We kept paddling toward 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 guys and both had the same haircut — shiny, jet-black buzz cuts with a left-hand parting — and very neat mustaches. 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 soccer team.
“Four-four-two,” Lotfi had said, smiling. “I will supply the back four and goalkeeper, Hubba-Hubba the midfield and two strikers.” I’d discovered he was a Manchester United fan, and knew more than I did about the English Premier League, which wasn’t difficult. The only thing I knew about soccer was that, like Lotfi, more than seventy-five percent of Manchester United’s fans didn’t even live in the U.K.
They weren’t 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 jabber on about their time in Europe or when they’d gone on vacation 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 gotten the okay 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 detailed updates 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. It was a small, blue-beaded hand with a blue eye in the center 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 7-Eleven-type supermarkets and a domestic fuel company, all based in and around Oran. We were heading for his vacation home, where, so the int (intelligence) 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 number 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 three hundred and fifty 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’s interests. Who cared? All I cared about was keeping totally focused 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 U.S. 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, D.C., 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 of 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, but gas: they had vast reserves of it.
Only fifty or so yards to go now, and the depot was plainly visible above us, bathed in yellow light from the fence line, where arc lights on poles blazed into the compound. We knew from Lotfi’s recce (reconnaissance) that the two huge tanks to the left of the compound were full of kerosene 28, a domestic heating fuel.
On the other side of the compound, still within the fence line and about thirty yards from the tanks, was a line of maybe a dozen tankers, all likely to be fully laden, ready for delivery in the morning. Along the spit, to the right of the compound as I looked at it, were the outer walls of Zeralda’s vacation house, silhouetted by the light of the depot.
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.