Энди МакНаб. День независимости(engl)
Liberation Day by Andy McNab
Also by Andy McNab Non-fiction
BRAVO TWO ZERO IMMEDIATE ACTION
Fiction
REMOTE CONTROL
CRISIS FOUR
FIREWALL
LAST LIGHT
LIBERATION DAY
ANDY McNAB
LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO SYDNEY AUCKLAND
TRANS WORLD PUBLISHERS
61-63 Uxbridge Road, London w5 5SA
a division of The Random House Group Ltd
RANDOM HOUSE AUSTRALIA PTY LTD 20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, New
South Wales 2061, Australia
RANDOM HOUSE NEW ZEALAND 18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland 10, New
Zealand
RANDOM HOUSE SOUTH AFRICA (PTY) LTD Endulini, 5a Jubilee Road, Parktown
2193, South Africa
Published 2002 by Bantam Press a division of Transworld Publishers
Copyright Andy McNab 2002
The right of Andy McNab to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs
and Patents Act 1988
All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance
to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBNs 0593 046188 (cased)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the
prior permission of the publishers.
Typeset in ll/13#pt Palatino by Falcon Oast Graphic Art Ltd Printed in
Great Britain by Mackays plc, Chatham, Kent
Dedicated to all victims of terrorism
LIBERATION DAY
One.
TUESDAY, 6 NOVEMBER 2001, 23:16 hrs
The submarine had broken surface ten minutes earlier, and its deck was
still slippery beneath my feet. Dull red torchlight glistened on the black
steel a few metres ahead of me as five of the boat's crew feverishly
prepared the Zodiac inflatable. As soon as they'd finished it would be
carrying me and my two team members across five kilometres of Mediterranean
and on to the North African coast.
One of the crew broke away and said something to Lotfi, who'd been
standing next to me by the hatch. I didn't understand that much Arabic, but
Lotfi translated. They are finished, Nick we are ready to float off."
The three of us moved forward, swapped places with the submariners, and
stepped over the sides of the Zodiac on to the anti-slip decking. Lotfi was
the cox and took position to the right of the Yamaha 75 outboard. We bunched
up near him, each side of the engine. We wore black bobble hats and gloves,
and a 'dry bag' - a GoreTex suit over our clothes with rubber wrists and
neck to protect us from the cold water. Our kit had been stowed in large
zip-lock waterproof bags and lashed to the deck along with the fuel
bladders.
I looked behind me. The crew had already disappeared and the hatch was
closed. We'd been warned by the captain that he wasn't going to hang around,
not when we were inside the territorial waters of one of the most ruthless
regimes on earth. And he was willing to take even fewer risks on the
pick-up, especially if things had gone to rat shit while we were ashore. No
way did he want the Algerians capturing his boat and crew. The Egyptian navy
couldn't afford to lose so much as a rowing-boat from their desperately
dilapidated fleet, and he didn't want his crew to lose their eyes or
bollocks, or any of the other bits the Algerians liked to remove from people
who had pissed them off.
"Brace for float-off." Lotfi had done this before.
I could already feel the submarine moving beneath us. We were soon
surrounded by bubbles as it blew its tanks. Lotfi slotted the Yamaha into
place and fired it up to get us under way. But the sea was heaving tonight
with a big swell, and no sooner had our hull made contact with the water
than a wave lifted the bow and exposed it to the wind. The Zodiac started to
rear up. The two of us threw our weight forward and the bow slapped down
again, but with such momentum that I lost my balance and fell on to my arse
on the side of the boat, which bounced me backwards. Before I knew what was
happening, I'd been thrown over the side.
The only part of me uncovered was my face, but the cold took my breath
away as I downed a good throatful of salt water. This might be the
Mediterranean, but it felt like the North Atlantic.
As I came to the surface and bobbed in the swell, I discovered that my
dry bag had a leak in the neck seal. Sea-water seeped into my cheap pullover
and cotton trousers.
"You OK, Nick?" The shout came from Lotfi.
"Couldn't be better," I grunted, breathing hard as the other two hauled
me back aboard.
"Got a leak in the bag."
There was a mumble of Arabic between the two of them, and a schoolboy
snigger or two. Fair one: I would have found it funny too.
I shivered as I wrung out my bobble hat and gloves, but even wet wool
keeps its heat-retaining qualities and I knew I was going to need all the
help I could get on this part of the trip.
