The Afghan

CHAPTER 10

IT WAS A LONG and wearisome flight. There were no in-flight refueling facilities, which are expensive. This Hercules was just a prison ship, doing a favor for the Afghan government, which ought to have picked up their man in Cuba but had no aircraft for the job.

They flew via American bases in the Azores and Ramstein, Germany, and it was late afternoon of the following day that the AC-130 dropped toward the great air base of Bagram at the southern edge of the bleak Shomali Plain. The flight crew had changed twice, but the escort squad had stayed the course, reading, playing cards, catnapping, as the four sets of whirling blades outside the portholes drove them east, ever east. The prisoner remained shackled. He, too, slept as best he could.

As the Hercules taxied onto the apron beside the huge hangars that dominate the American zone within Bagram base, the reception group was waiting. The U.S. provost major heading the escort party was gratified to see the Afghans were taking no chances. Apart from the prison van, there were twenty Afghan Special Forces soldiers, headed by the unit commander. Brigadier Yusef. The major trotted down the ramp to clear the paperwork before handing over his charge. This took a few seconds. Then he nodded to his colleagues. They unchained the Afghan from the fuselage rib and led him shuffling out into a freezing Afghan winter.

The troops enveloped him, dragged him to the prison van and threw him inside. The door slammed shut. The U.S. major decided he absolutely would not want to change places. He threw up a salute to the brigadier, who responded. “You take good care of him, sir.” said the American. “That is one very hard man.”

“Do not worry, Major,” said the Afghan officer. “He is going to Pul-i-Charki jail for the rest of his days.”

Minutes later, the prison van drove off, followed by the truck with the Afghan SF soldiers. They took the road south to Kabul. It was not until complete darkness that the van and the truck became separated in what would later be officially described as an unfortunate accident. The van proceeded alone. Pul-i-Charki is a fearsome, brooding block of a place to the east of Kabul, near the gorge at the eastern end of the Kabul plain. Under the Soviet occupation, it was controlled by the KHAD secret police, and constantly rang with the screams of the tortured.

During the civil war. several tens of thousands never left alive. Conditions had improved since the creation of the new, elected Republic of Afghanistan, but its stone battlements, corridors and dungeons still seem to echo with the shrieks of its ghosts. Fortunately, the prison van never made it. Ten miles after losing the military escort, a pickup truck came out of a side road and took up station behind the van. When the truck flashed its lights, the van driver pulled over at the prereconnoitered flat area off the road and behind a clump of stunted trees. There, the “escape” took place. The prisoner had been uncuffed as soon as the van left the last security check at Bagram’s perimeter. Even as the van rolled, he had changed into the warm, gray, woolen shalwar kameez and boots provided. Just before the pullover, he had wound round his head the feared black turban of the Talib. Brigadier Yusef who had descended from the cabin of the truck to be taken on board by the pickup, now took charge. There were four bodies in the open back of the utility.

All had come fresh from the city mortuary. Two were bearded, and they had been dressed in Talib clothing. They were actually construction workers who had been atop some very insecure scaffolding when it collapsed and killed them both. The other two derived from separate car accidents. Afghan roads are so potholed that the smoothest place to drive is the crown at the center. As it is considered rather effeminate to pull over just because someone is coming the other way, the harvest in fatalities is impressive. The two smooth-shaven bodies were in prison service uniform.

The prison officers would be found with handguns drawn, but dead; the bullets were fired into the bodies there and then. The ambushing Taliban were scattered at the roadside, also shot with slugs from the pistols of the guards. The van door was savaged with a pickax and left swinging open. That was how the van would be found sometime the next day.

When the theater had been accomplished, Brigadier Yusef took the front seat of the pickup beside the drive. The former prisoner climbed in the back with the two Special Forces men he had brought with him. All three wrapped the trailing end of their turbans round their faces to shelter from the cold. The pickup skirted Kabul, and cut across country until it intercepted the highway south to Ghazni and Kandahar. There waited, as each night, the long column of what all Asia knows as the “jingly” trucks. They all seem to have been built about a century ago. They snort and snarl along every road of the Middle and Far East, emitting their columns of choking black smoke. Often, they are seen broken down by the roadside, the driver being prepared to trudge many miles to find and buy the needed part. They seem to find their way over impossible mountain passes, along the sides of bare hillsides on crumbling tracks. Sometimes, the gutted skeleton of one can be seen in the defile below the road. But they are the commercial lifeblood of a continent, carrying an amazing variety of supplies to the tiniest and most isolated settlements and the people who live in them. The British named them jingle trucks many years ago because of their decorations. They are carefully painted on every available surface with scenes from religion and history. There are representations from Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism and Buddhism, often gloriously mixed up. They are decorated and caparisoned with ribbons, tinsel and even bells. Hence they jingle. The line on the highway south of Kabul contained several hundred, their drivers sleeping in their cabs, waiting for the dawn. The pickup slewed to a halt beside the line. Mike Martin jumped from the back and walked to the cab. The shrouded figure behind the wheel had his face hidden by a shemagh of checkered cloth. On the other side, Brigadier Yusef nodded but said nothing. End of the road.

Start of the journey. As he turned away, he heard the driver speak.

“Good luck, boss.”

That term again. Only the SAS called their officers “boss.” What the American provost major at Bagram had not known as he made the handover was not only who his prisoner was, but that since the installation of President Ham id Karzai the Afghan Special Forces had been created and trained at his request by the SAS. Martin turned away, and started to walk down the line of trucks. Behind him, the taillights of the pickup faded as it headed back to Kabul. In the cab, the SAS sergeant made a cell phone call to a number in Kabul. It was taken by the head of station. The sergeant uttered two words and terminated. The SIS chief for all Afghanistan also made a call on a secure line. It was four in the morning in Kabul, eleven at night in Scotland. A one-line message came up on one of the screens. Phillips and McDonald were already in the room, hoping to see what they then saw. “Crowbar is running.”

On a freezing, pitted highway, Mike Martin permitted himself one last glance behind him. The red lights of the pickup were gone. He turned and walked on. Within a hundred yards, he had become the Afghan. He knew what he was looking for, but he was a hundred trucks down the line until he found it. A license plate from Karachi, Pakistan. The driver of such a truck would be unlikely to be Pashtun and so would not notice his imperfect command of Pashto. He would be likely to be a Baluchi, heading home to Pakistan ’s Baluchistan Province.

It was too early for the drivers to be rising, and unwise to rouse the driver of the chosen truck; tired men woken suddenly are not in the best of tempers, and Martin needed him in a generous mood. For two hours, he curled up beneath the truck and shivered.

Around six, there was a stirring, and a hint of pink in the east. By the roadside, someone started a fire and set a billy on it to boil. In central Asia, much of life is lived in and around the teahouse, the chaikhana, which can be created even with a fire, a brew of tea and a group of men. Martin rose, walked over to the fire and warmed his hands.

The tea brewer was Pashtun but taciturn, which suited Martin fine. He had taken off his turban, unwound it and stowed it in the tote bag hanging from his shoulder. It would be unwise to advertise being Talib until one knew the company was sympathetic. With a fistful of his Afghanis, he bought a steaming cup and sipped gratefully. Minutes later, the Baluchi clambered sleepily out of his cab and came over for tea.

Dawn broke. Some of the trucks began to kick to life, with plumes of black smoke. The Baluchi walked back to his cab. Martin followed. “Greetings, my brother.”

The Baluchi responded, but with some suspicion.

“Do you by any chance head south to the border and Spin Boldak?” If the man was heading back to Pakistan, the small border town south of Kandahar would be where he would cross. By then, Martin knew, there would be a price on his head. He would have to skirt the border controls on foot. “If it pleases Allah,” said the Baluchi.

“Then in the name of the all-merciful, would you let a poor man trying to get home to his family ride with you?”

The Baluchi thought. His cousin normally came with him on these long hauls to Kabul, but he was sick in Karachi. This trip he had driven alone, and it was exhausting.

“Can you drive one of these?” he asked.

“In truth, I am a driver of many years.”

They drove south in companiable silence, listening to the Eastern pop music on the old plastic radio propped above the dash. It screeched and whistled, but Martin was not sure whether this was just the static or the tune. The day wore on, and they chugged through Ghazni and on toward Kandahar. On the road, they paused for tea and food-the usual goat and rice-and filled the tank. Martin helped with the cost from his bundle of Afghanis, and the Baluchi became much more friendly.

Though Martin spoke neither Urdu nor the Baluchi dialect, and the man from Karachi spoke only a smattering of Pashto, with sign language and some Arabic from the Koran they got along well.

There was a further overnight stop north of Kandahar, for the Baluchi would not drive in the dark. This was Zabol Province, wild country, and peopled by wild men. It was safer to drive in the daylight with hundreds of other trucks in front, behind and yet more heading north. Bandits prefer the night. At the northern outskirts of Kandahar, Martin claimed he needed a nap, and curled up along the bench behind the seats that the Baluchi used as his bed. Kandahar had been the headquarters and stronghold of the Taliban, and Martin wanted no reformed Talib to think he saw an old friend in a passing truck. South of Kandahar, he again spelled the Baluchi at the wheel. It was still midafternoon when they came to Spin Boldak; Martin claimed he lived in the northern outskirts, bade his host a grateful farewell and dropped off miles before the border checkpoint.

Because the Baluchi spoke no Pashto, he had kept his radio tuned to a pop station and Martin never heard the news. At the border, the lines were longer even than usual, and when he finally rolled to the barrier he was shown a picture. A black-bearded Talib face stared at him. He was an honest and hardworking man. He wanted to get home to his wife and four children. Life was hard enough. Why spend days-even weeks-in an Afghan jail trying to explain that he had been totally ignorant? “By the prophet, I have never seen him,” he swore, and they let him go. Never again, he thought as he trundled south on the Quetta road. He might hail from the most corrupt city in Asia, but at least you knew where you were in your own hometown. Afghans were not his people. Why get involved? He wondered what the talib had done.

Martin had been warned that the hijack of the prison van, the murder of its two warders and the escape of a returnee from Guan-tanamo Bay could not be covered up. To start with, the U.S. Embassy would make a fuss. The “murder” scene had been discovered by patrols sent up the Bagram road when the prison van failed to arrive at the jail. The separation of the van from its military escort was put down to incompetence. But the freeing of the prisoner was clearly by a criminal gang of Taliban leftovers. A hunt was mounted for them.

Unfortunately, the U.S. Embassy offered the Karzai government a photograph, which could not be refused. The CIA and SIS heads of station tried to slow things down, but there was only so much they could do. By the time all border posts received a faxed photograph, Martin was still north of Spin Boldak. Though he knew nothing of this, Martin was determined there would be no chances taken at border crossings. In the hills above Spin Boldak, he hunkered down and waited for night. From the position he had climbed to, he could see the lie of the land, and the route he would take on the march to come. The small town was five miles ahead and half a mile below him. He could see the road snaking in and the trucks on it. He could see the massive old fort that had once been a stronghold of the British Army.

He knew the capture of that fort in 1919 had been the last time the British Army used medieval scaling ladders. They had approached secretly by night, and, apart from the bellowing of the mules, the clang of ladles on cauldrons and the swearing of the soldiers when they stubbed their toes, were silent as the grave so as not to wake the defenders.

The ladders had been ten feet too short, so theyd crashed into the dry moat with a hundred soldiers on them. Happily, the Pashtun defenders, crouching behind the walls, presumed the force attacking them must be enormous, so theyd quit through the back door and run for the hills. The fort fell without a shot. Before midnight, Martin stole quietly past its walls, through the town and into Pakistan. Sunrise found him ten miles down the Quetta road. Here he found a chaikhana and waited until a truck that accepted paying passengers came along and gave him passage to Quetta. At last, the black Talib turban, instantly recognizable in those parts, became an asset and not a liability. So on it went. If Peshawar is a fairly extreme Islamist city, Quetta is more so, only exceeded in its ferocity of sympathy for Al Qaeda by Miram Shah. These are within the Northwest Frontier provinces, where local tribal law prevails. Though technically across the border from Afghanistan, the Pashtun people still prevail, as does the Pashto language, and extreme devotion to ultratraditional Islam. A Talib turban is the mark of a man to be reckoned with. Though the main road south from Quetta heads for Karachi, Martin had been advised to take the smaller highway southwest to the wretched port of Gwadar. This lies almost on the Iranian border at the extreme western end of Baluchistan. Once a sleepy and malodorous fishing village, it has developed into a major harbor and entrepot, contentedly devoted to smuggling, especially opium. Islam may denounce the use of narcotics, but that is for Muslims. If the infidels of the West wish to poison themselves and pay handsomely for the privilege, that has nothing to do with true servants and followers of the prophet.

Thus, the poppies are grown in Iran, Pakistan and, most of all, Afghanistan, refined to base morphine locally and hence smuggled farther west to become heroin, and death. In this holy trade, Gwadar plays its part. In Quetta, seeking to avoid conversation with Pashto speakers who might unmask him, Martin had found another Baluchi truck driver heading for Gwadar. It was only in Quetta that he learned there was a five-million-afghani price on his head-but only in Afghanistan.

It was on the third morning after he heard the words “Good luck, boss” that he dropped off the truck and settled gratefully for a cup of sweet green tea at a sidewalk cafe. He was expected, but not by locals.

The first of the two Predators had taken off from Thumrait twenty-four hours earlier. Flying in rotation, the UAVs would keep up a constant day-and-night patrol over their assigned surveillance area.

A product of General Atomics, the Predator UAV RQ-i is not much to look at. It resembles something that might have come from the airplane modeler’s doodling pad.

It is only twenty-seven feet long and pencil slim. Its tapered seagull wings have a span of forty-eight feet. Right at the rear a single 113-horsepower Rotax engine drives the propellers that push it along, and the Rotax just sips petrol from its hundred-gallon fuel tank.

Yet from this puny impulsion, it can speed up to 117 knots, or loiter along at seventy-three. Its maximum endurance aloft is forty hours, but its more normal mission would be to fly up to four hundred nautical miles radius from home base, spend twenty-four hours on the job and fly home again. Being a rear-engined “pusher” device, its directional controls are up front. They can be operated by its controller manually, or switched to remote control from a computerized program to do what is wanted and keep doing it until given fresh instructions.

The Predator’s true genius lies in its bulbous nose, the detachable Skyball avionics pod.

All of the communications kit faces upward, to talk to and listen to the satellites up there in space. These receive all its photo images and overheard conversations and pass them back to base.

What faces downward is the Lynx synthetic-aperture radar and the L-3 Wescam photographic unit. More modern versions, such as the two used over Oman, can overcome night, clouds, rain, hail and snow with the multispectral targeting system.

After the invasion of Afghanistan, when the juiciest of targets were spotted but could not be attacked in time, the Predator went back to the makers, and a new version emerged. It carried the Hellfire missile, giving the eye in the sky a weaponized variant.

Two years later, the head of Al Qaeda from Yemen left his compound far in the invisible interior with four chums in a Land Cruiser. He did not know it, but several pairs of American eyes were watching him on a screen in Tampa. On the word of command, the Hellfire left the belly of the Predator, and seconds later the Land Cruiser and its occupants simply vaporized. It was all witnessed in full color on a plasma screen in Florida.

The two Predators out of Thurait were not weaponized. Their whole task was to patrol at twenty thousand feet-out of sight, inaudible, radar immune-and watch the ground and sea below.

THERE WERE four mosques in Gwadar, but discreet British inquiries of the Pakistani IS1 extracted the information that the fourth and smallest was flagged as a hotbed of fundamentalist agitation. Like most of the smaller mosques in Islam, it was a one-imam place of worship, surviving on donations from the faithful. This one had been created and was run by imam Abdullah Halabi. He knew his congregation well, and from his raised chair as he led the prayers he could spot a visiting newcomer at a glance. Even at the back, the black Talib turban caught his eye.

