The Bomb Maker

by Thomas Perry

  She snatched the pile of bills from the bed and folded them into her jeans pocket. “Thanks. Take your AK and the case, and then we never saw each other before.”

  He zipped the rifle into its case and stood. She stepped close, pecked his cheek, and said, “Too bad we didn’t have more time.” Then she stepped to the door and held it open for him to leave. When he was out, she closed the door and gave it an extra tug to be sure he hadn’t done something to jam the latch so he could get in again. Then she turned and hurried into the staircase without looking back.

  The bomb maker walked to his van and drove. He had a feeling about this transaction. If he went back into the show, she would see him, and other people would probably notice she was looking at him. Only bad things could come from that. She had been right. It was time to move on.

  He went to the gun show in Tucson and picked up another AK-47 in very good condition. Two days later he found two, in Tucumcari, New Mexico, and drove on into Utah. He stopped in St. George for the next show.

  After a day at the show without finding another rifle, he was sitting at a table in a bar across the street from his hotel eating a steak dinner. Sitting next to his dinner plate was a glass of bourbon. He had come in mainly because the bar was close to the gun show, and he guessed that drinkers there for the show would rather choose a bar that was in walking distance. There were only five restaurants serving alcohol here on the north side of the Grand Canyon in any case. The liquor law in Utah required it to be served only to members of private clubs, so he had to pay two dollars to join the fictitious club.

  The drink sat untouched while he ate his steak. He had bought the drink only because having it would make him look relaxed and ordinary, and if he needed to, he could sip it later to prolong his time in the bar.

  There were a couple of groups of men who were there for the gun show. He seldom lifted his eyes from the table, but he eavesdropped first on one group and then on the other, listening for information he could use. After a time, another group of three men came in, and he concentrated on them.

  After they ordered, one of the men said, “So, I rented him the old house on the edge of the arroyo. It was the farmhouse from the days when that plot was a separate property. After the arroyo got all filled in with sediment and ran out of water, nothing got planted there except in wet years, but our family kept up the house. He stayed there for twelve years. He was a good tenant, a quiet guy, very steady. He’d worked over at the insurance company for at least seventeen. And then he died. He told me when he retired that he had no relatives left. He’d had parents and siblings, the last one a sister who was much older than he was. He’d had a girlfriend for a while, and she died too. He was eighty-four when his heart attack came, and he was still filling in at the insurance company doing paperwork.

  “I paid for his funeral because I figured nobody else would. Then it turned out he had left a will saying whatever was left in the house I rented him was mine. Two days later I went into the house. I figured I’d better empty the refrigerator and cupboards and start cleaning to prepare for another tenant.

  “I went down to the basement to look around for anything else I had to get rid of, and what’s down there? He’s got canteens, backpacks, ponchos, sleeping bags, all in desert camouflage. The rest is all guns and ammo. He was apparently waiting for the end of the world.”

  “He was a survivalist?” one of the others asked.

  “Yeah. He never told me, never talked politics or anything like that. Of course the smart ones don’t tell anybody. They think the government or the Chinese or somebody will come and take them out. They don’t want to make it easy. He had ten AK-47s and about a thousand rounds of 7.62 ammo for them. There were a lot of manuals, maps, contraptions for cleaning water to drink, and that kind of thing.”

  “Ten AK-47s. Why did he think he needed ten?”

  “Beats me. I guess he didn’t want to be without one. They weigh eight and a half pounds. At his age he couldn’t carry ten, let alone the ammo.”

  “What are you going to do with them?” said a third man.

  “I’m selling them tomorrow at the show. I’ve got some extra magazines, ammo, and stuff, so I could probably get ten thousand for them.”

  The bomb maker waited while the conversation turned to other subjects. He kept watch in case the man with the rifles got ready to leave and he could talk to him outside. But first one, then the other man got up, said good night, and left. When the last man was getting ready to pay and leave, the bomb maker approached the table. “Excuse me,” he said. “I happened to hear some of what you said about the AK-47s. I just happened to be looking for some.”

