The Miracle of Yousef: Historical and political thriller

by Gonçalo Coelho

  “I know who you are, Fahrouk. My name is Hassan Alaoui.”

  6

  With his knapsack on his back, Yousef went into a kebab restaurant with Hassan Alaoui. Immediately he caught the smell of huge pieces of beef, lamb, veal and chicken roasting on vertical spits behind the stainless steel counter. In a heated glass display case several considerably smaller spits were arranged crammed with pieces of raw meat. Behind the counter there were two men serving. One of them, seated behind the cash register, was older and stronger than the other, and had a heavy mustache. He appeared to be the owner of the restaurant. Hassan Alaoui greeted him in Arabic, and Yousef followed suit.

  “You’re Arabian as well?” the man asked.

  “Moroccan,” Yousef replied.

  “Casablanca? Marrakesh?”

  “Casablanca.”

  “Welcome then, Moroccan!”

  “Listen, Rafiq,” Alaoui cut in. “We need to talk, but comfortably, understand? And to eat, too, of course!”

  “Understood. Say no more.” The man touched a button on the cash register and the money drawer sprang open. From it he removed a key that he offered over the counter to Alaoui. “Take it, you can go to the back room. And what do you want to eat?”

  They each ordered lamb Kebab with salad and chili sauce, then took a beverage from a cooler full of chilled cans and bottles.

  “Ok. I’ll bring your food.” Yousef relaxed.

  They ventured into the back of the restaurant, climbing up two steps and entering another long, narrow room with rows of tables stuck to the walls on either side and a corridor of scarcely a meter between them. None of the tables were occupied. Evidently the restaurant survived chiefly from its take-away business. A solitary television suspended by a simple bracket attached to the wall was playing music video clips. The two men walked to the back of the room where a paper stuck to a closed door indicated the space behind it was off limits. Alaoui opened the door with the key the restaurant owner had given him, and they went into a spacious storage room with a number of shelves, cabinets, cases and a round table in the center with several chairs around it.

  “What is this place?” Yousef asked, looking around him.

  “It’s where the owner does the accounts, stores his stuff and it’s also where we play cards occasionally. Here we can talk in comfort. No one’s watching us.”

  Alaoui sat down at the table and with a movement of his arm invited Yousef to take a seat in front of him. Yousef complied and sat down, laying his pack at his feet.

  “Let’s get to the reason we’re here, all right? For the moment all I know is that your name is Hassan Alaoui. That’s not much. You’ll have to give me something more than that.”

  “And you know that I am here on the orders of Sheik Omar Rasoul Sharif. That should be enough for you. He gave you my name, didn’t he? He told you I’m at your disposal to carry out the attack. You plan and command, I put together the team and execute. That’s how it works. The Sheik told you this, didn’t he?”

  Yousef took his time, but finally nodded.

  “So what else do you want me to tell you?”

  “For now it would be enough if you would tell me one thing: where is the attack?”

  Alaoui flashed a broad grin, brimming with confidence.

  “Bishopsgate. All that’s needed is your plan, and you tell me when to carry it out. How and when.”

  “For now all I can tell you is that it won’t be happening this year. This isn’t like robbing a grocery store...”

  “The Sheik told me to give you enough time to prepare things properly. He told me that I can trust you with my eyes closed. I trust that he told you the same about me, despite your misgivings. Apart from that, October is ending, so it’s not that much time until the end of the year.”

  “For now I have nothing more to say to you except that it will be early next year. When I have more information I’ll be in touch.”

  “Write down my phone number.”

  Yousef reached for his backpack containing his school books, removed a pen and paper and wrote down the number.

  “Besides that, on Thursdays we have a card game here. I usually come. If you like, stop by and play a hand.”

  “All right, I’ll be in touch in a few weeks, as soon as I have something more definite.”

  “If you shut me out you’ll be making a mistake. I can help you. I have contacts.”

  “So be it.”

  The door-knob turned and the owner came in with their Döner Kekabs.

  It was only three weeks later, after Yousef had begun to develop a well-defined plan in his mind that he met again with Hassan Alaoui, and from that point on they met regularly until the day of the attack.