Lotfi fought to keep the boat upright as his mate and I leant on the
front or bow, as Lotfi was constantly reminding me -to keep it down. He
finally got the craft under control and we were soon ploughing through the
crests, my eyes stinging as the salt spray hit my face with the force of
pebble dash. As waves lifted us and the outboard screamed in protest as the
propeller left the water, I could see lights on the coast and could just
make out the glow of Oran, Algeria's second largest city. But we were
steering clear of its busy port, where the Spanish ferries to'd and fro'd;
we were heading about ten Ks east, to make landfall at a point between the
city and a place called Cap Ferrat. One look at the map during the briefing
in Alexandria had made it clear the French had left their mark here big
time. The coastline was peppered with Cap this, Plage that, Port the other.
Cap Ferrat itself was easy to recognize. Its lighthouse flashed every
few seconds in the darkness to the left of the glow from Oran. We were
heading for a small spit of land that housed some of the intermittent
clusters of light we were starting to make out quite well now as we got
closer to the coastline.
As the bow crashed through the water I moved to the rear of the boat to
minimize the effects of the spray and wind, pissed off that I was wet and
cold before I'd even started this job. Lotfi was the other side of the
outboard. I looked across as he checked his GPS and adjusted the throttle to
keep us on the right bearing.
The brine burned my eyes, but this was a whole lot better than the sub
we'd just left. It had been built in the 1960s and the air con was losing
its grip. After being cooped up in diesel fumes for three days, waiting for
the right moment to make this hit, I'd been gagging to be out in the fresh
air, even air this fresh. I comforted myself with the thought that the next
time I inhaled diesel I'd be chugging along ninety metres below the
Mediterranean, back to Alexandria, drinking steaming cups of sweet black tea
and celebrating the end of my very last job.
The lights got closer and the coastline took on a bit more shape. Lotfi
didn't need the GPS any more and it went into the rubber bow bag. We were
maybe four hundred metres off the shore and I could start to make out the
target area. The higher, rocky ground was flooded with light, and in the
blackness below it, I could just about make out the cliff, and the beach
Lotfi had assured us was good enough to land on.
We moved forward more slowly now, the engine just ticking over to keep
the noise down. When we were about a hundred metres from the beach, Lotfi
cut the fuel and tilted the outboard until it locked horizontal once more.
The boat lost momentum and began to wallow in the swell. He'd already
started to connect one of the full fuel bladders in preparation for our
exfiltration. We couldn't afford to mince about if the shit hit the fan and
we had to do a runner.
His teeth flashed white as he gave us a huge grin.
"Now we paddle."
It was obvious from the way they constantly took the piss out of each
other that Lotfi and the one whose name I still couldn't pronounce
Hubba-Hubba, something like that had worked together before.
Hubba-Hubba was still at the bow and dug his wooden paddle into the
swell. We closed in on the beach. The sky was perfectly clear and
star-filled, and suddenly there wasn't a breath of wind. All I could hear
was the gentle slap of the paddles pushing through the water, joined now and
again by the scrape of boots on the wooden flooring as one or other of us
shifted position. At least the paddling had got me warm.
Lotfi never stopped checking ahead, to make sure we were going to hit
the beach exactly where he wanted, and the Arabic for 'right' I did know:
"II al yameen, yameen."
The two of them were Egyptian, and that was about as much as I wanted
to know not that it had turned out that way. Like me, they were deniable
operators; in fact, everyone and everything about this job was deniable. If
we were compromised, the US would deny the Egyptians were false flagging
this job for them, and I guessed that was just the price Egypt had to pay
for being the second biggest recipient of US aid apart from Israel, to the
tune of about two billion dollars a year. There's no such thing as a free
falafel.
Egypt, in its turn, would deny these two, and as for me, they probably
didn't even know I was there. I didn't care; I had no cover documents, so if
I was captured I was going to get stitched up regardless. The only bits of
paper I'd been issued with were four thousand US dollar bills in tens and
fifties, with which to try to buy my way out of the country if I got in the
shit, and keep if they weren't needed. It was much better than working for
the Brits.