  “You found the right guy,” the man said. “I’ll have them at the show tomorrow morning. Table seventy-four. My name’s John Sutton.”

  “Are the ten rifles the only things you’re selling?”

  “Yes. They’re not anything I bought. I inherited them.”

  “That’s what I thought when you were talking to your friends,” the bomb maker said. “You know, you could save yourself the admission fee and the rental of the display space if you wanted to make the sale to me tonight. Then we could both save another day’s expenses. Hotel, food, and everything can add up.”

  “I guess that’s true,” said Sutton. “You mind telling me what you want ten identical rifles for? Are you a dealer?”

  “No. I plan to take them to Texas, where I want to open a rifle range. There would be nothing but Russian arms—Tokarev pistols, AK-47s, Makarovs, some old Nagant revolvers. I think a lot of people would like that.”

  “Maybe,” said Sutton. “I guess time will tell. I like your other idea, though. Maybe we can make a deal tonight and be ahead of the game. What do you want to offer for the ten rifles?”

  The bomb maker thought about his problem—finding AK-47s with no histories and getting them to his house without having his name on any government list. These, if the story Sutton told his friends was true, were probably brand-new, and he was far ahead of the schedule he had devised. “I’ll give you the going rate in cash tonight. No haggling. What everybody seems to ask is a thousand a rifle. I’ll give you a thousand a rifle. Ten thousand cash for the lot of them.”

  Sutton looked at him for a moment, and whatever doubts he had seemed to fade and disappear. “All right.”

  “Where are the guns?”

  “In my room at the hotel across the way. You staying there?”

  “Yes,” said the bomb maker.

  “You bring the money and we can load the guns into your vehicle right away. You got a truck?”

  “A van.”

  “That’ll do it,” said Sutton.

  They shook hands and walked out of the bar. When they reached the street they looked up and down and saw that there were long breaks in the traffic. At the right moment they stepped into the wake of a semi and strolled across to the hotel parking lot.

  Sutton said, “Bring your van over here to the nearest spot to this door, and I’ll start bringing the guns down.”

  The bomb maker trotted to his van as soon as Sutton went inside. When the bomb maker got into the van he removed one of the rifles he’d already bought, inserted a loaded magazine into it, and set it down across the passenger seat. Then he sat still for a moment. He scanned all the windows and balconies, then the dark spots around the hotel. He saw a room on the fourth floor where two men stood on the balcony looking down on the lot. They were the same two who had been in the bar with Sutton. He watched for a few seconds, then pulled his van into a space near the door to Sutton’s corridor. He went into his suitcase and found a banded stack of hundred-dollar bills that had the numerals “10,000” and stuck it in his jacket pocket.

  In a moment Sutton came out with a two-wheel dolly that held a box. When he moved up behind the bomb maker’s van, they lifted it off the dolly into the van. The bomb maker looked into one end of the box and saw five muzzles and into the other end and saw five rifle butts. He pulled one out at rand
om and examined it, then said, “Looks good. Want to get the others?”

  Sutton said, “What’s to stop you from taking off with those five while I’m up there?”

  “Okay, let’s go together.” He locked his van.

  They walked into the building with the dolly, took the elevator, and walked to a room on the fourth floor. Sutton opened the door and loaded the second box on the dolly.

  The bomb maker examined the other five rifles and said, “Here’s your money.” He handed Sutton the banded stack and then stepped back to look out the window so he could see his van. “Feel free to count it.”

  Sutton leafed quickly through the stack. “They’re all hundreds. That’s good enough for me.” He put the money in his coat pocket and started to wheel the guns out.

  The bomb maker said, “I’d be careful from here on. People in the hotel will have seen us hauling these guns out. They’ll know you must have gotten a lot of money for them.”

  “Don’t worry. They’re the only guns I’m selling, not the only guns I have.”

