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
