Still, Khadri was not sorry that he had taken the time to examine the bombs for himself, just as he had done his own target reconnaissance the night before. After the problems on the United flight, he intended to see to the success of this operation himself. These bombings would be a crucial diversion from the mega-attack coming next, and he could not allow another mistake.
He had planned the attack carefully. The truck and van were untraceable, bought for cash under fake names. Similarly, Fakhr and Aziz had built their cache of ammonium nitrate a hundred pounds at a time, while keeping a low profile. Until two weeks before, they had worked as cabbies and lived in a basement apartment in the Rampart district, a gritty neighborhood north of downtown Los Angeles. They rented month to month, always paid cash, always paid on time. It was their fifth apartment; Khadri insisted they move every year, so the neighbors never got friendly. Not that Rampart was known for its warmth.
Now Fakhr and Aziz were staying in a flophouse motel on Sunset Boulevard that wasn’t picky about identification. They lived in separate rooms and pretended not to know each other. Still, to maximize security, Khadri had spent only a few minutes with them. He would visit them just once before the mission tonight, to make sure they were ready. After the bombs went off there wouldn’t be much of them left to see.
“…TWELVE…THIRTEEN…FOURTEEN!”
Daunte Bennett hoisted the metal bar over his chest, arms shaking with effort. “One more. No help,” he grunted to Jarvis, his spotter. He lowered the bar, then pushed it up again, groaning as he fought the weight. Fifteen reps at 255 pounds was no joke.
“Almost there,” Jarvis said. Finally Bennett extended his arms to their limit and grunted in triumph. He steered the bar into its metal cradle with a loud clank.
“Two-five-five.”
“Coaches be begging you to sign.”
Bennett was twenty, a former linebacker for the Crenshaw High Cougars who was a step slow and a couple inches short for big-time college ball. He had tried to bulk up since he’d graduated the year before, hoping to add thirty-five pounds and become a D-lineman. But he knew Jarvis was blowing smoke. Despite protein shakes and daily workouts, he was still only 240, twenty pounds short. Without steroids, he had no chance, and he refused to put needles in his body so he could play third-string tackle for UCLA.
To pay the bills while he figured out his next move, Bennett had found a job as a bouncer at the Paradise Club in Hollywood. He might be too small for Div. I football, but in the real world, he looked plenty intimidating. And he had an even temper, a useful trait for a bouncer. He liked the job. The pay was good—$150 a night, cash, plus a twenty now and then from drunk white boys hoping to jump the line — and he liked watching people when they were trying to get in, or realizing they might not. Some stayed cool, some got huffy. All this for the chance to pay a $25 cover to listen to music so loud you couldn’t even hear it. Folks were silly sometimes.
But he didn’t want to be a bouncer all his life. He’d been thinking about the army, getting the chance for college without a football scholarship. Plus, part of him missed the structure he’d had playing ball. Having somebody to yell at him, work him hard. War was no joke, he knew that — a kid from the Cougars had gotten a leg blown off in Iraq — but he’d seen enough drive-bys to know that everybody died sooner or later. Might as well go down fighting.
KHADRI COULD HEAR the battered television in room 202 playing CNN even before he opened the door. Inside, Aziz and Fakhr sat side by side on the edge of the bed, three feet from the TV, its glow reflected in their eyes. They looked like zombies, Khadri thought. The living dead. When he closed the door Fakhr jumped up. His eyes flickered to Khadri and back to the television before coming to rest at last on a Koran that sat open on a table in the corner. Thin sweat stains soiled the armpits of his blue button-down shirt. The fear did not surprise Khadri. Looking at death was not entirely pleasant, even when the cause was just and heaven awaited. Now that they had picked up their vehicles and thrown out their clothes, Fakhr and Aziz had little to do but contemplate their mortality.
Khadri turned to Fakhr and hugged him, quickly and tightly.
“Fakhr.”
“Abu Mustafa.” They did not know his real name and never would.
Aziz rose, and Khadri hugged him as well.
