It had been three days in the making and now took up most of the back of the white Transit van. The explosives had been packed into aluminium beer kegs, each with double detonators. They had been stacked into the van, two dozen in all. Hundreds of six-inch nails had been duct-taped around the kegs to add to the lethal shrapnel. The wires from the detonators led to a central trigger unit which was connected to a Nokia mobile phone. It was a big bomb and a deadly one, designed to destroy its target and kill or maim anyone inside.The bomb had been carefully constructed by a fifty-year-old man who had driven up from Limerick. The bombmaker had been making explosive devices for the best part of three decades and had been taught by experts. He had been involved in the London Docklands bombing in February 1996 that had put an end to a seventeen-month ceasefire, and had helped build the bomb that had devastated Manchester city centre just four months later. When the IRA had lain down its arms in 2005, he had joined the Continuity IRA but within a year had switched to the Real IRA, whose Republican views were more in line with his own.Once he had finished putting the bomb together he had driven back to Limerick, and if all went to plan he would be sitting in front of the television with his wife and three daughters when it exploded.The man who was going to drive the van to its target was a sixty-year-old farmer from Warrenpoint, on the northern shore of Carlingford Lough.