We kept paddling towards the clusters of light. The wetness down my
back and under my arms was now warm, but still uncomfortable. I looked up at
the other two and we nodded mutual encouragement. They were both good lads
and both had the same haircut shiny, jet black short-back-and-sides with a
left-hand parting and very neat moustaches. I was hoping they were winners
who just looked like losers. No one would give them a second look in the
street. They were both in their mid-thirties, not tall, not small, both
clear-skinned and married, with enough kids between them to start up a
football team.
"Four-four-two," Lotfi had smiled.
"I will supply the back four and goalkeeper, Hubba-Hubba the midfield
and two strikers." I'd discovered he was a Man United fan, and knew more
than I did about the Premier League, which wasn't difficult. The only thing
I knew about football was that, like Lotfi, more than seventy-five per cent
of Man United's fans didn't even live in the UK, and most of the rest lived
in Surrey.
They hadn't been supposed to talk about anything except the job during
the planning and preparation phase, in a deserted mining camp just a few
hours outside Alexandria, but they couldn't help themselves. We'd sit around
the fire after carrying out yet another rehearsal of the attack, and they'd
gob off about their time in Europe or when they'd gone on holiday to the
States.
Lotfi had shown himself to be a highly skilled and professional
operator as well as a devout Muslim, so I was pleased that this job had got
the OK before Ramadan and also that it was happening in advance of one of
the worst storms ever predicted in this part of the world, which the
meteorologists had forecast was going to hit Algeria within the next twelve
hours. Lotfi had always been confident we'd be able to get in-country ahead
of the weather and before he stopped work for Ramadan, for the simple reason
that God was with us. He prayed enough, giving God sit reps several times a
day.
We weren't going to leave it all to Him, though. Hubba-Hubba wore a
necklace that he said was warding off the evil eye, whatever that was when
it was at home. It was a small, blue-beaded hand with a blue eye in the
centre of the palm, which hung around his neck on a length of cord. I
guessed it used to be a badge, because it still had a small safety-pin stuck
on the back. As far as the boys were concerned, I had a four-man team with
me tonight. I just wished the other two were more help with the paddling.
The job itself was quite simple. We were here to kill a
forty-eight-year-old Algerian citizen, Adel Kader Zeralda, father of eight
and owner of a chain of Spar-type supermarkets and a domestic fuel company,
all based in and around Oran. We were heading for his holiday home, where,
so the int said, he did all his business entertaining. It seemed he stayed
here quite a lot while his wife looked after the family in Oran; he
obviously took his corporate hospitality very seriously indeed.
The satellite photographs we'd been looking at showed a rather
unattractive place, mainly because the house was right beside his fuel depot
and the parking lot for his delivery trucks. The building was irregularly
shaped, like the house that Jack built, with bits and pieces sticking out
all over the place and surrounded by a high wall to keep prying eyes from
seeing the amount of East European whores he got shipped in for a bit of
Arabian delight.
Why he needed to die, and anyone else in the house had to be kept
alive, I really didn't have a clue. George hadn't told me before I left
Boston, and I doubted I would ever find out. Besides, I'd fucked up enough
in my time to know when just to get the game-plan in place, do the job, and
not ask too many questions. It was a reasonable bet that with over 350
Algerian al-Qaeda extremists operating around the globe Zeralda was up to
his neck in it, but I wasn't going to lie awake worrying about that. Algeria
had been caught up in a virtual civil war with Islamic fundamentalist groups
for more than a decade now, and over a hundred thousand lives had been lost
which seemed strange to me, considering Algeria was an Islamic country.
Maybe Zeralda posed some other threat to the West'sinterests. Who
cared? All I cared about was keeping focused totally on the job, so with
luck I'd get out alive and back to the States to pick up my citizenship.
George had rigged it for me; all I had to do in exchange was this one job.
Kill Zeralda, and I was finished with this line of work for good. I'd be
back on the submarine by first light, a freshly minted US citizen, heading
home to Boston and a glittering future.
It felt quite strange going into a friendly country undercover, but at
this very moment, the president of Algeria was in Washington DC, and Mr.
Bush didn't want to spoil his trip. Given the seven-hour time difference,
Bouteflika and his wife were probably getting ready for a night out on the
Tex Mex with Mr. and Mrs. B. He was in the States because he wanted the
Americans to see Algeria as their North African ally in this new war against
terrorism. But I was sure that political support wasn't the only item on the
agenda. Algeria also wanted to be seen as an important source of
hydrocarbons to the West. Not just oil, but gas: they had vast reserves of
it.
