Liberation Day (3 page)

3

T
he target house was to the right of us, and closer than the compound. The wall that surrounded it was a large, square, high-sided construction of plastered brick, painted a color that had once been cream. It was built very much in the Muslim tradition of architecture, for privacy. The main door faced the fuel tanks, and we knew from the satellite that it was rarely used. I couldn’t even see it from where I was, because the lights in the compound weren’t strong enough. From the shots Lotfi had taken during the CTR, I knew it consisted of a set of large, dark, wooden double doors rising to an apex, studded and decorated with wrought iron. The pictures had also shown a modern shutter-type garage door at the side, facing away from us toward the road. A dirt track connected it with the main drag.

Inside the high protection was a long, low building. It wasn’t exactly palatial, but showed that the fuel and teabag business paid Zeralda well enough for him to have his own little playground.

Double doors from quite a lot of the rooms opened onto a series of tiled courtyards decorated with plants and fountains, but what the satellite photographs hadn’t been able to show us was which room was which. That didn’t really matter, though. The house wasn’t that big and it was all on one floor, so it shouldn’t take us long to find where Zeralda was doing his entertaining.

The paved road flanked the far side of these two areas and formed the base of the triangular peninsula.

Lotfi moved back down into the dead ground and started to scramble along in the darkness to his left, just below the lip. As we followed, two cars raced along the road, blowing their horns at each other in rhythmic blasts before eventually disappearing into the darkness. I’d read that eighty percent of men under the age of thirty were jobless in this country and inflation was in high double figures. How anybody could afford fast cars was beyond me. I could only just about afford my motorbike.

We got level with the tanks and moved up to the lip of the high ground. Hubba-Hubba took off his bergen and fished out the wire cutters and a two-foot square of red velvet curtain material, while we put on and adjusted the black-and-white-check
shemags
that would hide our faces when we hit the hut. I wouldn’t be taking part directly because of my skin color and blue eyes. I would only come into the equation when the other two had located Zeralda. It wouldn’t matter that he saw me.

When Hubba-Hubba got his bergen back on and his
shemag
around his head, we checked each other again as Lotfi drew his pistol and did his tour guide routine, with a nod to each of us as we copied.

Breaking the operation down into stages, so that people knew exactly what to do and when to do it, made things easier for me. These were good men, but I couldn’t trust my life with people I didn’t know very well and whose skills, beyond the specifics of this operation, I wasn’t sure about.

Following Lotfi, with me now at the rear, we moved toward the fence line. It was pointless running or trying to avoid being in the open for the thirty or so yards: it was just flat ground and the light in the compound hadn’t hit us directly yet as the arc lights were facing into the compound, not out. We would get into that light spill before long, and soon after that we’d be attacking the hut, so hell, it didn’t really matter. There was no other way of crossing the open ground anyway.

There came a point where, bent over, as we tried instinctively to make ourselves smaller, we caught the full glare of the four arc lights set on high steel posts at each corner of the compound. A mass of small flying things had been drawn to the pools of light and buzzed around them.

I could hear the rustle of my pants as my wet legs rubbed together. I kept my mouth open to cut down on the sound of my breathing. It wasn’t going to compromise us, but doing everything possible to keep noise to a minimum and make this job work made me feel better. The only other sounds were of their sneakers moving over the rocky ground, and the rhythmic scrape of the nylon bergens over the chirp of the invisible crickets. My face soon became wet and cold as I breathed against the
shemag
.

We got to the fence line behind the shed. There were no windows facing us, just sunbaked wooden cladding no more than three feet away.

I could hear someone inside, shouting grumpily in French.
“Oui, oui, d’accord.”
At the same time there was a blast of monotone Arabic from a TV set.

Lotfi held the red velvet over the bottom of the fence and Hubba-Hubba got to work with his cutters. He cut the wire through the velvet, moving upward in a vertical line. Lotfi repositioned the velvet each time, the two men working like clockwork toys, not looking remotely concerned about the world around them. That was my job, to watch and listen to the sounds coming from the shed in case its occupant was alerted by the smothered
ping
each time a strand of chain-link gave way.

