If the implosion of the Drifts Hotel and Casino had proceeded as planned, no more than fifty pounds of dynamite would have been required to bring it tumbling down.
The secret was the location of the charges. By placing them next to a few deliberately weakened support pillars in strategic locations, those pillars would have given way simultaneously, causing each floor to collapse in turn. With gravity doing most of the work, the entire structure would have tumbled like a house of cards.
Because there would have been no significant outward explosive force, the building would have fallen straight down, collapsing in upon itself, or imploding. Flying debris would have been minimized, the risk of damage to nearby structures negligible.
But Steve Forrester’s unscheduled destruction of the building achieved quite the opposite effect. Instead of a neat implosion resulting in a compact, easy-to-scoop pile of rubble, the twelve thousand pounds of high explosives generated a violent, unconfined blast that scattered fragments of concrete and steel for over half a mile in all directions.
First came the flash. Brilliant, blinding, nova-bright.
A millisecond later, the roar. Thunderous, deafening, pure sound.
Then the shock wave. Irresistible, crushing, a giant invisible steamroller.
Huge chunks of concrete and steel rose skyward, tumbling in slow motion through the roiling orange-red fireball. Smaller pieces of debris flew wildly. Flaming embers arced through the night sky like wayward tracer bullets.
Some of the blast’s energy was absorbed in the instantaneous creation of a fifty-foot-deep crater. But at ground level, the outbound shock wave still packed enough punch to flatten anything in its path for a considerable distance—including the construction fence around the site, which folded down and outward as if it had been fixed to the ground by giant piano hinges. Deafened by the roar and stunned by the shock wave, Steve Forrester hardly felt the impact of the fence as it collapsed upon him, striking the back of his head and knocking the breath from his body. Valiantly, he tried to hold on to consciousness, to stay awake for Lucy, but it was futile.
With only three-quarters of an inch of plywood to shield him and Lucy from the debris that was raining down like massive hailstones, Forrester’s world faded to black.
“Unit 3-16. Request ambulances at intersection of Twain and Las Vegas Boulevard. Code 401B.”
“Acknowledged, 3-16.”
“Dispatcher, we have a Code 438 in front of Day’s Inn. Disabled vehicles blocking access to explosion site. Request wreckers. Repeat, request wreckers at Day’s Inn.”
“This is Unit 2-31. Code 422 on south side of explosion site. Officer down …”
Impatiently, Lieutenant Frank Marshall shut off the radio. Let someone else coordinate the cleanup; despite the rancor he felt toward his ex-partner, there was no way he was going to abandon Steve Forrester. With siren wailing, he floored the unmarked Ford into the dust storm that was rolling outward from the explosion.
“This is worse than driving through L.A. smog,” he remarked to Morris Jaworski as he slowed down because of the rapidly decreasing visibility. Ghostly outlines of the Strip’s big neon signs glimmered down weakly through the haze. Smoldering chunks of debris littered the roadway, becoming more numerous as the two lawmen neared the explosion site. In the distance, faint pockets of flame flickered through the fog, marking ground zero. Damaged vehicles littered the road.
“I haven’t seen so many wrecked cars since my ex-wife took her driving test,” Jaworski noted. “Steve must have smashed through them like a snowplow. God, I hope he made it out of the bus in time. Before it blew, I mean.”
“I do, too, Moe. Believe it or not.”
“What is it with you guys, anyway?”
“Steve and me? Well, we may not … see eye-to-eye about some matters, but right now that doesn’t seem so important. What he did took incredible guts. Let’s just do our damnedest to find him.”
“What about the people who were with him on the bus? Didn’t the radio call mention a woman with him? And some guy who jumped on board just as he drove off?”
“I assume the woman is Lucy Baker. She had called me earlier from Steve’s car. And I suspect the man might be Buster Malloy. We just have to hope that Lucy’s okay, too. As for Malloy, I don’t really give a shit.” He paused. “No, scratch that. I hope the bastard’s dead.”
They drove north until they could go no farther. Traffic was completely stalled. Still a fair way down the Strip, the pale red-blue flashes of Marshall’s hastily deployed roadblocks were just visible through the miasma.
“Come on, Moe,” said the LVMPD lieutenant, braking to a halt. “No way we’re gonna get any closer by car.”
The two men stepped out of the unmarked unit and began to run toward the blast site. When they reached the roadblock, Marshall stopped and asked one of the officers for a quick assessment of the damage.
“I don’t know what happened at the other roadblocks, Lieutenant,” the patrolman replied. “But I do know we kept a lot of vehicles from getting caught up in the explosion. And we cleared most of the traffic out of the area before the blast. If we’d’a had more than just a couple of minutes’ warning …”
“Yeah. Well, we didn’t. What about casualties?”