Only fifty or so metres to go now, and the depot was plainly visible
above us, bathed in yellow light from the fenceline,where arc lights on
poles blazed into the compound. We knew from Lotfi's recce that the two huge
tanks to the left of the compound were full of kerosene 28, a domestic
heating fuel.
On the other side of the compound, still within the fence line and
about thirty metres from the tanks, was a line of maybe a dozen tankers, all
likely to be fully laden, ready for delivery in the morning. Along the spit,
to the right of the compound as I looked at it, were the outer walls of
Zeralda's holiday house, silhouetted by the light of the depot.
Two.
The view of the target area slowly disappeared as we neared the beach
and moved into shadow. Sand rasped against rubber as we hit bottom. The
three of us jumped out, each grabbing a rope handle and dragging the Zodiac
up the beach. Water sloshed about inside my dry bag and trainers.
When Lotfi signalled that we were far enough from the waterline, we
pulled and pushed the boat so that it faced in the right direction for a
quick getaway, then started to unlash our kit using the ambient light from
the high ground.
A car zoomed along the road above us, about two hundred metres away on
the far side of the peninsula. I checked the traser on my left wrist;
instead of luminous paint, it used a gas that was constantly giving off
enough light to see the watch face. It was twenty-four minutes past
midnight; the driver could afford to put his foot down on a deserted stretch
of coast.
I unzipped my bergen from the protective rubber bag in which it had
been cocooned and pulled it out on to the sand. The backpacks were cheap and
nasty counterfeit Berghaus jobs, made in Indonesia and flogged to Lotfi in a
Cairo bazaar, but they gave us vital extra protection: if their contents got
wet we'd be out of business.
The other two did the same to theirs, and we knelt in the shadows each
checking our own kit. In my case this meant making sure that the fuse wire
and homemade OBIs hadn't been damaged, or worse still waterlogged. The
oil-burning incendiaries were basically four one-foot square Tupperware
boxes with a soft steel liner, into the bottom of which I'd drilled a number
of holes. Each device contained a mix of sodium chlorate, iron powder and
asbestos, which would have been hard to find in Europe, these days, but was
available in Egypt by the shed load The ingredients were mixed together in
two-pound lots and pressed into the Tupperware.
All four OBIs were going to be linked together in a long daisy chain by
one-metre lengths of fuse wire. Light enough to float on top of oil, they
would burn fiercely until, cumulatively, they generated enough heat to
ignite the fuel. How long that would take depended on the fuel. With petrol
it would be almost instantaneous the fuse wire would do the trick. But the
combustion point of heavier fuels can be very high. Even diesel's boiling
point is higher than that of water, so it takes a lot of heat to get it
sparked up.
But first we had to get to the fuel. All fuel tanks are designed with
outer perimeter bungs', walls or dykes whose height and thickness depend on
the amount of fuel that will have to be contained in the event of a rupture.
The ones that we were going to breach were surrounded by a double-thick wall
of concrete building blocks, just over a metre in height and about four away
from the tanks.
Lotfi and Hubba-Hubba had been rehearsing their tasks so often they
would have been able to do them blindfolded -which, in fact, we had done
some of the time during rehearsals. Training blindfolded gives you
confidence if you have to carry out a job in the dark, such as dealing with
a weapon stoppage, but it also makes you quicker and more effective even
when you can see.
The attack theory was simple. Lotfi was going to start by cutting out a
section of the wall, three blocks wide and two down, facing towards the
target house. Hubba-Hubba had turned out to be quite an expert with
explosives. He would place his two frame charges, one on each tank, on the
side facing the sea and opposite where I was going to lay out and prepare my
four OBIs.
As the frame charges cut a two-foot square hole in each tank, the fuel
would spew out and be contained in the bung. The ignited OBIs would float on
top of the spillage, burning in sequence along the daisy chain, so that we
had constant heat and constant flame, which would eventually ignite the lake
of fuel beneath them. We knew that the kerosene fuel oil rising in the bung
would spark up when the second of the four OBIs ignited, which should happen
as the fuel level reached just less than half-way up the bung wall. But we
wanted to do more than just ignite the fuel within the bung: we wanted fire
everywhere.
