Oklahoma City by Andrew Gumbel

Author:Andrew Gumbel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-11-13T05:00:00+00:00

ON SEPTEMBER 13, 1994, PRESIDENT CLINTON APPROVED A TEN-YEAR assault weapons ban, and McVeigh wondered if he hadn’t been plunged into the opening chapter of The Turner Diaries, in which passage of a repressive new gun law inspires the beginnings of a white supremacist resistance movement. Nichols said McVeigh experienced the weapons ban as a “prophecy…coming true before his very eyes.” There and then, McVeigh started driving around Kansas looking for bags of ammonium nitrate. He needed eighty or ninety bags for his bomb, but he never found more than a few at a time. Nichols chalked this up to McVeigh’s “city mind,” and told him to go to a farm co-op. He even told McVeigh how to look one up in the yellow pages.

They ended up going together to the Mid-Kansas Co-op in McPherson, immediately after Nichols finished his last day’s work on the farm. But McVeigh had apparently decided he did not want to be seen making the purchase. As they were approaching the co-op, he jumped out of Nichols’s pickup, saying he needed to make some phone calls. Nichols bought forty fifty-pound bags of ammonium nitrate on his own, in cash, and told the salesman, Rick Schlender, that he was planning to spread them on some freshly planted wheat fields.

Schlender found that odd, because the weather was not good for planting and most wheat farmers used liquid fertilizer. Schlender had no strong memory of the man—or men—who made this purchase; he told the FBI he remembered two of them. Since it was raining, Nichols bought a light-colored camper shell to fit over his truck bed—a feature many witnesses would pick up in the months to come.

He and McVeigh dumped the ammonium nitrate in a storage locker in Herington, where Nichols had originally intended to store his furniture. Now he noticed that McVeigh had not rented the space in his name, as he requested, but under the alias Shawn Rivers. It was another warning sign about McVeigh’s intentions that he failed to pick up on until much later.

That night, McVeigh pushed Nichols further into criminality by suggesting they scope out a nearby mining quarry and take whatever explosives they could find, just for fun. McVeigh presented it as something similar to his misadventure with Fortier at the National Guard armory in Kingman. But, this time, he and Nichols conducted a thorough reconnaissance and made plans to come back the next night. They brought Nichols’s Makita drill to break the padlocks and took care to park McVeigh’s Chevy a quarter-mile away on the far side of a field.

They hauled away enough material to build several large bombs: 299 sticks of Tovex, 544 electric blasting caps, and 93 lengths of Primadet shock tube fitted with nonelectric caps. Even now, Nichols would not see what trouble McVeigh was leading him into. “I was in denial that this one act would suck me into worse things that McVeigh had up his sleeve,” he wrote in 2010.

They were remarkably lucky they weren’t caught.

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