Liberation Day

by Andy McNab

Genres: Mystery; Thrillers

Synopsis

If Nick Stone wasn't so desperate for his American citizenship, he probably wouldn't have agreed to do this one last job with the CIA. But Carrie is over there and he simply can't refuse the chance of a new life with the woman he loves.

The job seems simple enough - and he is certainly skilled enough. Infiltrate the hostile, violent republic of Algeria, kill a money-laundering businessman, and bring back his severed head.

Stone knows there are some questions you don't ask, but as events spin out of control he realizes there is vital information he hasn't been told. Lurking beneath the glamorous exterior of the south of France is a dirty drugs war - and Stone is thrown into the middle of it. And there he is faced with his toughest dilemma yet...

Release date: January 26, 2021

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 512

Sample

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 trainers.

When Lotfi signalled 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 kit using the ambient light from the high ground.

A car zoomed along the road above us, about two hundred metres away on the far side of the peninsula. I checked the Baby-G 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 on to the sand. The backpacks were cheap and nasty counterfeit Berghaus jobs, made in Indonesia and flogged 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 kit. In my case this meant making sure that the fuse wire and homemade OBIs hadn’t been damaged, or worse still waterlogged. The oil-burning incendiaries 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 shedload. The ingredients were mixed together in two-pound lots and pressed into the Tupperware.

All four OBIs were going to be linked together in a long daisy chain by one-metre lengths of fuse wire. Light enough to float on top of oil, they would burn fiercely until, cumulatively, they generated enough heat to ignite the fuel. How long that would take depended on the fuel. With petrol it would be almost instantaneous – the fuse wire would do the trick. But the combustion point of heavier fuels can be very high. Even diesel’s boiling point is higher than that of water, so it takes a lot of heat to get it sparked up.

But first we had to get to the fuel. All fuel tanks are designed with outer perimeter ‘bungs’, walls or dykes whose height and thickness depend on the amount of fuel that will have to be contained in the event of a rupture. The ones that we were going to breach were surrounded by a double-thick wall of concrete building blocks, just over a metre in height and about four away from the tanks.

Lotfi and Hubba-Hubba had been rehearsing their tasks so often they would have been able to do them blindfolded – which, in fact, we had done some of the time during rehearsals. Training blindfolded gives you confidence if you have to carry out a job in the dark, such as dealing with a weapon stoppage, but it also makes you quicker and more effective even when you can see.

The attack theory was simple. Lotfi was going to start by cutting out a section of the wall, three blocks wide and two down, facing towards the target house. Hubba-Hubba had turned out to be quite an expert with explosives. He would place his two frame charges, one on each tank, on the side facing the sea and opposite where I was going to lay out and prepare my four OBIs.

As the frame charges cut a two-foot square hole in each tank, the fuel would spew out and be contained in the bung. The ignited OBIs would float on top of the spillage, burning in sequence along the daisy chain, so that we had constant heat and constant flame, which would eventually ignite the lake of fuel beneath them. We knew that the kerosene 28 fuel oil rising in the bung would spark up when the second of the four OBIs ignited, which should happen as the fuel level reached just less than half-way up the bung wall. But we wanted to do more than just ignite the fuel within the bung: we wanted fire everywhere.

The burning fuel would disgorge through the cut-out section in the wall and out on to the ground like lava from a volcano. The ground sloped, towards the target house. As soon as Lotfi had shown me the sketch maps from his recce, I’d seen that we could cut the house off from the road with a barrier of flame. I hoped I was right; two hundred policemen lived in barracks just three kilometres along the road to Oran, and if they were called to the scene we didn’t want to become their new best mates.

Just as importantly, we could make what happened tonight look like a local job – an attack from one of the many fundamentalist groups that had waged war on each other here for years. That was why we’d had to make sure the equipment was homemade, why all our weapons were of Russian manufacture, and our clothing of local origin. The Baby-G might not be regular Islamic fundamentalist issue, but if anyone got close enough to me to notice my watch, then I really was in the shit, so what did it matter? In less than two hours from now, Zeralda would be dead, and the finger of blame would be pointing at Algeria’s very own Islamic extremists, who were still making this the world’s most dangerous holiday venue.

