Good Day for Bomb Squad Is No Blast

I got the call just after 7 p.m. Thursday. Lt. Justin Eisenberg from the LAPD bomb squad told me to meet him near Los Angeles International Airport.

“We’ve got a report of a pipe bomb,” he said. I fumbled for my keys and notebook, then raced down the Harbor Freeway to the 105 West.

But before I take you there:

I had spent the earlier part of that day with the bomb squad, which has been run ragged since the London bombings. People are more vigilant about abandoned knapsacks, calling in reports of anything the least bit suspicious. And that’s kept the bomb gang scrambling.

It got particularly hairy last Monday.

“We went from one call to another to another,” said anti-terrorism chief John Miller, who interviewed Osama bin Laden back in his TV reporting days.

Several of the calls were clustered in the vicinity of the federal building on Wilshire.

“I turned to [LAPD Chief William] Bratton and said, ‘I don’t want to be paranoid, but it looks like someone is trying to draw all the bomb squad resources to the far end of the city, which makes me nervous about transit stuff and the downtown civic area.’ ”

Over the course of a few hours, Miller said, the bomb squad had been called to a bomb threat at a bank on Sunset Boulevard, a suspicious package at Wilshire and Westwood, a knapsack in a park near the federal building, another abandoned backpack near a BMW in the federal employee parking lot, and a suspicious bus rider who gingerly handled a white box and then left it at a bus stop near Pico and Sawtelle, backing away slowly.

“It was someone who clearly wanted the bomb squad” to roll, Miller said of the bus rider, who is still being sought. “He was described as a Middle Eastern man with a package that had a handle on it, and he looked at all the passengers and made eye contact with them and didn’t let anyone near him. When he got off, he waited for everyone else to get off first, then picked up the package gingerly, as if it contained a bomb.”

The package was empty, but Miller would still like to find the guy who left it there. The concern is that the unidentified man had accomplices who were observing the response of the bomb squad or testing a diversionary tactic.

The next potential crisis was the unattended knapsack found near the federal building. Sgt. Ron Capra of the bomb squad was concerned enough to order a 300-foot evacuation and send the unit’s robot in to inspect the sack.

The robot, a four-wheeled contraption, sent its findings back to the truck, where everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Miller said the bag contained CO2 canisters, wires and other electronic gear, and food stamps.

None of the other packages contained explosives, either, but with calls running 50% above average since London, I decided to spend Thursday with the bomb squad.

Very few of the bomb squad’s calls have any connection to terrorism, Capra said. But with a cluster of calls like those ones on the Westside, he can’t help thinking about London, Madrid and New York. Capra, in fact,

is scheduled to leave this

weekend for London to learn what he can about the explosions that killed more than 50 people.

The unit, more than 20-strong, works out of a cluttered submarine-like office with narrow hallways, charts of the periodic table and confiscated bombs, grenades and nasty materials of every type, from the crude to the frighteningly sophisticated.

Rocket-propelled grenade and missile launchers hang from ceilings, and Officer Jacqueline Hickey showed me a missile launcher found in the attic of a Hollenbeck home during a stolen property investigation.

“I’m a bomb technician,” says a sign on the wall. “If you see me running, try and keep up.”

“They’re my mad scientists,” Lt. Eisenberg said of his troops, many of whom have chemistry and engineering backgrounds.

In their downtime, the bomb technicians bone up on the latest terrorism and bomb-making developments from around the world. They don’t know what the next call might bring, and they don’t want to be surprised. It’s like a chess game with an invisible foe. Sometimes it’s more like an arms race, with the officers designing and dismantling their own bombs.

“You see this briefcase?” asks Det. Brandon Martin.

He takes an ordinary-looking black case, flips the locks, and I hear the electronic hum of a timer.

How much time do I have to run?

Martin opens the briefcase to show me where a fake explosive is concealed in the lining.

“We rig things, rope things, shoot things,” says Martin, who tinkered with toy rockets as a kid and poked around with his dad when the washing machine or toaster was on the fritz.

He was a year from graduating with a UCLA aerospace engineering degree 12 years ago when he got bored and joined the LAPD for the adventure of it. Plainclothes gang work got frustrating after a while and he made the switch to the bomb squad, where he and his colleagues train around the world for everything from underwater bomb detection to the worst-case scenario -- biochemical or nuclear attacks.

If it’s any consolation, Martin thinks there’s a greater chance of smaller scale attacks in crowded public spaces because low-grade explosive materials and step-by-step instructions are as easy to come by as ingredients and recipes for baking a cake.

“Terrorists could get more bang for the buck carnage-wise,” he said, and strike widespread fear.

In my time with the bomb squad Thursday, I’d learned a lot about explosives, but the phones were silent. The bomb squad gets roughly 1,100 calls a year, with a spike after any international bombing. But I’d managed to pick the one day with no action.

Martin and I went to the Parker Center auditorium to watch a couple of bomb-sniffing Labradors -- J.J. (trained by Officer Hickey) and Sundance (trained by Officer Anthony Huerstel) -- search for a hidden half-pound block of real TNT and a spool of detonation rope.

Both dogs earned bones. Do they make terrorist-sniffing dogs?

With no calls by day’s end, I went home and was about to sit down to dinner when Lt. Eisenberg called about the suspected pipe bomb near the airport. When you put the words “airport” and “bomb” together, not long after London, the adrenaline pumps.

The call had come from a man who was enjoying a cup of coffee in a park on Vista del Mar Boulevard, just above the beach and precisely where jets fly overhead on takeoff from LAX, when he spotted a salami-sized canister with a fuse. Patrolman Cesar Mata took one look at the thing and called the bomb squad.

Det. Doug Stice, one of the first bomb technicians on the scene, sent the robot out to have a look. In this very park two years ago, Stice had answered a pipe bomb call and found a harmless canister made to resemble a bomb and containing clues to an Internet treasure hunt game played with Global Positioning System devices.

He suspected this was another, and the images sent back by the robot made him 90% sure. But that wasn’t good enough.

“In today’s times,” Stice said, given London, and given the state of the world, he couldn’t be sure.

The bomb squad called airport police and takeoffs were halted.

Minutes later, the robot exploded the device.

It wasn’t a bomb.

In the shredded remains, I found a piece of paper with the letters “GPS.”

I don’t know what kind of morons would play games with devices made to look like bombs, but I left the scene thinking the same thing the bomb squad often thinks.

Could have been worse.