Later, before the black-bearded stranger could replace his sandals and lose himself in the crowds of the street, the imam tugged at his sleeve. “Greeting of our all-merciful Lord be upon you,” he murmured. He used the Arabic phrase, not Urdu.

“And upon you, Imam,” said the stranger. He, too, spoke Arabic, but the imam noticed the Pashto accent. Suspicion confirmed; the man was from the tribal Territories.

“My friends and I are adjourning to the madafa,” he said. “Would you join us and take tea?”

The Pashtun considered for a second, then gravely inclined his head. Most mosques have a madafa attached, a more relaxed and private social club for prayers, gossip and religious schooling. In the West, the indoctrination of the teenagers into ultra-extremism is often accomplished there. “I am Imam Halabi. Does our new worshipper have a name?” he asked. Without hesitation, Martin produced the first name of the Afghan president and the second of the Special Forces brigadier.

“I am Hamid Yusuf,” he said.

“Then, welcome, Hamid Yusuf,” said the imam. “I notice you dare to wear the turban of the Taliban. Were you one of them?”

“Since I joined Mullah Omar at Kandahar in 1994”

There were a dozen in the madafa. a shabby shack behind the mosque. Tea was served. Martin noticed one of the men staring at him. The same man then excitedly drew the imam aside and whispered frantically. He would not, he explained, ever dream of watching television and its filthy images, but he had been past a TV shop and there was a set in the window. “I am sure it is the man.” he hissed. “He escaped from Kabul but three days ago.”

Martin did not understand Urdu, least of all in the Baluchi accent, but he knew he was being talked about. The imam may have deplored all things Western and modern, but, like most, he found the cell phone damnably convenient, even if it was made by Nokia in Christian Finland. He asked three friends to engage the stranger in talk and not to let him leave. Then he retired to his own humble quarters and made several calls. He returned much impressed. To have been a Talib from the start, to have lost his entire family and clan to the Americans, to have commanded half the northern front in the Yankee invasion, to have broken open the armory at Qala-i-Jangi, to have survived five years in the American hellhole, to have escaped the clutches of the Washington-loving Kabul refime- this man was not a refugee; he was a hero. Imam Halabi may have been a Pakistani, but he had a passionate loathing of the government of Islamabad for its collaboration with America. His sympathies were wholly with Al Qaeda. To be fair to him, the five-million-afghani reward that would make him rich for life did not tempt him in the slightest. He returned to the hall and beckoned the stranger to him. “I know who you are,” he hissed. “You are the one they call the Afghan. You are safe with me, but not in Gwadar. Agents of the ISI are everywhere, and you have a price on your head. Where are your lodgings?”

“I have none. I have only just arrived from the north,” said Martin. “I know where you have come from; it is all over the news. You must stay here, but not for long. Somehow, you must leave Gwadar. You will need papers, a new identity, safe passage away from here. Perhaps I know a man.” He sent a small boy from his madrassah running to the harbor. The boat he sought was not in port. It arrived twenty-four hours later. The boy was still patiently waiting at the berth where it always docked.

Faisal bin Selim was a Qatari by birth. He had been born to poor fishermen in a shack on the edge of a muddy creek near a village that eventually became the bustling capital of Doha. But that was after the discovery of oil, the creation of the United Arab Emirates out of the Trucial States, the departure of the British, the arrival of the Americans and long before the money poured in like a roaring tide.

In his boyhood, he had known poverty, and automatic deference to the lordly white-skinned foreigners. But from his first days, bin Selim had determined he would rise in the world. The path he chose was what he knew: the sea. He became a deckhand on a coastal freighter, and as his ship plied the coast from Masirah Island and Sallah in the Dhofari Province of Oman round to the ports of Kuwait and Bahrain at the head of the Persian Gulf he learned many things with his agile mind.

He learned that there was always someone with something to sell, and prepared to sell it cheap. And there was someone else, somewhere, prepared to buy that something and pay more. Between the two stood the institution called customs. Faisal bin Selim made himself prosperous by smuggling. In his travels, he saw many things that he came to admire: fine cloth and tapestries, Islamic art, ancient Korans, precious manuscripts and the beauty of the great mosques. And he saw other things he came to despise: rich Westerners, porcine faces lobster pink in the sun, disgusting women in tiny bikinis, drunken slobs, all that undeserved money.

The fact that the rulers of the Gulf States also benefited from money that simply poured in black streams from the desert sands did not escape him. As they, too, flaunted their Western habits, drank the imported alcohol, slept with the golden whores, he came to despise them, too. By his midforties, twenty years before a small Baluchi boy waited for him at the dock in Gwadar, two things had happened to Faisal bin Selim. He had earned and saved enough money to commission, buy and own outright a superb timber-trading dhow, constructed by the finest craftsmen at Sur in Oman, and called Rasha, the pearl. And he had become a fervent Wahhabi. When the new prophets arose to follow the teachings of Mau-dudi and Sayyid Qutb, they declared jihad against the forces of heresy and degeneracy, and he was with them. When young men went to fight the godless Soviets in Afghanistan, his prayers went with them; when others flew airliners into the towers of the Western god of money, he knelt and prayed that they would indeed enter the gardens of Allah.

To the world, he remained the courteous, fastidious, frugal-living, devout master and owner of the Rasha. He plied his trade along the entire Gulf coast and round into the Arabian Sea. He did not seek trouble, but if a true believer sought his help, whether in alms or a passage to safety, he would do what he could.

He had come to the attention of Western security forces because a Saudi AQ activist, captured in the Hadramaut and confessing all in a cell in Riyadh, let slip that messages of the utmost secrecy destined for bin Laden himself, so secret that they could only be confided verbally to a messenger who would memorize them verbatim and take his own life before capture, would occasionally leave the Saudi peninsula by boat. The emissary would be deposited on the Baluchi coast, whence he would take his message north to the unknown caves of Waziristan where the sheikh resided. The boat was the Rasha. With the agreement and assistance of the ISI, it was not intercepted, just watched. Faisal bin Selim arrived in Gwadar with a cargo of white goods from the duty-free entrepot of Dubai. Here, the refrigerators, washing machines, microwave cookers and televisions were sold at a fraction of their retail price outside the Freeport warehouses.

He was commissioned to take back with him to the Gulf a cargo of Pakistani carpets, knotted by the thin fingers of little-boy slaves, destined for the feet of the rich Westerners buying luxury villas on the sea island being built off Dubai and Qatar.

He listened gravely to the small boy with the message, nodded, and two hours later, with his cargo safely inland without disturbing Pakistani customs, left the Rasha in the charge of his Omani deckhand and walked sedately through Gwadar to the mosque.

From years of trading with Pakistan, the courtly Arab spoke good Urdu, and he and the imam conversed in that language. He sipped his tea, took sweet cakes and wiped his fingers on a small cambric handkerchief. All the while, he nodded and glanced at the Afghan. When he heard of the breakout from the prison van, he smiled in approval. Then he broke into Arabic.

“And you wish to leave Pakistan, my brother?”

“There is no place for me here,” said Martin. “The imam is right. The secret police will find me and hand me back to the dogs of Kabul. I will end my life before that.”

“Such a pity,” murmured the Qatari. “So far… such a life. And if I take you to the Gulf States, what will you do?”

“I will try to find other true believers and offer what I can.”

“And what would that be? What can you do?”

“I can fight. And I am prepared to die in Allah’s holy war.”

The courtly captain thought for a while.

“The loading of the carpets takes place at dawn,” he said. “It will take several hours. They must be well belowdecks, lest the sea spray touch them. Then I shall depart, sails down. I shall cruise close past the end of the harbor mole. If a man were to leap from the concrete to the deck, no one would notice.” After the ritual salutations, he left. In the darkness, Martin was led by the boy to the dock. Here he studied the Rasha so that he would recognize her in the morning. She came past the mole just before eleven. The gap was eight feet, and Martin made it with inches to spare, after a short run. The Omani had the helm. Faisal bin Selim greeted Martin with a gentle smile. He offered his guest fresh water to wash his hands and delicious dates from the palms of Muscat.

At noon, the elderly man spread two mats on the broad coaming round the cargo hold. Side by side, the two men knelt for the midday prayers. For Martin, it was the first occasion of prayer other than in a crowd where a single voice can be drowned by all the others. He was word-perfect.

When an agent is way out there in the cold, on a “black” and dangerous job, his controllers at home are avid for some sign that he is all right: still alive, still at liberty, still functioning. This indication may come from the agent himself, by phone call, a message in the classified ads of a paper or a chalk mark on a wall, a preagreed “drop.” It may come from a watcher who makes no contact but observes and reports back. It is called a “sign of life.” After days of silence, controllers become very twitchy waiting for some sign of life. It was midday in Thumrait, early breakfast time in Scotland, the wee small hours in Tampa. The first and the third could see what the Predator could see, but did not know its significance. Need to know; they had not been told. But Edzell air base knew.

Clear as crystal, alternately lowering the forehead to the deck and raising the face to the sky, the Afghan was saying his prayers on the deck of the Rasha. There was a roar from the terminal operators in the ops room. Seconds later, Steve Hill took a call at his breakfast table, and gave his wife a passionate and unexpected kiss.

Two minutes later, Marek Gumienny took a call in bed in Old Alexandria. He woke up, listened, smiled, murmured, “Way to go,” and went back to sleep. The Afghan was still on course.

CHAPTER 11

With a good wind off the south, the Rasha hoisted sail, closed down her engine, and the rumbling below was replaced by the calm sounds of the sea: the lapping of the water under the bow, the sigh of the wind in the sails, the creak of block and tackle.

The dhow, shadowed by the invisible Predator four miles above her, crept along the coast of southern Iran and into the Gulf of Oman. Here, she turned half to starboard, trimmed her sail as the wind took her full astern and headed for the narrow gap between Iran and Arabia called the Straits of Hormuz. Through this narrow gap, where the tip of Oman ’s Musandam Peninsula is only eight miles from the Persian shore, a constant stream of mighty tankers went past: some low in the water, full of crude oil for the energy-hungry West; others riding high, going up-gulf to fill with Saudi or Kuwaiti crude. The smaller boats like the dhow stayed closer to the shore to allow the leviathans the freedom of the deep channel. Supertankers, if there is something in their way, simply cannot stop.

The Rasha, being in no hurry, spent one night hove to amid the islands east of the Omani naval base at Kumzar. Sitting on the raised poop deck in the balmy night, still clearly visible on a plasma screen at a Scottish air base, Martin caught sight of two “cigarette boats” by the light of the moon and heard the roar of their huge outboards as they sped out of Omani waters to make the crossing to southern Iran.

These were the smugglers he had heard about; owing allegiance to no country, they ran the smuggling trade. On some empty Iranian or Baluchi beach, they would rendezvous at dawn with the receivers, off-load their cargo of cheap cigarettes and take on board, surprisingly angora goats so valued in Oman. On a flat sea, their pencil-slim aluminum boats, with the cargo lashed midships and the crew hanging on for dear life, would be powered by two immense 250-horsepower outboards at over fifty knots. They are virtually uncatchable, know every creek and inlet, and are accustomed to driving without lights in complete darkness right across the paths of the tankers to the shelter of the other side.

Faisal bin Selim smiled tolerantly. He, too, was a smuggler, but rather more dignified than these vagabonds of the Gulf he could hear in the distance. “And when I have brought you to Arabia, my friend, what will you do?” he asked quietly. The Omani deckhand was at the forepeak, handline over the side, trying for a fine fish for breakfast. He had joined the other two for evening prayers. Now was the hour of pleasant conversation.

“I do not know,” admitted the Afghan. “I know only that I am a dead man in my own country; Pakistan is closed to me, for they are running dogs of the Yankees. I hope to find other true believers, and ask to fight with them.” “Fight? But there is no fighting in the United Arab Emirates. They, too, are wholly allied to the West. The interior is Saudi Arabia, where you will be found immediately and sent back. So…”

The Afghan shrugged. “I only ask to serve Allah. I have lived my life. I will leave my fate in His care.”

“And you say you are prepared to die for Him,” said the courtly Qatari. Mike Martin thought back to his boyhood and his prep school in Baghdad. Most of the pupils were Iraqi boys, but they were the sons of the cream of society, and their fathers were keen that they would speak perfect English and rise to rule great corporations dealing with London and New York. The curriculum was in English, and that included the learning of traditional English poetry. Martin had always had one favorite: the story of how Horatius of Rome defended the last bridge before the invading army of the House of Tarquin as the Romans hacked down the bridge behind him. There was a verse the boys used to chant together:

To every man upon this earth, Death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better, Than facing fearful odds, For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his gods.

“If I can die shahid- in the service of His jihad, of course,” he replied.

The dhow master considered for a while, and changed the subject. “You are wearing the clothes of Afghanistan,” he said. “You will be spotted in minutes. Wait.”

He went below and came back with a freshly laundered dish-dasha, the white cotton robe that falls from shoulders to ankles in an unbroken line. “Change,” he ordered. “Drop the shalwarkameez and the Talib turban over the side.”

When Martin was changed, bin Selim handed him a new headdress, the red-flecked keffiyeh of a Gulf Arab, and the black cord circlet to hold it in place. “Better,” said the old man when his guest had completed the transformation. “You will pass for a Gulf Arab, save when you speak. But there is a colony of Afghans in the area of Jeddah. They have been in Saudi Arabia for generations, but they speak like you. Say that is where you come from and strangers will believe you. Now let us sleep. We rise at dawn for the last day of cruising.” The Predator saw them weigh anchor and leave the islands, sailing gently round the rocky tip of Al Ghanam and turning southwest down the coast of the United Arab Emirates.

There are seven in the UAE, but only the names of the biggest and richest- Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah-spring to mind. The other four are much smaller, much poorer and almost anonymous. Two of these, Ajman and Umm al-Qaiwain, are cheek by jowl alongside Dubai, whose oil riches have made it the most developed of the seven.

Pujairah alone lies on the other side of the peninsula, facing east onto the Gulf of Oman. The seventh is Ras al-Khaimah.

It lies on the same coast as Dubai, but far up along the shore toward the Straits of Hormuz. It is dirt-poor and ultratraditional. For that reason, it has eagerly accepted the gifts of Saudi Arabia, including heavily financed mosques and schools-but all teaching Wahhabism. Ras al-K, as Westerners know it, is the local home of fundamentalism and sympathy for Al Qaeda and jihad. On the port side of the slowly cruising dhow, it would be the first to be reached. This occurred at sundown.

“You have no papers,” said the captain to his guest. “And I cannot provide them. No matter, they have always been a Western impertinence. More important is money. Take these.”

He thrust a wad of UAE dirhams into Martin’s hand. They were cruising in the fading light past the town, a mile away on the shore. The first lights began to flicker among the buildings.

“I will put you ashore farther down the coast,” said bin Selim. “You will find the coast road and walk back. I know a small guesthouse in the Old Town. It is cheap, clean and discreet. Take lodgings there. Do not go out. You will be safe, and, inshallah, I may have friends who can help you.” It was fully dark when Martin saw the lights of the hotel and the Rasha slipped toward the shore. Bin Selim knew it well; the converted Hamra Fort, which had a beach club for its foreign guests, and the club had a jetty. After dark, it would be abandoned.

“Fle’s leaving the dhow,” said a voice in the ops room at Edzell air base. Despite the darkness, the thermal imager of the Predator at twenty thousand feet saw the agile figure leap from the dhow to the jetty, and the dhow reverse her engine and pull back to the deeper water and the sea. “Never mind the boat; stay with the moving figure,” said Gordon Phillips, leaning over the console operator’s shoulder. The instructions went to Thumrait, and the Predator was instructed to follow the thermal image of a man walking along the coast road back toward Ras al-K.

It was a five-mile hike, but Martin reached the Old Town section round midnight. He asked twice, and was directed to the address of the guesthouse. It was five hundred yards from the family home of the al-Shehhi, whence had come Marwan al-Shehhi, who flew the airliner into the south tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11. He was still a local hero.

