Hydrofluoric acid is a chemical compound that exists as a colorless gas or as a fuming liquid. It is used to etch glass and clean brickwork and to make refrigerants and herbicides and pharmaceuticals. It’s also used, in very large quantities, to make high-octane gasoline.
When hydrofluoric acid is released into the atmosphere, it has a propensity to form a toxic aerosol cloud that will drift for miles, and exposure to this gas can result in lethal damage to the heart, liver, kidneys, and nervous system. It blinds and it burns and it causes pulmonary edema. But the description of its effects he liked best was one he had heard on an American television show. The man on the show had said, “It’s a terrible death. It’s one way you don’t want to die. It just melts your lungs.”
The refinery on Lake Erie kept as much as eight hundred thousand pounds of hydrofluoric acid on hand.
The refinery had once been located on the outskirts of the city, but as the city grew it became surrounded by homes and schools and shopping centers and office buildings. Due to the huge lake and the thermal effects it created, there was almost always a breeze—and it blew primarily in the direction of a housing development in which mostly white people lived.
Another television show—they learned so much from American media that they didn’t really need an intelligence-gathering apparatus—had described how vulnerable refineries and chemical plants were to attack—terrorist attack, as they put it. And they were. They were shockingly underprotected, considering what they contained, and the biggest weakness was not the physical security—the fences and cameras and alarms. The biggest weakness was the people who were paid to protect the facility.
The guards at this refinery dressed in dark blue uniforms and wore paratrooper boots and at first glance seemed quite impressive. Automatic pistols, Mace, oversized flashlights, and batons hung from their belts. But these men—and even some women—were laughable. Most were middle-aged, few had military training, and many had been rejected by police forces in the region because they failed to meet even the minimal qualifications required by local law enforcement. But more important, they had nothing to do. They occasionally conducted drills that disrupted refinery operations, but their primary function was to annoy the people entering the plant by performing perfunctory searches of backpacks and lunchboxes. Other than that, they sat. They sat all day and all night, waiting for something to happen, and they’d been sitting for so long doing nothing that they had long ago stopped expecting anything to happen.
“You see,” he said to the boy, “how the guard never walks into that area. It’s dark there, and muddy too, and he doesn’t want to get mud on his boots.”
“I know,” the boy said.