The Operative (40 page)

He felt the heavy, sturdy timbers surrounding the entrance that was a good ten feet square and, turning on the flashlight, he walked inside, checking the ceiling and supports as he made his way cautiously down the gradual incline. It became noticeably cooler and only slightly narrower and three hundred feet inside the passage suddenly opened out into a low-ceilinged cavern which was a meeting point for three other tunnels. The ground was level at this junction, the tunnels leading off it steeper than the entrance shaft. Stratton checked the supports that surrounded and held up the centre of the cavern and decided that this would be a good place to set up the ‘kitchen’.

A distinct odour had gradually increased in strength the deeper he got and he remembered that one of the mine’s problems was rotting timber supports at the lower levels – below the water table – which produced dangerous gases. Just as he wondered if he should have added a canary to his shopping list there was a sound behind him and he quickly aimed the flashlight, catching a small ground squirrel in the beam. It was standing on its hind legs, its nose twitching as it inspected this uncommon visitor. The animal was a sign that the gas was not at a serious concentration and confirmed an assumption that the beams in the water-logged sections far below had probably long since rotted and given off all their gases.

Stratton dug a cracker out of his pocket from a packet he had been munching on during the drive and tossed it near the squirrel.

The miners had always fed the rats to encourage them to stay close by – a dead rat indicated the possibility of bad air. The cracker landed just in front of the squirrel, spooking it, and it took off up the shaft.

Stratton made a final and more thorough inspection of the cavern ceiling before trudging back up the entrance shaft and back out into the sunlight. An hour later he had hauled most of the equipment off the truck and down into the mine that was now illumin ated by the petrol lamps. In that time the sun had dropped below the trees but he cracked on, setting up the kitchen for the first recipe.

After putting on goggles and a pair of thick rubber gloves he picked up the heavy chunk of dry ice wrapped in a cloth, placed it in one of the large pots and put another pot in on top of it. He then carefully poured nitric acid into the top pot until it was half full, hung the glass thermometer on the side and put the lid on the pot. The liquid needed to chill to near zero before he could start and he set about crumbling up all the hexamine blocks until he had a couple of bin bags filled with fine chunks of the stuff. A couple of hours later the acid was cool enough and he started to add the hexamine to it slowly, making sure that the temperature did not get too high.

When the acid was saturated with a third of the HMT Stratton gave it a long, steady stir and let it stand for twenty minutes while he quarter-filled the third pot with water. He then began to ladle the white slushy substance from the acid into the water and every now and then used the sieve to scoop out the now cleaner particles from the water, placing them into the fourth, still empty pot. He continued this process until all the solids had been strained from the acid and he was left with a white mulch that he mixed with more water to remove as much of the acid as possible. The final phase of this part of the process was to sieve out the mulch once again and place it on the stretched-out tarpaulin to dry.

When Stratton had finished he estimated that it would take another two batches to process the rest of the hexamine. Due to the limited life of the dry ice he cracked straight on with it.

By early morning the tarpaulin was covered in the flaky white powder which, when dry, would become one of the most powerful high-explosive materials ever invented. It was known as RDX. The compound was fairly stable, although if a heavy enough piece of ceiling were to fall on it the explosion would probably be felt in Bakersfield. But considering that the ceiling had remained intact for the last hundred and thirty years Stratton felt the odds were in his favour.

He poured the used acid down one of the shafts, dumped the remaining ice, turned off the lamps and headed out of the mine. The acid fumes had gradually been getting to him and he needed to rest as well as let the air quality in the mine get back to what it had been. He climbed onto the front bench of the pick-up that was long and comfortable enough to suit his needs and within minutes was fast asleep.

Six hours later Stratton was awake again. After a quick bite he headed back into the mine with the thirty-two plastic sandwich boxes.

He lit the lamps, inspected the RDX to find that it was almost dry and set about removing the sandwich boxes from their cartons and taking off all their lids. Using a wooden spoon he half-filled each box with RDX. When all thirty-two were done he scooped the remaining explosive into a couple of bin bags and put them in a far corner for later.

Next, he opened the drum of ball-bearings and carefully spooned them into the sandwich boxes on top of the RDX, filling each container to the top, an average of two hundred balls in each, he estimated. Then he closed the lids tightly and stacked them to one side.

The sandwich boxes constituted the first phase of Stratton’s
operation, although they were not quite complete. He stared at them, contemplating how much more work he had to do. For the first time since leaving LA he wondered if he was completely crazy and then reminded himself of his options. Fight or run. That was enough to get him back in focus and concentrate on the next task, which was to run a test of the RDX. Stratton had made this type of explosive on his special forces demolitions course but just in small amounts. It looked, smelled and felt right but there was only one way to make sure.

Only a little was needed but nevertheless he could not risk exploding it in the open and attracting attention – secrecy had been one of the main reasons for choosing this location in the first place. However, there were obvious risks with detonating even the smallest quantity inside the mine. The beams might be solid but he had no idea how unstable the rock above them was.

