Michael Costa from Los Angeles was the munitions expert on board and he’d been instructed to make a “bootleg fuel-air bomb with some real firepower.”
Okay, he could do that easily enough.
His working model was the BLU-96, often called a Daisy Cutter, which graphically described the end result. Costa knew that the bomb had originally been designed to clear away mine fields, as well as jungles and forests for military landing zones. Then some really crazy, sick dude had figured out that the Daisy Cutter could wipe out people as easily as it could trees and boulders.
So now here he was inside an old, beat-to-hell cargo plane flying over the Tuscarora Mountain range toward Sunrise Valley, Nevada, and they were very close to T, for target.
He and his new best friends were assembling the bomb right there on the plane. They even had a diagram showing how to do it, as if they were idiots. Assembling Fuel-Air Bombs for Dummies.
The actual BLU-96 was a tightly controlled military weapon and relatively hard to obtain, Costa knew. Unfortunately for everybody who lived, loved, ate, slept, and shit in Sunrise Valley, Daisy Cutters could also be assembled at home out of readily obtainable ingredients. Costa had purchased a thousand-gallon supplemental fuel bladder, then filled it with high-octane gas, fitted a dispersing device, and inserted dynamite sticks as an initiator. Next, he made a motion brake and trigger assembly using a parachutist’s altitude-deployment device for parts. Simple stuff like that.
Then, as he’d told the others on board the cargo plane, “You fly over the target. You push the bomb out the payload door. You run like your pants are on fire and there’s an ocean up ahead. Trust me, the Daisy Cutter will leave nothing but scorched earth below. Sunrise Valley will be a burn mark in the desert. A memory. Just you watch.”
Chapter 5
“EASY DOES IT, gentlemen. No one is to be hurt. Not this time.”
Nearly eight hundred miles away, the Wolf was watching in live time what was happening in the desert. What a flick! There were four cameras on the ground at Sunrise Valley that were pumping video footage to four monitors in the house in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles, where he was staying. For the moment, anyway.
He watched closely as the inhabitants of the mobile-home park were escorted by army personnel into waiting transport trucks. The clarity of the footage was very good. He could see the patches on the soldiers’ arms: NEVADA ARMY GUARD UNIT 72ND.
Suddenly he spoke out loud, “Shit! Don’t do that!” He started to squeeze the black handball rapidly in his fist, a habit when he was anxious or angry, or both.
One of the male civilians had pulled a gun and had it pointed at a soldier. Incredibly dumb mistake!
“You imbecile!” the Wolf shouted at the screen.
An instant later the man with the handgun was dead, facedown in the desert dust, which actually made it easier to get the other retards from Sunrise Valley into the transport trucks. Should have been part of the plan in the first place, the Wolf thought. But it hadn’t been, so now it was a small problem.
Then one of the handheld cameras focused on a small cargo plane as it approached the town and circled overhead. This was just gorgeous to behold. The handheld was obviously on board one of the army trucks, which were, he hoped, speeding out of range.
It was amazing footage—black and white, which somehow made it even more powerful. Black and white was more realistic, no? Yes—absolutely.
The handheld was steady on the plane as it glided in over the town.
“Angels of death,” he whispered. “Beautiful image. I’m such an artist.”
It took two of them to push the bladder of gas out the payload door. Then the pilot banked a hard left, fire walled the engines, and climbed out of there as fast as he could. That was his job, his piece of the puzzle, and he’d done it very well. “You get to live,” the Wolf spoke to the video again.
The camera was on a wide angle now and captured the bomb as it slowly plummeted toward the town. Stunning footage. Scary as hell, too, even for him to see. At approximately a hundred feet from the ground, the bomb detonated. “Ka-fucking-boom!” said the Wolf. It just came out of his mouth. Usually he wasn’t this emotional about anything.
As he watched—couldn’t take his eyes away—the Daisy Cutter leveled everything within five hundred yards of the drop site. It also had the capacity to kill everything within an area that large, which it did. This was utter devastation. Up to ten miles away windows blew out of buildings. The ground and buildings shook in Elko, Nevada, about thirty-five miles away. The explosion was heard in the next state.
And actually, much farther away than that. Right there in Los Angeles, for instance. Because tiny Sunrise Valley, Nevada, was just a test run.
“This is just a warm-up,” said the Wolf. “Just the beginning of something great. My masterpiece. My payback.”
Chapter 6
WHEN EVERYTHING STARTED, I was blessedly out of the loop, on a four-day vacation to the West Coast, my first in over a year. First stop: Seattle, Washington.
Seattle is a beautiful, lively city that—in my opinion, anyway—nicely balances the funky old and the cyber new, with possibly a tip of a Microsoft cap to the future side of things. Under ordinary circumstances I would have looked forward to a visit there.
These were kind of shaky times, though, and I had only to look down at the small boy tightly holding on to my hand as we crossed Wallingford Avenue North to remember why.
I had only to listen to my heart.
The boy was my son Alex, and I was seeing him for the first time in four months. He and his mother lived in Seattle now. I lived in Washington, D.C., where I was an FBI agent. Alex’s mom and I were involved in a “friendly” custody struggle over our son, at least it was evolving that way after a very stormy couple of encounters.