Liberation Day by Andy McNab Read Free Book Online Page A

the best part. As the flames flowed under the fuel trucks, they, too, would soon be joining in the fun, with luck just as the police arrived.
    Lotfi gave me a shove, and our shadows followed us until we got over the lip. Once we hit the sand it was simply a case of turning right and following the shoreline to the Zodiac.
    As I scrambled down the hill I felt nothing but exhilaration. At long last I’d earned my U.S. passport—and the right to a whole new life.

5
    FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 11:56 HRS.
    I sat on the T, the smart aluminum commuter train that had brought me from Logan Airport into Boston and, after a quick change, north toward Wonderland.
    Wonderland always sounded to me like some kind of glitzy shopping mall; in fact, it was only the drop-off point for people from the northern suburbs heading into Boston. Today, though, no destination could have been better named. Carrie had been lecturing at MIT this morning, so was picking me up here instead of at the airport, then taking me to her mother’s place in Marblehead, a small town about twenty miles north along the coast. Her mother had lent us the guest annex, while she carried on with her bed-and-breakfast business in the main house. Carrie and I lived there alone now that Luz had started high school in Cambridge. To me it was home, and it was a long time since I’d felt that way about anywhere.
    The other passengers looked at me as if I’d just escaped from the local nuthouse. After two days of traveling back from Egypt, my skin was greasy, my eyes stung, and my socks, armpits, and breath stank. As some kind of damage limitation before I saw Carrie, I was brushing my teeth and swallowing the foaming paste as I looked out of the window. It wasn’t going to transform me into Brad Pitt on Oscar night, but it was the best I could do.
    I picked up the nylon duffel bag near my feet and put it on the empty seat beside me. I needed to check just one more time that the bag was sterile of anything that could link me to the job before she picked me up. My hand passed over the smooth, rounded shape of the Pyramids snowstorm shaker I’d bought her at the Cairo airport, and the hard edge of the small photo album she’d lent me for my weeks away. “If you don’t look at it and think nice things about me every day, Nick Stone,” she’d said, “don’t even think about coming back.”
    I opened it and felt a grin spreading across my face, as it did every time I saw her. She was standing outside Abbot Hall in Washington Square, Marblehead, on the start of what she’d called my U.S. Heritage Induction Tour. Abbot Hall was the home of The Spirit of ’76, the famous portrait of a fife and drum at the head of an infantry column during the Revolutionary War. She wanted me to see it because she said it embodied the spirit of America—and if I were going to become a U.S. citizen one day, it was my solemn duty to damned well admire and be moved by it. I said I thought it looked more like a cartoon than a masterpiece, and she pushed me outside.
    Her short brown hair was being buffeted by the wind blasting off the Atlantic as I pressed the shutter. She looked like GI Jane in green fatigue cargos and a baggy gray sweater. She certainly didn’t look in her late thirties, even though a certain sadness in her smile, and a few small creases at the corners of her mouth and eyes, told anybody who was paying attention that the last couple of years had not been easy on her. “Nothing Photoshop can’t handle,” she said, “once I’ve scanned them into the PC.”
    It was rare to see her expression so relaxed, even when she was sleeping. Normally it was much more animated, most often frowning, questioning, or registering disgust at Corporate America’s latest outrage. She had good reason to look weighed down. It had been hard for her and Luz since the two of them had come back from Panama, one without a husband, the other without the man who’d become her father. Since Aaron’s death