Stone - 25 - Collateral Damage

spite of enhanced interrogation. He died there of a stroke, after having been waterboarded more than fifty times. His sons and daughter, all of whom had had intensive Islamic education, became radicalized by his capture and death.
    “Al Qaeda operatives made contact with them, and a cell was formed, funded by Osama bin Laden personally. After bin Laden’s death in a Navy SEAL raid last year, they dedicated themselves to perpetrating a monumental terrorist attack on the United States in revenge for the deaths of their father and bin Laden. They enlisted this man”—another photograph appeared—“Dr. Ahmed Kharl, who had been a highly placed scientist in the Pakistani nuclear program and who later worked on both the Iranian and North Korean programs. When the Pakistani program was shut down, he became a freelancer. He designed a device that would fit into a large trunk and had various parts machined at diverse shops, so that no one person ever knew what was being constructed. The parts were smuggled into the United States, along with three kilograms of enriched uranium, and Dr. Kharl traveled to Palo Alto, California, where he met with the three Shazaz siblings and assembled the device in an apartment rented by them.
    “The device and three smaller, non-nuclear bombs were transported to Los Angeles from the San Jose airport to a hangar at Santa Monica Airport. The three smaller bombs were assigned to McCallister’s three coconspirators, all of whom had gained employment at The Arrington. We now know that their purpose was purely diversionary—to make us think the attack was a conventional one. The device in the trunk was transported to The Arrington in a hotel vehicle by one of the three coconspirators and placed in the suite reserved by McCallister.
    “As you know, the presidents of the United States and Mexico were resident at the hotel for a conference and the signing of a treaty on security and immigration. Hundreds of other prominent people were either resident in the hotel or taking part in its grand-opening festivities. Two of the three smaller bombs were discovered by our teams before they could be detonated. The third was detonated in the Santa Monica Airport hangar, destroying the Caravan and killing its pilot and the third coconspirator. We believe this was the work of McCallister, who was covering his trail.
    “McCallister then set the bomb to go off at eight-thirty in the evening, near the end of a concert in the Arrington Bowl, attended by fifteen hundred people. He left the bomb in the closet, as you see it, then was driven to LAX and boarded a flight for London.
    “A magazine reporter who had met McCallister and had had sex with him in his suite accidentally saw the trunk in question and that evening, when she heard that we had been searching for a large piece of luggage, informed Mr. Freeman and Special Agent Rifkin of the presence of the trunk in Mr. McCallister’s suite. You all know what transpired after that. The following is what would have happened if the device had not been stopped from detonating.”
    The camera then zoomed out to an apparent altitude of several thousand feet, and an animated version of the nuclear explosion began.

Everyone started as the explosion of the device filled the screens. First there was an intense white light, followed by a fireball consuming the entire twenty-acre site of the hotel, and beyond, obliterating the Bel-Air neighborhood. This was coincident with a huge roar, shaking the speakers, and a visible shock wave that spread in all directions, destroying nearly all the buildings at UCLA, across Sunset Boulevard, and extending for miles farther. Fires broke out everywhere.
    Everyone took a breath, but the event was not over. Up Stone Canyon, two city reservoir dams broke, and a high wall of water swept down the canyon, through the UCLA campus, and past Wilshire Boulevard.
    The chief bomb technician’s voice rose again. “The three and a half billion gallons of water in the two reservoirs would have had the effect of extinguishing most of the fires caused by the initial fireball.”
    The camera zoomed slowly upward, exhibiting the enormous swath of ruin left by the explosion.
    “We estimate that more than a million people would have died in the first hour after the blast, and that as many as two million more would have died within ninety days from their injuries or from radiation sickness.”
    The camera continued to pull back, and the scar on the