To reduce the risk of bringing down the roof in the kitchen Stratton constructed the test apparatus several hundred feet along one of the passages that led deeper into the mine. It was a simple device: a sledgehammer suspended from a beam on the end of a long piece of string looped through a bent nail, the head a couple of feet above a metal plate on the ground. The string led back up the shaft to what he considered to be a safe distance and, to test the tackle, he released the string, allowing the hammer to fall onto the plate. He returned with a piece of RDX no bigger than a pea, re-rigged the hammer, and placed the explosive compound on the metal sheet precisely where the hammer had struck. Satisfied that everything was in position he turned on the flashlight to light his way back up the tunnel when he saw the ground squirrel standing in front of him in its beam.

‘I’d head back up the tunnel if I were you, mate.’

The squirrel looked at him, twitching its nose, and as Stratton moved towards it the little animal scampered back up the shaft.

Stratton reached the safe point, only to find the squirrel waiting
there for him. ‘If you’re going to stick around you might want to put your fingers in your ears,’ he advised.

The squirrel got up onto its hind legs as if in response and watched him.

‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you,’ Stratton said as he took a last look around, shone his flashlight back up the shaft towards the entrance just in case he had to leg it, looked back at the taut string disappearing in the other direction around a slight bend, and released it. A second later there was a terrific boom, the noise accentuated by the confinement of the shaft. Dust fell from the ceiling and he moved several paces back, ready to run. But the rumble of falling earth soon subsided and complete silence descended once again.

Stratton checked every surface of the shaft with his torch as he carefully walked back down it. Dust filled the air as he approached the test site but all the supports appeared to be solidly in place and the ceiling had held. He found the hammer lying several feet from the impact point, its wooden handle broken, and although the metal plate was in its original position it had a serious dent in the centre of it.

‘Not bad at all,’ Stratton said as he inspected the underside of the plate. Then he looked back up the shaft, wondering what had become of the ground squirrel.

Ten miles from Twin Oaks on a remote hillside a small solar-powered analogue seismograph picked up the tremor and automatically transmitted it through its antenna, using the Southern California Seismic Net work. It was relayed to the central computer facility in the seismology laboratory on the Caltech campus in Pasadena, Los Angeles. Here the data was instantly converted into a digital format so that computers could read, process and store it.

A technician responded to a data-arrival signal and isolated it for examination. The graph displayed an unusual peak and, using the vector capabilities formed by two other seismographs that had also picked up the tremor, he plotted the location.

A colleague working on the other side of the room who had also heard the data alarm looked up from his computer monitor. ‘What was it?’ he asked.

‘It wasn’t a fault tremor – it’s a mile from the nearest fault line. Looks like it was an explosion, same as the peaks from Lanser’s quarry but nowhere near it.’

‘Where was it?’

‘Twin Oaks, near Caliente.’

‘That’s way out in the boonies. Maybe someone’s liquor still blew up,’ the other guy said with a chuckle.

‘I guess,’ the first technician agreed. He saved the data and went back to his work.

Stratton set about preparing what he needed for the next phase, which was the construction of the detonators. But he was missing one essential ingredient that he would have to get later that evening. He spent the next few hours cutting the narrow plastic pipe into three-inch lengths and then sat down to study the construction blueprints of Skender’s building.

A large part of the special forces explosives course that he had attended had been dedicated to studying structures and identifying their weaknesses and fulcrums, points where the minimum amount of explosive would have the greatest effect. Stratton was encouraged to discover that Skender’s architect had used a great deal of suspension in his design: much of the building’s support relied on a huge pillar that ran up its centre like a tent pole. Had the designer used a wigwam construction where the building was supported by its sides it would have made his job more compli-cated because the primary stress locations would have been more spread out and difficult to reach on the outside shell of the pyramid. As it was, the primary supports hinged off the central pillar, making it sturdier against earthquakes and relying heavily on a system of centralised strength.

The rest of Stratton’s explosives course had dealt with the manu facture of a range of volatile com pounds, the different uses of low (gunpowder, for example) and high explosives, various types of booby traps, and mathematical formulas for calculating the precise amount of explosives required to cut steel and con-crete, as well as the best shape into which a charge should be formed for maximum effect. In the old days saboteurs had used the more simple formula of ‘P for plenty’ but with the development of plastic explosives scientists and mathematicians began to take a greater interest in the subject. Plastic explosives, which were basically RDX mixed with plasticisers, were not only pliable but very stable compared to TNT. They could be cut with a knife for precision work, could literally be thrown around and even set
light to, be it only in small quantities at a time. But they could be detonated with a hammer blow.

The most important factor in the creation of precise cutting formulas, as far as special forces were concerned, was that exact amounts of explosives could be calculated for given jobs, allowing saboteurs to carry less and blow up larger and more complex targets. Such as steel girder bridges: in the old days large – and hence heavy – amounts of the more unstable TNT were placed against main supports to blow them to smithereens. But it had required large teams to carry the stuff into enemy territory whereas rela-tively small amounts of PE4, or C4, and even less Super-X, precisely shaped and placed to cut specific girders, could do the same job.

Each time Stratton studied the plans for Skender’s pyramid he saw more and more possibilities and his familiarity with the building increased.

As darkness descended Stratton decided to make a move since it would take a good hour or so to get to his destination and a hot fast-food meal on the way sounded appealing. He climbed into the truck and backed out of the barn. An hour and a half later he arrived at a large town called Simi Valley north of LA, pulled into a side road and killed the engine. He took one of the bottles of nitric acid off the seat, placed it in his backpack, climbed out and walked up the road.