They didn’t like anyone unless he was one of their own. We hoped that our attack would be blamed on the GIA, the Armed Islamic Group. They were probably the cruellest and most screwed-up bunch I’d ever come across. These guys had been trained and battle-hardened in places like Afghanistan, where they’d fought with the mujahadeen against the Russians. After that, they’d fought in Chechnya, and then in Bosnia and anywhere else they felt Muslims were getting fucked over. Now they were back in Algeria – and this time it was personal. They wanted an Islamic state with the Quŕān as its constitution, and they wanted it today. In the eyes of these people, even OBL (Osama Bin Laden ) was a wimp. In 1994, in a grim precursor of attacks to come, GIA hijacked an Air France plane in Algiers, intending to crash it in the middle of Paris. It would have worked if it hadn’t been for French anti-terrorist forces attacking the plane as it refuelled, killing them all.

Unlike me, all the equipment in my bergen was dry. I peeled off my dry bag, and immediately felt colder as the air started to attack my wet clothes. Too bad, there was nothing I could do about it. I checked chamber on my Russian Makharov pistol, pulling back the topslide just a few millimetres and making sure, for maybe the fourth and last time on this job, that the round was just exposed as it sat in the chamber ready to be fired. I glanced to the side to see the other two doing the same. I let the topslide return until it was home tight before applying safe with my thumb, then thrust the pistol into the internal holster that I’d tucked into the front of my trousers.

Lotfi was in a good mood. ‘Your gun wet too?’

I nodded slowly at his joke and whispered back, as I shouldered my bergen, ‘Pistol, it’s a pistol or weapon. Never, ever a gun.’

He smiled back and didn’t reply. He didn’t have to: he’d known it would get me ticking.

I made my final check: my two mags were still correctly placed in the double mag holder on my left hip. They were facing up in the thick bands of black elastic that held them on to my belt, with the rounds facing forwards. That way I would pull down on a mag to release it and they would be facing the right way to slam into the pistol.

Everyone was now poised to go, but Lotfi still checked – ‘Ready?’ – like a teacher at the airport on a school trip, making everyone show their passports for the tenth time. We all nodded, and he led the way up to the high ground. I fell in just behind him.

Lotfi was the one taking us on target because he was the only one who had been ashore and carried out a CTR [close target recce]. Besides, he was the one in charge: I was here as the guest European, soon to be American, terrorist.

There was a gentle rise of about forty metres from the tip of the peninsula where we’d landed to the target area. We zigzagged over sand and rock. It was good to get moving so I could warm up a little.

We stopped just before the flat ground and sat and waited for a vehicle to make its way along the road. Lotfi checked it out. No one said it, but we were all worried about the police being stationed so close, and whether, because of the terrorist situation here, they constantly patrolled their immediate area for security. I was still happy to stop and catch my breath. My nose was starting to run a little.

Lotfi dropped down below the ledge and whispered in Arabic to Hubba-Hubba before coming to me: ‘Just a car, no police yet.’

The wet T-shirt under my pullover was a bit warmer now, but it was just as uncomfortable. So what? It wouldn’t be long before it was black tea and diesel fumes again, and, for about the first time in my life, I’d be proactively planning a future.

I pulled back my pullover sleeve and glanced down at my Baby-G. 00:58. I thought of Mr and Mrs B. Just like the Bouteflikas, they too were probably having a wash and brush-up while they talked about what on earth they were going to talk about over the Tex Mex. Probably something like, ‘Oh, I hear you have lots of gasoline in your country? We wouldn’t mind some of that, instead of you giving it to the Italians to fill up their Fiats. And, oh, by the way, there’ll be one Algerian fewer for you to govern when you get back. But don’t worry, he was a bad ’un.’

As the sound of the vehicle faded in the direction of Oran, we all raised our heads slowly above the lip to scan the rock and sandy ground. The constant noise of crickets, or whatever they called them here, rattled into the night.

The fuel compound was an oasis of yellow light and bright enough to make me squint until my eyes adjusted. It was just under two hundred metres to my half-left. From my perspective the tanks were sitting side by side, surrounded by the bung. To the right of them was the not-so-neat row of fuel trucks.

The perimeter of the compound was guarded by a three-metre high chain link fence, sagging in places where the trucks had backed into it over the years.

In the far corner of the compound, by the gate that faced the road, was the security hut. It was no more than a large garden shed. The security was for fire watch just as much as for stopping the trucks and fuel disappearing during the night; the depot had no automatic fire system in the event of a leak or explosion. Lotfi told us there was a solitary guy sitting inside, and if the whole thing sparked up it would presumably be his job to get on the phone.

That was good for us, because it meant we didn’t have to spend time neutralizing any fire-fighting apparatus or alarms. What was bad was the police barracks. A complete fuck-up on our side was only a phone call and three Ks away. If we got caught it would be serious shit. Algeria wasn’t exactly known for upholding human rights, no one would be coming to help us, no matter what we said, and terrorists were routinely whipped to death in this neck of the woods.



11



I ducked into the first doorway to my left, trying my hardest to look interested in the glass display cabinets along the wall while I collected my thoughts. The elderly shopkeeper gave me a smile and a genial ‘Bonjour’.

‘Bonjour, parlez-vous anglais?’

‘Yes.’

‘Just looking, thank you.’

He left me alone as I looked at the array of wooden and plastic pipes and all the paraphernalia you need to smoke one. I turned my wrist and checked Baby-G: 11:04. Greaseball still had twenty-six minutes to wait until the RV was closed, and I was in no rush. I took my time. I needed to think.

I didn’t want to meet up with him, source or not, especially outside, especially if he was a known face. That was bad professionally: I needed to be the grey man.

I turned to the door and gave the old man a mechanical ‘Au revoir’, straight from the phrasebook, wishing that what little time I’d spent at school had been at French lessons.

Without looking in the direction of the RV I went back out into the street, turned right towards the pedestrian crossing, over the road, and pushed my shoulder against the door of the tabac. It was a dreary place, the walls covered in dark brown carpet to complement the dark wooden floors. The old men in here had half a dozen Gauloises on the go, the haze of smoke adding to the gloom. I sat back from the window so I could keep an eye on Greaseball, and ordered myself a coffee.

He’d lit up another cigarette. The pack was on the table with the lighter on top, next to his portemonnaie. He ordered something more, and as the waitress turned to go back into the café I took my paper napkin and wrapped it round the espresso cup before taking a tester sip. Greaseball started to get a little agitated now, checking his watch for the fifth time in as many minutes. There were three more minutes to go until eleven thirty, and once again he checked through the café window to see if there was anyone seated inside on his own, before twisting round again and making sure the mag was flat and easy to spot.

I poured my change on to the table from my small brown coin purse and left eleven francs, which were collected with a grunt by the old guy running the show.

Greaseball checked his watch once more, then leant across to ask the waitress cleaning the next table for the time. Her reply seemed to confirm what he feared, because he got to his feet and checked up and down the road again as if he knew what he was looking for. It was eleven thirty-four before he packed away his cigarettes and finally headed up the hill.

I picked up the cup for the last time, gave the lip a quick wipe before leaving with the napkin, and followed him from my side of the road as trucks and vans blocked him from view for split seconds. I needed to make a little distance and be right on top of him in case he got into a car. If he did, I could stop him before he moved off. I would have to approach him at some time, but not yet. First of all I needed to make sure no one else was following him – or me.

I couldn’t see anything suspicious: no one talking to themselves with their eyes glued to the back of Greaseball’s head; nobody leaping into or out of cars in a desperate measure to get behind him, or concentrating so much on not losing him in a crowd that they took a slide in dog shit or bumped into people and lamp posts.

Dicing with death, I crossed the road then focused on his brown suede loafers, which perfectly matched the fag-bag. He had bare, hairy ankles. No socks: very South of France. He walked with Julia in his right hand and the bag in his left.

I didn’t want him to have any opportunity to turn and make eye contact, since he’d be unlikely not to recognize me. And, given the circumstances of our last meeting, I guessed he might be a tad nervous when he did.