The proprietor was surly and suspicious until Martin mentioned Faisal bin Selim. That and the sight of a wad of dirhams cleared the air. He was bidden to enter, and shown to a simple room. There were seemingly just two other paying guests, and they had retired.

Unbending his attitude, the room keeper invited Martin to join him for a cup of tea before turning in. Over tea, Martin had to explain that he was from Jeddah, but of Pashtun extraction.

With his dark looks, full black beard and the repeated references to Allah of the truly devout, Martin convinced his host that he also was a true believer. They parted with mutual wishes for a good night’s sleep. The dhow master sailed on through the night. His destination was on the harbor, known as “the Creek,” in the heart of Dubai. Once simply that-a muddy creek, smelling of dead fish, where men mended their nets in the heat of the day-it has become the last “picturesque” sight in the bustling capital, opposite the gold soukh, beneath the windows of the towering Western hotels. Here, the trading dhows are berthed side by side, and the tourists come to stare at the last portion of “Old Arabia.”

Bin Selim hailed a taxi, and instructed the driver to take him three miles up the coast to the Sultanate of Ajman, smallest and second poorest of the seven. There, he dismissed the taxi, ducked into a covered soukh of twisting alleys and clamoring stalls and lost himself to any following “tail,” should there have been one.

There was not. The Predator was concentrating on a guesthouse in the heart of Ras al-Khaimah. The dhow master slipped from the soukh into a small mosque, and made a request of the imam. A boy was sent scurrying through the town and came back with a young man who genuinely was a student in the local technical college. He was also a graduate of the Darunta training camp owned and run by Al Qaeda outside Jalalabad until 2001.

The old man whispered in the ear of the younger, who nodded and thanked him. Then the dhow master went back through the covered market, emerged, hailed a taxi and returned to his freighter in the Creek. He had done all he could. It was up to the younger men now. Inshallah.

That same morning, but later due to the time difference, the Countess of Richmond eased out of the estuary of the Mersey and into the Irish Sea. Captain McKendrick had the conn, and took his freighter south. In time, she would, keeping Wales to her left, clear the Irish Sea and Lizard Point, to meet the Channel and the eastern Atlantic. Then her course lay south, past Portugal, through the Mediterranean to the Suez Canal, and thence to the Indian Ocean. Belowdecks, as the cold March seas flew up over the bow of the Countess, was a cargo of carefully protected and crated Jaguar sedans, destined for the showrooms of Singapore.

FOUR DAYS passed before the Afghan sheltering in Ras al-Khaimah received his visitors. Following his instructions, he had not gone out, or at least not as far as the street. But he had taken the air in the closed courtyard at the rear of the house, screened from the streets by double gates eight feet high. Here various deliver)’ vans came and went.

While in the courtyard he was seen by the Predator, and his controllers in Scotland noted his change of dress.

His visitors, when they came, did not arrive to deliver food, drink or laundry, but to make a collection. They backed the van close to the rear door of the building. The driver stayed at the wheel; the other three entered the house. The lodgers were both away at work, the room keeper by agreement out at the shops. The team of three had their directions. They went swiftly to the appropriate door and entered without knocking. The seated figure, reading his Koran, rose to find himself facing a handgun in the grip of a man trained in Afghanistan. All three were hooded.

They were quiet and efficient. Martin knew enough of fighting men to recognize his visitors knew their business. The hood went over his head and fell to his shoulders. His hands came behind his back, and the plastic cuffs went on. Then he was marching-or being marched-out the door, down the tiled corridor and into the back of the van. He lay on his side, heard the door slam, felt the van lurch out of the gate and into the street.

The Predator saw it, but the controllers thought it was another laundry delivery. In minutes, the van was out of sight. There are many miracles that modern spy technology can accomplish, but controllers and machines can still be fooled. The snatch squad had no idea there was a Predator above them, but their shrewdly choosing midmorning for the snatch rather than midnight fooled the watchers at Edzell.

It took three more days before they realized that their man no longer appeared daily in the courtyard to give the “sign of life.” In short, he had disappeared. They were watching an empty house. And they had no idea which of the several vans had taken him.

In fact, the van had not gone far. The hinterland behind the port and city of Ras al-K is wild and rocky desert rising to the mountains of Ras al-Jibal. Nothing can live here but goats and salamanders. Just in case the man they had snatched was under surveillance, with or without his knowledge, the kidnappers were taking no chances. There were tracks leading up into the hills, and they took one. In the rear, Martin felt the vehicle leave the tarred road and start to jolt over pitted track. Had there been a tailing vehicle, it could not have avoided detection. Even staying out of sight, its plume of rising desert dust would have given it away. A surveillance helicopter would have been even more obvious. The van stopped five miles up the track into the hills. The leader-the one with the handgun-took powerful binoculars and surveyed the valley and the coast, right back to the Old Town, whence they had come. Nothing came toward them. When he was satisfied, the van turned and went back down the hills. Its real destination was a villa standing in a walled compound in the outer suburbs of the town. With the gates relocked, the van reversed up to an open door, and Martin was marched back out and down another tiled passage. The plastic ties came off his wrists, and a cool metal shackle went on the left one. There would be a chain, he knew, and a bolt in the wall that could not be ripped free. When his hood came off, it was the kidnappers who had their heads covered. They withdrew backward, and the door slammed. He heard bolts go into sockets.

The cell was not a cell in the true meaning. It was a ground-floor room that had been fortified. The window had been bricked up, and though Martin could not see it a painting of a window adorned the outside to fool even those with binoculars peering over the compound wall.

Considering what he had undergone years before in the SAS program of “interrogation resistance,” it was even comfortable. There was a single bulb in the ceiling protected against thrown objects by a wire cage. The light was subdued but adequate.

There was a camp bed, and just enough slack in his chain to allow him to lie on it to sleep. The room also had an upright chair that he could also reach, and a chemical toilet. All were within reach but in different directions. His left wrist, however, was in a stainless-steel shackle that linked to a chain, and the chain went to a wall bracket. He could not begin to reach the door, through which his interrogators would enter-if at all-with food and water, and a spy hole in the door meant they could check on him any time and he would neither hear nor see them.

At Castle Forbes, there had been lengthy and passionate discussions over one problem: Should he carry any tracking device on him? There are now tracker transmitters so tiny they can be injected under the skin without cutting the epidermis at all. This is pinhead-sized. Warmed by blood, they need no power source. But their range is limited. Worse, there are ultrasensitive detectors that can spot them.

“These people are absolutely not stupid,” Phillips had stressed. His colleague from CIA Counter-Terrorism agreed.

“Among the best educated of them,” said McDonald, “their mastery of very high technology, and especially the computer sciences, is awesome.” No one at Forbes doubted that if Martin was subjected to a hypertech body search and something were discovered, he would be dead within minutes. Eventually, the decision was no planted bleeper. No signal sender. The kidnappers came for him an hour later. They were hooded again. The body search was lengthy and thorough. The clothes went first, until he was naked, and they were taken away for searching in another room. They did not even employ invasive throat and anal search. The scanner did it all. Inch by inch, it was run over his body in case it bleeped, meaning it had discovered a non-body-tissue substance. Only his mouth caused it to bleep. They forced his mouth open and examined every filling. Otherwise-nothing. They returned his clothing, and prepared to leave. “I left my Koran at the guesthouse,” said the prisoner. “I have no watch or mat, but it must be the hour of prayer.”

The leader stared at him through the spy hole. He said nothing, but two minutes later he returned with mat and Koran. Martin thanked him gravely. Food and water were brought regularly. Each time, he was waved back with the handgun as the tray was deposited where he could reach it. The chemical lavatory was emptied in the same way.

It was three days before his interrogation began, and for this he was masked, lest he look out the windows, and led down two corridors. When his mask was removed, he was astonished. The man in front of him, sitting calmly behind a carved refectory table, for all the world like a potential employer interviewing an applicant, was youthful, elegant, civilized, urbane and uncovered. He spoke in perfect Gulf Arabic.

“I see no point in masks,” he said, “nor silly names. Mine, by the way, is Dr. al-Khattab There is no mystery here. If I am satisfied you are who you say you are, you will be welcome to join us. In which case, you will not betray us. If not, then I am afraid you will be killed at once. So let us not pretend, Mr. Izmat Khan. Are you really the one they call ‘the Afghan’?” “They will be concerned about two things,” Gordon Phillips warned him during one of their interminable briefings at Forbes Castle. “Are you truly Izmat Khan, and are you the same Izmat Khan who fought at Qala-i-Jangi? Or have five years in Guantanamo turned you into something else?”

Martin stared back at the smiling Arab. He recalled the warnings of Tamian Godfrey. Never mind the wild-bearded screamers; watch out for the one who will be smooth-shaven; who will smoke, drink, consort with girls; who will pass for one of us. Wholly Westernized. A human chameleon, hiding the hatred. Totally deadly. There was a word… takfir.

“There are many Afghans,” he said. “Who calls me ‘the Afghan’?” “Ah, you have been incommunicado for five years. After Qala-i-jangi, word spread about you. You do not know about me, but I know much about you. Some of our people have been released from Camp Delta. They spoke highly of you. They claim you never broke. True?”

“They asked me about myself. I told them that.” “But you never denounced others? You mentioned no names? That is what the others say of you.”

“They wiped out my family. Most of me died then. How do you punish a man who is dead?”

“A good answer, my friend. So, let us talk about Guantanamo. Tell me about Gitmo.”

Martin had been briefed hour after hour about what had happened to him on the Cuban peninsula. The arrival on 14 January 2002-hungry thirsty, soiled with urine, blindfolded, shackled so tightly the hands were numb for weeks. Beards and heads shaved, clothed in orange coveralls, stumbling and tripping in the darkness of the hoods…

Dr. al-Khattab took copious notes, writing on yellow legal note-paper with an old-fashioned fountain pen. When a passage was reached where he knew all the answers, he ceased, and contemplated his prisoner with a gentle smile. In the late afternoon, he offered a photograph.

“Do you know this man?” he asked. “Did you ever see him?” Martin shook his head. The face looking up from the photograph was General Geoffrey D. Miller, successor as camp commandant to General Rick Baccus. The latter had sat in on interrogations, but General Miller left it to the CIA teams.

“Quite right,” said al-Khattab. “He saw you, according to one of our released friends, but you were always hooded as a punishment for noncooperation. And when did the conditions start to improve?”

They talked until sundown, then the Arab rose.

“I have much to check on,” he said. “If you are telling the truth, we will continue in a few days. If not, I’m afraid I shall have to issue Suleiman with the appropriate instructions.”

Martin went back to his cell. Dr. al-Khattab issued rapid orders to the guard team and left. He drove a modest rented car, and he returned to the Hilton Hotel in Ras al-Khaimah town, elegantly dominating the AI Saqr deepwater harbor. He spent the night and left the next day. By then, he was wearing a well-cut cream tropical suit. When he checked in with British Airways at Dubai International Airport, his English was impeccable.

In fact, Ali Aziz al-Khattab had been born a Kuwaiti, the son of a senior bank official. By Gulf standards, that meant that his upbringing had been effortless and privileged. In 1989, his father had been posted to London as deputy manager of the Bank of Kuwait. The family had gone with him, and avoided the invasion of their homeland by Saddam Hussein in 1990.

Ali Aziz, already a good English speaker, was enrolled in a British school at age fifteen and emerged three years later with accentless English and excellent grades. When his family returned home, he elected to stay on and go for a degree at Loughborough Technical College. Four years later, he emerged with a science degree in chemical engineering, and proceeded on to a doctorate. It was not in the Arabian Gulf but in London that he began to attend the mosque run by a firebrand preacher of anti-Western hatred and became what the media like to call “radicalized.” In truth, by twenty-one he was fully brainwashed, and a fanatical supporter of Al Qaeda.

A “talent spotter” suggested he might like to visit Pakistan; he accepted, and then went on, through the Khyber Pass, to spend six months at an Al Qaeda terrorist training camp. He had already been marked out as a “sleeper” who should lie low in England and never come to the attention of the authorities. Back in London, he did what they all do: He reported to his embassy that he had lost his passport and was issued a new one, which did not carry the telltale Pakistan entry stamp. As far as anyone who asked was concerned, he had been visiting family and friends in the Gulf and had never been near Pakistan, let alone Afghanistan. He secured a post as lecturer at Aston University, Birmingham, in 1999-Two years later, Anglo-American forces invaded Afghanistan. There were several weeks of panic in case any trace of him in the terror camps had been left lying round, but, in his case, AQ head of personnel, Abu Zubaydah, had done his job. No traces were found of any al-Khattab ever having been there. So he remained undiscovered, and rose to be AQ commanding agent in the UK.

As Dr. AL-KHATTAB’S London-bound airliner was taking off, the Java Star eased away from her berth in the Sultanate of Brunei on the coast of Indonesian North Borneo and headed for the open sea.

Her destination was the West Australian port of Fremantle, as usual, and her Norwegian skipper, Knut Herrmann, had no inkling his journey would be anything other than usual, routine and eventless.

He knew that the seas in those parts remain the most dangerous waters in the world, but not because of shoals, riptides, rocks, tempests, reefs or tsunamis. The danger here is pirate attacks.

Every year, between the Straits of Malacca to the west and the Celebes Sea to the east, there are over five hundred pirate attacks on merchant shipping, and up to a hundred hijackings. Occasionally, the crew are ransomed back to the shipowners. Sometimes they are all killed and never heard of again; in those cases, the cargo is stolen and sold on the black market. If Captain Herrmann sailed with an easy mind on the “milk run” to Fremantle, it was because he was convinced his cargo was useless to the dacoits of the sea. But on this trip, he was wrong.

The first leg of his course lay north, away from his eventual destination. It took him six hours to pass the ramshackle town of Kudat and come round the northernmost tip of Sabah and the island of Borneo. Only then could he run southeast for the Sulu Archipelago.

He intended to move through the coral-and-jungle islands by taking the deepwater strait between Tawitawi and Jolo islands.

South of the islands, it was a clear run down the Celebes Sea to the south and eventually Australia.

His departure from Brunei had been watched, and a cell phone call made. Even if it had been intercepted, the call referred only to the recovery of a sick uncle who would be out of hospital in twelve days. That meant: twelve hours to intercept.

The call was taken on a creek on Jolo Island, and the man who took it would have been recognized by Mr. Alex Siebart, of Crutched Friars, City of London. It was Mr. Lampong, who no longer affected being a businessman from Sumatra. The twelve men he commanded in the velvety tropical night were cutthroats, but they were well paid and would stay obedient. Criminality apart, they were also Muslim extremists. The Abu Sayyaf movement of the southern Philippines, whose last peninsula is only a few miles from Indonesia on the Sulu Sea, has the reputation not only for religious extremism but also of being killers for hire. The offer Mr. Lampong had put to them enabled them to fulfill both functions. The two speedboats they occupied put to sea at dawn, took up position between the two islands and waited. An hour later, the Java Star bore down on them, passing from the Sulu Sea into the Celebes. Taking her over was a simple task, and the gangsters were well practiced.

Captain Herrmann had taken the helm through the night, and as dawn came up over the Pacific, away to his left, he handed over to his Indonesian first officer and went below. His crew of ten lashkars were also in their bunks in the fo’c’sle.

The first thing the Indonesian officer saw was a pair of speedboats racing up astern, one on each side. Dark, barefoot, agile men leapt effortlessly from speedboat to deck and ran after toward the superstructure and bridge where he stood. He had just time to press the emergency buzzer to his captain’s cabin, and the men were bursting through the door from the flybridge. Then there was a knife at his throat, and a voice screaming, “Capitan, capitan…” There was no need. A tired Knut Herrmann was coming topside to see what was going on. He and Mr. Lampong arrived on the bridge together. Lampong held a mini Uzi. The Norwegian knew better than to begin to resist. The ransom would have to be sorted out between the pirates and his employer company HQ in Fremantle. “Captain Herrmann…”

The bastard knew his name. This had been prepared. “Please ask your first officer, did he in any circumstances make a radio transmission in the past five minutes?”

