He reached the clearing without encountering another elk and with the car still in one piece, but found that the drive had taken him nearly half as long again as he’d thought it would.
Instead of weighing himself down with equipment, once he’d unloaded it he made two trips from the car to the fence then, after listening and watching, made another two trips to transfer everything over to the building.
In spite of the cool night he was still sweating from his drive, and after he’d finished ferrying forty pounds of propane and was ready to put the cylinders in place and connect up the hoses, he was out of breath and even hotter.
At the south end of the munitions store he stood the first of the cylinders beside the right-hand wall, and the second one beside the left hand wall, slipping the open ends of the hoses through the nearest ventilation slot before he went to set up the candles in their holders. These he positioned as close as he could to ventilation slots at the other end of the building — a location he hoped would guarantee the best result by preventing any pre-ignition before the gas reached its lower explosive limit.
Somehow the arrangement looked too simple and too innocent, he thought, perhaps because none of the candles were yet alight.
Shielding the flame from a match, he lit the first of them, making sure the perforated asparagus can was doing its job and that the wick was burning steadily before he went to attend to the other three.
When he’d finished and stepped back to look, although a glow from the nearest can was surprisingly bright, it wouldn’t be visible from any distance, he decided, and even less easy to see once the candle inside had burned down a little.
So far he’d been able to manage without the help of his flashlight. But he used it now, poking it into the ventilation slots to make certain nothing was blocking the ends of the hoses before he opened the cylinder valves and listened for the hiss of escaping gas.
Instead of retreating right away, for several minutes he stayed where he was, breathing in the night air and trying not to wonder whether or not O’Halloran had run into trouble.
When he did finally leave, he made a point of walking back slowly to the fence and climbed it equally slowly, resisting the temptation to look back until he reached his car.
In the moonlight he could just make out the bank of scrub and the outlines of some larger trees, but beyond that the darkness had swallowed up the glow from the candles and he could barely see the building.
Before commencing his return drive, he took off the new watch he’d bought and put it in his pocket, hoping that if he couldn’t see the hands creeping round he’d be able to concentrate more on his driving.
The idea was unsuccessful. Less than halfway into what had turned out to be an uneventful journey, he found himself counting down the minutes under his breath, and long before he reached the highway and had parked the car out of sight behind the trees, he’d all but convinced himself that something had gone wrong.
He was outside relieving himself against a tree when a flash of light and a dull boom told him that it hadn’t.
The initial explosion was unimpressive. The one that followed wasn’t.
In Singapore, the violence of the blast that had blown out the front of his apartment had caught Coburn off guard. But this blast was on a different scale entirely.
A second after everything around him turned white, the shock wave slammed him face-first against the tree, and the night was filled with a thunderous reverberating roar.
The roar didn’t stop, rolling off hills, echoing from nearby canyons and varying in intensity as munitions continued to explode and burn, fuelling a fire that from the highway to the ski-field was slowly turning the sky deep red.
For a while, before he went back to sit in the car he continued staring at the sky, pleased to have given O’Halloran the best possible chance, but a little taken aback by what he’d managed to achieve.
If nothing else this was going to cost the Free America League a heap of money, he thought, hardly compensation for the deaths and misery they’d been causing around the world, but a good first step towards stopping them from doing it again.
With his part of the job done, while he waited to learn whether O’Halloran had been equally successful, he stopped himself from counting down another set of minutes by thinking, not about O’Halloran, but about Heather — remembering the day he’d first met her at the shipyard, picturing her sitting in the sun on the village jetty, and recalling her expression on the night when she’d tried to discover whether he wanted to make love to her.
The faster he was able to conjure up the images, the more there were — snapshots of her in different places at different times, some easy to hold in his mind, others not, and one of her combing her hair in the hut that was so fleeting he decided to recapture it.
But before he could do so, the passenger door of the car was wrenched open, and O’Halloran threw himself inside.
The American looked as though he’d been running. He was breathing hard, and sweat on his face was glistening in the moonlight.
‘Drive,’ he said.
‘How did you get on?’
‘For Christ’s sake. Just drive, will you?’
‘OK, OK.’ Coburn started the engine and eased the Chrysler out of the shadows, skirting the pot-holes and delaying switching on his lights until he was clear of the track and able to turn north on the highway.
‘Why the big rush?’ he said.
‘If someone’s decided that fucking bang of yours was no accident, they could’ve called the police. We don’t want to run into a roadblock.’
Coburn thought the possibility unlikely, preferring to believe that, since their luck had held up to now, there was no reason for it to suddenly go bad on them.
‘Let me know when you’ve calmed down,’ he said.
‘Sorry.’ O’Halloran took off his jacket and used the lining to wipe his face. ‘It was pretty damn easy. I didn’t see any cameras, so I had plenty of time to sneak around outside the house and have a look through the windows of a couple of rooms that had lights on. Once I’d got an idea of the layout, I figured I’d find somewhere to wait on the west side.’
‘Behind the house?’
O’Halloran nodded. ‘Ten seconds after you blew the magazine, every light came on and men started pouring out of every damn door in the place. I didn’t count how many men there were — six or seven maybe.’
‘Was Shriver one?’
‘Yep. I had a good look at him. When everything had died down, I let myself in and went straight to the room where I’d seen him sitting at a desk. I took a couple of photos and spent the rest of my time playing with his computer.’
‘Does that mean the password worked?’ Coburn said.
‘I didn’t need it. Shriver was in such a hurry, he forgot to switch off his computer. I got to it before it went in to standby.’
‘And?’ Coburn controlled his impatience.
‘I didn’t check out every single file. I just downloaded data from his E-drive. Don’t ask me if it’s going to be any good. We won’t know until we can have a proper look at it.’
‘What’s an E-drive?’
‘Just a data file — the place where people like Shriver store the kind of information we’re after. Half of his documents were crap — old notes he’d used for his TV appearances. But I turned up what looks like a draft press release he was in the middle of working on, and I copied some other stuff that might be pretty interesting.’
Instead of asking what it was, Coburn pointed.
Adding to the light streaming from every window of the ranch house was light coming from the open garage and the stable block, while all along the driveway, flood lamps hidden in the shrubbery were illuminating the garden and the Long Creek Ranch sign hanging above the entrance to the property.