I checked constantly to my left at the shops and apartment-block entrances for somewhere I could go if he stopped. It’s not an easy bit of tradecraft, because by the time the target has turned and looked back you have to be static if in view or, better still, hidden. And you can’t afford to draw attention to yourself in the process.

He turned left, off the main, and became unsighted. I quickened my pace to get to the corner, did the Cannes Shuffle, and crossed the road. No way was I turning into dead ground without first checking what was waiting for me.

Looking left and right for traffic as I crossed, I had the target once more. He was still on the left-hand side of the road and wasn’t checking behind him. He was walking purposefully: he wasn’t running from something, he was going to something.

Once on the other pavement I turned left and went with him. He was a bit further away now, but that was fine because the road was a lot narrower, just a normal street lined with houses and apartment blocks. There weren’t many real people here, so a little distance was a help.

Looking ahead and keeping the red in my peripheral vision, I could see the large blue neon sign ahead for an Eddie’s on my side of the road. The supermarket took up the ground floor of an apartment block. It was one of a chain called E. Leclerc. I didn’t actually know what the E stood for, but it had been a boring four days so I’d made up the name, along with Thackery’s.

There was a rotisserie van at the kerb with its sides open, selling freshly cooked chicken and rabbit. A flock of small cars were trying to force themselves into impossible spaces and double-park around the shop. They bumped up on to the kerb, and into each other. People didn’t seem to care much about their paintwork down here.

Greaseball crossed towards the store and disappeared up the road immediately before it. I quickened my step. As I got to the junction I saw him easily beyond the chaos of shoppers, moving up the road. It was very narrow here, just single track, and quite steep now that we’d got further up the hill. There were no pavements, just iron fences and stone walls either side, flanking houses and apartment blocks. Some of the buildings were quite new and some needed a lick of paint, but they all had one thing in common, and that was the amount of ironwork that covered every point of entry.

He kept to the left. I followed, allowing him to become temporarily unsighted now and again as the road twisted uphill, in case he stopped. We were the only two on this stretch of road and I didn’t want to make my presence too obvious. If he’d disappeared by the time I got round the corner, the drills for finding him would be long, laborious and boring, but I had no choice. I’d have to find a place to hide and wait for him to reappear. If I had no luck I’d have to contact George and tell him the bad news. I’d lie, of course, and say I’d seen something suspicious around the RV. He would have to get his finger out in quick time and do whatever he did to get another RV organized.

I wasn’t worried any longer that he was going to a car, because he wouldn’t have parked this far from the RV. The thought did cross my mind that he’d pinged me and was moving around the town a bit to confirm I was following him. What that would mean to me, I didn’t know – maybe a reception as I turned a corner. But I had no option, really. I had to follow and contact him once we were somewhere safer and less exposed.

The old terracotta roofs that overlapped the walls here and there each side of me would have been there for donkey’s years before the dull cream apartment blocks that had sprung up on every available patch of land since the sixties. They were no more than five or six storeys high; quite a few of the balconies had towels, duvets or washing hanging off them; one or two had barbecues. I could hear the drone of the traffic from the main drag off to my right.

Greaseball took off the pashmina to reveal a blue checked shirt. He wasn’t the only one getting hot; I was starting to leak around my face and down my spine as I made my way uphill. We passed some more apartment blocks, which seemed a little the worse for wear, and Greaseball stopped for a car to squeeze past. He rummaged in his fag-bag. There was a not-too-good-looking block opposite, with a line of cars nosy-parked in front.

I carried on towards him, head down, not making eye contact. He might be pinging me this very moment, waiting for me to betray myself. The car accelerated past me and I had to stop to let him through as Greaseball disappeared into the covered, mosaic-tiled porchway.

There was no time to be subtle. I only had one chance. I ran towards him and got there just as he turned the key in the glass-and-brass-effect main door. He had his back to me but he could see me in the reflection of the glass.

‘Beautiful, isn’t she?’