  They took the rifles down and loaded them in the bomb maker’s van. They shook hands, and the bomb maker drove off. He turned into the parking lot of a diner far down the street just before the city road met the highway, and pulled in between two big semi trucks.

  While he waited he loaded a second thirty-round magazine for the AK-47 he’d already taken out and set on the seat beside him. In a few minutes he saw Sutton, the man who had sold him the weapons. Sutton drove past the lot, but didn’t see the bomb maker’s van. He was busy looking in the rearview mirror of his pickup truck. Then he swung up the westbound entrance to the interstate. After about two minutes another truck pulled up the ramp after him. The driver was one of the men who had been in the bar with him hours ago.

  The bomb maker shrugged. He had warned Sutton. Looking for a buyer for ten military rifles was a dangerous task, but obviously it wasn’t as dangerous as the time after the sale was made and everybody knew you must have the cash on you.

  For the first couple of hours he wondered if Sutton was going to make it home, but after that he forgot because he didn’t care. He had nineteen rifles, four more than he needed to keep his employers satisfied, and nobody knew his name.

  When he stopped for a snack and a cup of coffee outside Salt Lake City, he went to the case where he’d been storing the .45 pistols he had bought. He hadn’t been paying much attention to them along the way, just buying a good one whenever there was one in the inventories of the private sellers. When he counted, he came up with only thirteen, so he headed southeast and bought his last two at the Houston show. Once he had all of the AK-47s and the .45 ACP pistols, he knew how many extra magazines and boxes of ammunition he could pay for in cash, so he bought them from a wholesaler at the show. He drove homeward in a leisurely manner, not taking any chances of being stopped by police.

  30

  The bomb maker drove his van into his garage and closed the door with the remote control. He cleared his AK-47 rifles to be sure there were no forgotten rounds in any of the chambers, and then he examined them closely and carefully. They had all been cleaned and covered with a thin protective layer of gun oil, and at least ten of the nineteen had never even been fired. He locked them up, then carried his suitcase into the house.

  He went to sleep and got up early the next day to begin work on the next stage. His clients had never said anything about the serial numbers of the weapons. Why would they care? They seemed to be terrorists, and if their guns were ever in the hands of the authorities, they would already be dead. Tracing the weapons could not harm them. But tracing any of the guns to a previous owner might lead to a description of the bomb maker, and maybe a surveillance shot of him, or even his van.

  The next stage of the bomb maker’s work was purely for his own protection. An AK-47’s serial number was stamped on the lower receiver. He put on latex gloves, took the first AK-47 apart, clamped the lower receiver on his new drill press, aimed the bit at the right spot, and turned on the power.

  Removing a serial number was difficult, because the process of stamping the number into the steel made microscopic changes deep in the metal. After filing or buffing it was still possible to bring back the number. The only way that really worked was to set a drill on the surface and drill all the way through. There had to be nothing left to read.

  When he finished the first rifle, he put it in a fresh, clean metal box and began to work on the next one. Removing the numbers took two days. In the end he had fifteen AK-47 rifles with no serial numbers.

  He cleaned another steel storage box and went to work on the .45 ACP pistols. The Beretta numbers were on the left side of the receiver. The Springfield, Smith and Wesson, and Sig Sauer pistols had a variety of locations—either side of the receivers or on the underside. He went about the work patiently and drilled all of them off.

  At the gun show in Houston he had bought a fully functional replica of the original trigger and sear mechanism for the AK-47. Now he went to work duplicating enough of these parts for all nineteen rifles.

  Ten days later, when he had finished modifying all of the weapons, he went back to cleaning. In the end he had nineteen fully automatic AK-47s with no serial numbers, each loaded with a clean thirty-round magazine and supplied with two more, and fifteen loaded .45 pistols with two spare magazines each. Every magazine and bullet had been touched only with rubber gloves, and each weapon had been cleaned and kept free of his fingerprints.