  7

  London

  February 11, 1991

  7:30 a.m.

  Today is the day of his first big attack on western soil. The alarm clock goes off. He has scarcely slept a wink. Calmly – and with both eyes open – he reaches for the alarm. Nadia wakes up as well, also from a light sleep. They are finally husband and wife. They gaze into each other’s eyes and he kisses her. It is an intense kiss full of anticipated longing containing both the fierce desire to be reunited with her after the planned attack, as well as the impossibility of entertaining any certainty in this regard. Neither of them can resist the strong emotions taking hold of them as they surrender their bodies to each other in an enchanted enclosure of overwhelming passion, urgency and lust. An entire ocean of sensations reaches its peak, followed by landfall in an earthly jungle of fear and anxiety where time never stops, and for this very reason, Yousef is now running late.

  Out of a sea of sheets, desire, kisses and sweat, Yousef gets up to take a shower. As soon as he shuts the bathroom door he hears Nadia sobbing quietly. Under a stream of tepid shower water he goes over the plan in his mind, feeling the adrenaline rising unstoppably in his blood. Meanwhile, the plane tickets to New York have already been purchased, and all Nadia has to do within a few hours is to take the suitcases and wait for Yousef at Heathrow Airport. If everything goes as planned, in a few hours they will be together again aboard a plane flying to the Big Apple. But if everything goes wrong ... well, it’s best not even to think of that, Nadia tells herself, still in bed, in tears.

  8:05 a.m.

  Yousef leaves the house in a heavy parka, backpack on his back, and turns into the Finchley Road. It is freezing cold and always with that drizzle that Yousef has gotten used to living with for most of the year. He feels his ears and the tip of his nose quickly getting very cold. Hassan Alaoui is waiting for him in a sober brown Austin Allegro. Yousef gets in, greeting him. Alaoui takes off immediately.

  “Is everything going as planned? Did they get the truck just as I asked?” Yousef inquires.

  “Yes. The boys I assigned to this job have already changed the plates and painted it black. They’re professionals.” Alaoui speaks as he is driving, his eyes fixed on the road. A heavy leaden sky darkens the day.

  “Good. That’s why I gave you all that money.”

  “And you can count on it. It’s a professional job. If they nail us today, it won’t be for stealing a truck.”

  8:37 a.m.

  The Austin Allegro takes an exit from the A1 North of London and turns onto a side road. A little later it parks at the door of an abandoned warehouse. The two men get out of the car - Yousef with his backpack on his back – and head towards the tall broad zinc door of the warehouse. Alaoui sticks the key in the garage door, turns the lock and opens the warehouse, sliding the door sideways just enough for the two of them to get in. They enter, the door closes, and in the same moment Alaoui turns on the light.

  “Here it is,” he announces as he turns on the light, as though he is presenting a car for its inauguration at a world exhibit.

  Before them is a Volvo truck, broad, imposing and tall, with the box open, able to carry tons of sand. Yousef walks around, inspecting it.

  “So the bomb goes here inside just as I exp
lained?”

  “Of course. It’s in there under that layer of asphalt covering it,” Alaoui replies, pointing at the truck’s open box. “All as specified. You’ve got your car-bomb loaded with the fertilizer bomb you requested. ANFO, Ammonium Nitrate and fuel oil, a one-ton bomb ready to go off and blow up the financial heart of London. Let’s hope it can do all you say it can.”

  “The person you bought it from didn’t explain its effects?”

  “I don’t trust salesmen much.”

  “What we’ve got here is capable of destroying buildings located within a 500-meter radius.” And after a pause, “Does anyone know this is here?”

  “No, you can rest easy. I hired different crews for everything. The ones who stole the truck have no idea it’s going to be a car bomb, and the ones who sold us the bomb don’t know how we plan to blow it up and couldn’t care less. None of them are the sort of people you’d want to get to know. They’d just as soon do business with us as the IRA, ETA or any other group.”

  “And getting the bomb to this warehouse and into this truck?”

  “Another crew. They have no idea what ANFO is, or that you can make bombs with fertilizer. You can rest easy. Any other questions?”

