It was calculated down to a matter of seconds, and it unfolded in less than a minute.
The clock started ticking about 11:20 Monday night. With stopwatch precision, the American sedan drove up the narrow street to the guardhouse of the Vinnell Corp. compound, passing a sign on the high perimeter wall that warns, “Visitors must be escorted.”
Maybe the guards saw it was an American car and didn’t react until it was too late. In a brief shootout, three guards armed with a 50-caliber machine gun atop a truck across the road from the guardhouse were killed or injured. Sentries in the guardhouse itself were overpowered; their fate is unclear. At some point, the shooters jumped from the sedan. Their job almost done, they lowered the barrier barring entry.
A Dodge Ram truck then speeded through, took the first left turn and drove a block to a four-story apartment block housing 70 trainers, mainly Americans. Finally, it took a quick right and stopped a few yards down the road — to just the right point for maximum impact, according to a tentative reconstruction by U.S. military officials Tuesday.
Then the bomb inside the Dodge was detonated — probably by the driver.
The explosion, estimated by the U.S. military to be the equivalent of a 400-pound bomb and probably made up of a sophisticated materiel such as Semtex or RVX, sheared the face off the apartment block. Concrete, glass, furniture and sleeping inhabitants were hurled in all directions.
The explosion left a massive crater in the road at last 10 feet deep and 10 feet wide, according to U.S. military estimates.