  The day after he completed the weapons, he returned to his work on his explosive devices. He had already decided not to tell his clients the guns were ready. He had to be in control this time, but his clients were not controllable people. If he turned the guns over to them right away, they would begin to pressure him. As soon as they had weapons, they would be impatient to launch their attack. He didn’t even know what they intended to attack.

  He thought about them again. They never seemed to give him any information that would make it easy to identify them. They never complained about a specific grievance, a hatred that would tell him where in the world they had originated. They were all young, tan-skinned males who could be from a wide variety of places, and they spoke with practically no accent. They never spoke a language to each other besides English, or addressed any of their companions by name. There was no Jose, no Raj, no Ahmed, no Singh, no Zog, no Chou, no Pepe. Everything they wore or used seemed to have been bought in the same American stores where everybody else shopped. They had taken to paying him regularly since they’d arrived, and it was always in American hundred-dollar bills. The money had made him trust them, but it had not given him any information about them.

  He knew he needed more time to work now. He would delay the revelation that he had the guns and return to work on his bombs.

  Before he had been sent off to buy weapons, he had been engaged in making a supply of explosives and detonators. The hospital batch had been as good as, and maybe better than, the others. One quality of a good mix was stability, and another was power. The bomb he delivered to the hospital had been intended to cause total destruction to one patient room inhabited by Diane Hines and about a dozen visitors.

  Instead, the head nurse and an orderly had taken the cake bomb into a break room to cut and plate it. The bombing had been a failure, but the explosive charge had been magnificent. It had blown through both walls of the break room, including an outer wall made of structural concrete, steel I beams, and an outer shell of bricks and mortar. He had failed in his mission, but his bomb was much better than he expected, and it was the first use of the newest batch. It was wonderful stuff. Over the next few weeks he would incorporate as much of it as he could in devices and then get started on making more. He couldn’t expect to get paid until he fulfilled his promise to kill off the Bomb Squad. He needed to make something they didn’t expect.

  The exceptional power of the new batch of Semtex gave him the idea of building a few small antipersonnel bombs. He began to plan a
nd make drawings for the new designs. He drew a few bounding mines, based on the Bouncing Betty bombs the Germans made in World War II. After the war, the Soviet Union, China, and the United States all made their own versions. They had a trigger that freed a spring beneath the bomb. When the spring was free the bomb would fly upward about five feet and detonate, sending steel balls outward in a ring with a kill zone of about twenty feet.

  He needed some other designs. Now that he had a new drill press and a new lathe, he went to work on a set of antiwithdrawal fuzes. He based one on the M123 fuze the air force used. The fuze had a set of exterior threads that fitted into a threaded receptacle on the bomb. The original fuze had two ball bearings embedded in the thread. In the original, when the fuze was screwed in, the bearings slipped into two recesses, making it impossible to unscrew. Instead of the ball bearings, he used a moving collar, which a bomb technician would try to unscrew. Once the fuze was in, the collar would unscrew one turn and then free a spring-loaded pin to stab against the detonator and initiate an explosion in the main charge. He devised an improved hiding system for antipersonnel mines by inserting a bounding mine into a tube and burying the tube so it hid the mine below ground level and then acted as a launcher.

  He devised antipersonnel weapons as systems. He could install one mine alone, but each one had the capability of being connected to one or more others, so touching one bomb would set off others nearby.

  Each day he would pursue new ideas, some of them his own, others adaptations of devices used in wars. He was particularly pleased whenever he was able to make a device that looked like an old classic design but build in a trigger that worked differently from the original. He loved to imagine a bomb technician following the procedures in an old military manual to render a device safe, then blowing himself to pieces.

  While he worked he recorded the local television news reports. One night after a long and productive day he returned to the house, showered and changed his clothes, sat down, put the VTR on fastforward, and began to speed through the reports. He could be fairly certain that if the image on the screen was a crowd of children, a bear in a swimming pool, a group of people in front of a movie theater, or anyone smiling, it had nothing to do with him. When he saw the chief of police on a podium he stopped the speeding image and backed up.