Free Wet Desert: Tracking Down a Terrorist on the Colorado River by Gary Hansen

However, he had no intentions of letting anyone see it.
    Now things would get exciting. He walked outside and peeked around the back of the trailer at the guard shack. He could see the guard was still in the shack. He knew he didn't have much time. He hustled back into the trailer, and removed the false wall, where the night before he had retrieved the single hair. Before, with the false wall in place, someone could have noticed that the inside wasn't even half the size of the outside. However, he had not intended to let anyone get a good look.
    Now with the panels gone, a dozen white metal fifty-gallon barrels were exposed, stacked three wide, two high, and two deep. He used a special dolly with a lift jack to grab the first barrel off the top row. When he first tried to move the barrels back in Vegas he was surprised at how heavy they were, hence the expensive dolly. He wheeled the barrel down a metal ramp out of the trailer and right into the elevator. Laying it down on its side on the floor he shoved the barrel's bottom against the back of the elevator. A few minutes later a whole row of barrels were lying on their sides against the back of the elevator. He was on his way back to get the next barrel when he heard the security guard's voice.
    "Everything all right in there?"
    The sound made him freeze. He wiped sweat off his forehead, then poked his head out from behind the trailer. The security man had walked down the access road onto the dam, but headed west toward the visitor center door instead of toward the elevator.
    He yelled out to him, "Yeah, I'm just checking everything right now."
    The man waved and kept walking toward the visitor center.
    He increased his pace on the remaining barrels. Fifteen minutes later he had all twelve barrels stacked, four wide and three high, against the back of the elevator. The elevator sagged slightly at the weight and no longer lined up perfectly with the floor. With the last barrel in place he removed the clamp off one of the top barrels and removed the metal lid. The inside was packed tight with what looked like dirty white crystals or pellets. The smell of diesel invaded his nostrils when the lid came off. He removed the remaining lids and tossed them in the small room outside the elevator shaft, the smell of fuel now strong in the elevator.
    He hustled back into the trailer twice and retrieved the footlocker on one trip, and a car battery on the next. He set the car battery under the elevator control panel, and then opened the footlocker. He pulled a metal tube almost eighteen inches long and an inch in diameter out of the box. The tube had two wires hanging out of it. He forcefully rammed it in one of the barrels until only the wires were visible. The motion dislodged white pellets which trickled to the floor. He took no notice, continuing working until all twelve barrels had wires hanging out of them. He then spent the next few minutes wiring them together. He finished by connecting them to the circuit board and finally to the car battery. When he connected the car battery, a red LED illuminated on the circuit board.
    He took a moment to check his work. The materials he used were all readily available. The white pellets were the hardest to get, and required that he make a purchase in
Utah
, using his grandfather's name for their farm in southern
Utah
. Even the farm stores wouldn't sell that much fertilizer to a city boy. The ammonium nitrate fertilizer was common enough, if you had a good reason to buy it. Of course his grandfather was too old to notice that it never made it onto the fields.
    Although he had heard about ammonium nitrate being used for bombs, most notably the
Oklahoma
Federal
Building
, it had been a surprise to learn that ammonium nitrate was not the core of the bomb. The explosive part of the bomb was the diesel fuel itself. The ammonium nitrate only acted as an accelerant, providing an oxygen boost during the chemical reaction of the explosion. However,