“Some civilians were hurt by flying debris. That’s all I can tell you right now. We requested ambulances.”
“All right. See if you can get these cars turned around and out of here. Let the ambulances through.”
“We’re on it.”
The black-and-white squad car sat forlornly amid the scattered chunks of broken concrete and twisted metal like an abandoned junker awaiting its final journey to the crusher. The left side of the vehicle was severely dented. Its hood and trunk lid were gone. The candy-bar roof flasher was history. All four tires were flat. Except for a jagged crust around the frames,
there was not a square inch of glass remaining in any of its windows.
The surviving member of the two-man patrol team sat facing out on the passenger seat of the battered car, his heels resting on the door sill. Blood oozed from dozens of tiny puncture wounds on the left side of his face and neck. A white-coated emergency medical technician squatted next to him, dabbing at the cuts and carefully tweezing crystals of safety glass from his patient’s skin.
On the driver’s side, between the car and the remains of the Drifts’s construction fence, a motionless form, covered by a red blanket, lay on the asphalt. Another EMT had wheeled a gurney next to it and was unzipping a rubber body bag just as Frank Marshall and Morris Jaworski arrived breathlessly on the scene.
Marshall flashed his badge at the EMT with the body bag. “What the hell happened here?” he asked bluntly.
“I’m afraid this officer’s dead, Lieutenant,” the technician replied, indicating the still form at his feet.
“I’d like to know who it is. May I look under the blanket?”
“You don’t want to see him. His head is completely severed. Must have been a piece of flying debris.”
“Poor bastard,” said Morris Jaworski.
“Why don’t you talk to the other officer?” the ambulance man suggested. “He’s over there in the car—being treated for cuts.”
Shaking his head sadly, Frank walked around to where the surviving policeman was being ministered to by the EMT. Despite the blood, he recognized the man immediately. Greg Foster, a fifteen-year veteran of the LVMPD. And that meant his partner, the dead man, had to be Jerry Stern. A rookie, married with a couple of young kids, if Marshall recalled correctly. Goddamn it, the police lieutenant mused bitterly, why is it always the ones with the most to live for who have to die?
Aloud, he said gently to the bleeding cop: “How are you feeling, Greg?”
The policeman’s voice quavered and he trembled visibly. “Oh God, Lieutenant … it-it was awful. One minute Jerry’s s-standin’ there … the next minute his … his f-f-fuckin’ head’s gone. He’d just g-gotten out of the car … to talk to this guy—”
“What guy, Greg?”
“I-I dunno. Some guy … ran out of the b-building just before it blew. Looked like … looked like he was carryin’ somebody on his shoulder. He ducked down … behind the fence—”
“Where, Greg? What part of the fence?”
“Take it easy on him, Lieutenant,” the EMT cut in. “He’s still in shock … .”
Marshall ignored the medic and persisted. “This is important, Greg. Exactly where did you see this man run to?”
Foster waved off the EMT’s ministrations and rose unsteadily to his feet. He pointed to the flattened construction fence. “Just … just over there, Lieutenant. See that sheet of plywood … with the big chunk of concrete on top of it?”
“He’s under there?”
The injured officer nodded weakly and sank back onto the passenger seat of the ruined police car. “How’m I gonna … tell Jerry’s wife?” he muttered.
“Hey, you! Give us a hand over here. Quick!”
The EMT caught the urgency in Frank Marshall’s voice. He immediately abandoned the body bag and ran over to join the two policemen at the remains of the fence. “What’s up, Lieutenant?”
“Somebody’s trapped under this collapsed fence.” Marshall indicated a sheet of plywood, reinforced with a frame of two-by-fours, one of hundreds surrounding the blast site that had been blown flat by the shock wave. The end of the sheet was pinned under a large jagged piece of concrete bristling with rusty rebar stumps. “If you two guys could roll that cement back just a little, I think I can lift this end.”
Using the protruding rebar as handles, Morris Jaworski and the medic strained to move the heavy lump of concrete. Gradually, agonizingly, they rolled it back, an inch, two inches. The faces of both men shone red with exertion and dripped with sweat. Another inch—but it was enough for Frank Marshall. With a Herculean heave, he lifted his end of the fence panel knee-high. Then, using a weightlifter’s clean-and-jerk motion, he reversed his grip and dropped to a crouch. With every ounce of sinew he possessed, the big policeman slowly straightened his legs and raised the end of the plywood sheet to shoulder height.
Jaworski and the EMT quickly ran to share Marshall’s burden. Between them, the three men managed to slide the plywood out from under the chunk of concrete and toss it to one side. It had covered a slight depression in the ground. In the depression lay the dusty, dark-jacketed body of a man.