“Brothers,” Khadri said in English. He motioned for Fakhr and Aziz to sit. “Brothers,” he said again. “The sheikh himself awaits this night.” He gestured at the television. “Tonight the infidels will have news. Tonight they will see our power for themselves.”
Fakhr’s left hand twitched uncontrollably.
“Fakhr—”
“What if we fail, Abu Mustafa?”
“We won’t fail,” Khadri said. For twenty minutes they walked through the plan and its contingencies: What if one of the trucks ran late, or got pulled over, or a bomb didn’t explode? Khadri focused on the details so that the attack itself seemed inevitable. When they had discussed every possibility, he picked up the Koran and turned to the eighty-seventh sura, “The Most High.”
“Let’s read together,” he said.
“Bismallah rahmani rahim…” they chanted. “In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful…”
All three knew the sura by heart. Like many Muslim boys, as children they had memorized important verses of the Koran even before they could read. They slowed as they reached the climax of the prayer, the lines Khadri wanted them to remember.
He succeeds who grows
Who remembers the name of his Lord and performs his prayer
But you prefer the life of the world
Though the hereafter is better and more lasting
Yes, this is set down in the scrolls of the ancients
The scrolls of Abraham and Moses.
Khadri squeezed the hands of his men. The fear had left Fakhr’s eyes, he saw. “The hereafter is better and more lasting,” Khadri said. “I envy you, brothers. Soon you will be in heaven. As is said in the twenty-second sura: Praised be Allah, for He is the truth.”
“He quickens the dead, and He is able to do all things,” Aziz said, finishing the verse.
“Nam,” Khadri said. “Now send the kafirs”—the unbelievers—“to hell.”
THE SERVICE WAS taking forever, Josh Goldsmith thought. He sat on the bimah, the raised stage at the front of the Temple Beth El synagogue, trying not to look at his parents. He was nervous, although he had no reason to be. Everyone in the sanctuary tonight was a relative, a friend, or a regular at temple. Josh wore a new gray suit, a white shirt, and a red tie with tiny blue rabbits that he had picked out himself. He was trying not to be too nervous. He peeked at his watch: 9:35. He’d be on soon.
THE TRIP HAD taken exactly as long as Fakhr expected — no surprise, since he had driven the route a dozen times in the last month. He guided the white Dodge van down Walton Avenue, heading south toward Wilshire. He wanted to come through the intersection with speed. The light ahead dropped from red to green, and Fakhr tapped on his brakes to put more space between the van and the car ahead. A few seconds later, he pumped the gas. The van leapt ahead.
“I CALL JOSHUA Goldsmith, our bar mitzvah, to the microphone to lead us,” Rabbi Nachman said. Josh felt his legs wobble as he stood. In the front row, his sister Becky looked at him and pretended to pick her nose before his mom elbowed her sharply. He smiled at her and felt his stomach loosen up. Those people out there were just family and friends. Think Blue.
FAKHR PILOTED THE van up the steps at the northeast corner of the temple, the corner nearest the intersection. A middle-aged security guard barely had time to stand before the van plowed him down and smashed through the temple’s entrance into the hall outside the sanctuary. Fakhr steered toward its doors. He wouldn’t be able to get into the sanctuary itself, but that didn’t matter.
Don’t be scared, Fakhr told himself. Do it quickly. “Allahu akbar,” he said aloud.
He had taped the detonator, a small plastic
box connected to a thick black wire, to the passenger seat so it wouldn’t bounce as he came up the steps. He tore it off the seat, looked at it for a moment, and pressed the button in the middle of the box.
JOSH HAD ALMOST reached the microphone when he heard a loud crash outside. The congregation turned around, and three men stood up to investigate.
THE BUTTON CLICKED. A jolt of electricity ran through the wire to the blasting caps attached to the dynamite in the back of the van. The dynamite exploded, and a moment later the ANFO detonated.
INSIDE THE SYNAGOGUE, the world ended.
