2
August 10 came too early for Richard. The last of the convoys had arrived near midnight the night before. It was well past 2am by the time the bricks had been fully unloaded at Ground Zero, under the watchful eyes of Jason McMurray and his men. McMurray himself worked through the rest of the night, threading the fuses through the mass of Semtex. The pile had been laid out in concentric circles, and stacked pyramid style. Each segment was separately threaded with fuses designed for shaped charge explosives, and hooked up to a series of Amptec Research timers. The timers were hooked up in parallel and linked to a complicated switching device, which was in turn connected to McMurray’s laptop. At zero hour, which had now been set for 3pm, the laptop would electronically signal the timers, which would simultaneously send powerful currents through the mass of fusing cables to each layer of the Semtex pyramid. McMurray was so obsessed with the simultaneous ignition of the entire mass that he had cut the fusing cable himself and then calculated the exact volume that each layer would take. He had spent days reviewing his calculations over and over again to ensure that the ignition would be simultaneous and complete. Richard had thought it might be as simple as shoveling it all in a heap and firing an RPG into it, but McMurray was horrified at the suggestion.
Other military units had now become involved. The Air Force Materiel Command out of Wright-Patterson had sent a detachment of six people, who had, to McMurray’s frustration, peppered the growing Semtex pile with sensors of various sorts. They’d also laid out further concentric circles of thermo-graphic, electromagnetic, and percussion sensors at various distances from Ground Zero. The Air Force Research Laboratory Munitions Directorate, stationed at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, had seen the coverage on CNN, and had sent its own team of experts to monitor the blast. Richard and McMurray both found it highly amusing that these groups had found out about the blast from news reports, and not from the Air Force internal command structure. “Would never happen in the Navy,” Richard muttered to himself.
“They’re Air Force weenies,” said McMurray, trying to lighten the mood. “Any explosion bigger than a fart and they need to study it. You know how it goes.”
To round it out, four Navy Night Hawk Helicopters, with support and ground crew, had been sent from the Theodore Roosevelt Battle Group, stationed in the Mediterranean, along with a small Marine Expeditionary Unit to supplement the Libyan security forces.
“There are too many guys in uniforms running around here,” said Richard.
“That’s how things go wrong.” A familiar pain was invading his temples, and he dug into his pockets for some of his medication. He popped a couple of Oxycontins — not ideal, but it was the first thing he found.
“Know the feeling well,” said McMurray, watching Richard throw back what he assumed to be aspirin or ibuprofen. “When I’m done with this job I’m off with my kids and wife. She inherited this gorgeous place on a lake in southern Arizona. I negotiated thirty 30 days.”
“Kids?” asked Richard.
“Yup, three girls. Two, four, and six. They’re the reason I put up with a lot of this bull. You?”
“Two. Out of the house. Gone. My wife took them when she left. Sometimes wish they were two and four again. I’d do anything to go back.” McMurray shuddered a bit when he heard the hollow tone in Richard’s voice. It was well known that Richard’s first wife had left him, and taken the kids, shortly after he was asked to leave the Navy.
McMurray turned back to his counts, anxious for a way to end what had suddenly become an awkward conversation.
As zero hour approached, the anticipation became palpable. CNN tried to bring a helicopter into the area, but the Libyans wouldn’t approve the use of the airspace. “Bloody good thing, too,” Richard said when he heard. He didn’t want to have to deal with the fallout if a news chopper and crew were destroyed by their little explosion. McMurray had been on the Sat-phone with some of the propeller heads at Fort Gilles, and he told Richard that the observation post should be pushed back to five miles from Ground Zero. Minyar himself was present, in his tent, and his camp needed to be moved as well.
With two hours left to go before the moment of truth, a team of frantic scientists from the Livermore National Laboratory arrived, begging for a 24-hour postponement. They had spent a billion dollars in the past decade to study non-nuclear high explosives, and just a minor repositioning of the pile, and the insertion of a few hundred more sensors (which were on their way) would provide an extraordinary research opportunity. Richard told them to get stuffed.
“It’s going to be one hell of a blast, Richard,” McMurray said, watching the offended scientists drive away in a huff. “I’m not really sure what will happen. None of these scientists even know. Nothing of this magnitude has ever been done before in a controlled environment. The pressure wave will be immense, and it’s going to throw up one monster of a dust cloud. That’s why everyone wants to be here to see it.”
“Pretty screwball idea to invite the media, if you ask me,” Richard replied. “But I suppose Minyar wants to score some brownie points on the international stage.”
“Actually, I agree with what we’re doing here,” said McMurray. “Semtex is like Play-Do Silly Putty You can stick it anywhere. Took less than a pound to do the Lockerbie thing. It’s too versatile a weapon. It’s good for the world to see this big a pile of it destroyed. Makes everyone safer.”
“Well, I’ll tell the crowd to move back. We can’t take the chance of fucking this up in front of the world media.” Richard had the Libyan soldiers demobilize the media camp and move it back a few more miles. Then he went over the inventory sheets one last time, checking off the volumes of Semtex delivered to Ground Zero with the inventories that had been counted by the joint Libyan and CIA teams when they first started loading it up. Everything was looking on track, with 20 minutes left to run.
Then he noticed a problem. Something that didn’t quite match up.
“Wait a second, what’s this?” he muttered to himself. He was looking at the Benghazi Marine Base tallies. More than 200 tons of the Semtex had been stored there, and some 35 truckloads were required to bring it to Bazemah. “Let’s see,” he continued. “Exactly 192,800 kilos in Benghazi. Thirty-five loads. Thirty-four tallies. Total, total…188,500 kilos from Benghazi in Bazemah… wait a minute…” The numbers were dancing off the pages in front of his eyes.
McMurray interrupted his thoughts. “Fifteen minutes to liftoff, Richard. We’re wired up and ready to go.”
“That’s good, Sergeant,” murmured Richard, a trickle of sweat running down his forehead. “That’s good.” He was starting to fret. His blurring vision was causing the fine print on the tallies and inventory sheets to drift in and out of focus. The eleventh-hour move from two miles back to five miles back had been irritating. The haste of the operation, and the deadline created by Minyar for the benefit of the press, had made for less-than-optimal planning. The magnitude of the task had been underestimated, and the delivery schedule over the past week had turned out haphazard at best. The presence of the research teams and the growing satellite uplink camp being assembled by various news services was too distracting. Richard had never received training for this sort of thing. He looked again at the delivery tallies and inventories. He was missing a sheet. He went back to the Humvee that had served as his base of operations, knowing that his movements were becoming frantic. Surely the sheet was there. Surely.