  “I really hope not. For both of our sakes.”

  “So now it’s just taking the bomb to the place and blowing the City sky-high.”

  “Hold on. The device to set it off is lacking.”

  “Well, that’s your department, but get moving because time is short. We can’t get behind schedule more than we already are.” Stressing the last words, Alaoui distinctly alludes to the fact that Yousef left the house later than planned to meet him. Yousef doesn’t answer, he isn’t going to tell him that he Nadia were overcome by a sudden urgency to make love in the last minutes they had to themselves before the Bishopsgate attack. Instead, he opens the backpack and removes a pack of sticks of dynamite bound together with black adhesive tape, with an electronic device attached, on which a red light flashes incessantly. He places it in the strategic spot next to the mixture of Ammonium Nitrate and fuel oil in the box of the truck. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small rectangular black box, with a switch to turn the small device on and off, and an LED light that is currently turned off.

  “Now all you have to do is connect this remote control, which I built myself, press this button” – Yousef places his thumb over the button by way of example – “and Boom! Sky-high. A ton of fertilizer will blow up in the world’s second largest financial center. The Western materialist vacuum will come crashing down. Let them learn of the harm they’ve done placing Israel in the territory of Palestine, let them learn of the harm they’ve done occupying Saudi Arabia with their armies, so they’ll get out of Arab lands once and for all, and let the Arab people all be united under one single flag governed by Sharia! So the foreigners will leave us in peace once and for all!”

  “Nice speech,” says Alaoui, applauding.

  “Let’s get out of here. The time has come to act.”

  9:09 a.m.

  The heavy Volvo dump truck carrying a ton of explosives in the back pulls onto the shoulder in the middle of the A1 north of London in front of a metallized blue Vauxhall Carlton. Two men of typical Anglo Saxon appearance get out of the car, tall and strong, both very pale, with light, somewhat shaggy hair, one of them with an earring in his nose, the other with one through his brow. Inside the truck, Yousef looks in the rearview mirror outside the door.

  “Are these the men taking the material to the target?”

  “Very British, aren’t they?” Alaoui retorts scornfully. “Let’s do it.”

  The two Arabs open the door and jump out of the truck. Without a word they go past the Englishmen on the edge of the highway and move towards the Vauxhall Carlton as the others move towards the Volvo. When they have switched places as planned, the truck pulls out, then the Vauxhall pulls out following calmly right behind it.

  9:42 a.m.

  The Volvo truck-bomb stops right in front of the tallest building in London at that time: the Natwest Tower, which would later receive the name Tower 42, in reference to its forty-two storeys. The Vauxhall pulls up alongside the truck and keeps going. Two blocks later it pulls over and parks, and Alaoui pulls up the hand brake, which makes its usual scratching noise. Yousef holds the detonator in his hand. He flips the switch, turning on a red light. Then he presses a button on his wrist watch turning on the stop-watch: a one-minute count-down starting now. Yousef’s thumb hovers over the button that will trigger the explosion, the button that will execute the sentence. His gaze is fixed on his left wrist where the stop-watch moves steadily and inexorably in a rapid countdown.

  “I always thought we should be closer to the Volvo,” Alaoui announces abruptly.

  Yousef keeps his concentration on the stop-watch.

  “This is the fruit of our labor,” Alaoui persists. “The war is finally reaching the heart of western capitalism that defiles the world, instead of remaining always and exclusively in the same places, out there in what they call the Third World, where there are always military forces or their spies pulling the strings to destroy or bring to victory anyone they choose, with no thought for the collateral damage. The hour of capitalism’s defeat is at hand.”

  Yousef doesn’t answer, merely stares at the stop-watch on his wrist as the two men sink into an anxious silence.

  “You will feel it.”

  “What?”

  “You will feel the impact from here. If we were closer there would be a risk of our getting hit. Fifteen seconds,” Yousef warns.