The burning fuel would disgorge through the cut-out section in the wall
and out on to the ground like lava from a volcano. The ground sloped,
towards the target house. As soon as Lotfi had shown me the sketch maps from
his recce, I'd seen that we could cut the house off from the road with a
barrier of flame. I hoped I was right; two hundred policemen lived in
barracks just three kilometres along the road to Oran, and if they were
called to the scene we didn't want to become their new best mates.
Just as importantly, we could make what happened tonight look like a
local job an attack from one of the many fundamentalist groups that had
waged war on each other here for years. That was why we'd had to make sure
the equipment was homemade, why all our weapons were of Russian manufacture,
and our clothing of local origin. The traser might not be regular Islamic
fundamentalist issue, but if anyone got close enough to me to notice my
watch, then I really was in the shit, so what did it matter? In less than
two hours from now, Zeralda would be dead, and the finger of blame would be
pointing at Algeria's very own Islamic extremists, who were still making
this the world's most dangerous holiday venue. They didn't like anyone
unless he was one of their own. We hoped that our attack would be blamed on
the GIA, the Armed Islamic Group. They were probably the cruel lest and most
screwed-up bunch I'd ever come across. These guys had been trained and
battle-hardened in places like Afghanistan, where they'd fought with the
mujahadeen against the Russians. After that, they'd fought in Chechnya, and
then in Bosnia and anywhere else they felt Muslims were getting fucked over.
Now they were back in Algeria and this time it was personal. They wanted an
Islamic state with the Qur'an as its constitution, and they wanted it today.
In the eyes of these people, even OBL (Osama Bin Laden ) was a wimp. In
1994, in a grim precursor of attacks to come, GIA hijacked an Air France
plane in Algiers, intending to crash it in the middle of Paris. It would
have worked if it hadn't been for French anti-terrorist forces attacking the
plane as it refuelled, killing them all.
Unlike me, all the equipment in my bergen was dry. I peeled off my dry
bag, and immediately felt colder as the air started to attack my wet
clothes. Too bad, there was nothing I could do about it. I checked chamber
on my Russian Makharov pistol, pulling back the top slide just a few
millimetres and making sure, for maybe the fourth and last time on this job,
that the round was just exposed as it sat in the chamber ready to be fired.
I glanced to the side to see the other two doing the same. I let the top
slide return until it was home tight before applying safe with my thumb,
then thrust the pistol into the internal holster that I'd tucked into the
front of my trousers.
Lotfi was in a good mood.
"Your gun wet too?"
I nodded slowly at his joke and whispered back, as I shouldered my
bergen, "Pistol, it's a pistol or weapon. Never, ever a gun."
He smiled back and didn't reply. He didn't have to: he'd known it would
get me ticking.
I made my final check: my two mags were still correctly placed in the
double mag holder on my left hip. They were facing up in the thick bands of
black elastic that held them onto my belt, with the rounds facing forwards.
That way I would pull down on a mag to release it and they would be facing
the right way to slam into the pistol.
Everyone was now poised to go, but Lotfi still checked" Ready like a
teacher at the airport on a school trip, making everyone show their
passports for the tenth time. We all nodded, and he led the way up to the
high ground. I fell in just behind him.
Lotfi was the one taking us on target because he was the only one who
had been ashore and carried out a CTR [close target recce]. Besides, he was
the one in charge: I was here as the guest European, soon to be American,
terrorist.
There was a gentle rise of about forty metres from the tip of the
peninsula where we'd landed to the target area. We zigzagged over sand and
rock. It was good to get moving so I could warm up a little.
We stopped just before the flat ground and sat and waited for a vehicle
to make its way along the road. Lotfi checked it out. No one said it, but we
were all worried about the police being stationed so close, and whether,
because of the terrorist situation here, they constantly patrolled their
immediate area for security. I was still happy to stop and catch my breath.
My nose was starting to run a little.
Lotfi dropped down below the ledge and whispered in Arabic to
Hubba-Hubba before coming to me: "Just a car, no police yet."
The wet T-shirt under my pullover was a bit warmer now, but it was just
as uncomfortable. So what? It wouldn't be long before it was black tea and
diesel fumes again, and, for about the first time in my life, I'd be pro
actively planning a future.
I pulled back my pullover sleeve and glanced down at my traser. 00:58.