The telephone line snaked into the compound from one of the concrete posts that followed the road, which looked like a strip of liqorice running left and right. There was a sign, in both Arabic and English, to be careful of the bend. I knew that if I went to the right I would hit Oran about ten miles away, and if I went left I would pass Cap Ferrat and eventually hit Algiers, the capital, about four hundred miles to the east.

Hubba-Hubba and Lotfi finished cutting the vertical line as the one-sided conversation continued inside the shed, then carefully pulled the two sides apart to create a triangle. I eased my way slowly through, so my bergen wouldn’t snag. I got my fingers through Lotfi’s side of the fence to keep it in position and he followed suit, taking hold of Hubba-Hubba’s side while he packed the cutting gear. When he was through as well, we eased the fence back into place.

We put our bergens on the ground behind the shed, to the accompaniment of the monotonous Arabic TV voice, and the old guy still babbling in French.

It flashed through my mind that I had no idea what had been happening in Afghanistan this past week. Was the U.S. still bombing? Had troops gone in and dug the Taliban out of their caves? Having been so totally focused on the job in the mining camp and then stuck in the submarine, I didn’t have a clue if OBL was dead or alive.

We used the light to make final adjustments to each other’s
shemags
.

Everyone carefully checked chamber for the last time. They were becoming like me, paranoid that they were going to pull a trigger one day and just get a dead man’s click because the topslide hadn’t picked the round up due to the mag not being fully home.

Lotfi was hunched down and bouncing on the balls of his feet. He just wanted to get on with it and hated the wait. Hubba-Hubba looked as if he were at the starting blocks and unconsciously went to bite his thumbnail, only to be prevented by the
shemag
. There was nothing we could do but wait until the old guy had finished his call; we weren’t going to burst in halfway through a conversation. I listened to the French patter, the TV, the buzz of the mosquito things around the lights, and our breathing through the cotton of the
shemags
. There wasn’t even the hint of a breeze to jumble the noises together.

Less than a minute later, the guard stopped talking and the phone went down with an old-style ring of a bell. Lotfi bounced up to full height and checked Hubba-Hubba was backing him. He looked down at me and we nodded in time before they disappeared around the corner without a word. I followed, but stayed out of the way as Lotfi pulled open the door; the TV commentator was momentarily interrupted by a single shouted instruction and the sort of strangulated pleas you make to two weapon-pointing Arabs in
shemags
. I saw a sixty-something guy in baggy, well-worn pants and a tattered brown-check jacket, drop a cigarette from between his thumb and forefinger before falling to his knees and starting to beg for his life. His eyes were as big as saucers, his hands upturned to the sky in the hope that Allah would sort this whole thing out.

Hubba-Hubba stuck the muzzle of his Makharov into the skin at the top of the old guy’s balding head and walked around him using the weapon as a pivot stick. He reached for the phone and ripped it from its plug. It fell to the floor with one final ring, the noise blending with the scrape of plastic-soled shoes on the raised wooden floor as they dragged him over to a folding wooden chair.

I could see that he had been watching Al Jazeera, the news network. The TV was black-and-white, and the coat-hanger antenna wasn’t exactly state-of-the-art, but I could still make out the hazy nightscope pictures of Kandahar getting the message from the U.S. Air Force as tracer streamed uselessly into the air.

The old guy was getting hysterical now, and there were lots of shouts and pistols aimed his way. I guessed they were telling him, “Don’t move, camel-breath,” or whatever, but in any event it wasn’t long before he was wrapped up so well in duct tape he could have been a Christmas present.

The two of them walked out and closed the door behind them, and we retrieved the bergens. Things were looking good. “Train hard, fight easy” had always been shoved down my throat, even as an infantry recruit in the 1970s, and it was certainly true tonight. The other half of the mantra, “Train easy, fight hard—and die,” I pushed to the back of my head.