  Neither he nor Alaoui take their eyes from the stopwatch, whose seconds, tenths and hundredths of seconds squirm past at racing speed on Yousef’s wrist. Five, four, three, two, one … until the moment arrives. Zero. The moment to wipe out a million, reducing it to zeroes, nothing but zeroes. Yousef presses the button on the remote control. The two men’s’ hearts are pounding like thunder. Sweat streams from their heads. They look up expecting the shock and roar of the huge explosion but instead hear nothing, only silence.

  “Do you think it blew up?” Alaoui asks at length, sweat plainly streaming down his head.

  “I don’t know... I mean, we should have felt the shock and heard the explosion. I don’t know what’s going on. Whatever it is, we can’t stay here, it’s not safe. Get going, Hassan. Whatever’s happened, we’ve got to get out of here!”

  “I’ll just get a little closer to see what happened.”

  “No! That’s an unnecessary risk. We must be professional.”

  “I want to see.”

  “Hassan, no. Let’s go.” Yousef seizes the older man by the collar. “I’m not kidding.”

  Alaoui shakes off Yousef’s arms with a brusque movement, faces him for several seconds, then places his hand on the key in the ignition. In that instant shots ring out near the Vauxhall hitting and smashing the car’s rear window. Yousef ducks down, then sensing a lull, turns back to try to see what is going on. A man on the sidewalk in civilian attire, dressed in a suit, is approaching the car with a pistol in his hand.

  “Go, Hassan!” Yousef shouts, but turning sees that Alaoui is inert, slumped forward onto the steering wheel, shot in the head. The man in the suit fires off several more shots, then takes cover to reload. Yousef reaches into the pack at his feet and pulls out an automatic pistol. He opens the door and slips to the back of the car, taking up a kneeling, shielded position. He aims in the direction of the enemy, whom he assumes is a policeman, and waits for him to show himself. The moment the man appears, Yousef fires a steady stream of bullets with deadly accuracy. The man topples to the ground. Yousef goes closer, firing off two more shots at point-blank range. Instantly he returns to the Vauxhall, reaches into his pack, this time removing a stick of dynamite and a lighter, then backs away, lights it and flings it into the Vauxhall. The car blows up with a deafening roar in a huge black, yellow and orange cloud. Taking cover in a building entrance, Yousef feels the rolling h
eat. He takes off at a run toward the Liverpool Street tube station. The primary attack has failed. There is nothing but a blown up car that didn’t kill or injure anyone, instead of what should have been the massive explosion of the contents of the lethally rigged Volvo truck.

  About two years later, in April of 1993 in the same place, in Bishopsgate, the IRA’s biggest attack would take place, in every way similar to this one planned by Yousef. A ton of ANFO would explode, spreading destruction through buildings within a radius of up to five hundred meters. It would happen on a Saturday, at 10:25 a.m. According to information subsequently disclosed, about 500 tons of steel would be destroyed and 140,000 square meters of office space disrupted. The church of Saint Ethelsburga, seven meters from the site of the explosion, would be totally annihilated. A number of insurance companies would go bankrupt due to the payments they would have to make to cover the incident.

  11:25 a.m.

  Yousef comes out of the underground and enters the facilities of Heathrow Airport. On the monitors he verifies his check-in counter. He proceeds down corridors and more corridors, in normal steps and in the sweeping giant steps of the rolling sidewalks. His heart is still racing somewhat, though outwardly he manages to appear completely composed. He has killed before. The feeling that comes after killing is becoming easier and easier to bear. At this point, Yousef is thinking more of Nadia, and is convinced that if his heart is still racing, it is solely on her account. There is no reason whatsoever for him to imagine that she will not be there, as agreed, at the check-in counter of the airline on which they are to fly to New York, yet even so, he fears she will not appear. More than fear there is a nearly intolerable dread he feels at the thought that she might not be there for any reason. He feels an overwhelming desire to embrace her. When he reaches the check-in counter, full of dread, he does not see her. It is she who sees him first. Unable to contain herself, she runs towards him as soon as she spots him, and they embrace as though it has been years and not hours apart, completely forgetting their surroundings. Nadia cannot hold back her tears. Yousef hugs her tightly and only as the dimensions of their actual situation dawn on him does he whisper in her ear: