McNab, Andy - Nick Stone 05 - Liberation Day

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Liberation Day

Andy McNab

Dedicated to all victims of

terrorism

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,

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LiberationDaybyAndyMcNabDedicatedtoallvictimsofterrorismOne.TUESDAY,6NOVEMBER2001,23:16hrsThesubmarinehadbrokensurfacetenminutesearlier,anditsdeckwasstillslipperybeneathmyfeet.Dullredtorchlightglistenedontheblacksteelafewmetresaheadofmeasfiveoftheboat'screwfeverishlypreparedtheZodiacinflatable.Assoo...

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McNab, Andy - Nick Stone 05 - Liberation Day

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