Liberation Day Read Free

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.
    All four OBIs were going to be linked together in a long daisy chain by three-foot 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 gasoline 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 ignited.
    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 three feet in height and about four yards 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 toward 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 ignite when the second of the four OBIs ignited, which should happen as the fuel level reached just less than halfway 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 onto the ground like lava from a volcano. The ground sloped, toward 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 miles along the road to Oran, and if they were called to the scene we didn’t want to become their new best friends.
    Just as important, 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 traser 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 vacation spot.
    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 cruelest and most screwed-up bunch I’d ever come across.