Reminds me of a passage from
The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad -- the terrorist gets his retarded BIL to deliver a bomb to Greenwich Observatory, but it goes off as he stumbles taking it up the hill. Nothing left but a crater in the lawn. He has a tough time explaining things to his wife....
Exeter is a lovely little city, BTW -- spent the summer of '74 in law school there. What do you suppose they did to warrant the wrath of Jihad? Not a damned thing, of course. They're infidel swine and that's enough.