“You make jokes to cover up so many things, don’t you?”
I shrugged, fighting back another stupid remark.
“Kismet, justice, mercy, and compassion. You have been studying a little bit more than that article since we last spoke, haven’t you? Here is something else for you to think about.” He turned back to the TV, sat on his heels, and rocked slightly from side to side to adjust himself. He looked completely ridiculous in his shower cap, but spoke with such dignity I found myself hanging on his every word. “In Sura 28:88, the Qur’an says: ‘And cry not unto any other god along with Allah. There is no god save Him.’
“Now where have we heard these words before? We sound the same, and we are the same, in so many ways, except that the Bible has stories about our God written by many people, sometimes hundreds of years after the event, while the Qur’an holds God’s very words, spoken directly to the Prophet.
“That’s why one in five people on the planet is a Muslim, Nick. We feel closer to God.”
I shifted myself away from the wall. “Well, ask him to keep an eye on us over the weekend, will you? We might need a hand.”
“Of course. But you know true believers are always triumphant over nonbelievers, in the end. Maybe you will be able to put a good word in yourself, one day.”
Chapter 18
I went into the kitchen. Hubba-Hubba was rubber-glove deep in dishwashing suds as he cleaned the coffee things.
“See you down there.”
He nodded as he tackled a stubborn coffee stain. His aunt would have been proud of him. The sounds of Lotfi at prayer floated in from the living room as I lifted the trapdoor and went down the wooden ladder into the musty coolness of the cellar. It wasn’t that big, maybe three yards by three, but high enough to stand up in. In the far corner was a coarse green blanket laid out with all our equipment in very straight lines.
Hubba-Hubba really did like order. Squared up with the edge of the blanket were our radios, binoculars, and the drug packs we’d need to subdue the hawallada.
I knelt in the dust of the stone floor and checked the radios first. They were small yellow Sony walkie-talkies, the sort of things designed for parents to keep track of their kids on ski trips or in the mall. We had two each, one on our bodies, one as a backup in the trunk of each car. If there was a drama with anyone’s radio, they could either get their own spare or go to another vehicle, take the key hidden behind the rear license plate, and help themselves to a replacement.
The Sonys only had a communications distance of about a mile and a half, virtually line of sight. It would have been better to have a longer-distance set in case we got split up during the follow, but at least it meant we couldn’t be listened to out of that range. Taped to the bottom of each were eight AA batteries: two batches of standby power. Attached to a plug was a cell phone, hands-free with a plastic earclip. The jack was taped firmly in place so it didn’t fall out when someone was sending, because Murphy’s Law dictated that that was exactly when it would get pulled out, and we’d be in loud time, treating the world to a running commentary on what we were up to.
The row of three rectangular gray plastic cases, each about seven inches long and three wide, contained enough anesthetic to send an elephant to sleep. They were disguised as diabetics’ insulin kits. I opened one to check the thin green autopen, sunk into its hard plastic recess. It was already loaded with a needle and cartridge. Also embedded into the plastic were another three needles that simply clicked onto the bottom of the pen, and another three cartridges. Once you had it against the target’s skin, you pressed the trigger, and the spring inside would shoot the needle forward and inject the drug, which in this case wasn’t insulin but ketamine. Alongside them was a card holding six diaper pins, with big pink plastic caps. The hawallada wouldn’t be too worried about the color: the pins were to prevent their tongues falling down their throats and choking them. Depressed ventilation was a side effect of this stuff, so their airway had to be kept clear at all times.
I started to check the other two insulin kits, making sure that each also contained a scratched and worn steel Medic Alert bracelet as cover, warning anyone who was interested enough to check that we were, strangely, all diabetic.
Ketamine hydrochloride — street name “Special K” or “K”—is still used as a general anesthetic for children, persons of poor health, and small furry animals. It is also a “dissociative anesthetic,” separating perception from sensation. Higher doses, the sort we were going to give, produce a hallucinogenic effect. It can cause the user to feel very far away from his or her body. They enter what some people call a “K-hole”; it has been compared to a near-death experience, with the sensation of rising above one’s body and finding it difficult to move. I had that feeling most mornings, but the amount these hawallada would be getting, they’d be waving through the space shuttle window.
In powder form, ketamine looks a little like cocaine; street users snort it, mix it in drinks, or smoke it with marijuana. Our hawallada were going to be getting it in liquid form, jabbed into the muscle mass of their ass where there was little risk of us hitting a blood vessel and causing permanent damage.
The three sets of green binos were small x8, the sort that fits into a coat pocket. We needed them in case we couldn’t close in on the boat for the trigger and had to get eyes on the target from a distance.
All these items were important, but none more so than the dark blue plastic cylinder that lay at the center of the blanket. About eighteen inches long and three in diameter, it came apart if you twisted it in the middle. A length of fishing line had been fed through a small hole that we’d burnt with a hot skewer just by the join, and was held in position by a strip of insulation tape on the outside of the casing, which had been folded back on itself to make a tab for easy removal.
The cylinder looked like it had come from a stationery shop, and was normally used for storing rolled-up drawings. Now it was full of some very exotic HE (high explosive) taken from a consignment made in Iran and sent to GIA in Algeria, but intercepted by the Egyptians on the way. I’d collected it at the same time as the insulin kits from the DOP, when I first got in-country.
Like everything else on this job, the components from which the pipe bomb was constructed were normal everyday items that could be bought cheaply and without raising eyebrows. Hubba-Hubba had bought all the supplies he needed from hardware stores: wooden clothespins, emery paper, thumbtacks, a small soldering set, wire, superglue, insulation tape. The last item on the shopping list had come from a phone shop.
I felt a little guilty about giving Hubba-Hubba this task instead of doing it myself. I got on well with these people, yet here I was, jeopardizing his security by making him buy all the supplies and build the device. But that was just how it was; as team commander I wasn’t going to compromise myself if I didn’t have to, and he knew the score.
I heard footsteps behind me as the praying continued above, and saw Hubba-Hubba’s sneakers coming down the ladder. He still had his gloves on, and the cuffs of his rolled-up sleeves were wet. He came and knelt down beside me.
“No offense, mate,” I tapped one of the radios with my right index finger, “but you understand that I have to check everything.”
He nodded. He was a professional; he understood the mantra — check and test, check and test. “You had better take a look at this, then. One of my best, I think.”
He carefully untwisted the cylinder and pulled it apart at the center. The inside was packed with eight pounds of the mustard-colored high explosive, with just enough space in the center for the pager and initiation circuit, which were glued onto a rectangle torn from a cornflakes box. The pager was glued facedown, so that with the back cover removed, the two AA batteries and the rest of the workings were exposed. He laid the opened device back on the blanket.