There was no need to ask. Lampong was speaking in English. For the Norwegian and his Indonesian officer, it was the common language. The first officer screamed that he had not touched the radio’s transmit button. “Excellent,” said Lampong, and issued a stream of orders in the local dialect. This the first officer understood, and opened his mouth to scream. The Norwegian understood not a word, but he understood everything when the dacoit holding his number two jerked the seaman’s head back and sliced his throat open with a single cut. The first officer kicked, jerked, slumped and died. Captain Herrmann had not been sick in forty years at sea, but he leaned against the wheel and emptied his stomach.

“Two pools of mess to be cleaned up,” said Lampong. “Now, Captain, for every minute you refuse to obey my orders, that will happen to one of your men. Am I clear?”

The Norwegian was escorted to the tiny radio shack behind the bridge, where he selected channel 16, international distress frequency. Lampong produced a written sheet.

“You will not just read this in a calm voice. Captain. When I press TRANSMIT and nod, you will shout this message with panic in your voice. Or your men die, one by one. Are you ready?”

Captain Herrmann nodded. He would not even have to act in order to affect extreme distress.

“Mayday, Mayday Mayday. Java Star, Java Star… catastrophic fire in engine room… I cannot save her… my position…” He knew the position was wrong even as he read it out. It was a hundred miles south into the Celebes Sea. But he was not about to argue. Lampong cut the transmission. He brought the Norwegian at gunpoint back to the bridge. Two of his own seamen had been put to work frenziedly scrubbing up the blood and the vomit on the floor of the bridge. The other eight he could see marshaled in a terrified group out on the hatch covers with six dacoits to watch them. Two more of the hijackers stayed on the bridge. The other four were tossing life rafts, life belts and a pair of inflatable jackets down into one of the speedboats. It was the one with the extra fuel tanks stored amidships. When they were ready, the speedboat left the side of the Java Star and went south. On a calm, tropical sea, at an easy fifteen knots, they would be a hundred miles south in seven hours, and back in their pirate creeks in ten after that.

“A new course. Captain,” said Lampong civilly. His tone was gentle, but the implacable hatred in his eyes gave the lie to any humanity toward the Norwegian. The new course was back toward the northeast, out of the cluster of islands that make up the Sulu Archipelago, and across the national line into Filipino water. The southern province of Mindanao Island is Zamboanga, and parts of it are simply no-go areas for Filipino government forces. This is the terrain of Abu Sayyaf. Here they are safe to recruit, train and bring their booty. The Java Star was certainly booty, albeit unmarketable. Lampong conferred in the local lingo to the senior among the pirates. The man pointed ahead to the entrance to a narrow creek flanked by impenetrable jungle.

What he asked was: “Can your men manage her from here?” The pirate nodded.

Lampong called his orders to the group round the lashkar seamen at the bow. Without even replying, they herded the sailors to the rail and opened fire. The men screamed and toppled into the warm sea. Somewhere below, sharks turned to the blood smell.

Captain Herrmann was so taken by surprise he would have needed two or three seconds to react. He never got them. Lampong’s bullet took him full in the chest, and he, too, toppled back from the fly-bridge into the sea. Half an hour later, towed by two small tugs that had been stolen weeks earlier, and with much screaming and shouting, the Java Star was at her new berth beside a stout teak jetty.

The jungle concealed her from all sides and from above. Also hidden were the two long, low tin-roofed workshops that housed the steel plates, cutters, welders, power generator and paint.

The last, despairing cry from the Java Star on channel 16 had been heard by a dozen vessels, but the nearest to the spot given as her position was a refrigerator ship loaded with fresh and highly perishable fruit for the American market across the Pacific. She was commanded by a Finnish skipper, who diverted at once to the spot. There he found the bobbing life rafts, small tents on the ocean swell that had opened and inflated automatically as designed. He circled once and spotted the life belts and two inflated jackets. All were marked with the name: M V Java Star. According to the law of the sea, which he respected, Captain Raikkonen cut power and lowered a pinnace to look inside the rafts. They were empty, so he ordered them sunk. He had lost several hours and could stay no longer. There was no point. With a heavy heart, he reported by radio that the Java Star was lost with all hands. Far away in London, the news was noted by insurers Lloyd’s International, and at Ipswich, UK, Lloyd’s shipping list logged the loss. For the world, the Java Star had simply ceased to exist.

CHAPTER 12

In fact, the interrogator was gone for a week. Martin remained in his cell with only the Koran for company. He would, he felt, soon be among that revered company who had memorized every one of the 6,666 verses in it. But years in Special Forces had finally given him a rare gift among humans: the ability to remain motionless for exceptionally long periods and defy boredom and the urge to fidget.

So he schooled himself again to adapt to the inner contemplative life that alone can stop a man in solitary confinement from going mad. This talent did not prevent the operations room at Edzell air base from becoming very tense. They had lost their man, and the inquiries from Marek Gumienny in Langley and Steve Hill in London became more pressing. The Predator was double-assigned: to look down on Ras al-Khaimah in case Crowbar appeared again, and to monitor the dhow Rasha when it appeared in the Gulf and docked somewhere in the UAE.

Dr. al-Khattab returned when he had confirmed every aspect of the story as it concerned Guantanamo Bay. It had not been easy. He had not the slightest intention of betraying himself to any of the four British inmates who had been sent home. They had all declared repeatedly that they were not extremists and had been swept up in the American net by accident. Whatever the Americans thought, Al Qaeda could confirm it was all true. To make it harder, Izmat Khan had spent so long in solitary for noncooperation that no other detainee had got to know him well. He admitted he had picked up fragmentary English, but that was from the endless interrogations when he had listened to the CIA man and then the translation by the one Pashto-speaking ‘terp.

From what al-Khattab could discover, his prisoner had not slipped up once. What little could be gleaned from Afghanistan indicated that the breakout from the prison van between Bagram and Pul-i-Charki jail had indeed been genuine. What he could not know was that this episode had been accomplished by the very able head of station of the SIS office inside the British Embassy. Brigadier Yusef had acted out his rage most convincingly, and the agents of the by-now-resurgent Taliban were convinced. And they said so to Al Qaeda inquiries. “Let us go back to your early days in the Tora Bora,” he proposed when the interrogation resumed. “Tell me about your boyhood.” Al-Khattab was a clever man, but he also could not know that, even though the man in front of him was a ringer, Martin knew the mountains of Afghanistan better than he. The Kuwaiti’s six months in the terrorist training camps had been exclusively among fellow Arabs, not Pashtun mountain men. He noted copiously even the names of the fruits in the orchards of Maloko-zai. His hand sped across the legal pad, covering page after page. On the third day of the second session, the narrative had reached the day that proved a crucial hinge in the life of Izmat Khan: August 21, 1998, the day the Tomahawk cruise missiles crashed in the mountains. “Ah, yes, truly tragic,” he murmured. “And strange, for you must be the only Afghan for whom no family member remains alive to vouch for you. It is a remarkable coincidence, and as a scientist I hate coincidences. What was the effect on you?”

In fact, Izmat Khan, at Guantanamo, had refused to talk about why he hated Americans with such a passion. It was information from the other fighters who had survived Qala-i-Jangi and reached Camp Delta that filled the gap. In the Taliban army, Izmat Khan had become an iconic figure, and his story was whispered round the campfires as the man immune to fear. The other survivors had told the interrogators the story of the annihilated family. Al-Khattab paused and gazed at his prisoner. He still had grave reservations, but of one thing he had become certain. The man truly was Izmat Khan; his doubts were over the second question: Had he been “turned” by the Americans? “So you claim you declared a sort of private war? A very personal jihad? And you have never relented? But what did you actually do about it?” “I fought against the Northern Alliance, the allies of the Americans.”

“But not until October and November 2001.” said al-Khattab.

“There were no Americans in Afghanistan until then,” said Martin. “True. So you fought for Afghanistan… and lost. Now you wish to fight for Allah.”

Martin nodded.

“As the sheikh predicted,” he said.

For the first time, Dr. al-Khattab’s urbanity completely forsook him. He stared at the black-bearded face across the table for a full thirty seconds, mouth agape, pen poised but unmoving. Finally, he spoke, in a whisper, “You… have actually met the sheikh?”

In all his weeks in the camp, al-Khattab had never actually met Osama bin Laden. Just once, he had seen a black-windowed Land Cruiser passing by, but it had not stopped. But he would, quite literally, have taken a meat cleaver and severed his left wrist for the chance of meeting, let alone conversing with, the man he venerated more than any other on earth. Martin met his gaze and nodded. Al-Khattab recovered his poise.

“You will start at the beginning of this episode and describe exactly what happened. Leave out nothing, no tiny detail.”

So Martin told him. He told him of serving in his father’s lashkar as a teenager freshly back from the madrassah outside Peshawar. He told of the patrol with others, and how they had been caught on a mountainside with only a group of boulders to shelter in.

He made no mention of any British officer, nor any Blowpipe missile, nor the destruction of the Hind gunship. He told only of the roaring chain gun in the nose; the fragments of bullet and rock flying around until the Hind-eternal praise be to Allah-ran out of ammunition and flew away. He told of feeling a blow like a punch or a hit from a hammer in the thigh, and being carried by his comrades across the valleys until they found a man with a mule and took it from him.

And he told of being carried to a complex of caves at Jaji and being handed over to Saudis who lived and worked there.

“But the sheikh, tell me of the sheikh,” insisted al-Khattab. So Martin told him. The Kuwaiti took down the dialogue word for word. “Say that again, please.”

“He said to me: ‘The day will come when Afghanistan will no longer have need of you, but the all-merciful Allah will always have need of a warrior like you.’” “Then what happened?”

“He changed the dressing on the leg.”

“The sheikh did that?”

“No, the doctor who was with him. The Egyptian.” Dr. al-Khattab sat back and let out a long breath. Of course, the doctor, Ayman al-Zawahiri. companion and confidant, the man who had brought Egyptian Islamic jihad to join the sheikh to create Al Qaeda. He began to tidy up his papers. “I have to leave you again. It will take a week, maybe more. You will have to stay here. Chained, I am afraid. You have seen too much, you know too much. But if you are indeed a true believer, and truly ‘the Afghan,’ you will join us as an honored recruit. If not…”

Martin was back in his cell when the Kuwaiti left. This time, al-Khattab did not return straight to London. He went to the Hilton, and wrote steadily and carefully for a day and a night. When he had done, he made several calls on a new and “lily-white” cell phone that then went into the deepwater harbor. In fact, he was not being listened to, but even if he had been his words would have meant little. But Dr. al-Khattab was still in freedom because he was a very careful man.

The calls he made arranged a meeting with Faisal bin Selim, master of the Rasha, which was moored in Dubai. That afternoon, he drove his cheap rental car to Dubai and conversed with the elderly captain, who took a long personal letter and hid it deep in his robes. And the Predator kept circling at twenty thousand feet.

Islamist terror groups have already lost far too many senior operatives not to have realized that for them, however careful they are, cell phone and sat phone calls are dangerous. The West’s interception, eavesdrop and decryption technology is simply too good. Their other weakness is the transferring of sums of money through the normal banking system.

To overcome the latter danger, they use the hundi system, which, with variations, is as old as the first caliphate. Hundi is based on the total-trust concept, which any lawyer will advise against. But it works because any money launderer who cheated his customer would soon be out of business or worse. The payer hands over his money in cash to the hundi man in place A and asks that his friend in place B shall receive the equivalent minus the hundi man’s cut. The hundi man has a trusted partner, usually a relative in place B. He informs his partner, and instructs him to make the money available-all in cash-to the payer’s friend who will identify himself thus.

Given the tens of millions of Muslims who send money back to families in the home country, and given that there are neither computers nor even checkable dockets, and given that it is all in cash and both payers and receivers can use pseudonyms, the money movements are virtually impossible to intercept or trace. For communications, the solution lies in hiding the terrorist messages in three-figure codes which can be e-mailed or texted round the world. Only the recipient, with a decipher list of up to three hundred such number groups, can work out the message. This works for brief instructions and warnings. Occasionally, a lengthy and exact text must travel halfway round the world. Only the West is always in a hurry. The East has patience. If it takes so long, then it takes that long. The Rasha sailed that night and made her way back to Gwadar. There, a loyal emissary, alerted in Karachi down the coast by a text message, had arrived on his motorcycle. He took the letter and rode north across Pakistan to the small but fanatic town of Miram Shah. There, the man trusted enough to go into the high peaks of South Waziristan was waiting at the named chaikhana and the sealed package changed hands again. The reply came back the same way. It took ten days. But Dr. al-Khattab did not stay in the Arabian Gulf. He flew to Cairo, and then due west to Morocco. There, he interviewed and selected the four North Africans who would become part of the second crew. Because he was still not under surveillance, his journey appeared on no one’s radar.

When the handsome cards were dealt, Mr. Wei Wing Li received a pair of twos. Short, squat and toadlike, his shoulders were surmounted by a football of a head and a face deeply pitted with smallpox. But he was good at his job. He and his crew had arrived at the hidden creek on the Zamboanga peninsula two days before the Java Star. Their journey from China, where they featured in the criminal underworld of Guangdong, had not involved the inconvenience of passports or visas. They had simply boarded a freighter whose captain had been amply rewarded, and had thus arrived off Jolo Island, where two speedboats out of the Filipino creeks had taken them off.

Mr. Wei had greeted his host, Mr. Lampong, and the local Abu Sayyaf chieftain who had recommended him, inspected the living quarters for his dozen crewmen, taken the fifty percent of his fee “up front” and asked to see the workshops. After a lengthy inspection, he counted the tanks of oxygen and acetylene, and pronounced himself satisfied. Then he studied the photos taken in Liverpool. When the Java Star was finally in the creek, he knew what had to be done and set about it.

Ship transformation was his specialty, and over fifty cargo vessels plying the seas of Southeast Asia with false names and papers also had false shapes thanks to Mr. Wei. He had said he needed two weeks and had been given three, but not an hour longer. In that time, the Java Star was going to become the Countess of Richmond. Mr. Wei did not know that. He did not need to know. In the photos he studied, the name of the vessel had been air-brushed out. Mr.

Wei was not bothered with names or papers. It was shapes that concerned him. There would be parts of the Java Star to cut out and others to cut off. There would be features to be fashioned from welded steel. But most of all, he would create six long, steel sea containers that would occupy the deck from below the bridge to the forepeak in three pairs.

Yet they would not be real. From all sides, and from above, they would appear authentic down to the Hapag-Lloyd’s markings. They would pass inspection at a range of a few feet. Yet inside, they would have no interior walls; they would constitute a long gallery with a hinged, removable roof, and access through a new door, to be cut in the bulkhead below the bridge and then disguised to be invisible unless one knew the location of the release catch. What Mr. Wei and his team would not do was the painting. The Filipino terrorists would do that, and the ship’s new name would be applied after he had left. The day he fired up his oxyacetylene cutters, the Countess of Richmond was passing through the Suez Canal.

When Ali Aziz al-Khattab returned to the villa, he was a changed man. He ordered the shackles removed from his prisoner, and invited him to share his table at lunch. His eyes glittered with a deep excitement. “I have communicated with the sheikh himself,” he purred. Clearly, the honor consumed him. The reply was not written. It had been confided in the mountains to the messenger verbally, and he had memorized it. This is also a common practice in the higher reaches of Al Qaeda.

The messenger had been brought all the way to the Arabian Gulf, and when the Rasha docked the message had been given word for word to Dr. al-Khattab. “There is one last formality,” he said. “Would you please raise the hem of your dishdasha to the midthigh?”

Martin did so. He knew nothing of al-Khattab’s scientific discipline, only that he had a doctorate. He prayed it was not in dermatology. The Kuwaiti examined the puckered scar with keen attention. It was exactly where he was told it would be. It had the six stitches sutured into place in a Jaji cave eighteen years earlier by a man he revered.

