Lavie Tidhar - Osama

The Hilltop Hotel stands on Ngiriama Road in downtown Nairobi. On the busy street outside are shoe-shiners; scratch-card stands; taxi-drivers; dusty shops selling stationary, rice, spices from Zanzibar, tinned foods and fresh tomatoes; down the road a little is an Indian restaurant. Electric fans move dust around inside the low-ceilinged buildings. The Hilltop itself is a run-down establishment catering mainly to backpackers.

The men in room 107a were not backpackers. They had checked into the hotel using fake passports, and were in the final stages of preparing to commit an act of mass murder. They did not, perhaps, see themselves as murderers, though under both the American and Kenyan penal code that is what they would be considered. The men believed they were acting on God’s behalf, and perhaps they were right. God was on their side. Soon they would be successful.

Mohammed Odeh arrived in Nairobi on the fourth of August. It was a Tuesday. He had come off a night bus from Mombassa at 7:30am, and checked into the Hilltop Hotel under a fake Yemeni passport, into room 102b. He went to sleep, getting up just before noon. He met with the others. He was dressed as a Muslim cleric, complete with a long beard. Later, he changed his clothes, putting on trousers and a shirt. He also shaved his beard.

He left on Wednesday evening. He spent his last few hours in Nairobi shopping. He had his shoes shined on Moi Avenue, near the American embassy. At 10:00pm he got on a flight to Pakistan.

August seventh was a Friday. The US ambassador was meeting with Kenyan Trade Minister Joseph Kamotho at the Ufundi Cooperative Bank near the embassy. The United States Embassy was a concrete building comprising seven floors, five above-ground, two below. Standing at Post One was Marine Corporal Samuel Gonite. The detachment commander, Gunnery Sergeant Cross, was making his rounds.

Mohamed Rashed Daoud Al-Owhali was dressed that morning in black shoes, a white short-sleeved shirt, blue jeans and jacket. He carried a 9mm Beretta. He also carried four stun grenades. At 9:20am he made a phone call. The truck, a Toyota Dyna, had already been loaded with boxes full of eight hundred kilograms of TNT, cylinder tanks, batteries, detonators, fertilizer, and sand bags. Al-Ohwhali entered the truck on the passenger seat. Driving was a Saudi man known as Azzam. Leading the way in a white Datsun pickup truck was a third man. He was known as Harun.

They arrived at the embassy compound just before 10:30am. Azzam drove the truck to the rear parking lot. A mail van was leaving, and he waited for it to pass before driving up to the drop-bar. Al-Owhali stepped out of the truck. He walked towards the lone guard when he realised he had left his jacket — and his Beretta — in the truck. He still had the stun grenades. He shouted at the guard, demanding that he raise the bar. The guard refused. Al-Owhali pulled the pin out of one grenade and threw it at the guard. There was an explosion. The guard ran away, shouting. Azzam drew the Beretta from Al-Owhali’s jacket and began firing at the embassy windows. Al-Owhali began to run. A moment later, Azzam pressed the detonator button.

The explosion tore a crater in the ground. It blasted windows and tumbled concrete, and made men and women fly through the air as they died. Nearby Haile Selassie Avenue was strewn with debris. The windows of the Cooperative Bank House facing the avenue were blown by the blast. The American ambassador was knocked unconscious by the blast and cut by flying glass. The small bank building behind the embassy collapsed onto the chancery’s emergency generator, spilling thousands of gallons of diesel fuel into the basement of the embassy. The diesel fuel ignited.

Two hundred and twelve people died in the attack. Four thousand were wounded. One woman, a Kenyan tea-lady from the Ufundi House offices, was trapped under the rabble. Her name was Rose Wanjiku. Rescuers, including marines and an Israeli special rescue unit, tried to reach her. She communicated with them constantly. She had been buried for five days. She died several hours before they finally reached her.

Mohammed Odeh landed in Karachi on the morning of August seven, a short time after the attack. As he went through immigration the first news of the bombing could be heard on the radio. He smiled. He passed through the airport and stepped out into the sunshine. Once outside, he located a phone box, and dialled a number.

‘Emir?’ he said into the silence of the mouthpiece. He took a deep breath. ‘With the grace of God, we are successful.’

In the summer the sunlight falls down on Vientiane and turns walls and people translucent. Puddles of sunlight collect in street corners, and scooters pass through them and splash light onto shop fronts and down to the canals that run through the city toward the Mekong. The sunlight stains shirts with dark patches of sweat, and sends dogs to seek shelter in the shade of parked cars. Peddlers move sluggishly along the road with their wares of bamboo baskets, fruit and red-pork baguettes. The whole city seems to pause, its skin shining, and wait for the rains to come and bring with them some coolness.

Joe put down the book on the low bamboo table and sighed. The small china cup before him contained strong Laotian mountain coffee, sweet with the two sugars he liked to use, which was overdoing it, he knew, but that was the way he liked it. Beside him was an ashtray containing two cigarette stubs. Also on the table was a soft packet of cigarettes and a Zippo lighter, a plain one, which sat on top of the cigarettes. He sat, as he did every morning, in the small coffee shop facing the car park of the Talat Sao market in downtown Vientiane. Through the glass windows he could watch the girls walk past.

The book was a worn paperback with a garish, colourful cover. It showed a multi-story building in the final stages of collapse, a dusty African street, and people running away from a blast. The book was called Assignment: Africa and, in an only slightly smaller subtitle, announced it as the third title in the series Osama Bin-Laden: Vigilante . The unlikely name of the author was Mike Longshott.

Joe reached for the packet on the table and extracted a cigarette, his third. He lit up with the Zippo and stared out of the window. Soft jazz played in the air. Every morning Joe came here, walking the half-hour distance from his apartment on Sokpaluang Road, past the bus station and the adjacent fruit and vegetable market, past tuk-tuk drivers, dogs and squawking chickens and the large sign that extolled the virtue of Keeping Our Country Clean — All Good Citizen Must Pick Up Litter, across the traffic lights and into the Talat Sao, the Morning Market, and into the small air-conditioned coffee shop that served more as his office than his office ever did.

He sat there for a long time and was not disturbed. Staring out through the glass windows he could see friends meet and walk away, laughing. A mother walked past with her two children, holding their hands. Three men shared a cigarette outside, gesturing with their hands as they talked, then wandered off. A girl appeared on the steps and seemed to wait for something to happen. Five minutes later a boy appeared through the doors and her smile lit up her face, and they walked away, though without acknowledging each other. A village woman came in through the car park carrying baskets. A businessman in a suit walked down the stairs accompanied by an entourage, all hurrying towards a black car and its sheltered air-conditioning. A long time ago Joe had learned that it was sometimes easiest to feel alone amongst people. He no longer let it disturb him, but as he sat there, isolated from the outside by the transparent glass windows, he felt for a moment disconnected from time, all contact between him and the rest of humanity removed, cauterized, his connection to the people outside no more than an amputee’s ghost-limb, still aching though it was no longer there. He took a drag on the cigarette and exhaled, and some of the ash fell down on the book, and left a grey mark where Joe brushed it off.