In the wee small hours

Most decent folk were asleep an hour after midnight when the explosion rocked the area.....the lights went out, the telephone lines went dead.....sirens began to sound, and bells rang.....hidden in our basement office, we lit kerosine lamps and fell back on emergency drill, dispatching runners to predetermined offices of various police and security functions of the government.  Darkness was giving way to dawn when the lines started ringing again.....a while later current was restored....callers were asking us if we knew what was going on, but we had no answers yet. One of our officers returned from his trip to a close police station, to report that the fire was out now and detectives were starting to study the scene.....it looked like a bomb had been planted, it was not thought to be some kind of industrial accident in the power station.

Superior offices gave us the word to not release to callers of lower clearance the true nature of the incident.....they did not want the newspapers to be putting out extra editions stirring up fears in the public of anarchist mad bombers on the loose in the city.  But all resources were being mobilized to find exactly that....the mad bombers.....the detectives did find some evidence of their identity....in many small pieces at the scene.....it was beginning to look like their device had gone off prematurely, catching the madmen in their own blast of high explosives.....a wallet was found that had not burned....a name was associated through our files with another name.....and eventually the nature of the anarchist cell was deduced.....these findings are classified to this day, and the public will probably never know what really disturbed their rest that dark night.