October 12, 2002 — page 2

Indonesian and Australian investigators both say there were three bombs planted in Kuta: two smaller devices outside Paddy's and the Sari Club, and a larger cache of explosives driven up Jalan Legian in a Mitsubishi L-300 minivan. The first analysis showed the bombs had traces of four explosives: RDX, AMX, ammonium nitrate and the plastic explosive C-4, which is used by militaries worldwide—and terrorists too. Investigators don't yet know how the devices were detonated, or by whom. They do know the explosions occurred between 11:05 and 11:15—in a lethally precise sequence.

Surfer Beirne got to Paddy's just minutes before. "I greeted the security man at the front door," he says. "I walked up the north side of the bar. At the back there was this group of guys, big guys. There were three pretty girls, blond. Pat from Zimbabwe waved at me. I went over. We were sitting real close together. I was looking directly at the bar. Then—Boom!—there was a flash, a little bit yellow and white at the top. It looked like there were two little flashes but it might have been my eyes. Everybody was silhouetted, all the heads. I remember I was on the floor. And I heard another—Boom! That was the bomb at the Sari Club. In between the first bomb and the next there was three seconds. I saw all the people running toward the door, a mass of people. I remember seeing flames on the roof. I leapt over a fence. At that instant the big bomb went off. I must have leapt just as it had gone off or just prior. I landed and looked both ways down the street. There was carnage. The security guard who had greeted me at the gate was sitting on the curb, covered in blood. I crouched down to see if he was O.K. He was calm and just staring out into the road. A girl ran up to me and asked me, 'Where have you been, where have you been?' I said, 'I was in Paddy's.' And she was screaming, 'My mother, my mother was in there. My mother.'"

In the Sari Club moments before, Ayu had been behind her cash register, enjoying the scene. She didn't hear the blast before she was thrown to the floor and momentarily knocked unconscious. When she came to, she was sitting on a pile of ice that had spilled out of a nearby bin. "It was cold," she remembers. The bar and her cash register were gone—along with the throng of customers that had been on the other side.

Several survivors recall that the first thing they noticed was an eerie darkness: the bombs cut off the power supply. Some looked up from the floor to see the Bali night sky through the blown-off roofs of buildings, the only illumination coming from fires ignited by the blast. For many, there was a morbid silence: their eardrums had ruptured.

"It was hell on earth," says William Cabler, a 42-year-old surfer from California who was in the Sari Club. "All I saw was people burning, little girls with their hair on fire trying to put it out, and I'm telling them to run." He survived the inferno by breaking his way through a fence. "I just kept hitting it, hitting it and hitting it, broke my shoulder, but I got the fence open and I think a lot of people escaped behind me."

David Fielder, a 46-year-old British rugby referee from Hong Kong who honeymooned in Bali 18 years before, said that getting through the corpses scattered around Paddy's was like a rugby game in hell. He tripped and rolled over some dead bodies. "It was beyond description," he says. "The only thing I could think of was whether I would see my family." According to Dr. Leslie Kuek, a Singaporean plastic surgeon who flew to Bali to help survivors, the concussive blast of the big bomb probably ruptured the internal organs of many of the people inside the club; the fires that followed burnt them alive.

Businessman Kadek was in another of his restaurants across town when he heard the blasts. Almost immediately, he received a call from the Paddy's doorman. "I said, 'What do you mean a bomb?'" He quickly phoned a bigger bar he owns called Double Six and had it shut down. Then he sped home and spent the next few hours calling families to check up on his staff at Paddy's.

Kuta's traffic chief Haji Bambang felt the blasts at his home, looked outside, and saw a huge, yellow, billowing mushroom cloud. Within 15 minutes he had gathered members of an Islamic community group he heads and was on the scene. He watched a car explode into a ball of flame in front of the Sari Club. He heard screaming, lots of screaming, mostly from the mouths of foreign tourists. "Help me," they pleaded. "Oh my God. Help me."

He came across an Australian man whose legs were missing. No one had a stretcher, so Haji Bambang instructed two of his charges to grab the wailing man under his arms and by the waist to carry him from the fires. Turning around, he found a woman with a breast missing. Haji Bambang could see she was traumatized for she appeared to be screaming but no sound was coming out. She had shouted herself hoarse.

When Australian acupuncturist Tansen and his grandson Sai picked themselves off the floor of the just opened clothing shop, they saw Mira, Tansen's wife, on the ground with a slab of concrete on her back. Sai lifted the block off his grandmother. The street outside was chaos. A wall of flame was moving down the street, and the family started running to where their car was parked. Sai looked back. In the flames he saw people on fire attempting to crawl over the beams of a bamboo roof. When the family reached their car, a young man ran toward them, skin melting off his arms and back. They helped him into the car. On the ride to the hospital, the family did its best to keep talking, lying to the stranger—telling him they were almost at the hospital though they were stuck in a traffic jam. "He was screaming so loud," recalls Sai. They were able to get his name: Phil Britten, 22-year-old captain of the Kingsley football team. He had been watching teammate Paltridge doing his AC/DC act on the dance floor when the bombs went off. They took him to the nearby Bali Clinic where they poured saline solution on his back.

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