both open before he closed the hatch.
Stahl said, “We’d better stop now. This is a lot of high explosive for one load, and somebody’s got to drive it out to the range and detonate it. Hines, can you call to tell the nearest squad to get somebody out here to pick it up and bring us another containment vessel? If they’ve got two, they’d better bring them both.”
“Yes, sir.” She took off her helmet, went to the driver’s seat of the truck, and made the call.
In ten minutes, Team Three’s truck came and took away the first load.
Team One restored their helmets and went to work again. Stahl said to Hines and Elliot: “I want to get everything else out before we touch the shaped charge. That means every brick of plastic and all the wires we can see before we move the big one.”
They followed the same procedure as before, using lights and mirrors in the trunk to be sure there was nothing to actuate a detonator, no spring or metal clip ready to move and bridge a gap in a firing circuit. Whenever they had a sufficient number of bricks free of the trunk they called for a pickup and started on the next containment vessel. After an hour there was a radio call from headquarters. Stahl went to listen.
He said, “Stahl.”
“Bomb Unit Three just called in from the range. They set off the first few bricks of explosive. There were no duds. The plastic is well made, very high power.”
“Thank you,” said Stahl. “Ask them to come back and pick up the next load.” He went back to work on the trunk of the car.
“Anything we need to know?” asked Elliot.
“No,” said Stahl. “You know how it is. If you’re not the one downrange, you get impatient and want to chat.”
“Right,” said Elliot.
A few minutes later, they reached the last four bricks around the shaped charge. One by one, they removed each explosive brick and replaced it with a sandbag to hold the shaped charge in place. The last bricks were now in the containment vessel.
The three stood back and studied the device in the trunk. It was a ten-inch pipe with a funnel-shaped cone of metal welded on the lower end, aimed down through the hole that had been cut in the floor of the trunk. The pipe had been held upright by a frame consisting of circular pieces of plywood with four legs, and by the weight of the plastic explosives wedged around it. There was a matching cap on the top end like what a plumber would use to cap a pipe, with two holes drilled into it for the leads of a blasting cap. The two leads were spliced to a pair of wires that led to a hole drilled in the forward end of the trunk. The wires would lead under the car’s seats and the carpet toward the dashboard, engine, and battery.
Stahl said, “Let’s cut those leads.”
Hines leaned into the trunk and clipped one of the wires with wire cutters, capped it, cut and capped the other, then stepped back.
The three looked at the structure, and then Stahl said, “The frame is anchored with screws to keep the charge vertical. But the guy didn’t build the frame around the bomb. He prefitted it to the pipe, and after he built the bomb he just set the bomb down into it. I’ll bet we could lift it straight up if we wanted to.”
“Do we want to?” said Hines.
“Not yet. I’m a little more interested in the cone right now. It’s just a steel cone with air inside and some kind of liner—probably copper, maybe tin and lead—but it’s designed to focus the force of the blast straight downward through the pavement to the gasoline storage tanks. If the cone is built right, the liner will become a jet of molten metal and blow downward through the steel plates we put under the truck, the pavement, and a few feet of ground without any trouble.”
“Should we take the cone off?” said Elliot. “If we take the cone away, the rest of it is just a bomb. If it goes off, it’ll blow up unfocused, in all directions.”
“True,” said Stahl. “Removing it won’t change much for us. Look at the size of the charge. But if the cone is gone, it’s less likely to set off all that gasoline. We might be the only ones killed.”
“I’ll buy that,” said Hines. “We’ll take away most of his victims.”
“We can’t move the main charge like this unless we know what’s meant to detonate it,” said Stahl. “So let’s do this without moving it.”
Stahl said, “Slightly different method this time. Let’s get some ice from the freezer in the station’s store. We pack the outside of the tube with ice. We leave the bomb in its cradle to help keep it steady, and then saw the cone off. But first we drill the cone to be sure it really is there just to focus the blast, and there’s nothing in it.”
Elliot went into the store and brought back three bags of ice, but they didn’t open them, because water from the melting could short-circuit any stray wires and set off the device. Hines was the one to drill into the cone. When she finished, they held the flexible camera up to the hole and looked in. Elliot said, “It’s empty. All the action is upstairs.”
Hines used the electric hacksaw to remove the cone. She picked it up, looked at the inner surface, and said, “Copper it is.”
They cooled the outside surface with the ice bags, and then Stahl removed them and stared at the bomb. “You know, that end cap at the top looks like it might be threaded. Let’s see if we can unscrew it.”
“How?” asked Hines.
“You two hold the tube tight as you can, and I’ll try to unscrew the cap.”
The three assumed their positions, and Stahl tried to turn it.
“It won’t budge,” said Elliot.
Stahl leaned into the trunk to get his helmet’s faceplate close to the end cap and ran his flashlight around the cap. “There’s some residue here.” He touched it with his finger. “It looks like epoxy. That could be part of what the guy spent seven point five seconds doing in the trunk. He didn’t need seven seconds to flip a switch. He probably put epoxy on the rim of the tube to form a seal before he closed it.”
Elliot said, “Once he had the tube packed and wired, he wouldn’t want anybody to open it again.”
Hines said, “What do you want to do?”
“I’ll be right back.” Stahl went to the truck and took the microphone. “This is Stahl.”
“Yes, sir. What do you need?”
“I need to detonate a bomb in the Los Angeles River. It has to be close, within walking distance of this gas station.”
“A bomb? In the river?”
“Yes. There’s very little open space around here. We’re in the middle of the city, and we have a bomb we’ll need to detonate. The bomb is high explosive, and far too big and powerful to be transported in a containment vessel. I believe it has a fuze so sensitive that towing it will just convert the containment vessel into shrapnel. The riverbed is concrete, the sides are about twenty feet deep, and it’s dry right now. That’s the only place that makes much sense to me.”
“I don’t know. We’ll have to get permission.”
“Call Deputy Chief Ogden. Tell him what I want, and have him handle the permission. I just need the maintenance gate in the fence opened. Got it?”
“Yes, sir.”