The explosion looked nothing like the Hollywood version of a car bomb — a smoky fireball that blows out windows but leaves the body of the car intact. Those explosions are produced by low-velocity explosives like black powder, which burn in small showy blasts. High explosives like dynamite don’t burn; they detonate, turning from solid to gas instantaneously and in the process generating tremendous heat.
In a fraction of a second, Fakhr and the van ceased to exist, as the gas produced by the explosion moved outward and created a huge pressure wave that pushed the air forward at two miles a second. Effectively, the bomb created a super-tornado in the synagogue, a tornado with winds fifty times more powerful than those seen in nature.
The pressure wave and the shrapnel it created blew apart the back wall of the synagogue and tore to pieces everyone at the back of the sanctuary. Others burned to death in the flash fireball from the explosion, which reached a temperature of several thousand degrees. No one could run, hide, or duck. Survival was a matter of luck and distance; Josh’s parents in the first row had better odds than his cousin Jake six rows back. His uncle Ronnie against the wall had no chance at all.
Then the pressure wave reversed direction to fill the vacuum left where the van had stood. The explosion had blown the ceiling off its walls. As the roof was pulled back down, the walls — now weakened and out of alignment — could no longer support it. The ceiling fell in progressively, from the back to the front of the synagogue, dropping tons of concrete and wood and steel on the survivors of the initial blast.
For Josh Goldsmith, the collapse of the ceiling came as a relief.
Josh had the misfortune to be standing when the explosion occurred, so he took more than his share of shrapnel. Metal fragments from the van turned his face into a bloody pulp. A larger piece sliced into his stomach and cut his liver nearly in half. Lacerations covered his body. Fortunately, his agony lasted only a few seconds, until a slab of concrete from the ceiling crushed his skull.
ON HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD it was just another Friday night. Convertibles and tricked-out pickups cruised slowly, bass thumping. The evening was unseasonably warm for April, and girls in thigh-high skirts flirted with boys in muscle shirts. A red Lamborghini Diablo competed for attention with a black Cadillac Escalade on gleaming twenty-six-inch rims. Tourists snapped pictures of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Near the corner of Hollywood and Ivar, dozens of kids had lined up to get into the Ivar, a restaurant and club that attracted the masses from the Valley. Across the boulevard, police barricades held back a hundred fans who’d shown up for the premiere of Number, a campy horror movie about a crazed accountant, at Cinespace, a movie theater in the same building as the Ivar.
From a Nissan Altima parked two blocks east, Khadri watched Aziz’s van snake slowly west on Hollywood. Aziz was running a few minutes late, though Khadri didn’t expect him to have a problem. The police and firefighters would just be reaching the synagogue. They would need a minute to realize they were looking at a crime scene, and their immediate response would be to lock down the city’s other synagogues, not to look for a bomb in Hollywood. Still, Khadri wished Aziz would hurry.
Khadri had parked outside the blast zone but close enough to feel the bomb for himself. He knew he should have left Los Angeles already, but he couldn’t help himself. He wanted to see his handiwork firsthand. He had his escape route mapped, of course: east to Phoenix, Arizona. He would stay for a few days — no need to rush — then leave the Altima at Sky Harbor International and fly to Mexico City. No one would notice the car for weeks, and it couldn’t be connected to him anyway.
Khadri looked at the men and women walking past his car. Those heading east would live; those walking west might die. Their fates were no concern of his, he thought, any more than American generals worried about what happened to the inhabitants of the cities they attacked. This was war, and sometimes war killed people who didn’t think of themselves as combatants. These people weren’t innocents, though they preferred to imagine themselves that way; no one in America was an innocent.
He drummed his fingers against the wheel, anxious to feel the blast.
ARMS FOLDED, BENNETT stood outside the Paradise Club, a half block west of the corner of Hollywood and Ivar. Paradise was harder to get into than the Ivar, so the lines were smaller but just as unruly. Tonight a crowd had formed early.
“Puta!”
“Asshole!”
Near the front of the line, two guys in their early twenties, one white, the other Hispanic, got in each other’s faces. Bennett stepped forward. “Easy,” he said. They appealed to him simultaneously.
