In that silent moment Watkins identified the device on the counter. It was a photographer’s intervalometer, a device often planted in the wild to detect movement of an animal on a trail and trigger a camera many times in succession as the animal passed by.
Watkins half turned his body toward the front door to go back, then realized he was not going to make it. The first electrical impulse would be for a charge near the front door, and the next impulses would race around the house, each one setting off a charge where he might take shelter, tearing the house down over him one explosion at a time. “No,” he thought. “Toward it.”
Watkins pivoted back toward the kitchen, pushed off with his legs and heard the first click of the intervalometer as it sent the first impulse, but there was no explosion. He burst through the swinging door, building speed as he lumbered across the kitchen, dashing for the back door.
The intervalometer’s second click set off an explosion at the front of the house, the one designed to kill him if he’d retreated to the front door. The shock shook him and his ears hurt, as though it had damaged his eardrums. He flung the back door open and launched himself off the back porch to the lawn. He managed to remain on his feet in the heavy bomb suit, still struggling to run.
The second explosion punched out the kitchen windows behind him and showered him with glass, and the third took out the windows over his right shoulder. One after another, the charges blew, the next set at the corners of the house. Watkins kept moving, not able to turn and look back, but he heard a crash he believed was the collapse of the roof over the living room.
The house was being imploded, the way demolition teams imploded skyscrapers and apartment complexes. He knew the only thing that had kept him alive for the past ten seconds was the necessity that the last charge to blow was the one near the intervalometer that set off the charges. The kitchen charge would be the biggest.
In another half second it came, knocking him off his feet onto the grass, clapboards and two-by-fours striking his back. Then clouds of white dust obscured the world.
3
Watkins lay still for a few seconds while the debris fell around him, then listened. There was a strange, terrible silence that made him wonder if he’d lost his hearing.
“I’m alive,” he said into the microphone, and was relieved to hear himself speak.
“We heard somebody breathing,” said Maynard’s voice in his earpiece. “Are you hurt?”
“I think I’m okay,” said Watkins. It wasn’t a perfunctory answer. Some bomb victims had fatal internal injuries and bleeding they didn’t detect at first. “Let’s get the area roped off before we get overrun.”
He recognized Graham’s voice. “We’re on it.”
The voices and the incidental noises in Watkins’s earpiece went away. Watkins pushed himself up to his knees, examined his bomb suit for holes or tears, but found it intact. He stood and the layer of debris on his suit fell in a puff of dust at his feet.
The thing to worry about now was unexploded ordnance. He began to walk across the backyard looking for surprises among the pieces of the house. It was unlikely this bomber would have made any bad electrical connections and left a charge unexploded. He was too highly skilled for that. But his work was also devious and premeditated, so it was important to Watkins to be sure he had not left anything intentionally.
As Watkins surveyed the scene he saw the thoroughness of the bomber’s work. There were a great many small pieces blown from the house — roof shingles, mostly from the corners of the building, windows and frames, glass, a few sections of clapboard. But the main part of the structure had collapsed into a pile.
Some of the studs and roof timbers he could see had been drilled and wired for charges, so the house would fall in on itself. He found the front door out on the lawn near the street with forty round holes punched through it. He looked at the angles of impact and realized there must have been a bomb or two with ball bearings taped to them placed above the gypsum board of the ceiling to kill him if he tried to run out that way.
He watched his team’s black bomb truck stop in the street. It was emblazoned with bright gold paint that said BOMB SQUAD in the hope it would keep at least some bystanders at a distance. Hitched to the back of the truck was a containment vessel on wheels, a steel ball about five feet in diameter with a hatch that could be sealed and a valve for the release of gases. Graham and Maynard got out and began to string yellow tape to keep people away until the scene was found safe and the pieces were examined for evidence.
The team’s truck had been only five hundred feet away, so it reached the bombed house immediately, but now other vehicles began to arrive. The patrol cars that had blocked off the street on both ends before he entered the house now admitted two fire trucks, an ambulance, and then another bomb truck towing a containment vessel.
Captain Victor Del Castillo, the commander of the Bomb Squad, jumped down from the truck and trotted up to Watkins. He was lean and tall, a long-distance running enthusiast, and spent months each year trying to recruit his squad members for the annual police endurance races. He said, “Tim, are you all right?”
“A little stressed,” said Watkins.
“Stressed? That’s it? Then I won’t waste my sympathy on you. Did you see anything inside we ought to be looking for?”
“The kitchen was at the back. An intervalometer was on the counter.”
“A what?”
“An intervalometer, like photographers use. It was a black box about the size of a cell phone, with the name Canon on it in white letters. I think it was the kind that has a motion sensor that sets off the camera if you want to take pictures of lightning or moving animals or something. I leaned into the kitchen and saw a small red light go on. Then I heard a click. Once the power was on, it ran through a sequence of clicks, each one setting off a charge.”
“I’ll have the guys start looking for pieces of it. If there’s anything left, it could have a serial number or something. The main thing right now is to be sure we don’t still have live explosives.”
Del Castillo had come with a three-man team of bomb techs, and he assigned them to search the scene for explosives, pieces of detonators, or other bomb components. He repeated Watkins’s description of the intervalometer and added it to the list. In another ten minutes two more trucks arrived bringing three-man teams, who were added to the sweep. They had to make sure the danger was over before a crime scene crew could come in and collect evidence.
Their search was difficult and painstaking. Any scrap of metal might be part of one of the bombs. It was essential to clear the area of anything that might explode, and this had to be the priority.
The scene was not quite like any Watkins had seen before. Where the house had been was now a pile of lumber, some of it charred near the ends where small charges had been placed. The roof was collapsed over the pile of wood and siding, its gutters now about three feet above the ground and its peak less than six feet high. The lots on this street were not large, but the houses on either side of this one appeared to be intact.
Watkins looked over the area and realized there were fourteen techs working this scene — exactly half of the LAPD Bomb Squad. After a short time, Del Castillo waved to summon Watkins to the bomb truck parked on the street.
He was carrying a laptop now, and he opened it on the hood of the bomb truck. “Hey, Tim,” he said. “Take a look. I got the plans for this house from Building and Safety.”