“Thank you, my friend. The sheikh himself sends his personal greetings. What an incredible honor. He and the doctor remembered the young warrior and the words spoken.

“He has authorized me to include you in a mission that will inflict on the Great Satan a blow so terrible that even the destruction of the towers will seem minor.

“You have offered your life to Allah. The offer is accepted. You will die gloriously, a true shahid. You and your fellow martyrs will be spoken of a thousand years from now.”

After three weeks of wasted time. Dr. al-Khattab was now in a hurry. The resources of Al Qaeda down the entire coasts were called upon. A barber came to trim the shaggy mane to a Western-style haircut. He also prepared to shave off the beard. Martin protested. As a Muslim and as an Afghan, he wanted his beard. Al-Khattab conceded it could be clipped to a neat Vandyke around the point of the chin, but no longer.

Suleiman himself took full-face photos, and twenty-four hours later appeared with a perfect passport, showing the bearer to be a marine engineer from Bahrain, known to be a staunchly pro-Western sultanate. A tailor came, took measurements and reappeared with shoes, socks, shirt, tie and dark gray suit, along with a small valise to carry them. The traveling party prepared to leave the next day. Suleiman, who turned out to be from Abu Dhabi, would be going all the way, accompanying the Afghan. The other two were “muscle,” locally produced, locally recruited and dispensable. The villa, having served its purpose, would be scoured and abandoned.

As he prepared to leave before them, Dr. al-Khattab turned to Martin. “I envy you, Afghan. You can never know how much. You have fought for Allah, bled for Him, taken pain and the foulness of the infidel for Him. And now you will die for Him. If only I could be with you.” He held out his hand, English style, then recalled that he was an Arab and embraced the Afghan. At the door, he turned one final time. “You will be in paradise before me, Afghan. Save a place for me there.

Inshallah.”

Then he was gone. He always parked his hired car several hundred yards away and round two corners. Outside the villa gates, she crouched, as always, adjusting a shoe and glancing up and down the road. There was nothing but some chit of a girl two hundred yards up, trying to start a scooter that refused to fire. But she was local, in jilbab, covering the hair and half the face. Still, it offended him that a woman would have any motorized vehicle at all. He turned and walked away toward his car. The girl with the spluttering engine leaned forward and spoke into something inside the basket above the front mudguard. Her clipped English spoke of Cheltenham Ladies’ College. “Mongoose I, on the move,” she said.

ANYONE WHO has ever been involved in what Kipling called “the Great Game,” and what James Jesus Angleton of the CIA referred to as the “wilderness of mirrors,” will surely agree the greatest enemy is the UCU. The Unforeseen Cock-Up has probably wrecked more covert missions than treachery or brilliant counterintelligence by the other side. It almost put an end to Operation Crowbar. And it all started because everyone consumed by the new atmosphere of cooperation was trying to be helpful. The pictures from the two Predators that were “spelling” each other over the UAE and the Arabian Sea were going back from Thumrait to Edzell air base, which knew exactly why and American Army CENTCOM at Tampa, Florida, which thought the British had simply asked for some routine aerial surveillance. Martin had insisted that no more than twelve should ever know he was out in the cold, and the number was still only at ten. And they were not in Tampa. Whenever the Predators were over the Emirates, their images contained a teeming mass of Arabs, non-Arabs, cars, cabs, docks and houses. There were far too many to begin checking out every one. But the dhow called the Rasha, and her elderly master, were known about. So when she was docked, anyone visiting her was also of possible interest.

But there were scores. She had to be loaded and unloaded, refueled and reprovisioned. The Omani crewman scrubbing her down exchanged pleasantries with passersby on the quayside. Tourists wandered by to gawk at a real trading dhow of traditional teak. Her skipper was visited onboard by his local agents and personal friends. When a single, clean-shaven young Gulf Arab in white dishdasha and white, filigreed thub skullcap conferred with Faisal bin Selim, he was just one of many.

Edzell operations room had a menu of a thousand faces of confirmed and suspected AQ members and sympathizers, and every image from the Predators was electronically compared. Dr. al-Khattab did not trigger red flags because he was not known. So Edzell missed him. These things happen. The slim young Arab visiting the Rasha rang no bells in Tampa either, but the Army sent the images as a courtesy to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, and the National Reconnaissance Office-spy satellites-in Washington. The NSA provided them as a service to their British partners at GCHQ Gheltenham, who had a good, long look, missed al-Khattab and sent the images to the British Security Service-counterintelligence-more commonly known as MI5, at Thames House, just down the embankment from the Houses of Parliament. Here, a young probationer, keen to impress, ran the faces of all the visitors to the Rasha through the Face Recognition database. It is not all that long ago that the recognition of human faces relied on talented agents who worked in half darkness, poring over grainy images with magnifying glasses trying to answer two questions: Who is the man woman in this photo, and have we ever seen them before? It was always a lonely quest, and took years before a dedicated scrutineer developed the sixth sense that could recall that the “chummy” in the photo had been at a Vietnamese diplomatic cocktail party in Delhi five years earlier and was certainly for that reason from the KGCB.

Then came the computer. Software was prepared that reduced the human face to over six hundred tiny measurements and stored them. It seems every human face in the world can be broken down into measurements. It may be the exact distance to the micron between the pupils of the eyes, the width of the nose at seven points between eyebrows and tip, twenty-two measurements for the lips alone, and the ears…

Ah, the ears. Face analysts love the ears. Every crease and furrow, wrinkle and curve, fold and lobe, is different. They are like fingerprints. Even the ones on the left and right side of the head are not quite the same. Plastic surgeons ignore them, but give a skilled face-watcher both ears in good definition and he will get his “match.”

The computer software had a memory bank fare bigger than a thousand faces stored at Edzell. It had convicted criminals of apparently no political persuasion at all, because even they can work for terrorists if the price is right. It had immigrants, legal and illegal, and not necessarily Muslim converts. It had thousands and thousands of faces taken from demonstrations, as the protesters rolled by the hidden cameras, waving their placards and chanting their slogans. And it did not confine its database to the United Kingdom. In short, it had over three million human faces from all over the world. The computer broke down the face talking to the master of the Rasha, compensated for the oblique angle of the shot by picking the single image where the man raised his head to look at a jet taking off from Abu Dhabi airport, secured its six hundred measurements and began to compare. It could even adjust for added or shaved facial hair.

Fast though it was, the computer still took an hour to do its work. But it found him.

He was a face in a crowd outside a mosque just after 9/11 cheering enthusiastically whatever the orator was saying. This orator was known as Abu Qatada, fanatical Al Qaeda supporter in Britain, and the crowd he was addressing that late September day of 2001 was from al-Muhajiroun, a jihad-supporting extremist group.

Abstracting the face of the student from the file, the probationer took it to his superior. From there, it went up to the formidable lady running MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller. She ordered that the man be traced. No one then knew the probationer had uncovered the chieftain of Al Qaeda in Britain. It took a bit more time, but another match came up; he was receiving his doctorate at an academic ceremony. His name was Ali Aziz al-Khattab, a highly Anglicized academic with a post at Aston University, Birmingham. With what the authorities had, he was either a highly successful, long-term sleeper or a foolish man who in his student days had dabbled with extreme politics. If every citizen in the second category were arrested, there would be more detainees than police.

For sure, he had apparently never been anywhere near extremists since that day outside the mosque. But a fully reformed foolish boy is not spotted conferring with the captain of the Rasha in Abu Dhabi port. So… he was in the first category: an AQ sleeper, until proven otherwise. Further discreet checks revealed he was back in Britain, resuming his laboratory work at Aston. The question was: Arrest him or watch him? The problem was, a single aerial photograph that could not be revealed would not secure a conviction. It was decided to put the academic under surveillance, costly though it was.

The quandary was solved a week later when Dr. al-Khattab booked a flight back to the Arabian Gulf. That was when the SRR was brought in. Britain has for years possessed one of the best “tracker” units in the world. It was known as the 14^th Intelligence Company, or the Detachment, or, more simply, the Det. And it was extremely covert. Unlike the SAS and the SBS, it was not designed as a unit of ultra-hard fighters. Its talents were extreme stealth and skill at planting bugs, taking long-range photos, eavesdropping and tracking. It was particularly effective against the IRA in Northern Ireland. In several cases, it was the information provided by the Det that enabled the SAS to set an ambush for a terrorist attack unit and wipe them out. Unlike the hard units, the Det used women extensively. As trackers, they were more likely to pass as harmless and not to be feared. The information they were able to bring back was indeed very much to be feared.

In 2005, the British government decided to expand and upgrade the Det. It became “the Special Reconnaissance Regiment.” It had an inaugural parade in which everyone, including the presiding general, was photographed only from the waist down. Its headquarters remain secret, and if the SAS and SBS are discreet the SRR is invisible. But Dame Eliza asked for them and got them. When Dr. al-Khattab boarded the airliner from Heathrow to Dubai, there were six from the SRR on board, scattered invisibly among three hundred passengers. One was the young accountant in the row behind the Kuwaiti. Because this was just a shadowing operation, no reason could be seen not to ask the Special Forces of the UAE for cooperation. Ever since World Trade Center terrorist Marwan al-Shehhi was discovered to have come from the UAE, and even more since the leak that the White House was tempted to bomb the Al Jazeera TV station at Qatar, the UAE had been extremely sensitive about Islamist extremism-and nowhere more than in Dubai, headquarters of the Special Forces. Thus, two hired cars and two rented scooters were available for the SRR team when it landed, just in case Dr. al-Khattab was being picked up. It was noted he had carry-on baggage only. They need not have bothered; he rented a small Japanese compact, which gave them time to move into position. He was tailed first from the airport to the Creek in Dubai, where once again the Rasha was moored after her return from Gwadar. This time, he did not approach the vessel, but stood by his car a hundred yards away until bin Selim spotted him.

Minutes later, a young man known to no one emerged from be-lowdecks on the Rasha, moved through the crowd and whispered in the ear of the Kuwaiti. It was the answer from the man in the mountains of Waziristan coming back. Al-Khattab’s face registered amazement.

He then drove along the traffic-teeming road up the coast, through Ajman and Umm al-Qaiwain and into Ras al-Khaimah. There, he went to the Hilton to check in and change. It was considerate of him, because the three young women in the SRR team could use the female washroom to change into the all-coveringjY/fcafc and get back to their vehicles.

Dr. al-Khattab emerged in his white dishdasha and drove away through the town. He adopted several maneuvers designed to shake off a “tail,” but he had no chance. In the Arabian Gulf, the motor scooter is everywhere, ridden by both sexes, and, the clothes being the same, one rider is much like another. Since being assigned to the job, the team had been studying road maps of all seven emirates until they had memorized every highway. That was how he was tailed to the villa.

If ever there had been any residual doubt that he was up to no good, his tail-shaking antics dispelled it. Innocent men do not behave like that. He never spent the night at the villa, and the SRR woman followed him back to the Hilton. The three men found a position on a hilltop that commanded a view of the target villa and kept vigil through the night. No one came or went. The second day was different. There were visitors. The watchers could not know it, but they brought the new passport and the new clothes. Their car numbers were noted, and one would be traced and arrests made later. The third was the barber, also later traced.

At the end of the second day, al-Khattab emerged for the last item. That was when Katy Sexton, tinkering with her scooter up the road, alerted her colleagues that the target was on the move.

At the Hilton, the Kuwaiti academic revealed his plans, when, speaking from his room, which had been bugged in his absence, he booked passage on the morning flight out of Dubai for London. He was escorted all the way home to Birmingham and never saw a thing.

MI5 had done a cracking job and knew it. The coup was circulated on a “for your eyes only” basis to just four men in the British intelligence community. One of them was Steve Hill. He nearly went into orbit. The Predator was reassigned to survey the villa in the far desert-side suburbs of Ras al-Khaimah. But it was midmorning in London, afternoon in the Gulf. All the bird saw were the cleaners going in. And the raid. It was too late to stop the Special Forces of the UAE from sending in their closedown squad, commanded by a former British officer, Dave De Forest. The SIS head of station in Dubai -a personal friend, anyway-was onto him like a shot. Word was immediately put out on the jungle telegraph that the “hit” had stemmed from an anonymous tip from a neighbor with a grudge. The two cleaners knew nothing; they came from an agency, they had been prepaid and the keys had been delivered to them. However, they had not finished, and swept up in a pile was a quantity of black hair, evidently from a scalp, and from a beard-the texture is different. Other than that, there were no traces of the men who had lived there.

Neighbors reported a closed van, but no one could recall the number. It was eventually discovered abandoned, and revealed to have been stolen, but much too late to be of help.

The tailor and the barber were a better harvest. They did not hesitate to talk, but they could describe only the five men in the house. Al-Khattab was already known. Suleiman was described and then identified from mug shots, because he was on a suspect list locally. The two underlings were described, but the descriptions rang no bells of recognition.

It was the fifth man that De Forest, with his perfect Arabic, concentrated on. The SIS station chief sat in. The two Gulf Arabs who had done the tailoring and the barbering came from Ajman, and were simply workers at their trade. No one in that room knew about any Afghan; they simply took a complete description and passed it to London. No one knew about any passport because Suleiman had done it all himself. No one knew why London was becoming hysterical about a big man with shaggy black hair and a full beard. All they could report was that he was now neatly barbered, and possibly in a dark two-piece mohair suit.

But it was the final snippet that came from the barber and the tailor that delighted Steve Hill, Marek Gumienny and the team at Edzell. The Gulf Arabs had been treating their man like an honored guest. He was clearly being prepared for departure. He was not a dead body on a tiled floor in the Arabian Gulf.

At Edzell, Michael McDonald and Gordon Phillips shared the same joy, but a puzzle. They knew their agent had passed all the tests and been accepted as a true Jihadi. After weeks of worry, they had had their second sign of life. But had their agent discovered a single thing about Stingray, the object of the whole exercise? Where had he gone? Was there any way he could contact them? Even if they could have spoken to their agent, he could not have helped. He did not know, either.

And no one knew that the Countess of Richmond was unloading her Jaguars at Singapore.

CHAPTER 13

Even though the traveling party could not know there were pursuers a few hours behind them, their escape was, for them, a lucky chance. Had they turned toward the coast housing the six emirates, they would probably have been caught. In fact, they headed east, over the mountainous isthmus, toward the seventh emirate, Fujairah, on the Gulf of Oman. They soon left the last paved road and took to rutted tracks, and lost themselves among the baking brown hills of Jabal Yibir. From the col at the height of the range, they descended toward the small port of Dibbah. Well to the south on the same coast, the police at Fujairah City received a request and a full description from Dubai and mounted a roadblock at the entrance to their town on the mountain road. Many vans were stopped, but none contained the four terrorists.

There is not much to Dibbah, just a cluster of white houses, a green-domed mosque, a small port for fishing vessels and the occasional charger boat for Western scuba divers. Two creeks away an aluminum boat waited, drawn up on the shingle, its huge outboards out of the water. Its cargo space amidships was occupied by chained-down tanks of extra fuel. Its two-man crew was sheltering in the shade of a single camel thorn among the rocks. For the two local youths, this was the end of their road. They would take the stolen van high into the hills and abandon it. Then they would simply disappear into the same streets that had produced Marwan al-Shehhi. Suleiman and the Afghan, their Western clothes still in bags to shield them from the flying salt water, helped push the cigarette boat backward into waist-deep water. With both passengers and the crew aboard, the smuggler craft idled its way up the coast almost to the tip of the Musandam Peninsula. The smugglers would only make the high-speed dash across the strait in darkness. Within twenty minutes of the sun’s setting, the helmsman bade his passengers hold on and opened up the power. The smuggler erupted out of the rocky waters of the last tip of Arabia and hurled itself toward Iran. With five hundred horsepower behind it, the nose rose, and the craft began to skim. Martin judged they were covering the water at almost fifty knots. The slightest ripple on the sea was like hitting a log, and the spray flayed them. All four, who had wrapped their keffiyehs round their faces as a shield from the sun, now kept them there to protect from the spray.