I thought of Mr. and Mrs. B. Just like the Bouteflikas, they too were
probably having a wash and brush-up while they talked about what on earth
they were going to talk about over the Tex Mex. Probably something like,
"Oh, I hear you have lots of gasoline in your country? We wouldn'tmind some
of that, instead of you giving it to the Italians to fill up their Fiats.
And, oh, by the way, there'll be one Algerian fewer for you to govern when
you get back. But don't worry, he was a bad 'un."
As the sound of the vehicle faded in the direction of Oran, we all
raised our heads slowly above the lip to scan the rock and sandy ground. The
constant noise of crickets, or whatever they called them here, rattled into
the night.
The fuel compound was an oasis of yellow light and bright enough to
make me squint until my eyes adjusted. It was just under two hundred metres
to my half-left. From my perspective the tanks were sitting side by side,
surrounded by the bung. To the right of them was the not-so-neat row of fuel
trucks.
The perimeter of the compound was guarded by a three-metre high chain
link fence, sagging in places where the trucks had backed into it over the
years.
In the far corner of the compound, by the gate that faced the road, was
the security hut. It was no more than a large garden shed. The security was
for fire watch just as much as for stopping the trucks and fuel disappearing
during the night; the depot had no automatic fire system in the event of a
leak or explosion. Lotfi told us there was a solitary guy sitting inside,
and if the whole thing sparked up it would presumably be his job to get on
the phone.
That was good for us, because it meant we didn't have to spend time
neutralizing any fire-fighting apparatus or alarms. What was bad was the
police barracks. A complete fuck-up on our side was only a phone call and
three Ks away. If we got caught it would be serious shit. Algeria wasn't
exactly known for upholding human rights, no one would be coming to help us,
no matter what we said, and terrorists were routinely whipped to death in
this neck of the woods.
Three.
The 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
rendered brick, painted a colour 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
towards 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 tea bag business paid Zeralda well
enough for him to have his own little playpen.
Double doors from quite a lot of the rooms opened on to 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 metal led 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 per cent 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 she mags that would hide our faces when we hit the
hut. I wouldn't be taking part directly because of my skin colour 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 school-trip
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 towards the fence
line It was pointless running or trying to avoid being in the open for the
thirty or so metres: 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 fuck it, 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 trousers 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 trainers moving over the rocky ground, and the rhythmic scrape
of the nylon berg ens 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 a metre 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
upwards in a vertical line. Lotfi re-positioned 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 slab of liquorice 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
kilometres away, and if I went left I would pass Cap Ferrat and eventually
hit Algiers, the capital, about four hundred Ks 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 kit. When he was through as well, we eased the
fence back into place.
We put our berg ens on the ground behind the shed, to the accompaniment
of the monotonous Arabic TV voice, and the old guy still gob bing off in
French.
It flashed through my mind that I had no idea what had been happening
in Afghanistan this past week. Were the US 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 she mags
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 top slide 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 was
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 half-way through
a conversation. I listened to the French waffle, the TV, the buzz of the
mozzie things around the lights, and our breathing through the cotton of the
she mags 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 and 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 she
mags I saw a sixty-something bloke, in baggy, well-worn trousers 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 boy's balding head and walked around him using the weapon as a
pivot stick. He reached for the phone and ripped it from its socket. 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 good news from the US Air Force as tracer streamed
uselessly into the air.
The old boy 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 gaffer tape he could have been a Christmas present.
The two of them walked out and closed the door behind them and we
retrieved the berg ens Things were looking good. Train hard, fight easy had
always been shoved down my neck, 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 tyres, heading for the tanks no more
than fifty metres away. The trucks were to my left, dirty minging old things
with rust streaks down the sides of their tanks from years of spillage. If
the sand and dust now stuck to them was 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-metre spool of safety fuse, looking a bit like a reel of
green washing line. All the kit 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 mate, God, started to play stone masons 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 metres away. This was
a problem because of the noise Lotfi was making. But, fuck it, 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 mate, the evil eye protector, assembled and checked the frame charges
from his bergen. These were very basic gizmos, eight two-foot-long strips of
plastic explosive, two inches wide, an inch thick, taped on to 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 dodgy-looking Russian
flash detonators into the PEon 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 kids' TV. 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 down to 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 50p piece that worked
very much like a kitchen egg-timer. They were manufactured as key rings to
remind you of when your 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 to 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 on to 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 four-by-two.
