Brute Force

94

Her name was Layla Hamdi. She was Palestinian, and she ran the training camp in Ajdabiya.

Lynn tilted his head in my direction. 'Eight hundred kilometres along the coast – halfway between here and Egypt.'

Mansour had more. 'In October 1985, after the PLO was attacked by Israeli planes in Tunis, the various factions that made up the PLO had decided to accept a clandestine offer from Gaddafi to relocate many of their significant activities, including weapons instruction, to Libya.

'Since Libya was already firmly on the West's radar screens for its support of foreign terrorist organizations like PIRA, the PLO's move here was picked up and tracked. But the Ajdabiya training camp and its leading proponents, including Layla, Lesser's teacher, weren't.'

He was happy to talk about it now, he said, because all of this was very firmly history; one of the many aspects of Libya's past that the country's Great Leader had freely renounced in the wake of the Lockerbie settlement.

Believe that and you'd believe anything. Mansour was waffling because he knew that the longer he talked, the more time he bought for himself. I'd have been doing the same.

Time for us, on the other hand, was ticking on. It was coming up to 5 a.m.: first light soon. Decisions were going to have to be made.

Layla Hamdi, he said, had trained as a chemist at UCLA, was incredibly gifted academically, and had shown no signs of radicalism until both her parents were killed by a stray IDF tank-shell that ripped through their quiet apartment in Gaza. The Israelis never apologized – Layla's parents were merely collateral damage in the Palestinian homelands; reason enough on its own, I thought, to turn Layla away from life as an academic and to the Cause.

When she returned from the USA she signed up with Force 17, another PLO spin-off, and soon discovered she had a natural skill as a bomb-maker.

Pulling in disparate techniques in the art of explosive-charge construction from right across the Middle East – including those taught by the British to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan – Layla rose through the ranks of the PLO to become its bomb-maker supreme. 'In the never-ending game of new countermeasures by us and then counter-countermeasures by you that characterized the bomb-maker's world, Layla was the person who kept the PLO and its fellow travellers state-of-the-art.'

She started out as Lesser's mentor and became his lover. Not long after that, she became his wife. 'When she first met him, Layla was already in her mid-thirties. Lesser was still in his late twenties, the tall muscled Irish boy with the unkempt hair.'

I pictured him in bomb class. He must have stuck out a mile in the company of his fellow students: Latinos from the Shining Path, Muj from Afghanistan, Arabs, and the odd Red Brigade Italian. Fuck knows what he and Layla had had in common, beyond bomb-making and sticking it to imperialist, bourgeois, capitalist regimes.

According to Mansour, it had been love at first sight. The Palestinian and the Irishman. It sounded like a bad joke . . . When Gaddafi did his deal with the West, one of the conditions was that he gave up his support of terrorism. The bomb-making school was shut down and Layla suddenly found herself out of a job.

Now in her mid-fifties, and not in the best of health, she had decided to stay in Libya rather than go back to the West Bank. I couldn't say I blamed her. Ajdabiya, whatever that was like, couldn't be any worse than the Gaza Strip. Well, we were about to find out.

'How long to get there?'

'By car? If you take the coast road, maybe eight hours. But for you, that would not be an option. It runs through the oil fields and there are many checkpoints. Without papers, you would not get through.'

'Is there another way?'

'There is the desert road, but it will add another four hours to the journey. There are still checkpoints, but fewer. And the guards are more likely to accept baksheesh. The road, however, is still dangerous.'

'How so?'

'There are potholes – deep ones; deep enough to shatter an axle. And after a storm, the sand can bury several kilometres of tarmac, forcing you off-road. You would need a four-by-four, at the very least.'

Mansour must have realized, the second he'd opened his mouth, that he'd walked straight into that one. He added almost immediately: 'Of course, Al-Inn, you are at liberty to take my car. In fact, it would be an honour . . .'

I turned to Lynn. 'Grab whatever you think might help us on the road: a map, even if Mansour's Q7 has sat nav; water – lots of it; and food – as much as you can find, so we can eat on the move.'

I packed the revolver in my day sack and pocketed the Makarov along with Mansour's mobile phone.

Mansour told me where in his study he kept his spare mags and ammo. I went and took all I could fit into the day sack.

It was there that I also found his money – just as Lynn had predicted: a briefcase full of dollars – roughly ten grand's worth. Ten grand would go a long way in the baksheesh stakes – all the way between here and Johannesburg, if need be.

Lynn was still emptying the fridge of water bottles when I got back. I ripped at the clingfilm to release Mansour.

He rubbed his wrists. 'What are you going to do with me?'

I tapped my watch. 'You've got five minutes to get dressed. Then you're coming with us.'