The undercover life of Barry Broad

-- One afternoon two summers ago, labor union lobbyist Barry Broad sat through a dull legislative hearing at California's ornate Capitol building.

As lawmakers droned, he fell into a daydream. Broad, an avid news consumer and armchair geopoliticist, began pondering the Middle East, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

"What if CIA secret agents could engineer a Chernobyl-like nuclear meltdown that would stymie Iran's ambitions to build a nuclear bomb?" Broad mused. "What if Iran's mullahs could smuggle a radioactive 'dirty bomb' into the Port of Los Angeles and set it off at Griffith Observatory?" And "what if both events were to occur simultaneously?"

Suddenly, the bearded, balding, 50-year-old family man thought: "What a good idea for a book!"

Broad's daydreaming and his wisp of a plot morphed into hundreds of hours of researching and writing that produced an international thriller, "Eve of Destruction."

The book, Broad's first, was published by Seven Locks Press in Santa Ana and is scheduled to be in bookstores next month.

Turning the concept into a 496-page novel (list price $24.95) with dozens of characters was the challenge of a lifetime for the neophyte author. He recalled that it took him two months to get the courage up to write the first word.

"One Friday night, my wife and kids were gone and I was hanging out," he said. "I sat down at the computer and wrote a chapter that was a critical moment for one of the characters." That was Hannah, a clandestine operative for Israel's Mossad intelligence service.

"I enjoyed myself and wrote for two hours," he said. "So I told myself, let's see if I can write 150 pages" more.

With the prose finally flowing, Broad started researching. He visited California ports and questioned his union members to learn about the movement of cargo and security weaknesses.

To his delight, the Internet yielded a treasure trove of information about everything from "Iranian cigarette brands to how to make a bomb, nuclear or conventional." The Iranian military export company's website gave him access to an extensive catalog of weapons.

Broad's wife and two teenage children were shocked at the sensitive data he downloaded. "They believed that any day the FBI was going to come knocking on our door, asking what the heck I was doing," he said.