Liberation Day Read Online Free PDF Page B

took out the tanks as well as me. But hell, this was the only way to do it tonight as far as I was concerned.
    I lay as flat as I could in the sand, even forcing my heels down, with the extended wires running over the bung, before removing the top of the box.
    To arm the device, I turned the Parkway dial to 30. Then I gave it another one or two minutes for luck, all very high-tech stuff.
    I let go of the dial and could hear the ticking as the spring began to unwind. I had tested this unit over and over again and, give or take five seconds, it was always on time over the half-hour. The panel pin that was attached flat to the dial had maybe an inch and a half to travel before connecting with its vertical twin.
    All that remained was for me to take off the rubber wedge and replace the wooden lid on the timer unit so no dirt could find its way between the two pins. I joined the others. All being well, fragments of the timer unit would confirm that tonight’s devastation was the work of an old and bold ex-muj who’d been up to no good. It would just underline what the security guy told them.
    As we went past the hut the door was open and an Al Jazeera newscaster was taking us through more fuzzy black-and-white pictures of the night’s events in Afghanistan. We made our way to the cut in the fence line and Lotfi pointed to his shemag as a signal for me to cover up. I tucked the cotton around my mouth and saw the security guy, still bound up with tape, now lying in the sand below the lip. He had shit his baggy pants big-time, but he’d live through the night.
    Hubba-Hubba knelt down and gave him a few highlights in rapid Arabic from the GIA party political broadcast, then at Lotfi’s nod we all left him praying noisily to himself through the duct tape and ran directly toward the house.
    Lotfi pulled out the alloy caving ladder from his bergen and unrolled it in the sand. Hubba-Hubba moved around to the other side of the wall facing the road to check the garage door. Why climb the wall if there was an easier way through?
    I gave the heavy wrought-iron door handle a twist. It turned, but the door wouldn’t budge. Hubba-Hubba came back shaking his head. We were going to need the caving ladder after all. Made from two lengths of steel cable with alloy tube rungs in between, the whole thing was about nine inches wide and fifteen feet long, designed for cavers to get up and down potholes, or whatever they do down there.
    Lotfi brought out the two poles we’d picked up at the hardware store, the telescopic jobs you can stick a squeegee on if you want to clean high windows. Like all the other gear except for the timing unit, this should be coming back with us; but if anything got left behind, it couldn’t have a Home Depot label on it.
    He taped them together to make one long pole, just slightly shorter than the wall itself. Lotfi used it to lift the large steel hook that was attached to one end of the wire ladder, and eased it over the top of the wall.
    I checked chamber on my Makharov yet again, and the others copied. Then, after a shemag check, we were ready to go. I stepped closer. “Remember, if we have a situation—no head shots.” I’d been boring these two senseless for days about this, but it was imperative we didn’t mess up Zeralda’s head. I didn’t know why, but I was starting to make an educated—well, sort of—guess.
    I checked traser: with luck, just over twenty-two minutes left before the tanks became infernos. I tapped Hubba-Hubba on the shoulder. “Okay, mate?”
    He started to climb, with me steadying the waving ladder under him. Caving ladders aren’t climbed conventionally; you twist them through ninety degrees so that they run between your legs and you use your heels on the rungs, not your toes. Back at the mining camp, watching these two trying to get up and down had been like a scene in a slapstick comedy. Now, with so much practice, they glided up and down like—chimpanzees.
    Hubba-Hubba