He spun round, leaving the key in place. His eyes were bulging and his arms fell to his sides as he moved back against the glass. My left hand grabbed the hem of my sweatshirt, ready to pull it up and draw down the Browning. His eyes darted after it. He had a good idea of what that was all about. For several moments he just stared at me in horror, then he stammered, ‘You? You?’

I wasn’t surprised he’d remembered me. Some things stay with you for ever.

Even from a couple of feet away I could smell his heavy aftershave, mixed with the odour of heavily lacquered hair. I said again, ‘Beautiful, isn’t she?’ and nodded at the magazine in his hand. There was still no reply.

‘Answer me. Beautiful, isn’t she?’

At last I got something. ‘Yes, but Katharine Hepburn . . .’ His face wobbled. He realized he’d fucked up. ‘No, no, no, please. Wait, wait. She is, yes, she is, but not as much as Katharine Hepburn, don’t you think?’

It was good enough. ‘Where are you going?’

He half turned and pointed. He’d shaved this morning, but already had shadow.

‘Is there anybody in there with you?’

‘Non.’

‘Let’s go in, then. Come on.’

‘But. . .’

I shoved him through the door, and into the dark foyer. The rubber soles of my Timberlands squeaked on the grey phoney-marble floor. A baby was crying in one of the ground-floor flats and I could smell frying as we headed for the lift. He was still flapping big-time. There was some heavy erratic breathing going on in front of me as he cradled his pashmina in his arms. I was going to reassure him about my intentions, but then thought, fuck it, why bother? I wanted to keep him on the back foot.

The small, box-like lift arrived and we got in. The smell changed. Now it was like the tabac. He pressed for the fourth floor and the thing started to shudder. I was standing behind him, and could see the sweat trickle down from his neck hair on to his shirt collar as I tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Show me what’s in the bag.’ He was only too eager to comply, and held it up for inspection over his shoulder. There was nothing in there that I hadn’t seen already: a pack of Camel Lights, a gold lighter and a small leather money pouch. The keys were still in his hand.

The lift climbed so slowly it was hard to tell if it was moving at all. Looking at him from the rear, I could see that his jeans were a bit too tight around his gut. His love handles flopped out each side, straining against his shirt, and folding over his waistband. A gold Rolex and a couple of thin gold bracelets dangled from his left wrist on to his perfectly manicured hand. He also had a matching pair of bracelets on his right wrist, and a signet ring on his little finger. All in all, he looked like an over-the-hill gigolo who thought he was still twenty-one.

He zipped up the bag and wiped the sweat from his neck. ‘There’s no one here,’ he assured me. ‘I promise you.’

The lift doors opened and I gave him a shove into a semi-dark landing. ‘Good. What number?’

‘This way. Forty-nine.’

I squeezed behind him, my right hand ready to draw down on my 9mm again as he placed the key into the cylinder lock in a dark brown varnished door. It opened into a small room, maybe ten by ten. The sun was trying hard to penetrate the net curtains covering the glass sliding doors of the balcony, and not quite succeeding. He walked in while I waited where I was, hand on my pistol grip. He turned back towards me, arms sweeping around the room, ‘Look, you see, everything is OK.’

That was his opinion. He might be Mr Gucci out on the boulevards, but this place was a tip. To my left was a door into the kitchen. It was fitted with 1970s faded blue and white veneered units that had been worn down in places to the chipboard. An ashtray overflowed on to a half-eaten baguette. The sink was piled high with dirty pans and dishes.

I closed the door with my heel as I walked in and motioned to him with my head. ‘Bolt it.’

I moved aside as he obeyed, breathing heavily.

There was another door to the left. ‘Where does that go?’

‘The bedroom and bathroom. ’

He started to walk towards it, eager to please. ‘Let me go and—’

‘Stop, we go together. I want to see every move you make. Got it?’

I followed a few steps behind him as his loafers squeaked over the light grey mock marble. Both of the other rooms were in a similar state. The bedroom just fitted the bed, and the rest of the floor was covered with newspapers, dirty underwear, and a couple of Slazenger tennis bags still in their Decathlon sports-shop carrier. He didn’t look the tennis type, but the two used syringes that lay on top of the bags were very much his style, which was why he tried to kick it all under the bed without me seeing. He was obviously contributing energetically to al-Qaeda’s heroin profits.

