CHAPTER 20

The evening news was on and there was a report on Iraq. The reporter stood amid the wreckage of a street, houses in rubble, and in front of him was the shattered remains of an army HumVee.

“Here is where they met their death,” he said, gesturing toward the wreckage.

“They drove over an IED, an improvised explosive device, and it blew up under the vehicle, sending it into the air. Inside, the four men were trapped. Two of them are in the field hospital, bound for care in a German facility where they will be prepped for artificial limbs, and the other two were blown to pieces by this device.” He held up some fragments of metal.

“This is all that’s left,” he said, holding up a piece of the bomb.

Suddenly it dawned on me. Men in that foreign country had figured out a way to blow up soldiers who drove armored vehicles. Winslow drove an expensive Mercedes, but it wasn’t armored. And if they could figure out a way to blow up soldiers, then I could figure out a way to blow up Earl Anthony Winslow.

I watched the rest of the report carefully. But there was nothing about how the bomb was constructed, only details about the number of such weapons. Apparently at the beginning of that war soldiers were killed by rifle fire or mortar attacks but now the majority of the injuries came from these bombs, placed where vehicles traveled, set off by remote control, using simple mobile phones as the triggering device. If terrorists in a foreign country under siege by another army, denied the usual avenues to materials, could make such weapons, how complicated could they be?

I went to my computer and googled IEDs. What I found was that the idea went back to the 1960’s when members of the Irish Republican Army fashioned bombs to blow up British soldiers and pubs frequented by the opposition. The bombs had gotten more sophisticated, but the principle remained the same. Make an explosive device, figure out a way to detonate it from a distance, often not far away and when the vehicle filled with soldiers drove over it, boom! It shattered their lives.

I could imagine Winslow’s expensive Mercedes driving out of his gate, turning onto Carmel Drive and suddenly there was an explosion, a crater in the street and the car would be on its side, shattered, and Winslow would be either dead or in pieces, requiring a pain-filled rehabilitation, dealing with replacement limbs and possibly a damaged brain, rendering him non compos mentis. It would be the perfect way to deal with the fucker.