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If, he thought, making a wry little joke with himself, if there was still any place to dump garbage in his garbage dump.
The problem with the farm, Marion often thought, was exactly opposite from the problem he had with the house in Philadelphia. In the city, people were always trying-and often succeeding-in taking away things that belonged to him. At the farm, people were always giving him things he hadn't asked for and didn't want. Such as wornout automobile tires, refrigerators, mattresses, and bed springs.
He didn't like it, of course. No civilized person could be anything but annoyed with the transformation of one's private property into a public dump. But he understood why it had happened, and why the police couldn't do much about it.
While the land was mostly flat, there were two depressions, each more than two acres in size, both of them touching the road that cut across the property from one county road to the other. The garbage dumpers simply backed their trucks up to the edge of the depressions and unloaded their worn-out mattresses, rusty bed springs, old tires, and broken refrigerators.
Marion had from time to time complained to the authorities about the unauthorized dumping, but to no avail. They told him that if he, or they, caught someone dumping, they would of course deal with the matter. But since there was no one living in the area, police patrols seldom visited it, their presence being required elsewhere.
His only solution, they told him, was to both fence and post the property. Fencing 1,280 acres was of course for financial reasons out of the question. And when he had put up PRIVATE PROPERTY-TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED signs where the paths began at the county roads, the only response had been that the garbage dumpers, or someone else, had used them for target practice. It had been a waste of money.
Four months before, on one of his monthly weekends at the farm, he had taken the canvas tarpaulin off the old Fordson tractor his father had bought years before, jump-started it with jumper cables from his rented Chevrolet, and driven it around the farm on what he thought of as his quarterly inspection of the property.
This time there had been something new in the larger of the two garbage dumps. Lockers. They appeared to have been in a fire. There were approximately fifty of them, each about three feet square. They were painted green, and they were constructed in units of three.
Curiosity had overcome his disgust and annoyance, and he'd gotten off the Fordson, leaving it running, and gone down in the depression and opened them. It was only then, when he found keys in most of them, that he recognized them for what they were. They were the lockers one found in railroad stations, where travelers stored their suitcases. You put a quarter in the slot, which allowed you to withdraw the key. When you returned to the locker for your belongings and put the key back in the lock, the door could be opened, but the mechanism now seized the key and would hold it until another quarter was deposited.
Marion had happened to have two quarters in his pocket, and tested two of the lockers. They were operable.
He had then regretted having thrown the fifty cents away, and climbed out of the depression and got back on the Fordson and drove back to the farmhouse. He had made his supper, and then got on his knees and prayed for the souls of those of his men whom the Lord had chosen to take unto Him in 'Nam.
He would have thought that he would have given no further thought to the lockers than he had to the refrigerators and worn-out tires or the other garbage, but they stayed in his mind. Where had they come from? He thought he would have heard if there had been a fire in a railroad station. Why, since some of them had hardly been damaged, had they been discarded?
He had thought of the lockers not only during that weekend on the farm, but often afterward. There had been no answers until he had read inThe Philadelphia Inquirer that the Vice President was going to arrive in Philadelphia and depart from Philadelphia by train, at the 30^th Street Station.
Then, of course, it had all become quite clear. The reason the lockers had been dumped on the farm was because the Lord wanted him to have the lockers to use when he disintegrated the Vice President.
The moment this had popped into his mind, Marion knew that it was true. There was no need to get on his knees and beg the Lord for a sign. The Lord had already given him a sign, back in 'Nam. Marion had personally gone to the l
ocker room of the Hotel de Indochine to investigate the explosion that had taken the lives of twenty-six American civilian technicians. The Vietcong had set off explosives, almost certainly Composition C-4, in half a dozen lockers. He thought that each charge had probably been a half pound of C-4, around which chain had been wrapped. Each charge had functioned like an oversize fragmentation hand grenade. The American civilians had literally been disintegrated.
The lockers in the Hotel de Indochine were not identical to the ones that had been dumped in the depression-they had been eighteen inches by five feet, not three feet square. But that was a detail that didn't seem to matter.
There were rows of lockers like the ones that had been dumped all over 30^th Street Station. All he was going to have to do was install a device in one locker in each of the rows. And then be in a position to see the Vice President, so that he could detonate the explosive device that would disintegrate him.
It was possible, even probable, Marion knew, that people who had not offended the Lord would also be disintegrated. But there were two ways to look at that. It couldn't be helped, for one thing, and certainly the Lord would somehow compensate in Heaven those whose premature deaths had been made necessary in order to carry out His will.
Marion had realized that it was becoming more and more clear why the Lord had chosen him as His instrument to carry out His will. There were not that many people around with his level of expertise in making lethal devices from readily available material. And there were not very many people around with access to a testing area. You can't cause an explosion in very many places without causing a good deal of curiosity. The farm, in the middle of the Pine Barrens, was one of the very few places where an explosion would not be heard.
After Marion had put the garbage from the meal into the paper bag from the grocery store, he turned off the Coleman lantern in the kitchen and went into the bedroom.
He made the bed, laid out fresh underwear and socks for the morning, took off his clothes, and then turned off the other Coleman lantern. He dropped to his knees by the side of the bed, and prayed the Lord's grace on himself as he began to carry out His will, and then for the souls of the boys who the Lord had taken into Heaven from Vietnam, and then he got in bed and was almost instantly asleep.
****
Marionwoke at first light. He changed into the linen he had laid out the night before, and then made his breakfast. Bacon, two fried eggs, fried "toast," coffee, and a small can of tomato juice. After he ate he washed the dishes and pots and pans, and added the refuse to the garbage from supper.
He then began to lay out on the table everything he would need to make the devices. There were two large rolls of duct tape, approximately thirty feet of one-inch link chain, the shortwave receivers from Radio Shack, and an assortment of tools, including a large bolt cutter. Then he went out to the car and brought in the Composition C-4.
The basic device would be two quarter-pound blocks of Composition C-4, which looked not unlike sticks of butter, except of course they were gray in color, and had a hole to accommodate the detonator. He didn't have as many detonators as he would have liked to have had, so for the testing, he would use one detonator per device. The devices he would install in the lockers in 30^th Street Station would have two detonators per device. Redundancy was the term. The chances of two detonators failing to function were infinitesimal.
First he taped a dozen blocks of Composition C-4 together, two blocks to a unit. Then he wound chain around one of the double blocks, as tightly as he could, twisting the links so that they sort of doubled up on each other. Then, holding the last link carefully in his hand, he unwound the chain. He took the bolt cutter and cut the link he had held in his hand.
Then he measured off five more lengths of chain, using the first length as a template. He then wound the chain around the six double blocks of Composition C-4, and then wound that with the duct tape.
That was all that he felt he should do, in the interests of safety, in the house. The rest he would do on site.
He put the partially constructed devices into a canvas satchel, and carried that outside to where the Fordson sat under its tarpaulin. He removed the tarpaulin, and checked to see that there was sufficient fuel in the tank. Then from a small, two-wheel trailer attached to the rear of the tractor, he took a set of jumper cables.
