CHAPTER 22

Back at the house I googled, once again, the IED. But there was no formula for constructing one. There was plenty of information about how they worked, how much they had destroyed, but no list of the ingredients. The Internet told me that the parts were simple: a detonator that might be a garage door opener or a cell phone. The part of the bomb that set it off was an electrical charge or a small explosive charge. The charge itself was what did the damage and in cases like those in Iraq, they used the charge from a land mine. But there were other options, dynamite stolen or purchased, chemical explosives, and even mention of explosives that could be cooked up by somebody with the chemical knowledge. The device could be hidden in any kind of a package. Often the IEDs used on the battlefield were hidden in the dead body of an animal, or even in the dead body of a casualty. The injuries in the Middle East were no longer by rifle or mortar. They were mostly by these devices, buried on a roadway or driven to the point of explosion. Sometimes they were set off by someone watching, at other times the delivery person was blown up along with the victims. It was one thing to tell me that a garage door opener or a cell phone could be used to set off the bomb, but another to know exactly how such a device would be wired. What I needed were some blueprints. Or someone with the knowledge how such things worked. And I needed to find the explosive. I couldn’t purchase dynamite. I could steal some, but I would have to find out where dynamite was kept. The Internet said that construction sites were possibilities, but it would have to be construction where they were blowing up things. Road work or tunnels, coal mines. There were no coal mines in California where I lived. What I needed was to find someone who knew how to build an IED, and that would not be easy. Still, there had to be someone out there who knew how to fashion a bomb that would blow up Earl Winslow’s Mercedes. Timothy McVeigh had fashioned a bomb that blew up a whole multi-story building in Oklahoma City. McVeigh used ammonium nitrate, fertilizer, but he packed a truck full of the stuff. I needed something small enough to put in Winslow’s driveway, something that could be hidden in a small package. It would take time to find the answer, but egrets have time. They stand and wait and eventually the moment comes.