In less than thirty minutes, the first scattered lights of the Persian coast were visible to port, and the smuggler raced east toward Gwadar and Pakistan. This was the route Martin had covered under the sedate sails of the Rasha a month before. Now he was returning at ten times her speed. Opposite the lights of Gwadar, the crew slowed and stopped. It was a welcome relief. With funnels and muscles, they hoisted the drums to the stern and refilled each engine to the brim. Where they were going to fill up again for the return journey was their business.

Faisal bin Selim had told Martin these smugglers could get from Omani waters to Gwadar in a single night and be back with a fresh cargo by dawn. This time, they were clearly going farther, and would have to travel in daylight as well. Dawn found them well inside Pakistani waters, but close enough to shore to be taken for a fishing boat going about its business, save that no fish can swim that fast. However, there was no sign of officialdom, and the bare, brown coast sped past. By midday, Martin realized the destination must be Karachi. As to why, he had no idea.

They refueled at sea one more time, and, as the sun dipped to the west behind them, were deposited at a reeking fishing village outside the sprawl of Pakistan ’s biggest port and harbor.

Suleiman may not have been there before, but his briefing must have been by someone who had done a recce. Martin knew that Al Qaeda did meticulous research, regardless of time and expense; it was one of the few things he could admire. The Gulf Arab sought out the only vehicle for hire in the village and negotiated a price. The fact two strangers had come ashore from a smuggler craft with no suggestion of legality raised not an eyebrow. This was Baluchistan; the rules of Karachi were for idiots.

The interior stank offish and body odor, and the misfiring engine could manage no more than forty miles per hour. Neither could the roads. But they found the highway, and reached the airport with time to spare. The Afghan was appropriately bewildered and clumsy. He had only twice traveled by air, each time in an American AC-130 Hercules, and each time as a prisoner in shackles. He knew nothing of check-in desks, flight tickets, passport controls. With a mocking smile, Suleiman showed him.

Somewhere in the vast sprawling mass of pushing and shoving humanity that comprises the main concourse of Karachi International Airport, the Gulf Arab found the ticket desk of Malaysia Airlines and bought two single tickets in economy class to Kuala Lumpur. There were lengthy visa application forms to fill out. which Suleiman did, in English. He paid in cash American dollars, the world’s common currency.

The flight was on a European Airbus A330, and took six hours, plus two for time zone change. It landed at half past eight, after the serving of a snack breakfast. For the second time, Martin offered his new Bahraini passport, and wondered if it would pass muster. It did; it was perfect. From international arrivals, Suleiman led the way to domestic departures and bought two single tickets. Only when Martin had to proffer his boarding pass did he see where they were heading-the island of Labuan. He had heard of Labuan, but only vaguely. Situated off the northern coast of Borneo, it belonged to Malaysia. Though its tourist publicity spoke of a bustling cosmopolitan island with stunning coral in the surrounding waters, Western briefings on the criminal underworld mentioned another, darker reputation.

It was once part of the Sultanate of Brunei, twenty miles across the water on the Borneo coast. The British took it in 1846 and kept it for 115 years, barring three years under Japanese occupation during World War II. Labuan was handed by the British to the state of Sabab in 1963 as part of decolonization, then ceded to Malaysia in 1984.

It is one of those oddities that has no visible economy within its fifty-square-mile oval territory, so it has created one. With a status of international offshore financial center, no-tax free port, flag of convenience and smuggling mecca, Labuan has attracted some extremely dubious clientele. Martin realized he was being flown into the heart of the world’s most ferocious ship-hijacking, cargo-stealing, crew-murdering industry. He needed to make contact with base to give a sign of life, and he needed to work out how. Fast. There was a brief stopover at Kuching, first port of call on the island of Borneo, but nonalighting travelers did not leave the airplane. Forty minutes later, it took off to the west, circled over the sea and turned northeast for Labuan. Far below the turning aircraft, the Countess of Richmond, in ballast, was steaming for Kota Kinabalu, to pick up her cargo of padauk and rosewood.

After takeoff, the stewardess distributed landing cards. Suleiman took them both and began to fill them in. Martin had to pretend he neither understood nor wrote written English, and could speak it only haltingly. He could hear it all round him. Besides, though he and Suleiman had changed into shirts and suits at Kuala Lumpur, he had no pen, and no excuse for asking for the loan of one. Ostensibly, they were a Bahraini engineer and an Omani accountant heading for Labuan on contract to the natural gas industry, and that was what Suleiman was filling in. Martin muttered that he needed to go to the lavatory. He rose and went after where there were two. One was vacant, but he pretended both were in use, turned and went forward. There was a point. The Boeing 737 had a two-cabin service: economy and business. Dividing the two was a curtain, and Martin needed to get beyond it.

Standing outside the door of the business-class toilet, he beamed at the stewardess who had distributed the landing cards, uttered an apology and plucked from her top pocket a fresh landing card and her pen. The lavatory door clicked open, and he went in. There was only time to scrawl a brief message on the reverse of the landing card, fold it into his breast pocket, emerge and return the pen. Then he went back to his seat.

Suleiman may have been told the Afghan was trustworthy, but he stuck like a clam. Perhaps he wanted his charge to avoid making any mistakes through naivete or inexperience; perhaps it was the years of training in the ways of Al Qaeda, but his watchfulness never faltered, even during prayers. Labuan airport was a contrast to Karachi: small and trim. Martin still had no idea exactly where they were headed, but suspected the airport might be the last chance to get rid of his message, and hoped for a stroke of luck. It was only a fleeting moment, and it came on the pavement outside the concourse. Suleiman’s memorized instructions must have been extraordinarily precise. He had brought them halfway across the world, and was clearly a seasoned traveler. Martin could not know that the Gulf Arab had been with Al Qaeda for ten years, and had served the movement in Iraq and the Far East, notably Indonesia. Nor could he know what Suleiman’s specialty was. Suleiman was scouring the access road to the concourse building that served both arrivals and departures on one level, and he was looking for a taxi when one appeared heading toward them. It was occupied, but clearly about to deposit its cargo on the pavement.

There were two men, and Martin caught the English accent immediately. Both were big and muscular; both wore khaki shorts and flowered beach shirts. Both were damp in the blazing sun and moist, eighty-six-degree, premonsoon heat. One produced Malaysian currency to pay the driver, the other emptied the trunk of their luggage. They were scuba divers’ kit bags. Both had been diving the offshore reefs on behalf of the British magazine Sport Diver. The man by the trunk could not handle all four bags, one each for clothes, one each for diving tackle. Before Suleiman could utter a word, Martin helped the diver by hefting one of the kit bags from the pavement to the curb. As he did so, the folded landing card went into one of the side pockets, of which all kit bags have an array.

“Thanks, mate,” said the diver, and the pair of them headed for departure check-in to find their flight to Kuala Lumpur, with a connector to London. Suleiman’s instructions to the Malay driver were in English: a shipping agency in the heart of the docks. Here, at last, the travelers met someone waiting to receive them. Like the newcomers, he excited no interest by the wearing of ostentatious clothing or facial hair. Like them, he was takfir. He introduced himself as Mr. Lampong, and took them to a fifty-foot cabin cruiser, tricked out for game fishing, by the harbor wall. Within minutes, they were out of the harbor.

The cruiser steadied her speed at ten knots and turned northeast for Kudat, the access to the Sulu Sea and the terrorist hideout in Zamboanga Province in the Philippines.

It had been a grueling journey, with only catnaps on the airplanes. The rocking of the sea was seductive, the breeze after the sauna heat of Labuan refreshing. Both passengers fell asleep. The helmsman was from the Abu Sayyaf terror group; he knew his way-he was going home. The sun dropped, and the tropical darkness was not long behind. The cruiser motored on through the night, past the lights of Kudat, through the Balabac Strait and over the invisible border into Filipino waters.

Mr. Wei had finished his commission before schedule and was already heading home to his native China. For him, it could not have come too quickly. But at least he was on a Chinese vessel, eating good Chinese food rather than the rubbish the sea dacoits served in their camp up the creek.

What he had left behind he neither knew nor cared. Unlike the Abu Sayyaf killers or the two or three Indonesian fanatics who prayed on their knees, foreheads to the mat, five times a day, Wei Wing Li was a member of a Snakehead triad and prayed to nothing. In fact, the results of his work were a to-the-rivet replica of the Countess of Richmond, fashioned from a ship of similar size, tonnage and dimensions. He never knew what the original ship had been called, nor what the new one would be. All that concerned him was the bulbous roll of high-denomination bills drawn from a Labuan bank against a line of credit arranged by the late Mr. Tewfik al-Qur, formerly of Cairo, Peshawar and the morgue.

Unlike Mr. Wei, Captain McKendrick prayed. Not as often, he knew, as he ought to, but he had been raised a good Liverpool Irish Catholic; there was a figurine of the Blessed Virgin on the bridge just forward of the wheel, and a crucifix on the wall of his cabin. Before sailing, he always prayed for a good voyage, and on returning thanked his Lord for a safe return. He did not need to pray as the Sabah pilot eased the Countess past the shoals and into her assigned berth by the quay at Kota Kinabalu, formerly the colonial port of Jesselton, where British traders, in the days before refrigeration and if they had acquired canned butter in the monthly drop-off, had to pour it onto the bread from a small jug.

Captain McKendrick ran his bandanna round his wet neck once again, and thanked the pilot. At last, he could close up all the doors and portholes and take relief in the air-conditioning. That, he reckoned, and a cold beer would do him nicely. The water ballast would be evacuated in the morning, and he could see his log cargo under the lights of the dock. With a good loading crew, he could be back at sea the evening of the next day.

The two young divers, having changed planes at Kuala Lumpur, were on a British Airways jet for London, and not being a dry airline the divers had consumed enough beer to send them into a deep sleep. The flight might be twelve hours, but they would be gaining seven on the time zones and touching down at Heathrow at dawn. The hard-shell suitcases were in the hold, but the dive bags were above their heads as they slept.

They contained fins, masks, wet suits, regulators and buoyancy-control jackets, with only the diving knives in the suitcases in the hold. One of the dive bags also contained an as-yet-undiscovered Malaysian landing card.

In a creek off the Zamboanga peninsula, working by floodlights from a platform hung over the stern, a skilled painter was affixing the last D to the name of the moored ship. From her mast fluttered a limp Red Ensign. On either side of her bow and round her stern was the name Countess of Richmond, and, on the stern only, the city Liverpool beneath the name. As the painter descended and the lights flickered out, the transformation was complete. At dawn, a cruiser disguised as a game fisherman motored slowly up the creek. It brought the last two members of the new crew of the former Java Star, the ones who would take the ship on her-and their-last voyage.

The loading of the Countess of Richmond began at dawn, when the air was still cool and agreeable. Within three hours, it would return to its habitual sauna heat. The dockside cranes were not exactly ultramodern, but the stevedores knew their business, and chained cargo of rare timber swung onboard and were stowed in the hold below by the crew that toiled and sweated down there. In the heat of the midday, even the local Borneans had to stop, and for four hours the old logging port slumbered in whatever shade it could find. The spring monsoon was only a month away, and already the humidity, never much less than ninety percent, was edging toward a hundred.

Captain McKendrick would have been happier at sea, but loading and the replacement of the deck covers was achieved at sundown, and the pilot would come aboard only in the morning to guide the freighter back to the open sea. It meant another night in the hothouse, so McKendrick sighed, and again found refuge in the air-conditioning belowdecks.

The local agent came bustling aboard with the pilot at six in the morning, and the last paperwork was signed. Then the Countess eased away into the South China Sea.

Like the Java Star before her, she turned northeast to round the tip of Borneo, then south through the Sulu Archipelago for Java, where the skipper believed six sea containers full of Eastern silks awaited him at Surabaya. He was not to know that there were not, nor ever had been, any silks at Surabaya.

The CRUISER deposited its cargo of three at a ramshackle jetty halfway up the creek. Mr. Lampong led the way to a long house on stilts above the water, which served as a sleeping area and mess hall for the men who would depart on the mission that Martin knew as Stingray and Lampong as al-Isra. Others in the long house would be staying behind. It was their labors that had prepared the hijacked Java Star for sea.

These were a mix of Indonesians from Jemaat Islamiyah, the group who had planted the Bali bombs and others up the island chain, and Filipinos from Abu Sayyaf. The languages varied from local Tagalog to Javanese dialect, with an occasional muttered aside in Arabic from those farther west. One by one, Martin was able to identify the crew and the special task of each of them. The engineer, navigator and radio operator were all Indonesians. Suleiman revealed that his expertise was photography. Whatever was going to happen, his job-before dying a martyr -would be to photograph the climax on a digital radio camera and transmit, via a laptop computer and sat phone, the entire data stream for transmission on the Al Jazeera TV network.

There was a teenager who looked Pakistani, yet Lampong addressed him in English. When he replied, the boy revealed he could only have been British born and raised but of Pakistani parentage. His accent was broad English North Country:

Martin put it as coming from the Leeds/Bradford area. Martin could not work out what he was for, except possibly a cook.

That left three: Martin himself clearly granted his presence as the personal gift of Osama bin Laden; a genuine chemical engineer and presumably explosives expert; and the mission commander. But he was not present. They would all meet him later.

In the midmorning, the local commander, Lampong, took a call on his satellite phone. It was brief and guarded, but enough. The Countess of Richmond had left Kota Kinabalu and was at sea. She should be coming between Tawitawi and Jolo islands round sundown. The speedboat crews that would intercept her still had four hours before they needed to leave. Suleiman and Martin had changed from their Western suits into trousers, local flowered shirts and sandals, which were provided. They were allowed down the steps into the shallow water of the creek to wash before prayers and a dinner of rice and fish. All Martin could do was watch, understanding very little, and wait.

The two divers were lucky. Most of their fellow passengers were from Malaysia, and were diverted to the non-UK passport channel, leaving the few British easy access at immigration control. Being among the first down to the luggage carousel, they could grab their valises and head for the nothing-to-declare customs hall.

It might have been the shaven skulls, the stubble on the chins or the brawny arms emerging from short-sleeved flowered shirts on a bitter British March morning, but one of the customs officers beckoned them to the examination bench. “May I see your passports, please?”

It was a formality. They were in order.

“And where have you just arrived from?”

“ Malaysia.”

“Purpose of visit?”

One of the young men pointed at his dive bag. His expression indicated it was a pretty daft question, given that the bags bore the logo of a famous scuba equipment company. It is, however, a mistake to mock a customs officer. His face remained impassive, but he had in a long career intercepted quantities of exotic smoking or injecting material coming in from the Far East. He gestured to one of the dive bags.

There was nothing inside but the usual scuba gear. As he was zipping the bag back up. he ran his fingers into the side pockets. From one, he withdrew a folded card, looked at it and read it. “Where did you get this, sir?” The diver was genuinely puzzled. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen it before.” A few yards away, another customs man caught the rising tension, indicated by the exemplary courtesy, and moved closer.

“Would you remain here, please?” said the first officer, and walked through a door behind him. Those ample mirrors in customs halls are not for the vain to rearrange their makeup. They have oneway vision, and behind them are the duty shift of internal security-in the case of Britain, MI5. Within minutes, both divers, with their luggage, were in separate interview rooms. The customs men went through the luggage, fin by fin, mask by mask and shirt by shirt. There was nothing illegal.

The man in plain clothes studied the now-unfolded card.

“It must have been put there by someone, but not by me,” protested the diver. By now, it was nine-thirty. Steve Hill was at his desk in Vauxhall Cross when his private and very unlisted phone rang.

“To whom am I speaking?” asked a voice. Hill bristled. “Perhaps I should ask the same question. I think you may have a wrong number,” he replied.

The M15 officer had read the text of the message stuffed into the diver’s bag.