A pair of wardrobes were packed with brightly coloured clothes and shoes, all looking new. The bedroom stank of aftershave and cigarettes, but not as badly as the tiny bathroom did. It had a faded yellow sink, toilet and a typical French half-bath with a hand-held shower. Every surface was covered with bottles of shampoo, cologne and hair colour. The bath had enough pubic hairs around the plug-hole to stuff a mattress.

‘You see everything is correct. It is safe.’

I didn’t even bother to check if he was embarrassed as we walked back into the living room. I squeezed around the furniture and went over to the patio-style window that led on to the balcony overlooking the road we had just walked up. A couple of tennis rackets leant against the railings, and a pair of scrunched-up beach towels hung over the balustrade.

By now he was sitting nervously on a green settee, which had probably been installed at the same time as the kitchen. It was against the left-hand wall, facing a dirty Formica wall unit that was dominated by a huge TV and video. Everything was covered in so much dust I could even see his fingermarks around the controls. VHS tapes and all manner of shit was scattered around the shelves. A small boombox-type CD player stood on a shelf above the TV, surrounded by a sea of discs lying out of their boxes. The videotapes had no titles, but I could guess the sort of thing he was into watching.

The rectangular waxed-pine coffee table at the centre of the room was covered with more old newspapers, a half-empty bottle of red wine, and a food plate that had doubled as an ashtray. I was beginning to feel greasy as well as grubby in this guy’s company.

I got to the point, so I didn’t have to spend too much more time around him. ‘When will the boat be here?’

He crossed his legs and placed both hands around his knees, feeling a little more comfortable now it seemed I wasn’t going to take his head off. ‘Tomorrow night, at Beaulieu-sur-Mer, it’s towards Monaco.’

‘Write it down.’ I knew where it was, but wanted to make sure I had the right place. He leant forward, found a pen among the mess on the table, and wrote on the edge of a newspaper, in a scrawl that any doctor would have been proud of.

‘There is a port, a marina, I think you call it. It’s not far. Her name is the Ninth of May. It’s a white boat, quite large. It’s coming in tomorrow night.’ He ripped off the edge of the paper – ‘Here’ – and pushed it towards me.

I looked out of the window and down into the garden of one of the original houses opposite. An old man was tending a vegetable patch, attaching bits of silver paper to bamboo sticks. I kept watching him. ‘How many are going to be on board?’

‘There are three. One will always remain with the boat, while the other two collect the money. They’re going to start on Friday, the first of three collections. They’ll make one a day, and leave for Algiers with the money on Sunday. They are trying to close their accounts here in France – before you do it for them, no?’

I turned back to Greaseball. He rummaged around in his bag and dragged out a Camel. With an elegant flick of a lighter, he sat back and let smoke curl out of his nostrils. He crossed his legs once more and laid his left arm along the back of the settee as if he was running the show. He was starting to get a bit too confident. ‘Where are they going to collect the cash, then, Greaseball?’

He choked on his cigarette and smoke blew uncontrollably from his nose and mouth. ‘Greaseball?’ Composing himself, he took another drag and this time exhaled slowly, smiling at his new name. ‘Where? That I do not know, and I won’t until tomorrow night, maybe. I’m not sure yet. But I do know they’re only going to use public transport, buses, that sort of thing. It’s safer than Hertz. Conductors don’t keep records.’

It made sense to me. ‘Do you know how much money?’

‘Anything between two point five and three million American.’

He took another drag and I went back to watching the old guy dig around his vegetable patch, thinking about the number of suicide bombers’ families with Landcruisers with all the trimmings that could be funded with that sort of cash.

‘Are they collecting from hawalladas?’

‘Yes, of course. These guys on the coast, the ones who will be handing them the money, are hawalla people.’

I moved back one of the net curtains so I could get a clearer view.

‘What time will the boat arrive?’

‘Did you know this is where the money was collected to finance the attack on the American embassy in Paris?’ He took another drag and sounded almost proud. ‘Can you imagine what would have happened if that had been successful too?’

‘The