Cut and Thrust

36

In the predawn hours of the morning of the following day, Harry Gregg left his pickup truck in a parking lot adjacent to Santa Monica Airport and made the short hike down the road past Atlantic Aviation. He saw no one, and no one saw him.

He found a place where the chain-link fence surrounding the airport was concealed from the road by tall bushes, and scrambled between them to reach the fence. He took a set of short-handled bolt cutters from his backpack and made a three-foot horizontal cut of the fence near where the chain link disappeared into the ground, then another vertical cut alongside a fence pole. He peeled back the fence and let himself in, then pressed the chain link back into place. He stood quietly for a couple of minutes, listening for vehicles or footsteps. The airport was closed overnight, so there was no aircraft noise. Satisfied that he was alone, he walked over to the taxiway and began to move along the line of airplanes parked there. He saw two Citation Mustangs before he came to the one with the correct tail number.

Once again, he stopped and listened. Nothing. He knelt beside the nosewheel, took a small but very powerful lithium-powered flashlight from his pocket, and carefully examined the well into which the nosewheel would be retracted during flight. Once again, he stopped, looked around, and listened. Still nothing to disturb him.

He removed the explosive device he had built and, for the first time, connected the wire from the detonator to the cell phone that would activate it. He opened the clamshell phone and taped the top flap to the bomb, then he stuffed the bomb all the way up into the wheel well and taped it to the shaft of the nosewheel. He examined the installation carefully, then, satisfied that all was well, he switched on the bomb’s cell phone.

Several miles away, in a bar no more than a block from Harry’s Venice Beach house, a screenwriter named Aaron Zell sat on a stool and rattled the ice in his empty glass. “One more, Phil,” he said.

“Coming up,” the bartender replied. He filled a clean glass with ice, then filled it with the twelve-year-old scotch that his customer had been drinking since three A.M. and set it in front of him. “What’re you doing here alone tonight?” Phil asked. “Where’s your girl?”

“We had a fight,” Zell said. “I don’t even know what about.”

“I’ve had fights like that with women,” Phil said, fulfilling his role as sympathetic bartender. “You never know what’ll set ’em off.”

“Too fucking right,” Zell replied. He took his cell phone from his pocket and began to dial a number.

“So you’re going to fix things by waking her up in the middle of the night?” Phil asked.

“She never sleeps after a fight,” Zell said. “We once made a pact that we’d never go to sleep angry with each other.” The numbers on the cell phone were a little blurred, given how much he had drunk, and he got the number wrong. “Call failed,” the on-screen message said.

“Shit, dialed it wrong,” Zell said. He tried picking out the number again, and put the phone to his ear. This time, the phone rang once, stopped. “Now what?” he said.

Harry Gregg stuck his head as far up into the Mustang’s wheel well as he could, switched on his flashlight, and made a final inspection of his bomb. Then he heard something he had not expected. The cell phone that he had just taped to the explosive rang once.

Half a mile away, on the other side of the runway, at Santa Monica Airport, a sleepy security guard sat in his patrol car, smoking a cigar and watching the moon rise over Los Angeles. He was suddenly jolted fully awake by a brilliant flash across the runway, followed a millisecond later by the noise of an explosion.

He started his patrol car, switched on the flashers and the siren, and stomped on the accelerator. He crossed the runway and drove down the row of aircraft parked there, stopping fifty feet from what seemed to have been a Citation.

He got out his cell phone and dialed 911. When the operator answered he said, “This is airport security at Santa Monica Airport. An airplane has exploded, and I need the police right away. Hang on.” He had spotted something lying a dozen feet from the airplane and now illuminated it with his spotlight.

It appeared to be most of a human body. “You’d better send an ambulance, too,” he said. “No, on second thought, make it a coroner’s hearse.”

Then he hung up and pressed the speed-dial button that called his boss’s home number. It rang four times before it was answered.

“What the fuck?” a sleepy voice said.

“Floyd,” the security guard said, “it’s Roland. You’d better get your ass over to the airport right now. We’ve got an exploded airplane and a dead man on our hands.”