We crossed the hard crust of sand that had been splashed with fuel over the years, and compressed by boots and tires, heading for the tanks no more than fifty yards away. The trucks were to my left, dirty festering old things with rust streaks down the sides of their tanks from years of spillage. If the sand and dust now stuck to them were washed off, they would probably fall apart.

I clambered over the bung, feeling safe enough to pull off the
shemag
as the other two got on with their tasks. After I’d extracted the four OBIs, I checked at the bottom of my bergen for the nine-inch butcher’s knife and pair of thick black rubber gloves that came up to my elbows. They were the sort that vets use when they stick their arm up the rear end of large animals. I knew they were there, but always liked to check such things. Next out was the thirty-meter spool of safety fuse, looking a bit like a reel of green clothesline. All the gear we were using was in metric measures, but I had been taught imperial. It had been a nightmare explaining things to the boys during rehearsals.

Lotfi and his pal, God, started to play stonemasons on the bung, taking a hammer and chisel to the elevation that faced the target house, which was hidden in darkness, no more than two hundred yards away. This was a problem because of the noise Lotfi was making. But, hell, there was no other way. He just had to take his time. But at least once the first block was out, it would be a lot easier to attack the mortar. It would have been quicker and safer, noise-wise, to blow a hole in the wall at the same time as the tanks were cut, but I couldn’t have been sure that the right amount of wall had been destroyed, allowing the fuel to gush out before it was ignited.

I laid the four OBIs in a straight line on the floor as Hubba-Hubba and his pal, the evil-eye protector, assembled and checked the frame charges from his bergen. These were very basic gizmos, eight two-foot-long strips of PE (plastic explosive) two inches wide, an inch thick, taped onto eight lengths of wood. He was making sure the PE had connected by rolling more in his hands before pushing it into the joints as he taped the wood together to make the two square frame charges. He had pushed two iffy-looking Russian flash dets (detonators) into the PE on the opposing sides of each charge, then covered them with yet more PE. Both charges had then been wrapped in even more tape until they looked like something from a kids’ cartoon. It was bad practice using the dets like that, but this was a low-tech job and these sorts of details counted. If the charges didn’t detonate we’d have to leave them, and if they looked sophisticated and exotic it would arouse suspicion that maybe the job hadn’t been done by GIA.

Just to make sure they’d jump to the wrong conclusion, I’d made up a PIRA (Provisional IRA) timer unit to detonate them. They were dead simple, using a Parkway timer, a device about the size of a silver dollar that worked very much like a kitchen egg timer. They were manufactured as key rings to remind you of when your parking meter was about to expire. The energy source was a spring, and the timers were reliable even in freezing or wet weather conditions.

I watched as Hubba-Hubba disappeared around the side of the tanks facing the sea with his squares of wood and left me to sort out the OBIs. I heard the clunk as the first frame charge went onto the tank, held in place by magnets. He was placing them just above the first weld marks. Steel storage tanks are maybe half an inch thick at the bottom, due to the amount of pressure they have to withstand from the weight of fuel. There is less pressure above the first weld, so the steel can be thinner, maybe about a quarter of an inch on these old tanks. The frame charges might not be technically perfect, but they’d have no problem cutting through at that level, as long as they had good contact with the steel.

I heard the magnets clank into position on the second. He was doing everything at a walk, just as we had rehearsed. This wasn’t so that we didn’t make a noise and get compromised, but because I didn’t want him to run and maybe fall and destroy the charges. We’d only made two, and I had no great wish to end this job hanging upside down in an Algerian cell while my head was on the receiving end of a malicious lump of two-by-four.

I laid the green safety fuse alongside the OBIs that I’d placed in the sand three feet apart. The safety fuse between each OBI would burn for about a minute and a half, just like when Clint Eastwood lit sticks of dynamite with his cigar. A minute and a half was just a guide, as it could be plus or minus nine seconds—or even quicker if the core was broken and the flame jumped the gaps instead of burning its way along the fuse. That was the reason why I hadn’t connected the fuse in advance, but kept it rolled up: if there was a break in the powder it could be too big a gap for the flame to jump, and we’d have no detonation.