Mahoney paced to the map as the line went dead. She put her finger on the small dot over the oasis city of Al-Hofuf.
“Here there be dragons,” she whispered to herself.
Quinn stuffed the photographs inside his dishdasha, outside his T-shirt and facing away from his skin so he wouldn’t ruin the images with sweat. He’d need them preserved as well as possible if they hoped to get any sort of ID on the terrorists that remained alive.
As he walked past the second observation window, he noticed a black intercom box on the wall between him and the three soldiers. He almost passed it by, but one of the men stirred on a filthy cot. In his early twenties, the boy was soaked in sweat, blinded by the ravages of his disease. His name tag read MEEKS — the missing Air Force TACP from Fallujah.
Jericho pushed the button, swallowed hard before he could speak. “Sergeant Trey Meeks… we’re here to take you home.”
Meeks tried to rise, but, too weak, made do with tipping his head toward the noise. “Who’s there?” His pitiful croak ripped at Quinn’s heart.
“Another American… OSI,” Quinn said, resting his head against the wall. “Hang on for a few minutes more and I’ll take care of everything.
“Air Force?”
“You bet,” Quinn said.
“An American,” the boy sighed. Exhausted from the effort of just a few words, he fell back against his sodden cot, wracked with spasmodic coughs. When he finally calmed, he turned back toward the window and blinked serenely. Though blind and covered with unimaginable gore, the corners of his cracked lips turned up in the slightest hint of a smile. “I knew you’d come.”
CHAPTER 31
Thirty-five minutes later, Jericho stacked the last fifty-pound bag of ammonium nitrate fertilizer on top of a pile as high as his chest. The barn’s cramped storage room was thirty feet from the lab’s outer wall, but he didn’t want to risk moving explosives back and forth across the open ground. He couldn’t help but chuckle at the irony of it all — an American, smack in the hotbed of Middle Eastern terrorism, manufacturing an IED — an improvised explosive device — much like the sort insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan used to kill U.S. troops almost every day. Like the bombs they used to kill thousands in a Colorado shopping mall.
Jericho’s device was far more crude. He only hoped it would be as effective.
Given time, enough foolish bravado, and the right materials, virtually anyone with access to the Internet could build a bomb. For Jericho, time was at a premium and he had to make do with the materials he had on hand.
Like Timothy McVeigh’s Ryder truck that had demolished the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma, the main component in Quinn’s explosive was ammonium nitrate. It was powerful stuff, capable of inflicting incredible damage. It was also relatively stable, needing an initial concussive blast and a fairly sizable booster to provide detonation. For that, Quinn had to bet on a little old fashioned ingenuity and a whole lot of luck.
He had roughly a ton of fertilizer — less than half of that used by McVeigh — but he hoped the dusty grain and hay loft would add to the explosion. Rummaging behind the old Farmall tractor, he was able to scrounge up three ten-gallon cans of diesel fuel. These he poured into holes he cut in three bags of fertilizer. Into the top bag, he nestled the two pony bottles from the portable oxygen-acetylene cutting torch. Detonating a bomb was a little more problematic if you wanted to live through it. For that, Jericho needed a trigger he could activate remotely.
The first thing he’d done on his arrival to the Saudi Kingdom was purchase a cell phone with a local number. Wiping the sweat from his forehead, he switched this phone to vibrate before lashing it to the neck of the oxygen tank with a short length of hay twine he found on the floor.
A search of the barn’s cleaning cabinet provided the necessary ingredients to mix with the precious iodine crystals he’d swiped from the horseshoeing box. This mixture would provide his blasting cap.
Preparations for his crude bomb complete, Jericho took a deep breath and opened the bottle of purple crystals. They began to evaporate as soon as he removed the lid. Pouring the entire bottle of metallic flakes into a plastic cup, he carefully mixed in the liquids from the cleaning closet to form a slurry of purple mud the consistency of thick pancake batter. He said a little prayer of thanks that he’d had a high school chemistry teacher with enough foresight to use The Anarchist’s Cookbook as a text. The finished product brought a smile to his face.
While it was wet, Quinn’s purple mud was relatively stable. When it dried, the slightest tremor could set it off like a blasting cap. He’d watched his chemistry teacher blow a hole in a phone book by barely touching a marble-sized dab of the dried stuff with a yardstick.
Up to this point, he’d worried more about getting caught than blowing himself to pieces. Now that was about to change. In the confined, fertilizer-filled air of the storage room the tiniest spark at the wrong time would spell disaster.
Jericho began to smear the wet purple mixture over the face of the cell phone. The heat was sweltering and the edges of the mud began to lighten and dry before his eyes. He consoled himself with the fact that if someone dialed a wrong number and called his phone right then, Farooq’s twisted experiments would be destroyed along with him.
Giving everything one last look, he gingerly touched the handles on the oxygen and then the acetylene bottle, giving them a twist until he heard an audible hiss from each.
Peeking out the storage room, he looked up and down the alleyway and, seeing no one in the failing light, shut the door behind him. He’d give the purple mud ten minutes to dry in the stifling heat.
Then he’d need to make a phone call.
“What do you mean he is here?”
Sheikh Husseini al Farooq slouched in air-conditioned comfort in the back seat of a black Lincoln Town Car limousine. Slender fingers clutched a car phone so tightly his manicured nails turned an opaque blue. His normally purring voice rose a half an octave. “I am here. How could such a man gain access to the Kingdom?”
“This I do not know,” Zafir said on the other end of the line. “But I am sure he is there. I tried to call Dr. Suleiman, but there was no answer. Security does not pick up either. I have already sent men to check, but I beg of you, my sheikh, leave the area at once. I fear it is not safe—”
“Nonsense,” Farooq cut him off. He pushed the button on his door console and the tinted window hissed down a few inches. A warm breeze hit him in the face, rich with the sweet odor of horses and new-mown hay. Farooq loved horses, the smell of them calmed him as much as a drug. “Stop worrying, my friend. I am surprised he made it this far. That is all. This is a beautiful evening. The sun sets on our beloved oasis, and, Allah willing, we are as safe as—”
The air suddenly grew thick, heavy, as if stacking up against itself. A terrific roar filled the dusky night. The limousine shook as if in the jaws of an earthquake. Alarms screeched all across the university parking lot. Grains of sand began to rain down as a black column of smoke enveloped his precious laboratory. The squeal of horses filled the void of the explosion.
Terrified Arabian horses bolted in every direction, snorting, tails flagging in blind panic. White-robed students poured from shattered glass doors and concrete buildings, surprised from their evening classes. Some stared in awe at the smoldering crater where Farooq’s laboratory had once stood. Some ran after the loose horses, spurred on by anxious professors and stable hands anxious to get the expensive animals back under control before they killed themselves.