Liberation Day Read Free Page A

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 Qur’an 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 antiterrorist forces attacking the plane as it refueled, 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 fraction 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 pants.
    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 riled.
    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 onto my belt, with the rounds facing forward. 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 tour guide at the airport with a group 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 yards 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 sweatshirt 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 sweatshirt sleeve and glanced down at my traser. 00:58. I thought of Mr. and Mrs. B. Just like the Bouteflikas, they too were probably having a wash and comb while they discussed 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,