“Hey, hero!” The lieutenant crouched next to the prostrate body and frantically shook its shoulder. “Is that you?”
Steve Forrester stirred and groaned.
He rolled off the prone form of Lucy Baker, who coughed and blinked her eyes open.
“You guys all right?” said Frank.
Lucy lifted her head and nodded weakly. Forrester raised himself on one elbow. He spat out a mouthful of grit and bestowed a twisted grin upon his rescuer. “Chrissake, Frank,” he croaked, “don’t you ever knock?”
In the police lab at the Southwest Area Command, Morris Jaworski nodded his thanks to the fingerprint specialist. “Good work, Chuck. I guess that confirms it.”
“The perps weren’t so smart after all,” the specialist observed. “Those thermite devices were loaded with prints.”
“Obviously, they expected them all to burn up with the Obelisk. They figured you can’t lift prints from ashes.” Jaworski scanned the printout on his desk. “Daniel K. Shiller. Con man, card cheat, grifter. Last collar at Diamond Lil’s for hand mucking. He was in the Spring Mountain lockup at the same time as Jurgen Voss. And Buster Malloy drove Voss to the jail that day. It all fits.”
“What are the chances of nailing this Shiller?”
“Pretty slim. We’ve got a statewide APB out. And the feds are putting him on their Ten Most Wanted list. But I’d bet my badge he’s out of the country by now.”
“With fifty million U.S. dollars in his pocket.”
“I know. But money doesn’t always buy happiness.”
The specialist sighed. “You’re probably right, Sarge. All the same, I’d like to give it a try someday.”
“Here’s a late-breaking bulletin from News Thirteen Inside Las Vegas. I’m Debbie Blake.”
The attractive blond newsreader’s face dissolved to a helicopter shot of a deep crater surrounded by a sea of rubble. Tendrils of smoke still rose from the scattered wreckage as fire trucks hosed down the area. She continued her voice-over: “Searchers have found another body near yesterday’s
massive explosion at the Drifts’s demolition site, estimated by authorities to be three times as powerful as the Oklahoma City blast. The body of an elderly man was discovered beneath the wreckage of a nearby collapsed wall. Officials have not yet released his identity.
“This brings to eight the number of known fatalities in the blast, including the bomber himself, whose body investigators say will probably never be found. Two passing motorists died when their vehicles were crushed by large pieces of concrete thrown out by the explosion. Three pedestrians were killed, either by the shock wave or from injuries caused by flying debris. A Las Vegas police officer died instantly when he stepped out of his patrol car just as the explosive was detonated. And a female visitor to Las Vegas was fatally wounded by flying glass when the window in her motel room across the street was shattered by the blast.
“Scores of injured people have been treated at area hospitals and clinics. Injuries range from cuts caused by flying glass to broken bones and internal injuries resulting from automobile accidents. Many collisions occurred when motorists lost control of their vehicles at the moment of the explosion.
“Damage to neighboring properties is estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Acres of broken glass and damaged neon signs are the most visible results of the disaster, the worst to hit Las Vegas since the MGM Grand fire of nineteen eighty.
“A police spokesman credits the quick thinking of a casino executive for saving thousands of lives in what could have been the most terrible manmade catastrophe in U.S. history, eclipsing even the destruction of the World Trade Center.” Footage of Steve Forrester and Lucy Baker being helped into the back of an ambulance appeared on-screen. “Steven Forrester, a vice president of the Galaxy Hotel and Casino, commandeered the Greyhound bus into which the twelve-thousand-pound bomb had been loaded by a gang of extortionists. He drove it away from the Roman Palladium, where it had been timed to explode within minutes, to the relative safety of the Drifts Hotel, scheduled for demolition tomorrow.
“With the help of Lucy Baker, a colleague at the Galaxy, Forrester subdued the bomber, Francis Marion Malloy, an ex-employee of the same hotel, who is believed to have died in the blast. One of his accomplices, Jurgen Voss, had previously committed suicide in police custody. A third gang member, identified as Daniel K. Shiller, is still at large, and a warrant has been issued for his arrest. Investigators have confirmed—”
Lucy pressed the MUTE button as the now-familiar images of the explosion’s aftermath continued to flicker silently across the picture tube. “Been there. Done that,” she murmured dreamily, snuggling closer to Steve Forrester on the Ethan Allen couch. “Why are we watching this, anyway?”
“I dunno. Must be something better on.”
“Anything strike your fancy?”
“How about a cigarette?”
“Uh-uh. You promised. I meant, is there anything you want to watch?”
He flexed his sore muscles and thought for a moment. “How about one of those I Love Lucy reruns?” he suggested casually, cupping her breast in his bandaged right hand.