This article is excerpted from “ A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite,” the newest single from the Atavist.

Ronay looked down at the dust carpeting the parking lot.

From somewhere deep inside the darkened carcass of the building came the distant sound of whirring machinery, still drawing power from an auxiliary generator no one had thought to shut off. Water poured from broken pipes, soaking everything. TV sets dangled by their cables over the abyss. Toilets teetered on the edges of newly calved precipices. Around it, webs of twisted rebar were tangled with broken drywall, bedclothes, and pieces of metal window frame. The void reached up to the fifth floor and all the way down into the basement. The explosion had torn a giant spherical hole through the middle of the hotel. Plaster dust was still drifting in the air. Beside him the state fire marshal shouted “C’mon!” and took off running toward the hotel lobby entrance. The concussion of the explosion knocked Ronay to the ground. He had come straight from the FBI Explosives Operations Center in Washington, where he worked as a bomb analyst. When the charge went off, Chris Ronay was standing on Stateline Avenue, still in his suit and tie. It was risky, but it was the best idea they had. If the bomb contained only low-voltage circuitry, it would be decapitated before the electrical impulses from the battery could reach the detonators and trigger the dynamite. Wolfson explained that the time between the detonation of the charge and the gas jet striking the box would be half a millisecond. This could disable the bomb by severing the fusing mechanisms the technicians could see in the top box from the explosives they believed filled the lower box. A precisely formed piece of plastic explosive encased in a brass jacket, it would create two explosive planes of hot gas collapsing on one another to form a fine jet: a pyrotechnic cutting tool. Finally, Leonard Wolfson, a civilian consultant to the Navy, suggested using more explosives to defeat the bomb, with a linear shaped charge.

Pick it up and carry it to a nearby golf course. They threw out every idea they could come up with. on Wednesday, the experts gathered in the Sahara command post for a roundtable meeting.

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