I laid the green safety fuse alongside the OBIs that I'd placed in the
sand a metre 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.
Once an OBI was ignited by the fuse it would burn for about two and a
half minutes. That meant that as soon as the first one sparked up there
would be about another minute and thirty before the next one did. Which
meant two of them burning together for a minute, and by the time the first
had burnt out, the third would be ignited, and so on to the fourth. I needed
the sort of heat generated by two of these things burning at once to make
sure the fuel ignited.
I opened the Tupperware lids of the OBIs and fed the safety fuse over
the exposed mixture in each of the boxes. They were now ready to party.
Hubba-Hubba was looking over his shoulder as he moved slowly backwards
towards me, unreeling another spool of fuse wire as he went. This was now
connected to one of the frame charges via two detonators. It wasn't the same
kind of fuse I'd been using. This was 'fuse instantaneous', which goes off
with the sound of a gunshot because the burn is so fast. There's a little
ridge that runs along the plastic coating so at night you can always
distinguish it from the straightforward ClintEastwood stuff. He cut the fuse
from his spool without a word, and went back to do the same with the second
charge.
The PIRA timer unit would initiate the fuse instantaneous, which would
burn at warp speed to a four-way connector, a three inch by three inch green
plastic box with a hole in each side. I didn't know what the small worn-out
aluminium plate stuck to its base called it in Russian, but that was the
name I knew it by. All this box did was allow three other lengths of fuse to
be ignited from the one Hubba-Hubba's two lengths of fuse instantaneous to
the two charges, and my safety fuse for the OBIs.
Hubba-Hubba was now unreeling the fuse instantaneous from the second
charge back towards me as I took the safety fuse and cut it from the reel
six inches back from the first OBI, making sure the cut was straight so the
maximum amount of powder was exposed to ignite it in the four-way connector.
I then pushed the end of it into one of the rubber recesses, giving it a
half-turn so that the teeth inside gripped the plastic coating. Hubba-Hubba
placed the two fuses instantaneous next to me and went to help Lotfi.
I cut his two lengths of fuse in the same way before feeding the lines
into the connector as the sound of Lotfi's rubber mallet hitting his chisel
filled the air and the navigation lights of an airliner miles up floated
silently over us.
I checked the three lines that were, so far, in the connector to ensure
the three lines into it were secure before cutting a metre length of the
ridged fuse instantaneous and placing it in the last free hole. This was the
length that went to the timer unit, a three-inch-thick, postcard-sized
wooden box.
Then, as I lay on my stomach and started to prepare, a vehicle drove
along the road from the direction of Oran.
The noise got louder as it came round to the base of the peninsula. I
could tell by the engine note and the sound of the tyres that it wasn't on
the road any more, it was going cross-country.
Shit, police. I heard a torrent of Arabic whispers from the other two a
few metres away. I got their attention.
"Lotfi, Lotfi! Take a look."
He got on to his knees, then slowly raised his head. Instinctively I
checked that my Makharov was still in place.
I got up and looked over their heads. The vehicle was a civilian 4x4,
heading for the house. The headlights were on full beam and bounced up and
down on the garage doors set in the compound wall. As it got closer to the
building the driver sounded the horn.
Shit, what was happening? My information was that no one would be
moving in or out of the house tonight. George had said that when we hit this
place Zeralda would definitely be in there. He'd assured me the intelligence
was good quality.
The wagon stopped and I could just about hear some rhythmic guitar
music forcing its way out of the open windows. Was the int wrong? Had the
target just arrived, instead of coming in yesterday? Was this another group
of mates come to join in the fun? Or was it just a fresh batch of Czechs or
Romanians with bottle-blonde hair being ferried in for the next session?
Whatever, I wanted to be in the house for no more than half an hour, not
caught up directing a cast of thousands.
I watched as the garage shutter rattled open. I couldn't tell if it had
been operated electronically or manually. Then the vehicle disappeared
inside and the shutter closed.
We got back to business. With the timer unit in my hand and the bergen
on my back, I climbed over the bung, feeling more than a little relieved.
The other two were still attacking the wall and Hubba-Hubba seemed to
lose patience, kicking it with the flat of his foot to free a stubborn
block.
I opened the top of the timer unit and gave it one more check.
Basically it consisted of a fifteen-metre length of double-stranded electric
flex coming