The explosives had been stockpiled in the shop for several months. They were stacked on pallets and covered with tarps. Packing the truck with explosives took Phil, Ray, and Stan nearly twenty-one hours, in three successive seven-hour sessions, over the course of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights. Stan did most of the positioning of the explosives, while Phil and Ray used a pair of dollies and a large Radio Flyer child’s wagon for the many trips back and forth from the explosives pile. Nearly every item got a wrap of PETN detonating cord to ensure that they’d all explode simultaneously. They included every explosive that they could find: hundreds of recovered land mines (with their detonators removed), some mining gelignite, as well as a few dud French artillery shells, which were handled very gingerly and wedged in nose-upward. By the end of the third night, Stan’s back was going into spasm.
In all, they estimated that there was ten tons on board, and even after deducting the weight of the artillery shell casings and land mine housings, there were at least eight tons of various high explosives.
At 10:15 on Monday morning, Terrence drove the Central Cariboo Dumpster truck to the front gate of the UN headquarters building, right on schedule. The gate guard recognized both the truck and Terrence’s face and waved him through.
One Dumpster was located at a door on the north side of the building, just east of the round Gathering Place Building, which after the UN took over the campus became jokingly known by the French as the Sex and Drugs Building. This Dumpster was near the auto shop. The nearest door was marked: DOOR 5.5 (SHOP). Two other Dumpsters were located at the southeast corner of the building near Door 7. But unlike those, Door 5.5 was outside the field of vision of the gate guards.
Terrence simply backed the truck up to Door 5.5 alongside the Dumpster, using the truck’s rearview camera to get the truck within a foot of the overhang. Leaving the engine running, he pulled the fuse igniter and then immediately hopped out of the cab and reached back in to jab the joystick to make it sound as if the truck was lifting a Dumpster, as usual. He ran in a sprint to the north fence. A dozen snips with a small pair of bolt cutters made a gap in the rear fence big enough for him to slip through. In his haste, he tore the shoulder of his jacket. Terrence was soon up and running.
The senior gate guard—a caporal with four years of service—grew impatient. He wondered why the garbage truck had not returned to the front of the building to empty the other two Dumpsters. He muttered, “Où êtes-vous, Macaca?”
Macaca was an epithet originally used by the French colonials to disparage the natives in the Congo, but more recently it had been applied to the aboriginals in Canada. The guard surmised that the driver was smoking a cigarette. He picked up his radio handset and hesitated. Finally, he pressed the handset’s talk bar and hailed the security office in the building.
At that moment a massive explosion leveled the building, leaving just one part of the west wall standing. A sixteen-foot-deep crater marked the spot where the dump truck had been parked. The adjoining round Gathering Place Building was also destroyed. Because that building was partially earth-bermed, it left a large circular crater next to the smaller, oval bomb-blast crater. The explosion killed everyone in both buildings. It also seriously injured the gate guards and ruptured their eardrums.
The shock wave from the explosion threw Terrence off balance and made him stumble to his knees, even though he was more than 450 yards away. Looking back, he could see that the explosion was sending fragments in all directions, and it had raised a huge reddish cloud of smoke and dust. The red hue of the dust had been created by pulverized bricks. The blast wave shattered house windows in a quarter-mile radius and set off car alarms even farther out. The sound of the explosion was heard as far away as the hamlet of Riske Creek.
Terrence regained his footing and began running. It sounded as if every dog in town was barking or howling. Nearby, he heard emergency service vehicle sirens wailing. He started to sing an old Salish fight chant as he ran. His getaway vehicle was his rusting old Ford Escort, now outfitted with stolen license plates. It was parked a kilometer away at the junction of Highway 97 and Dixon Road.
Terrence quickly got on the highway and past the reservation to make the turn to Dugan Lake before any new roadblocks were set up. A woman from his band was waiting right where she promised she would be. As she got in the car, she exclaimed, “Wow, I could hear that ka-boom from here! Was that really all the way down at the TRU campus?”
Terrence nodded and said with a laugh, “Yep. Big explosion!”
Ten minutes later, he stopped three hundred meters short of the trail to his uncle’s cabin and pulled his backpack and a duffel bag out of the trunk of the car. He handed the middle-aged woman the car key.
Terrence said, “Take bad care of my car for me, okay?”
“Okay. Pútucw!” (Good-bye.)
The scene around the headquarters was chaotic. Aside from the gate guards, the firefighters didn’t find any survivors, only bodies in the rubble. And close to the north door, where the truck had exploded, they found only parts of bodies. The unofficial casualty count was 207, but it was eventually arrived at by taking the full unit rosters and deducting the number of soldiers and airmen who were at the airport or at outlying posts. Among the dead were the French brigade commander and his entire staff.
In the following five days, UNPROFOR patrols and checkpoints began hand swabbing anyone they contacted. Anyone who tested positive for explosives—and false positives were commonplace—was subjected to arrest and lengthy interrogation. It was already well established that false positives were created by soaps and hand lotions containing glycerin. Traces of fertilizer and cleaning products also gave false positives for nitrates. Two elderly residents who took nitroglycerin pills for angina also had their hands test positive. There were summary executions of five men, all aboriginal, who were suspected of conspiracy in the bombing. Two of these men had failed hand-swab tests. Only one of them was a close friend of Terrence, and none of them had anything to do with the bombing.
Terrence later learned that his small house on Proctor Street had been searched very thoroughly by a composite team of RCMP and UNPROFOR officers. They even removed many Sheetrock wall panels. The yard was scanned with a metal detector and dug up in several places, but the investigators found nothing. The UNPROFOR officer in charge then ordered the house burned. Since it was a rental, Terrence’s landlord was not pleased.
Two weeks later, Terrence sent identical handwritten letters via courier to the editors of both the Kamloops and Prince George newspapers (there was no longer a newspaper published in Williams Lake). The letters read:
Dear Editor:
By now, you’ve heard that I drove the truck that carried the load of explosives to the UN HQ at the TRU Campus. Yes, I done it. I am not ashamed of what I done. Those basterds deserved it. We blew them up with their own land-mines and artilary shells. Serves them right! They are rapists, thiefs, and murderers.
But I do want to say that I am sorry for all the broken windows and the upset dogs, in town. (I hear they barked for two days.)
UNPROFOR’s censors refused to let the letters be published.