He’d already spent the entire day building his weapon at an auto repair yard a quarter-mile away in northern Tepito. He’d taken his three 105-millimeter high-explosive artillery shells, removed the fuses in the nose cones, replaced each with a homemade delayed-action base fuse, wired them to detonate, and attached a blasting cap to each device. The blasting caps were, in turn, attached to a signaling device.
At the beginning of the Iraq War, Zarif and men like him used simple electronic detonating signalers, such as garage-door openers, to command-detonate IEDs. Soon enough, however, coalition forces began taking measures to jam these signals, so Zarif and the others graduated to cell phones.
These worked for a while. In fact, Zarif still used these almost exclusively against insurgents in Syria, but cell phones were not a perfect solution, either. Their signals could be jammed or otherwise interrupted, and large parts of the world were without coverage.
But there was another way. Long-range cordless phones aren’t popular in the United States, but in locations with spotty cell coverage the devices are ubiquitous. The Taiwanese firm StreamTel sold a popular model of phone that consisted of a base station that plugged into a wired phone network, and a handset with a range of up to dozens of kilometers. Two or more handsets could be paired to the same line, and this created a nearly unjammable long-range signaling device.
StreamTel sets were components of thousands of IEDs in the Middle East. The company boasted that forty percent of its world market share came from sales to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and the U.S. military understood the reason behind the demand.
Zarif had a Maldonado lieutenant purchase a base station and two handsets from a telephone store in Guadalajara and ferry them into the capital city, and the Iranian built his device much as he would have done had he been in Mosul, Iraq, or Helmand Province in Afghanistan. It wasn’t state-of-the-art, but the veteran bomb maker always believed the tried-and-true methods were the most reliable.
The entire IED was carried into the construction site just after dark inside a large rolling tool chest the size of a steamer trunk, and then Zarif was left alone behind the orange tarp while the half-dozen other men poured concrete on the sidewalk on José J. Herrera and in the already built stairwell in the center of the site.
The open rebar wall frame that Zarif had found three days earlier had changed. The men today had built a lumber casing around the lower six feet of the wall and they had already filled it with concrete. Above this they had built another wooden frame to raise the wall up to its intended height of twelve feet, but a portion of the frame high on the wall was missing, following Zarif’s instructions.
One by one Zarif took the pieces of his IED up a ladder and onto a scaffolding five feet off the ground next to the wall and he gently reassembled the device in the metal rebar grid exposed by the missing boards. The shells faced out toward the six-lane street on the other side of the tarp. They were positioned ten feet off the ground, and each one was slightly angled with wooden shunts so that they would project downward onto the street.
The artillery shells did not have full charges behind them, nor were they being propelled through long barrels that would spin them through rifling, so they would not launch like they would if fired from a howitzer. Still, Zarif had a design plan for his weapon to ensure that the explosives launched out to the street before detonating. He had two Maldonado men help him place three ninety-pound sheets of iron at the back of the device, behind the shells in the grid, using more wooden slats to hold them in position while he soldered them to the rebar. When he finished this, he had created a plate to deflect the back blast of the initial detonator charge, and thereby propel the artillery shells outward.
Zarif had created identical devices many times in the past, and he’d destroyed enemy armor with them at a range of up to fifty feet.
It took him nearly three hours to ready the IED high on the open wall, and then he covered the entire device with plastic bags, threading them through the rebar, wrapping them from the blast plate in back to the nose cones in front, protecting everything and hiding the bomb from the other Maldonado men. He and his helpers then cleared back the scaffolding and the ladder, and finally they called for the men to bring in the cement blower.
Three hours after this, the concrete was poured all around the device, and the next morning, when the quick-drying concrete had formed, workers began placing a thin sheet of stone veneer over the front of the wall.
By noon the next day the entire façade was complete. From Vidal Alcocer, the six-lane street down which the President would travel, it looked like a massive concrete parking-lot wall with a decorative façade, but in truth it hid the explosive force of three howitzer rounds, and on command, the rounds would launch out into the road in front of it and detonate.
But Zarif wasn’t finished. In the afternoon Zarif had Emilio take him to a grocery store, and here he grabbed a basket and walked directly to the spice section. He picked up several containers of cumin and turmeric.
Emilio asked, “Are you making dinner?”
“You’ll see.”
They returned to the construction site. It was empty again, but now the tarp in front of the wall had been cleared away, and they walked around the wall and under the tarp on the José J. Herrera side. Zarif went to his wall, pulled out his containers of spices, opened them, and got down on his hands and knees. Slowly and meticulously he began pouring them along where the floor met the new wall. He used a lot right below the device, and then he crawled in each direction, sprinkling less and less until he had covered the entire floor.
He stood up, dusted off his hands, and walked over to a drain in the concrete floor of the parking garage. He knelt down and peered through the metal grating, then looked up to Emilio. “One more thing. I need you to find me a dead animal.”
“What?”
“Really dead.”
An hour later a Maldonado runner arrived on the back of a motorcycle. In his hand he carried a white garbage bag. He handed it to Zarif, who opened the bag and recoiled from the stench. A putrefying cat lay inside.
Zarif walked over to the open drain, removed the grating, and dumped the dead cat out of the bag. It fell in just two feet before landing where the drainpipe turned.
He looked to Emilio. “This will also affect the dogs’ noses.”
Emilio nodded. “What dogs?”
“The Americans will search this area before the President drives by. I’ve seen it on YouTube. They will bring dogs that can smell explosives. But here the dogs will smell spices and dead cats.” He pointed up high on the wall. “Even if they check the wall, they won’t check up so high. No one will look for a bomb that points down.”
Zarif grinned at his own cleverness.
50
Adam spent his first day at the Chongju refinery installing his new computer terminal. Even though the machine was a new but run-of-the-mill PC, it had been shipped from France and had been loaded with a few off-the-shelf mining software programs he would use to operate the massive cone crusher. None of the software was terribly complicated, but the tools were very specific in nature, and even though Adam had learned the job in a couple weeks, no one in North Korea had the training or the experience to run the machine.