Thomas Perry
The Bomb Maker
To Jo, Alix, and Ian, with thanks to Otto Penzler
1
The maker’s fingers were nimble and certain, never trembling or touching any object or surface without intention. His hands were sure because he had designed the parts to be assembled in a precise order. A bomb was a simple machine. Its only moving part was a switch to complete the circuit running from the power source to an initiator and back. But bomb making was mentally demanding. Creating a potent blast required knowing the chemical processes he could produce by combining particular substances in specific proportions. He had to know how to coax them to transform from inert lumps of matter into sound, light, heat, and brute force.
The switch was enormously important. If he kept the switch open while he assembled the parts, nothing was at risk. The device became lethal only in the instant when the switch was engaged and the circuit was closed. Part of the maker’s power was building in the set of conditions that must exist before the switch would close.
He had used barometer switches designed to close when the bomb was at a specific altitude. He’d made time-delay bomb switches from kitchen timers, timers from lawn sprinkler systems, and alarm clocks. He’d made switches that used motion sensors from outdoor lighting fixtures to close a circuit when a person came near. He’d set bombs off with mousetraps, components from children’s toys and games, a pressure pad that turned on a laughing Halloween witch when a child stepped on it. He’d made a few from toasters and thermostats.
When commercially manufactured hardware was available that could perform the function he needed, he preferred to use it, no matter what its original purpose. Such components were tougher and more reliable than those built from scratch, and he could test them repeatedly ahead of time to be sure they worked, and then he could buy more or buy other models that worked better. Most electronic components came already tested, with a UL label on them. All he had to do was subvert the will of their designer to adapt them to his own purpose.
For similar reasons, he preferred to use commercially made initiators, preferably blasting caps. Usually he could not obtain manufactured explosives for the main charges of his bombs. Military explosives like C-4 were safe and reliable, but they were tightly controlled. Dynamite was far less powerful, but easier to buy or steal. The drawback of factory-made explosives was that they could be traced. Dynamite even contained tiny identifying tags that would be blown all over the blast area.
His only choice had been to learn to make his own. The planet was full of substances that could be made to explode. Many common materials could be induced to blow up — natural gas, wheat flour, coal dust, nitrate fertilizer. One of the biggest industrial explosions in history had been in a molasses plant. The cars people drove were propelled by small explosions of gasoline in the engine’s cylinders that pushed down pistons and turned a crankshaft. A bomb maker’s practical problem wasn’t that explosions were too difficult. Most of them were if anything too easy, too unpredictable.
Much of the challenge in his current project came from the miniaturization necessary to make a complex set of devices that would work in sequence, but not be noticed before detonation. He had to work with a magnifier on a small stand designed for jewelers and fly fishermen so he could do the delicate work without error.
The idea was to make a device small and familiar enough to be ignored, or at least to remain unsuspected. Right now his stand held a sturdy phone-size black plastic box bearing the white letters of a company logo: Canon, a name people knew. He popped open the case and studied the circuitry. He was pleased. This was an excellent piece of equipment. He could use it. He picked up his soldering gun to make the connections between the device’s circuitry and the electrical wires he was expecting the device to supply with power. Each of the wires was stripped to the copper at the end, and the rest of its length was white insulator. Most of the house where he wanted to use the small black box had white walls and white woodwork, so he had decided to start with white. He was intending to keep the device’s batteries charging on a wall socket until it was time. And then, even if the AC power source got cut off, the effect would be the same.
After two hours he finished and looked at his device. The circuit was as he had intended, and the solder connecting his twenty-four firing wires looked perfect. He turned off the intense desk lamp, rubbed his eyes with his hands, took a deep breath, and blew it out again. He had been working at this iteration of his idea for most of the day.
He stood and left the garage he had converted into a workshop, went out through the house and into the backyard. He thought of it as a backyard, but it was much too big to be called that. The land was fifty acres of sand mounds, dry brush and pebbles, rocks and yuccas, surrounded by miles more that didn’t seem to belong to anyone, and then a range of dry brown mountains on each side like the rim of a bowl.
It was late afternoon, and he looked out on the open land and assessed the period of daylight he had left. The shadows of the Joshua trees were long, but he might still get to his next device after he completed this test.
He had lived alone in the desert for over four years. The desert was a place where he could set off small charges, most of the time without anybody hearing them. Anybody who did hear would attribute the noise to a neighbor taking rifle practice. He did that sometimes too, and the sound was much louder than most of his experiments.
This time he didn’t need to make any noise. He had built a silent test device for the circuits he was making for this project. He went back into the shop in his garage and placed the small black box on one end of his long workbench. It had twenty-four coils of white wire attached to it. His test device was a six-foot board that held twenty-four five-watt lightbulbs. He connected each set of wires to one of the light fixtures.
He checked the adjustments on the small black box. Next he set the device to trigger when the electric eye detected motion near it.
He plugged the device into the nearest socket, stepped back about seven feet — too far away to touch it — and brought his hand down like a conductor eliciting the first note from an orchestra. The black box began to tick. With each tick, one of the five-watt bulbs went on. One by one, each of them lit and then went out, so it looked as though the light were a single bright object moving down the board. The effect reminded him of the marquee in front of the old Palace Theatre in Indianapolis during his childhood. He smiled. All twenty-four bulbs had lit and gone out.
He repeated the test, this time with the speed increased, so the light moved down the board much faster, taking only about a second to move the six feet down the board. He slowed it down and played with the timing control until he felt that the speed and rhythm were perfect. He disconnected the wires from the board and gently placed his small black box in a cardboard carton, taking care not to put any strain on the wires protruding from it. He went outside again, feeling he had accomplished something today.
The bomb maker was thirty-five and average looking, with short, dirty blond hair; a thin, sinewy body; and a flat stomach he kept that way with moderate habits and runs in the desert at dawn when it wasn’t too hot out. He stretched his back and arms and felt taller than his five feet ten inches. He took a deep breath as he stretched, enjoying the sun and the clear air and the endless blue sky and then decided he still had enough sunlight left to run his next test.
He went back to the workshop, retrieved another device, and set it up a hundred feet away on the range. The last thing he did was make the final connection to bring a blasting cap into the circuit. He retreated to the workshop and picked up the radio transmitter he had taken from the remote controller of a motorized toy car. He had rigged the transmitter to switch on when he stepped on a homemade pressure pad. He set the nearly flat object down at his feet and stepped on it. Instantly the receiver from the toy car received the signal and he heard the satisfying bang of the blasting cap.