Drago #6: And the City Burned. Art Spinella
coffee in all of Oregon.”
“Think there are more of them?”
“Sure, Nick. Why steal a dozen Blue Rhinos if you’re only going to make one bomb?”
Beth, the BPD’s receptionist and dispatcher, scurried into the office. “Make that 40, Chief.” She held out a piece of paper which Forte took. “North Bend, Coquille, Langlois, and Coos Bay PDs say they also have reports of propane tanks being stolen.”
Forte took the paper, scanned his dispatcher’s scribbles. “Well, guess that makes it officially worrisome.”
“But why?” I asked. “Forty propane tanks with three sticks of dynamite each is a hell of a lot of fire power.” I was feeling a little nervous. “What would you do with 40 home-made bombs?”
Forte slid Beth’s note to the top left of his desk where it wouldn’t get covered by other papers. “Don’t know, but for sure we have to find them all and we’ve got eight hours to do it. Suggestions, anyone?”
Sal bobbed his head. “Call up the local map in Google.”
Forte punched a couple of buttons on his Mac, zoomed in on the part of town we were in then pressed “Print.” The map spit out of the printer on the credenza behind the Chief’s desk. Sal grabbed a felt-tip pen and marked the police department with a black diamond.
Forte ran his finger over the diamond. “The tank was found about where the right-hand point of the diamond is.”
“What’s back there?” I asked.
“Gorse-choked gully, mostly. Pretty thick.”
He put the coffee mug down and pushed it away.
“So if the tank exploded, it would have started a pretty decent fire as well as an explosion.”
“Sure would have. And with the weather as hot as it’s been, it’s pretty dry. The gorse would have gone up in a flash.”
Bandon weather is fairly mild all year ‘round. Summers are temperate with a strong wind out of the north, but rarely above 80 degrees. This year had been one of those odd ones. Near triple digits for three days running. Phoenix may be set up for that kind of heat, but Bandon dries out like parchment paper. The ground gets hard, the trees become brittle, potted plants haven’t a chance in hell, so to speak.
Beth cleared her throat.
Forte looked up from the map. “Got a thought?”
“You know what day this is, don’t you?”
The Chief looked at his desk calendar. “September 26. Why?”
Beth’s voice hitched. “It’s the anniversary of the 1936 fire.”
1936
Other cities had suffered disastrous fires. Chicago. San Francisco. Atlanta. But those were major cities. Important cities to the country. Economic powerhouses with hundreds of thousands of inhabitants and hundreds of millions in commerce.
In 1936, Bandon – abutting the Coquille River – had fewer than 3,000 residents. In the wilderness of the country. An eyedropper of wealth compared to the others.
When the scorching heat of an out of control forest and gorse fire touched the two-story elementary school, the aged, dry wood exploded. In minutes, Bandon became a town of raging flames. Pavement melted. Sand turned to pebbles of glass. Windowpanes slumped into molten pools. Air so blistering and saturated with smoke, breathing became impossible.
In an hour, 600 homes and businesses were nothing but hell-hot skeletons; roofs and walls and contents mere memories.
Those seeking refuge on the beach discovered they were pinned to the ocean surf by mounds of once sun-bleached driftwood igniting from the ravaging heat. The sky, blue and clear just hours before, transformed into a kaleidoscope of orange, red and yellow seemingly itself ablaze. A tornado of wind, fed by the inferno, launched a 500-foot high firestorm of coal-hot embers. A volcano of searing wood, small and large; like lava and ash, it rained onto boats and mills and businesses and homes.
And frantic people desperately trying to escape the blaze with nowhere to run.
Hephaestus, the Greek god of fire, son of Zeus, swept his hand across the coastal town and left it barren.
CHAPTER TWO
SEVEN HOURS, FORTY-TWO MINUTES
Climbing from my chair, my shirt’s back stuck to the vinyl from perspiration. The humidity was maybe 7 percent. Nowhere near the usual 30 percent. But the temperature was already in the low 80s in the Chief’s office. My comfort zone is between 70 and 73 degrees.
“Show me where this one was found.”
Forte led Sal and me to the gully behind the police department. Even this early in the morning, the sun was giving its full face and force. The four-foot tall mix of gorse, wild blackberries and other scrub crackled under our feet. The heat had taken the last bits of moisture out of the plants and ground. We scrambled down the short incline and picked our way into the brush.
About 30 feet into the field Forte stopped and pointed to a small patch of tamped down scrub.
Sal pushed through the scrub to the north side of the patch. I did the same to the south, eyeballing the ground, figuring it was about three feet square. Bitter dry bushes had been trampled a bit, broken stems and dry leaves clumped into a non-descript pattern as if someone had simply walked to the spot and dropped the propane tank.
“No foot prints,” Sal said, bending down to inspect the thatch.
I pulled back some of the overgrowth hoping to find at least something that would provide a clue. Nothing except a circular indentation from the bottom ring of the propane tank. Someone had placed it on the ground and given it a twist to keep it upright. The hardpan lived up to its name.
Forte looked around the field to its edges. “If the bomb had gone off, this stuff would have turned into a nice brush fire. With this heat and the usual afternoon wind, it would have taken all the fire fighting resources of Bandon to put it out.”
Sweeping an arm around, “What is this, about 200 acres? The houses up there” nodding toward the east, “would have torched in a matter of minutes.” Turning toward the PD, “Our building would have gone up in just a few more minutes. This is scary, Nick.”
“Especially since there are presumably 39 other tanks somewhere.”
We pushed our way through the scrub back to the low-slung police station and Forte’s office. As the seriousness of the potential fire began to take hold, Forte said, “I’ll let the surrounding PDs know what we’re facing. Ditto the mayor and the fire departments. If someone is truly interested in reenacting the ’36 fire, I’m not sure we have the resources to deal with it. Even on a county basis.”
Sal sniffed his coffee mug and dropped it on a tray next to the coffee urn.
“But why do this, guys?” Sal asked. “What’s in it for someone to burn Bandon to the ground again?”
I shook my head. “Doesn’t matter right now. We have 39 potential explosions that are set to go off today.”
“You think they’re all set to go off at 4:30?”
“Sure do. Let’s play bad guys for a second. How do you get the most bang for your buck? How do you get total chaos and beheaded chicken confusion? You could set off the bombs one at a time over eight hours and have resources scrambling from one place to another, but you run the risk of having each of those fires put out quickly and the full force of the responders able to move on to the next fire. Light them all off at once, and there’s no way there are enough people to combat that many brush fires, especially if the afternoon wind kicks up, which it undoubtedly