Hamid Algar watched the Canadian tanker truck with satisfaction. The driver had driven straight north in the thickening traffic until Seattle’s skyline appeared out of the low clouds and mist.
He had no trouble staying behind the tanker as it followed Interstate 5’s winding curves. He had driven the route many times, and even taken some of the possible alternates each time with the sensing device in place. It had functioned as advertised. In a job like this, one hundred percent reliability was the only acceptable performance.
Algar had already moved over to the right lane when the truck passed the Madison Street exit. There was only one path it could follow now, and with a sense of farewell, he took the exit and drove off into the city center. He’d take Highway 99 south back to Burien. The interstate was much too crowded.
Jane Kelly didn’t see the Syrian leave. And even if she had spotted his battered blue Nova behind her, it would only have been one of a dozen cars turning off at Madison. She was nearing her own exit, Denny Way, less than a quarter mile away.
Traffic was still moving, thank goodness, although her speedometer now hovered at the fifteen-mile-an-hour mark. Up ahead, the highway curved a little to the left as it went under Olive Way.
The Olive Way-Boren Street underpass was especially wide, almost a tunnel. Above the highway, the two arterials intersected less than a block away, and the entire area had been roofed over.
The tanker truck passed beneath the intersection and out of the rain. The street surface was dry and lit by bright lamps on the ceiling of the underpass.
Hamid Algar’s box sensed the change in the surrounding light. Although small, the increase was enough to register on a sensitive photocell. A microchip brain attached to the photocell noted the change and began tracking the time. Unlike the bright beam of a passing headlight, this light lasted a tenth of a second, two-tenths, three, four. Five-tenths was enough. The microchip triggered a tiny electric pulse.
Inside the box, a firing squib detonated a shaped-charge warhead. The squid also ignited a magnesium flare. Designed to punch through inches of armor, the warhead penetrated the tanker truck’s milled steel shell easily, pushing a superheated jet of gas and metal into the liquid propane tank through a jagged, glowing hole.
The explosion died.
In its place, liquid propane began boiling out of the three-inch hole with a sound like a steam calliope jammed on high, changing to a gas as it hit the air. But when the streaming gas hit the box’s hissing magnesium flare, it ignited into a roaring jet of flame. The heat of the jet, hotter than a blowtorch, opened the hole larger and larger in a chain reaction until the entire front of the steel tank disintegrated. Propane gas mixed freely with the air. At that point, only milliseconds after the bomb went off, the rest of the tanker’s cargo disappeared in a devastating explosion.
The near-dawn darkness was overpowered by a searing orange-white fireball. Trapped by the ceiling of the underpass, the leading edge of the fireball spread out horizontally ahead and behind, but a final, titanic blast split the overhead structure and peeled it back. Slabs of concrete and steel weighing hundreds of pounds landed half a mile away, smashing through roofs and flattening cars and pedestrians crowding Seattle’s busy streets.
One car length behind the explosion, Jane Kelly had only a single, anguished second to understand what was happening before the roaring mindless wall of flame engulfed her Nissan.
She and all the others trapped in the four-lane underpass were incinerated. More than a dozen other cars and trucks on either side of the explosion were also scorched and burned. The vehicles on Olive and Boren streets above were either flipped over or fell through into the inferno below.
Half a minute after the echoes of the enormous blast faded away, stunned motorists left their cars on the highway and stood staring in shock and terror at the burning mass of twisted steel and concrete clogging the gap where the overpass had once been. Buildings on either side of the highway were burning, and the agonized screams and shrieks of those who were trapped and on fire tore through the sudden silence.
Burien, Washington Hamid Algar and his two comrades, Anton Chemelovic and Jabra Ibrahim, watched the television in rapt fascination. Coverage of the disaster had started only moments after Hamid had returned to their apartment, and now, like the rest of Seattle and America, they viewed the live television feed. But while the rest of the country watched in horror and fascination, the three Iranian-trained commandos were performing battle damage assessment.
The picture now on television came from the roof of a nearby office building. From above, the destroyed overpass looked like nothing more than a giant, blackened hourglass filled with rubble and twisted metal. Emergency vehicles surrounded the crater.
The reporter now on camera, stunned by the carnage and rattled by the lack of hard information, kept repeating the single, inadequate word: “tragedy.” It had been a tragic accident, there had been a tragic loss of life, and so on. Area hospitals were jammed and some of those with less critical injuries had been farmed out to smaller clinics. At the moment, the death toll stood at twenty-five, but that was expected to climb rapidly as searchers pulled apart the rubble. Sixty-three had been seriously hurt. Seattle’s burn wards were full.
The National Transportation Safety Board had already dispatched an investigative team to the area. They would land at Boeing Field at 2:10 P.M. Algar, Chemelovic, and Ibrahim all relaxed slightly. At least initially, the Americans were treating the tanker blast as an accident. They would find no immediate clues that this was a terrorist attack. When the NTSB’s investigators discovered the truth later, their trail would be days old, and it would be a very faint, very cold trail.
They nodded to each other. Tehran would be pleased.
Chemelovic, a Bosnian, had actually made the bomb. His gift for electronics had earned him special training in demolitions at Masegarh, and now both of his teammates praised his work. Algar told him several times exactly how he had placed the device. By the time the Syrian finished retelling the story, Chemelovic had a grin covering half his face. His skills had won a great victory in the war against the godless West.
Jabra Ibrahim rose from the couch and snapped the television off.
“Come on, both of you. Help me pack.”
Ibrahim, a Lebanese, had provided security and cover for the three-man cell. He’d rented the apartment, done the shopping, and organised all the logistics during their short, one week stay in the Seattle area. He was the conscientious one, the one who’d worked on their laptop computer while the others watched television.
Their personal gear went into one duffel bag, and their tools and weapons into another two. While Algar and Chemelovic cleaned up, Ibrahim meticulously went through each room, each closet, and each cupboard looking for anything that belonged to them or came from them. A scrap of paper, a button, anything that might provide a link to them.
When Chemelovic and Algar returned from loading their gear into the Nova, they helped in the search. A few small items were found, a tool under a piece of furniture and a sock, one of Algar’s, under another. Shamefacedly, he took possession of the offending article and stood next to Chemelovic as Ibrahim, the team leader, berated them both for sloppy security.
Finally, he handed each of them a rag and a bottle of cleaning solution. Systematically, they wiped down every smooth surface, every wall and every object capable of holding a fingerprint. While none of them had ever been fingerprinted by the American government, a print here might link them to some past act or location, or some future one.