The facility contained the latest in scientific equipment. It was located on the floor below and had recently undergone a major refit.
Thomas was confident that it ranked among the country’s best.
Of course, any forensic laboratory was only as good as its people. The BATF was fortunate to have recruited the finest personnel available — many of these technicians had come from the ranks of the military, where they received their initial training in the arcane business of explosives ordnance technology.
Thomas wasn’t surprised to find the agency’s se niormost EOD technician hard at work inside the lab as he entered. Les Stanley had once served in the same outfit as M. Sgt. Danny Lane, making him the perfect person to be carrying on Lane’s work here at BATF headquarters.
The Priority Mail IED they had defused earlier in the day had preceded Thomas to the lab. It was now Stanley’s job to further disassemble the device. Much like a coroner dissecting a corpse to uncover evidence of a homicide, Stanley was picking apart the remains of the bomb searching for clues.
He did so on a well-lit, oblong worktable, with a jeweler’s loupe strapped to his eye. Stanley had already cut away most of the cardboard box, and was concentrating his efforts on the bomb’s fiberboard base and the various fusing mechanisms that were still attached to it.
“It’s all so damn elementary,” observed Stanley, while carefully cutting the wire leads attached to the photocell.
Thomas had pulled over a stool alongside the technician, as Stanley continued his remarks without looking up. “On exposure to light, the photocell’s resistance decreases, causing the transistors to conduct.
Then, when the battery current flowing through the transistors reaches a sufficient level, the relay is activated, the contact closes, and the circuit is completed, firing the detonators.”
“Did the liquid nitrogen do much damage to the components?” asked Thomas as Stanley began scraping a sample of soldering into a small vial.
“The only problem it’s caused so far is with the outer carton,” returned Stanley, who next turned his attention to the device’s twin transistors.
“The quick-freeze burnt the cardboard surface, and if there were any fingerprints on there, we’re going to have a hell of a time finding them.”
“At least we’ve got the rest of it to work with,” said Thomas.
He watched as Stanley placed one of the transistors in a plastic evidence bag. Over a dozen similar bags had already been filled, a careful analysis of their contents being the next step in the investigation.
“Anything out of the ordinary so far, Les?”
Stanley somberly shook his head. “There’s nothing here that couldn’t be purchased in your local hardware store, except for those two blocks of C-4, that is. I’ve already had Mitchell run a preliminary analysis on it, and the results are sobering. The blend appears to be 91.8 percent RDX and 8.2 percent inert plasticizer, giving it an approximate detonating velocity of some 26,400 fps.” RDX, Thomas knew, was a high explosive made from nitric acid and hexamethylenetetramine.
“I was afraid that it would be military grade.” Thomas said with a sigh.
“I think I’ll give Ted Callahan a call over at the Pentagon, and see if the Army’s experienced any unexplained shortages lately, especially in the Virginia area.”
With this comment, Les Stanley deliberately put down his tweezers. He pushed aside his loupe, sat up straight, and turned his gaze on Thomas.
“Hell, last I heard, Callahan and his cronies couldn’t even find a pair of M 1 battle tanks and a trio of Humvees that mysteriously disappeared out of their Texas-based inventory. And you think they can help you find out if a couple of pounds of C-4 have been stolen? The damn Secretary of the Army could go missing for an entire week, and they’d never even miss him!”
Thomas didn’t doubt there were some thefts his friend couldn’t solve, but he decided nevertheless to follow up this avenue of investigation.
Col. Theodore Callahan could tell him about every Department of Defense facility in which C-4 was stored, and inform him where these potent plastic explosives were produced, and how they were accounted for afterwards. He excused himself and returned to his office, where a phone call found Callahan at his Pentagon office.
Thomas had served with Callahan in Grenada. They were to go their separate ways afterwards, only to be reunited in the past two years when Callahan was transferred to the Pentagon where he was serving as one of the Army’s top cops. It was in this official capacity that they were to work together again when Thomas was sent undercover to investigate an ongoing case involving racial tensions inside Army Special Forces.
Upon learning of Thomas’s current case, Callahan immediately offered his services. He also expressed a desire to help them with their bomb maker psychological profile. And when Callahan subsequently invited him to come right over to the Pentagon to continue the conversation, Thomas found himself unwilling to refuse his gracious offer.
Only after he hung up the phone did Thomas realize the late hour. It was rapidly approaching 5:00 p. m.” which meant that rush hour would be in full swing by the time he left his office. Not looking forward to fighting the traffic on Washington’s gridlocked surface streets, he decided instead to take the Metro.
His commute was a speedy one. An escalator at the Metro platform carried him right up into the Pentagon’s interior entry way. Looking from the top back down the tunnel from which he had just emerged, Thomas could see why the deeply buried Metro served a secondary function as a bomb shelter.
A tiled corridor led to the building’s main reception area and a security checkpoint. Even though he didn’t have a military ID, his BATF credential allowed him special access. One of the uniformed guards escorted him around the metal detector, and he was able to enter the Pentagon without having to remove his pistol from its shoulder harnessed holster.
While in the Air Force, Thomas spent nine months stationed at the Pentagon, so he was no stranger to its miles of mazelike hallways. The office he was presently bound for was on the third floor, located in the five-sided structure’s outer section, the E-ring.
It had been many months since he had last visited the Pentagon. As Thomas followed a long, sloping ramp up into its interior, a flood of memories engulfed him. Only yesterday, it seemed, had he been a bright-eyed young officer, fresh out of the Air Force Academy and ready to set the world on fire. What great dreams and lofty goals had guided him as he walked these same hallowed halls. He was going to single-handedly leave his mark on the military, feeling there was nothing he couldn’t accomplish if he put his mind to it.
As he was to learn all too soon, his ideals were as cliched as the phrases he’d felt described them and the system that he once had admired so was to have vastly different ideas as to how he could best serve it.
Conformity was the order of the day, with individual initiative definitely frowned upon. Time-consuming, bureaucratic procedures would try his patience, while any suggestions to address these inefficiencies were looked at with scorn. The successful officer learned these lessons early in his career, as the path to promotion was clearly trod by those who had figured out how best to play the game.
A passing group of smooth-faced, ROTC cadets reminded Thomas that this same game was going on today. Intelligent, vibrant, and eager to please, these young men were the fodder relied on by the powers that be to keep the system running. In so many ways, these cadets were the best that the country had to offer, and ultimately it was the military’s responsibility to use their talents wisely.