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.