He tended to believe the man’s explanation. In which case… “I am speaking from Heathrow, Terminal 3. The internal security office. We have intercepted a passenger from the Far East. Stuffed into his dive bag was a short handwritten message. Does ‘Crowbar’ mean anything to you?” To Steve Hill, it was like a punch in the stomach. This was no wrong number; this was no crossed line. He identified himself by service and rank, asked that both men be detained and that he was on his way. Within five minutes, his car swept out of the underground garage, crossed Vauxhall Bridge and turned down Cromwell Road to Heathrow.

It was bad luck on the divers to have lost their whole morning, but after an hour’s interrogation Steve Hill was sure they were just innocent dupes. He secured for them a full with-trimmings breakfast from the staff canteen, and asked them to rack their brains for a clue as to who had stuffed the folded note in the side pocket.

They went over everyone they had met since packing the bags. Finally one said, “Mark, do you remember that Arab-looking fella who helped you unload at the airport?”

“What Arab-looking fellow?” asked Hill.

They described the man as best they could. Black hair, black beard. Neatly trimmed. Dark eyes, olive skin. About forty-five, fit-looking. Dark suit. Hill had had the descriptions from the barber and the sailor of Ras al-Khaimah. It was Crowbar. He thanked them sincerely, and asked that they be given a chauffeured ride back to their Essex home.

When he called Gordon Phillips at Edzell and Marek Gumienny over breakfast in Washington, he could reveal the scrawl in his hand. It said simply: “If you love your country, get home and ring XXX XXXXXX. Just tell them Crowbar says it will be some kind of ship.”

“Pull out all the stops,” he told Edzell. “Just scour the world for a missing ship.”

As with Captain Herrmann of the Java Star, Liam McKendrick had chosen to bring his vessel round the various headlands himself and hand over after clearing the strait between the islands of Tawi-tawi and Jolo. Ahead was the great expanse of the Celebes Sea, and the course directly south for Makassar Strait. He had a crew of six: five Indians from Kerala, all Christians, loyal and efficient: and his first officer, a Gibraltarian. He had handed over the helm and gone below when the speedboats swept up from astern. As with the Java Star, the crew had no chance. Ten dacoits were over the rails in seconds and running for the bridge. Mr. Lam-pong, in charge of the hijack, came at a more leisurely pace.

This time, there was no need for ceremony or threats of violence unless instructions were obeyed. The only task the Countess of Richmond had to perform was to disappear, with her crew, and forever. Her valuable cargo, what had lured her to these waters in the first place, would be a total write-off, which was a pity but could not be helped.

The crew were simply marched to the taffrail and machine-gunned. Their bodies, jerking in protest at the unfairness of death, went straight over the rail. There was not even any need for weights or ballast to send them to the bottom.

Lampong knew his sharks.

Liam McKendrick was the last to go, roaring his rage at the killers, calling Lampong a heathen pig. The Muslim fanatic did not like being called a pig, and made sure the Liverpudlian mariner was riddled but still alive when he hit the sea.

The Abu Sayyaf pirates had sunk enough ships to know where the sea cocks were. As the keelson began to flood below the cargo, the raiders left the Countess and bobbed on the water a few cables away until she reared on her stern, prow in the air, and slid backward, tumbling slowly to the bottom of the Celebes Sea. When she was gone, the killers turned and raced for home.

For the party in the long house of the Filipino creek, it was another brief call on a sat phone from Lampong out at sea that triggered the hour of departure. They filed down to the cruiser moored at the foot of the steps. As they went, Martin realized that the ones being left behind were not showing any sense of relief but only deep envy.

In a career in Special Forces, he had never actually met a suicide bomber before the act. Now he was surrounded by them, had become one of them. At Forbes Castle, he had read copiously about the state of mind: the total conviction that the deed being done is for a truly holy cause, that it is automatically blessed by Allah Himself, that a guaranteed and immediate passage to paradise is ensured and that this sacrifice vastly outweighs any residual love of life.

He had also come to realize the level and depth of hatred that must be imbued in the shahid alongside the love of Allah. One half alone will not work. The hatred must be like a corrosive acid inside the soul, and he was surrounded by it. He had seen it in the faces of the dacoits of Abu Sayyaf who relished every chance to kill a Westerner; he had watched it in the hearts of the Arabs as they prayed for a chance to kill as many Christians, Jews and secular or insufficient Muslims as possible in the act of death; most of all, he had seen the hatred in the eyes of al-Khattab and Lampong, precisely because they sullied themselves in order to pass unnoticed among the enemy.

As they chugged slowly farther up the creek, the jungle closing in on every side and beginning to shut out the sky above them, he studied his companions. They all shared the hate and the fanaticism. They all counted themselves more blessed than any other true believers on earth.

Martin was convinced that the men around him had no more clue than he exactly what the sacrifice would entail: where they would be going, to target what and with what weapon.

They only knew, because they had offered themselves to die and been accepted and carefully selected, that they were going to strike the Great Satan in a manner that would be spoken of for a hundred years. They, like the prophet so long ago, were going on a great journey to heaven itself-the journey called al-Isra. Up ahead, the creek split. The chugging cruiser took the wider branch, and round a corner a moored vessel came into sight. She was facing downstream, ready to depart for the open sea. Her cargo was apparently stored in the six sea containers that occupied her fore-deck. And she was called the Countess of Richmond.

For a moment, Martin toyed with the thought of escaping into the surrounding jungle. He had had weeks of jungle training in Belize, the SAS’s tropical training school. But he realized as soon as the thought crossed his mind that it was hopeless. He would not make a mile without compass or machete, and the hunting party would have him within the hour. Then would come days of unspeakable agony, as the details of his mission were wrenched out of him. There was no point. He would have to wait for a better opportunity, if one ever came. One by one, they climbed the ladder to the deck of the freighter: the engineer, navigator and radioman, all Indonesians; the chemist and photographer, both Arabs; the Pakistani from the UK with the flat northern accent, should anyone insist on speaking to the Countess by radio; and the Afghan, who could be taught to hold the wheel and steer a course. In all his training at Forbes, in all the hours of studying faces of known suspects, he had never seen any of them. When he reached the deck, the man who would command them all on their mission to eternal glory was there to meet them. Him, the ex-SAS man, he did recognize. From the rogues’ gallery he had been shown at Castle Forbes, he knew he was staring at Yusef Ibrahim, deputy and right-hand man of al-Zarqawi, the butcher of Baghdad.

The face had been one of the “first division” in the gallery he had been shown at Castle Forbes. The man was short and stocky, as expected, and the stunted left arm hung by his side. He had fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets, and his left arm had stopped several shards of shrapnel during an air attack. Rather than accept a clean amputation, he preferred to let it hang, useless. There had been rumors that he had died there. Not true. He had been patched up in the caves, then smuggled into Pakistan for more advanced surgery. After the Soviet evacuation, he had disappeared.

The man with the withered left arm reappeared after the 2003 coalition invasion of Iraq, having spent the missing time as chief of security in one of the AO^camps under Taliban rule.

For Mike Martin, there was a heart-stopping moment in case the man recognized Izmat Khan from those Afghan days and wished to discuss it. But the mission commander just stared at him with featureless black-pebble eyes. For twenty years, this man had killed and killed, and he loved it. In Iraq, as aide to Musab al-Zarqawi, he had hacked off heads on camera and loved it. He loved to hear them plead and scream. Martin gazed into the blank, manic eyes and gave the habitual greeting. Peace be unto you, Yusef Ibrahim, Butcher of Karbala.

CHAPTER 14

The former Java Star emerged from the hidden Filipino creek twelve hours after the destruction of the Countess of Richmond. She cleared the Moro Gulf, and headed into the Celebes Sea, heading south by southwest, to join the sea track the Countess would have taken though the Makassar Strait. The Indonesian helmsman had the wheel, but beside him stood the British/Pakistani teenager and the Afghan, to whom he gave instruction on the keeping of a true course at sea.

Though neither of his pupils could be aware of it, counterterror-ist agencies within the world of the merchant marine had known for years, and been perplexed by the times a ship in these waters had been hijacked, steered round in circles for several hours with her crew in the chain locker, then abandoned. The reason was simply that just as the hijackers of 9/11 had achieved their practice in U.S. flying schools, the marine hijackers of the Far East have been practicing the handling of a large ship at sea. The Indonesian at the helm of the new Countess was one of these.

The engineer down below really had been a marine engineer before the ship he worked on had been hijacked by Abu Sayyaf. Rather than die, he had agreed to join the terrorists and become one of them.

The third Indonesian had learned all about ship-to-shore radio procedures while working in the harbormaster’s office of a North Borneo trading port until he was radicalized in Islam and accepted into the ranks of Jemaat Islamiyah, later helping to plant the Bali disco bombs.

These were the only three of eight who needed technical knowledge of ships. The Arab chemist would eventually be in charge of cargo detonation; the man from the UAE Suleiman would take the data stream images that would rock the world; the Pakistani youth would, if need be, emulate the North Country voice of Captain McKendrick; and the Afghan would “spell” the helmsman at the wheel through the days of cruising that lay ahead.

By the end of March, spring had not even attempted to touch the Cascade range. It was still bitterly cold, and snow lay thick in the forest beyond the walls of the Cabin.

Inside, it was snug and warm. The enemy, despite TV day and night, movies on DVD, music and board games, was boredom. As with lighthouse keepers, the men had not much to do, and the six-month term was a great test of the capacity of internal solitude and self-sufficiency.

Nevertheless, the guard detail could don skis or snowshoes and slog through the forest to keep fit and to get a break from the bunk-house, eatery and game room. For the prisoner, immune to fraternization, the strain was that much greater. Izmat Khan had listened to the president of the military court at Guantanamo pronounce him free to go, and was convinced Pul-i-Charki jail would not have held him for more than a year. When he was brought to this lonely wilderness-so far as he knew, forever-it was hard to hide the screaming rage inside. So he donned the kapok-lined jacket they had issued him, let himself outside and paced up and down the walled enclosure. Ten paces long, five paces wide. He could do it with eyes shut and never bump into the concrete. The only variety was occasionally in the sky above.

Mostly, it was of heavy, leaden gray cloud, from which the snow drifted down. But earlier, in that period when the Christians decorated trees and sang songs, the skies had been freezing cold but blue.

Then he had seen eagles and ravens wheeling overhead. Smaller birds had fluttered to the top of the wall and looked down at him, perhaps wondering why he could not come and join them in freedom. But what he liked most to watch were the airplanes.

Some he knew were warplanes, though he had heard of neither the Cascade range, where he was, nor McChord Air Force Base, fifty miles to the west. But he had seen American combat aircraft turning into their bombing runs over northern Afghanistan and he knew these were the same.

And there were the airliners. They were in different liveries, with varying designs on their tails, but he knew enough to know these were not national but company insignias. Except for the maple leaf. Some always had that leaf on the tail; they were always climbing, and they always came from the north. North was easy to work out; to the west, he could see the sun set, and he prayed the opposite way, toward Mecca, far to the east. He suspected he was in the USA because the voices of his guards were clearly American. So why did airliners with different national in-signias come from the north? It could only be because there was another land up there somewhere, a land where people prayed to a red leaf on a white ground. So he paced up and down, up and down, and wondered about the land of the red leaf. In fact, he was watching the Air Canada flights out of Vancouver.

In a sleazy dockside bar in Port of Spain, Trinidad, two merchant seamen were attacked by a local gang and left dead. Both had been skillfully knifed. By the time the Trinidadian police arrived, the witnesses had acquired amnesia, and could recall only that there had been five attackers who had provoked the bar fight and that they were islanders. The police would never get further than that, and no arrests were ever made.

In fact, the killers were local lowlife, and they had nothing to do with Islamist terrorism. But the man who had paid them was a senior terrorist in the Jamaat al-Muslimeen, the principal Trinidadian group on the side of Al Qaeda. Though still low profile across the Western media, JaM has been growing steadily for years, as have other groups right across the Caribbean basin. In an area known for its down-home Christian worship, Islam has been quietly growing with wholesale immigration from the Middle East, Central Asia and the Indian Subcontinent.

The money paid out by JaM for the killings came from a line of credit set up by the late Mr. Tewflk al-Qur, and the specific orders had come from an emissary of Dr. al-Khattab, who was still on the island.

No attempt had been made to steal the wallets of the dead men, so the Port of Spain police could quickly identify them as Venezuelan citizens and deck crew from a Venezuelan ship then in port.

Her master, Captain Pablo Montalban, was shocked and saddened to be informed of the loss of his crewmen, but he could not wait for too long in harbor. The details of shipping the bodies back to Caracas fell to the Venezuelan Embassy while Captain Montalban contacted his local agent for replacement sailors. The man asked around and got lucky. He came up with two polite and eager young Indians from Kerala who had worked their passage across the world, and who, even if they lacked naturalization papers, had perfectly good seamen’s tickets.

They were taken on, joining the other four seamen who made up the crew, and the Dona Maria sailed only a day late.

Captain Montalban knew vaguely that most of India is Hindu, but he had no idea that there are also a hundred and fifty million Muslims. He was not aware that the radicalization of Indian Muslims has been just as vigorous as in Pakistan, or that Kerala, once the hotbed of communism, has been particularly receptive territory for Islamist extremism.

His two new crewmen had indeed worked their way from India as deckhands, but on orders and to gain experience. And finally the Catholic Venezuelan had no idea that though neither had suicide in mind, they were working with, and for, Jamaat al-Muslimeen. The two unfortunates in the bar had been killed precisely to put the two Indian matelots on his ship.

Marek Gumienny chose to fly the Atlantic when he heard the report from the Far East. But he brought with him a specialist in a different discipline. “Arab experts have served their purpose, Steve,” he told Hill before he flew.

“Now we need people who know the world’s merchant marine.” The man he brought was from America ’s Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, merchant marine division. Steve Hill came north from London accompanied by another of his colleagues; he came from the SIS’s antiterrorism desk, maritime section.

At Edzell, the two younger men met: Chuck Hemingway from New York and Sam Seymour from London. Both had heard of the other from the reading of papers and briefings within the West’s antiterror community. They were told they had twelve hours to go into a huddle and come up with an evaluation of the threat and a game plan for coping with it. When they addressed Gumienny Hill, Phillips and McDonald, Chuck Hemingway went first.

“This is not just a hunt; this is a search for a needle in a haystack. A hunt has a known target. All we have is something that floats. Maybe. Let me lay it on the line.

“There are forty-six thousand merchant ships plying their trade on the world’s oceans as of now. Half of them are flying flags of convenience, which can be switched almost at the whim of the captain.

“Six-sevenths of the world’s surface is covered by ocean, an area so vast that literally thousands of ships are out of sight of land or any other vessel at any given time.

“Eighty percent of the world’s trade is still carried out by sea, and that means just under six billion tons. And there are four thousand viable merchant ports around the world.

“Finally, you want to find a vessel, but you don’t know her type, size, tonnage, contours, age, ownership, stern flag, captain or name. To have a hope of tracing this vessel-we call them ‘ghost ships’-we will need more that that, or a large dose of luck. Can you offer us either?”

There was a depressed silence.

“That’s damn downbeat,” said Marek Gumienny. “Sam, can you suggest a ray of hope?”

“Chuck and I agree there might be a way if we identify the kind of target the terrorists could be aiming for, then check out any ship heading toward that target and demand a gunpoint inspection of ship and cargo,” said Seymour. “We’re all listening,” said Hill. “What kind of target could they be most likely heading toward?”

“People in our line of business have been worried for years, and filing reports for years. The oceans are a terrorists’ playground. The fact that Al Qaeda chose for its first huge spectacular an attack from the air was actually illogical. They only hoped to take out four floors of the World Trade Center towers, and even then they were incredibly lucky. All that time, the sea has been beckoning to them.”

“Security of ports and harbors has been massively tightened,” snapped Marek Gumienny. “I know, I have seen the budgets.”

“With respect, sir, not enough. We know ship hijacking in the waters around Indonesia -that is, in all directions-has been steadily increasing since the turn of the millennium. Some has simply been to make money to fund terrorism’s coffers. Other events at sea defy logic.”

