Liberation Day

Chapter 3

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 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.

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 a half 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 backward toward 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 Clint Eastwood 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 aluminum plate stuck to its base was called 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 toward 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 a jet 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 three-foot 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 around to the base of the peninsula. I could tell by the engine note and the sound of the tires that it wasn’t on the road anymore, it was going cross-country.

Shit, police.

I heard a torrent of Arabic whispers from the other two a few yards away. I got their attention. “Lotfi, Lotfi! Take a look.”

He got onto 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 high beam and bounced up and down on the garage doors set into 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 pals come to join in the fun? Or was it just a fresh batch of Czechs or Romanians with bottle-blond 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-yard length of double-stranded electric flex coming out of a hole drilled in its side. Attached to the other end was a flash det, a small aluminum cylinder about the size of a third of a cigarette, that fitted over the fuse instantaneous. To keep it in one piece in transit, I had rolled up the flex and put a rubber band around it. Inside the box there was a twelve-volt battery beside the Parkway timer, the small rectangular type with the positive and negative terminals on top and next to each other. Both items were glued to the bottom of the box.

Soldered flat onto the timer unit was a small panel pin, protruding like a minute hand beyond the dial of the Parkway. It was no more than half an inch long, and had been roughened with emery cloth to make a good electrical contact. Also soldered onto it was one of the two strands of flex that came into the box. Another panel pin, which had also been emery-clothed, was sticking out from the bottom of the box, between the Parkway timer and the battery at the 0 on the Parkway dial. That, too, had a small length of wire soldered onto it, leading to the negative terminal of the battery. The other strand of flex was soldered directly to the positive.

The Parkway wasn’t set, so I’d pushed a wedge of rubber eraser down over the vertical pin to stop the two making contact. If they did, it would complete the circuit and initiate the flash det.

I lay there for another ten minutes or so until the other two had finished. It would have been a bit quicker if I’d gone and helped, but you never, ever lose control of the initiation device until you’re ready to leave the area. I wanted to know that every second we were by the tanks, the eraser was still covering that panel pin. The faint sound of Al Jazeera floated through the air. I could feel the wetness of my clothes cold against my skin now that I’d stopped moving.

It was time to connect the flash det and the timer to the device. I held up my hand and showed the boys the wooden box. They knew what was about to happen, and got up and left for the cut in the fence line. I knelt down by the fuse instantaneous to fit the flash det, checking the eraser was still in place before feeding the fuse into the small aluminum tube. I made sure the fuse end couldn’t get any farther inside, so it would initiate, then taped the whole bunch in place. There was a crimping tool that would have done the job much better, but it had to look low-tech.

I then unwound the wire from the elastic as I climbed back over the bung. This was very bad drill. I had connected the initiation device to the charges and was climbing about: if I dropped it, I’d turn the whole job into a gang fuck as the charges took out the tanks as well as me. But hell, this was the only way to do it tonight as far as I was concerned.

I lay as flat as I could in the sand, even forcing my heels down, with the extended wires running over the bung, before removing the top of the box.

To arm the device, I turned the Parkway dial to 30. Then I gave it another one or two minutes for luck, all very high-tech stuff.

I let go of the dial and could hear the ticking as the spring began to unwind. I had tested this unit over and over again and, give or take five seconds, it was always on time over the half-hour. The panel pin that was attached flat to the dial had maybe an inch and a half to travel before connecting with its vertical twin.

All that remained was for me to take off the rubber wedge and replace the wooden lid on the timer unit so no dirt could find its way between the two pins. I joined the others. All being well, fragments of the timer unit would confirm that tonight’s devastation was the work of an old and bold ex-muj who’d been up to no good. It would just underline what the security guy told them.

As we went past the hut the door was open and an Al Jazeera newscaster was taking us through more fuzzy black-and-white pictures of the night’s events in Afghanistan. We made our way to the cut in the fence line and Lotfi pointed to his shemag as a signal for me to cover up. I tucked the cotton around my mouth and saw the security guy, still bound up with tape, now lying in the sand below the lip. He had shit his baggy pants big-time, but he’d live through the night.

Hubba-Hubba knelt down and gave him a few highlights in rapid Arabic from the GIA party political broadcast, then at Lotfi’s nod we all left him praying noisily to himself through the duct tape and ran directly toward the house.

Lotfi pulled out the alloy caving ladder from his bergen and unrolled it in the sand. Hubba-Hubba moved around to the other side of the wall facing the road to check the garage door. Why climb the wall if there was an easier way through?

I gave the heavy wrought-iron door handle a twist. It turned, but the door wouldn’t budge. Hubba-Hubba came back shaking his head. We were going to need the caving ladder after all. Made from two lengths of steel cable with alloy tube rungs in between, the whole thing was about nine inches wide and fifteen feet long, designed for cavers to get up and down potholes, or whatever they do down there.