“This maricón pushed me,” the Hispanic guy said.
“He was checking out my girlfriend.”
“That fat bitch?”
Just like that the white guy stepped up and swung wildly. Bennett grabbed his arm before he could connect. This crap didn’t usually start until later. In the distance Bennett heard sirens screaming west. A lot of sirens.
The white kid tried to pull his arm from Bennett’s hand. “What’s your name?” Bennett said.
“Mitch.”
“Mitch, you’re walking this way,” Bennett said, and pointed west. He turned to the Hispanic guy. “What’s your name?”
“Ricky.”
“Ricky, that way.” He pointed east.
“Man—”
Bennett shook his head. “Start walking.”
They looked at Bennett’s huge arms and walked. He watched them go until the blare of horns down the block grabbed his attention. Hollywood was always loud on Friday nights, but this was ridiculous.
COLD AIR POURED out of the vents of the Mitsubishi panel truck, but Aziz couldn’t stop sweating. The cab stank with the acrid smell of his fear, overwhelming the faint scent of the rosewater he had dabbed on himself as he prepared to make his journey to paradise. Nine forty-five, five minutes late, and he still wasn’t there. Far worse, he could feel his resolve weakening. He had felt confident in the motel room, but as the moment approached he could no longer control his terror. Would it hurt when he pushed the button? What if he didn’t get to heaven? He knew he would, of course. The Koran said so. Abu Mustafa said so. He would be a shahid, a martyr, surrounded by the most beautiful virgins, drinking the purest water, eating the sweetest dates.
“Allah hath bought from the believers their lives and their wealth because the Garden shall be theirs,” the ninth sura said. “They shall fight in the way of Allah and shall slay and be slain.”
So he knew he would get to heaven.
But what if he didn’t?
The light ahead turned green but no one moved. Aziz leaned on his horn, and finally the cars ahead crawled forward. He looked at the street around him. These people walked around in a haze while their soldiers raped prisoners in Iraq. They sucked up the world’s oil and lived like kings while Muslim children starved. They treated their bodies with disrespect. They believed in a false god. They were pigs in slop. Everything they did was haram, forbidden. Anger surged in Aziz. He had no reason to fear. They deserved to die. It was Allah’s will.
The light dropped green again, and Aziz inched through the intersection of Hollywood and Ivar. Crowds filled the sidewalks. This was the spot. Aziz stopped the truck. He picked up the detonator and turned it back and forth in his hand.
I can’t, he thought. Allah forgive me, I can’t.
INSIDE THE TRUCK, time moved
very slowly. Aziz knew he had to decide. People were looking at him, and a police officer would tell him to move along soon. But he felt paralyzed. He wormed his thumb over the detonator, pressing down on its button ever so slightly, feeling the tension under his finger. He looked out the windshield and silently murmured the first sura to himself.
“In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful…”
Now, he told himself. Now or never.
He pushed the button.
THE SECOND BOMB proved even more devastating than the first. The explosion blew a crater fifteen feet deep and thirty feet around, and shot a cloud of smoke, debris, and fire hundreds of feet into the sky. With no walls to slow it, the overpressure wave killed everyone in an eighty-foot radius. The people nearest the truck were blown apart and barbecued; farther away the bodies were left recognizably human, although many lacked arms and legs. A few of the dead appeared basically unhurt; the blast wave had left their bodies intact but shaken their brains to jelly.
The blast partially knocked down four buildings, including the Ivar-Cinescape building directly across the street. Inside the Ivar, a fire began, and with only one emergency exit left, panic set in. Eighty-five more people were crushed or burned to death.
FOR JUST A moment after the explosion a shocked silence descended on the street, a false peace splitting before from after. Then chaos: car alarms ringing, fires roaring, screaming. So much screaming, most of it hardly recognizable as human: a high-pitched keening that started and stopped at random.
Bennett found himself on the ground. He pushed himself to his feet and ran toward the wreckage, not even noticing the blood dripping from his face. He didn’t know where to turn or what to do; he wished that he had taken that first-aid class at Crenshaw.
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