Liberation Day

Chapter 2

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 sneakers.

When Lotfi signaled 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 gear using the ambient light from the high ground.

A car zoomed along the road above us, about two hundred yards away on the far side of the peninsula. I checked 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 onto the sand. The backpacks were cheap and nasty counterfeit Berghaus jobs, made in Indonesia and sold 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 gear. In my case this meant making sure that the fuse wire and homemade OBIs (oil-burning incendiaries) hadn’t been damaged, or worse still, gotten waterlogged. The OBIs 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 truckload. The ingredients were mixed together in two-pound batches and pressed into the Tupperware.

All four OBIs were going to be linked together in a long daisy chain by three-foot 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 gasoline 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 ignited.

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 three feet in height and about four yards 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 toward 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 28 fuel oil rising in the bung would ignite when the second of the four OBIs ignited, which should happen as the fuel level reached just less than halfway 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 onto the ground like lava from a volcano. The ground sloped, toward 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 miles along the road to Oran, and if they were called to the scene we didn’t want to become their new best friends.

Just as important, 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 vacation spot.

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 cruelest 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 antiterrorist forces attacking the plane as it refueled, 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 topslide just a fraction 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 topslide 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 pants.

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 riled.

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 forward. 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 tour guide at the airport with a group 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 yards 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 sweatshirt 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 proactively planning a future.

I pulled back my sweatshirt 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 comb while they discussed 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’t mind 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 guy.”

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 yards 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 ten-foot-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 ignited 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 miles 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.