Lotfi brought out the two poles we’d picked up at the hardware store, the telescopic jobs you can stick a squeegee on if you want to clean high windows. Like all the other gear except for the timing unit, this should be coming back with us; but if anything got left behind, it couldn’t have a Home Depot label on it.

He taped them together to make one long pole, just slightly shorter than the wall itself. Lotfi used it to lift the large steel hook that was attached to one end of the wire ladder, and eased it over the top of the wall.

I checked chamber on my Makharov yet again, and the others copied. Then, after a shemag check, we were ready to go. I stepped closer. “Remember, if we have a situation — no head shots.” I’d been boring these two senseless for days about this, but it was imperative we didn’t mess up Zeralda’s head. I didn’t know why, but I was starting to make an educated — well, sort of — guess.

I checked traser: with luck, just over twenty-two minutes left before the tanks became infernos. I tapped Hubba-Hubba on the shoulder. “Okay, mate?”

He started to climb, with me steadying the waving ladder under him. Caving ladders aren’t climbed conventionally; you twist them through ninety degrees so that they run between your legs and you use your heels on the rungs, not your toes. Back at the mining camp, watching these two trying to get up and down had been like a scene in a slapstick comedy. Now, with so much practice, they glided up and down like — chimpanzees.

Hubba-Hubba disappeared over the top of the wall and I heard a faint grunt as he landed on the other side. Then came the slow metallic creak of bolts being gently pried open, while Lotfi retrieved and rolled up the ladder before stashing it back in his bergen along with the poles.

The door opened and I moved through into a small courtyard, hearing at once the gentle trickle of one of the ornamental fountains. I couldn’t see it, but knew from the sat (satellite) photos that it was in front of me somewhere.

Lotfi followed close behind me. It was very dark in here, with no lights on at all on this side of the house. The building’s irregular shape meant that light from another part of the building could easily be hidden. If we hadn’t seen the car turn up, we wouldn’t have known there was anyone at home.

I felt leaves against my shemag as I stood by the compound wall, looking and listening as my face became wet with condensation once more. Hubba-Hubba closed the door behind us, bolting it shut so that if we screwed up the job and Zeralda was able to make a run for it, it would take a while for him to escape.

Once they had gotten their bergens back on, I was going to lead. I wanted to be in control of my own destiny inside this cage. Pulling out my Makharov, I followed the building around to the right. I still couldn’t see anything, but I knew from the sat pictures that the floor of the courtyard was paved with large tiles in bold blue North African patterns.

We left the soothing sound of the fountain behind and rounded a corner, past a set of French windows behind closed wooden shutters. Maybe four yards in front of me, light spilled from a second set of doors onto a wrought-iron garden set, with a mosaic pattern on the circular table. I stopped to try to control my breathing, and heard faint, intermittent laughter ahead.

I eased off my bergen and left it on the ground, then got down on my knees and put out my hand to make sure the others were going to hold it right there.

I crawled to within a couple of feet of the French windows, and could suddenly hear guitars and cymbals. I smiled when I recognized Pink Floyd.

I lay down and craned my neck until I could see what was happening beyond the glass. As soon as I’d done it, I wished I hadn’t. The whole room was a haze of cigarette smoke. Zeralda was naked and covered in either oil or sweat, I couldn’t make out which, and his fat, gray-haired body and almost woman-sized breasts were wobbling about as he wrestled on a big circular bed. In the blue corner was a very frightened boy who couldn’t have been any more than about fourteen, with a crew cut and ripped T-shirt.

In all there were three boys in the room, all in different states of undress, and another adult, younger than Zeralda, in his thirties maybe, with greased-back hair, still clothed in jeans and white shirt but with bare feet. He seemed to be a spectator for now, sitting in a chair, smiling and smoking as he watched the one-sided bout. The other boys looked as scared as their friend, starting to realize what they’d let themselves in for.

I moved my head away to have a think about what I’d just seen. It had never crossed our minds that Zeralda’s fun and games involved boys; we’d been told it was women.

When I was far enough from the window I stood and walked back to the others. Our heads closed in and I quickly checked traser: elevenish minutes to go before the device went off. Before that happened we needed to be in on target and for Zeralda to be dead. That way, we’d have contained the situation before there was any sort of follow-up by the fire brigade or, even worse, the two hundred policemen.

The nylon of their bergens rustled gently as they moved in for me to whisper. “He’s in there with another man and three young boys.”

Hubba-Hubba raised his shovel-like hands in disbelief. “Boys? No women? Just boys? Young boys?”

“Yep.”

There was a collective Arabic mutter of disapproval. Hubba-Hubba could only just about control his breathing. “I will do it, let me kill him.”