“Such as?”

“There have been ten cases of sea dacoits stealing tugs. Some have never been recovered. They have no value as resales because they are pretty noticeable and hard to disguise. What are they for? We think they could be used to tow a captured supertanker right into a busy international port like Singapore.” “And blow her up?” asked Hill.

“No need. Just sink her with her cargo hatches open. The port would be closed for a decade.”

“Okay,” said Marek Gumienny, “so… possible target number one. Take over a supertanker and use her to close down a commercial port. This is a spectacular? Sounds pretty mundane, except for the port in question… No casualties.” “It gets worse,” said Chuck Hemingway. “There are other things that can be destroyed with a blocking ship, with vast damage to the world’s economy. In his October 2004 video, bin Laden himself said he was switching to ‘economic damage’.”

“Nobody out there in the shopping malls or the gas stations realizes how the whole of world trade is now geared to just-in-time delivery. No one wants to store or stockpile anymore. The T-shirt made in China that sold in Dallas on Monday probably arrived at the docks the previous Friday. Same with gasoline. “What about the Panama Canal? Or the Suez? Close them down and the whole global economy spins into chaos. You are talking damage in the hundreds of billions of dollars. There are ten other straits so narrow and so vital that sinking a really big freighter or tanker broadside would close them.” “All right,” said Marek Gumienny. “Look, I have a president and the other five principals to report to. You, Steve, have a prime minister. We cannot just sit on this message from Crowbar. Nor can we simply burst into tears. We have to propose concrete measures. They will want to be active, to be seen to be doing something. So list the likelihoods, and suggest some countermeasures. Dammit, we are not without resources of self-defense.”

Chuck Hemingway produced a paper that he and Seymour had worked on earlier. “Okay, sir, we feel probability one is likely to be the taking over of a very large vessel-tanker, freighter, ore carrier-and her sinking in a narrow but vital shipping bottleneck. Measures to counter? Identify all such bottlenecks and post warships at either end. All entering vessels to be boarded by Marines.” “Christ,” said Steve Hill, “that will cause chaos. It will be claimed we are acting as pirates. What about the owners of the host waters? Don’t they have a say?”

“If the terrorists succeed, both the other ships and the coastal countries will be ruined. There need be no delays-the Marines can board without the freighter slowing down. And, frankly, the terrorists on board any ghost ship cannot permit boarding. They have to fire back, expose themselves and scuttle prematurely. I think the shipowners will see it our way.”

“Probability two?” queried Steve Hill.

“Running the ghost ship, crammed with explosives, into a major facility, like an island of oil pipes or an oil rig, and blowing it to pieces. It causes astronomical ecodamage and economic ruin for years. Saddam Hussein did it to Kuwait, torching all their oil wells as the coalition moved in, so that he would leave them living off scorched earth. Countermeasure, same again. Identify and intercept every vessel even approaching the facility. Secure positive identification outside the ten-mile cordon sanitaire.” “We don’t have enough warships,” protested Steve Hill. “Every island, every seashore oil refiner, every offshore rig?”

“That is why the national owners have to share the cost burden. And it need not be a warship. If any interceptor vessel is fired on, the ghost ship is exposed, and may be sunk from the air, sir.”

Marek Gumienny ran his hand over his forehead.

“Anything else?”

“There is a possible third,” said Seymour. “The use of explosives to cause a terrible massacre of humans. In that case, the target would likely be a tourist facility crammed with holidaymakers by the seaside. It’s a horrible prospect, reminiscent of the destruction of Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1917, when an ammunition ship blew up in the heart of the inner harbor. It wiped the city off the map. It still rates as the biggest nonnuclear explosion in history.” “I have to report, Steve, and I am not going to enjoy it,” he said as they shook hands on the tarmac. “By the way, if countermeasures are taken-and they will have to be-there is no way we can keep the media out of this. We can devise the best cover story we can to divert the bad guys’ attention away from Colonel Martin. But, as you know, much as I take my hat off to him, you have to accept the reality. Chances are, he’s history.”

Major Larry Duval glanced out of flight dispersal into the Arizona sunshine and marveled, as he always did, at the sight of the F-15 Strike Eagle that awaited him. He had flown the F-15E version for ten years, and reckoned it had to be the love of his life.

His career postings included the F-lil Aardvark and the F-4G Wild Weasel, and they were both serious pieces of machinery that the U.S. Air force granted him the privilege to fly but the Eagle was for him, after twenty years as a USAF flier, the ace of them all.

The fighter he would be flying that day from Luke Air Force Base right up to Washington State was still being worked on. It crouched silently amid the teeming swarm of men and women in coveralls who crawled all over its burly frame, immune to love or lust, hate or fear. Larry Duval envied his Eagle; for all its myriad complexities, it could not feel anything. It could never be afraid.

The airplane being readied for this morning’s air test had been at Luke AFB for fundamental overhaul and ground-up servicing. After such a period in the workshops, the rules stated she had to be given a test flight. So the Strike Eagle waited in the bright spring sunshine of an Arizona morning, sixty-three feet long, eighteen high and forty across, weighing in at forty thousand pounds bone-dry, and eighty-one thousand pounds maximum takeoff weight. Larry Duval turned as his weapons systems officer. Captain Nicky Johns, strolled in from his own equipment checks. In the Eagle, the WSO, or Wizzo, rides in tandem behind the pilot, surrounded by millions of dollars’ worth of avionics. On the long flight to McChord AFB, he would test them all. The open utility drove up to the windows, and the two aircrew were driven the half mile to the waiting fighter. They spent ten minutes on their preflight checks, even though the chances their ground crew had missed something were extremely slim.

Once on board, they strapped themselves in, gave one last nod to the ground crew, who clambered down, headed back and left them in peace. Larry Duval started the two powerful FlOO engines, the canopy hissed down into its seals and the Eagle began to roll. It turned in to the light breeze down the runway, paused, received clearance and crouched for one last testing of the brakes. Then thirty-foot flames leaped from its twin afterburners, and Major Duval unleashed its full power.

A mile down the runway, at 185 knots, the wheels left the tarmac, and the Eagle was airborne. Wheels up, flaps up, throttles back to pull the engines out of gas-drinking afterburn mode and into military power setting. Duval set a climb rate of five thousand feet per minute, and from behind him his Wizzo gave him a compass heading for destination. At thirty thousand feet, in a pure blue sky, the Eagle leveled out. and pointed her nose northwest toward Seattle. Below, the Rockies were clothed in snow, and would stay with them all the way.

In the British Foreign Office, the final details for the transfer of the British government and its advisers to the April G8 were almost complete. The entire delegation would fly in a chartered airliner from Heathrow to JFK, New York, there to be formally met by the U.S. secretary of state. The other six, non-American delegations would fly in from six different capitals to JFK.

All the delegations would remain “air side” at the airport, a mile away from the nearest protesters outside its perimeter. The president was simply not going to allow what he called “loony tunes” to scream insults at his guest or harass them in any way. Repeats of Seattle and Genoa were not to be entertained. Transfer out of J F K would be by an air bridge of helicopters that would deposit their cargoes into a second totally sealed environment. From there, they would simply stroll into the venue of the five-day conference and be sealed in luxury and privacy. It was simple and flawless. “No one had ever thought of it before, but when you think about it it’s brilliant,” said one of the British diplomats. “Perhaps we should do it ourselves one day.”

“The even better news,” muttered an older and more experienced colleague, “is that after Gleneagles it won’t be our turn for years. Let the others cope with the security headaches for a few years.”

MAREK GUMIENNY was not long getting back to Steve Hill. He had been escorted by the director of his own agency to the White House, and had explained to the six principals the deductions that had been drawn following the receipt of a bizarre message from the unheard-of island of Labuan.

“They said much the same as before,” Gumienny reported. “Whatever it is, wherever it is, find it and destroy it.”

“The same with my government,” said Steve Hill. “No holds barred. Destroy on sight. And they want us to work together on this.” “No problem. But, Steve, my people are convinced the USA is likely to be the target, so our coastal protection takes precedence over everything else-Mideast, Asia, Europe. We have top priority over all our assets-satellites, warships, the lot. If we locate the ghost ship anywhere away from our shores, okay, we’ll divert assets to destroy it.”

The American director of national intelligence, John Negro-ponte, authorized the CIA to inform their British counterparts on a “for your eyes only” basis of the measures the States intended to take.

The defense strategy would be based on three stages: aerial surveillance, identification of vessel and check it out. Any unsatisfactory explanation, any unexplained diversion from course, would generate a physical intercept. Any resistance would entail destruction at sea.

To establish a sea territory, a line was drawn to create a complete circle of three hundred miles’ radius round the island of Labuan. From the northern curve of this circle, a line was drawn right across the Pacific to Anchorage, on the south coast of Alaska. A second line was drawn from the southern arc of the Indonesian circle southeast across the Pacific to the coast of Ecuador. The enclosed area was most of the Pacific Ocean. It included the entire western seaboard of Canada and the USA and Mexico down to Ecuador, including the Panama Canal.

There was no need to announce it yet, the White House had decided, but it was intended to monitor every ship in that triangle steaming east to the American coast. Anything leaving the triangle or heading to Asia would be left alone. The rest would be identified and checked out.

Thanks to years of pressure by a few bodies often dubbed “cranky,” there was one procedural ally. Major merchant marine shipping lines had agreed to file destination plans, as airliners file flight plans, as a matter of routine. Seventy percent of the vessels in the “check it out” zone would be on file, and the companies that owned them could contact their captains. Under the new rules, there was also an agreement that sea captains would always use specific words, known only to their owners, if they were secure. Failure to use the agreed-upon word could mean the captain was under duress.

It was seventy-two hours after the White House conference when the first KH-n “Keyhole” satellite rolled onto its track in space and began to photograph the Indonesian circle. Its computers had been instructed to photograph, regardless of steaming direction, any merchant marine vessel within three hundred miles’ radius of Labuan Island. Computers obey instructions, so it did. As the KH-n began to photograph, the Countess of Richmond, heading due south through the Makassar Strait, was 310 miles south of Labuan. It was not photographed.

From London, the White House’s obsession with an attack from the Pacific was only half the picture. The warnings from the Edzell conference had been submitted in the UK and the USA for further scrutiny, but the findings were broadly endorsed.

It took a long, personal call on the hotline between Downing Street and the White House to conclude a concordat on the two most vital narrows east of Malta. The agreement provided that the Royal Navy, in partnership with the Egyptians, would monitor the southern end of the Suez Canal to intercept all ships save the very smallest coming up from Asia.

The U.S. Navy’s warships in the Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean would patrol the Straits of Hormuz. Here, the threat would only be from a huge vessel capable of sinking itself in the deepwater channel running down the center of the straits. The principal traffic here was of supertankers, entering empty from the south, coming back low in the water and full of crude after loading at any of the score of islands scattered off Iran, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

The good news for the Americans was that the companies owning such vessels are relatively few altogether, and ready to cooperate to prevent a disaster for all of them. Landing a party of U.S. Marines by Sea Stallion helicopter on the deck of a supertanker heading for the straits, but still three hundred miles short, and having a quick tour of the bridge, took very little time and did not slow the vessel at all.

As for threats number two and three, every government in Europe with a major seaport was warned of the possible existence of a ghost ship under the command of terrorists. It was up to Denmark to protect Copenhagen, Sweden to look after Stockholm and Gote-borg, Germany to watch out for anything entering Hamburg or Kiel; France was warned to defend Brest and Marseille. British Navy airplanes out of Gibraltar started to patrol the narrows, the Pillars of Hercules, between the Rock and Morocco, to identify anything coming in from the Atlantic.

All the way over the Rockies, Major Duval had put the Eagle through its paces, and it had performed perfectly. Below him, the weather had changed. The cloudless blue skies of Arizona betrayed first a few wisps of mare’s tail cloud lines, which thickened as he left Nevada for Oregon. When he crossed the Columbia River into Washington, the cloud below him was solid from treetop height to twenty thousand feet, and moving down from the Canadian border to the north. At thirty thousand feet, he was still in clear blue sky, but the descent would involve a long haul through dense vapor. Two hundred miles out, he called McChord AFB and asked for a ground-controlled descent to landing. McChord asked him to stay out to the east, turn inbound over Spokane and descend on instructions. The Eagle was in the left-hand turn toward McChord when what was about to become the USAF’s most expensive wrench slipped out of where it had lain jammed between two hydraulic lines in the starboard engine. When the Eagle leveled out, the wrench fell into the blade of the turbofan. The first result was a massive bang from somewhere deep in the guts of the starboard Fioo as the compressor blades, sharp as cleavers and spinning close to the speed of sound, began to shear off.

Each sheared blade jammed among the rest. In both cockpits, a blazing red light answered Nicky Johns’s yelled “What the f____________________ was that?” In front of him, Larry Duval was listening to something inside his head screaming, Close it down.

After years of flying, Duval’s fingers were doing the job almost unbidden, flicking off one switch after another: fuel, electric circuits, hydraulic lines. But the starboard engine was blazing. The built-in fire extinguishers operated automatically but were too late. The starboard Fioo was tearing itself to pieces in what is known as “catastrophic engine failure.” Behind Duval, the Wizzo was telling McChord: “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. Starboard engine on fire…”

He was interrupted by another roar from behind him. Far from shutting down, fragments of the starboard engine had torn through the firewall and were attacking the port side. More red lights blazed. The second engine had caught fire also. With reduced fuel and one engine functioning, the Eagle with Duval piloting could have made it down. But with both engines dead, a modern fighter does not glide like fighters long ago; it plunges like a bullet. Captain Johns would tell the inquiry later that his pilot’s voice remained calm and level. He had switched the radio to transmit, so that the air traffic controller at McChord did not need to be informed; he was hearing it in real time.

“I have lost both engines,” said the major. “Stand by to eject.” The Wizzo looked one last time at his instruments. Altitude: 24,000. Diving; dive steepening. Outside, the sun still shone, but the cloud bank was seething toward them. He glanced round over his shoulder. The Eagle was a torch, flaming from end to end. He heard the same calm voice up front: “Eject, eject.” Both men reached down for the handle beside their seats and pulled. That was all they needed to do. Modern ejection seats are so automated that even if the airman is unconscious, they will do everything for him. Neither Larry Duval nor Nicky Johns actually saw their airplane die. With seconds to spare, their bodies were hurled upward through the shattering canopy and into the freezing stratosphere. The seat restrained their legs and arms so they would not flail and snap off. The seat protected their faces from the blast that could push their cheekbones through their skulls. Both falling ejection seats stabilized with tiny drogues and plunged toward the ground. In a second, they were lost in the cloud bank. Even when they were able to see through their visors, the two aircrew could only watch the wet, gray clouds rushing past them.

The seats sensed when they were near enough to the ground to release their charges. The restraining straps just flicked open, and the men, now separated by a mile from each other, fell out of their seats, which dropped into the landscape below.

The men’s parachutes were also automatic. They, too, deployed, first with a small drogue to steady the falling men in the air, then with the main canopy. Each man felt the heaving jerk as a terminal velocity of 120 miles per hour slowed to around fourteen.

They began to feel the intense cold through their light nylon flight suits and G suits. They seemed to be in a weird, wet, gray limbo between heaven and hell until they crashed into the topmost branches of pine and spruce. In the half darkness beneath the cloud bank, the major landed in a type of clearing, his fall cushioned by springy conifer branches lying flat on the ground. After several seconds dazed and winded, he released the main chute buckle at his midriff and stood up. Then he began to broadcast so the rescuers could get a fix on him.

Nicky Johns had also come down in trees, but not in a clearing; right in the thick of them. As he hit the branches, he was drenched in the snow that fell off them. He waited for the “hit,” the ground, but it never came. Above him, in the freezing gloom, he could see that his parachute was caught in the trees. Below, he could make out the ground. Snow and pine needles, he thought, about fifteen feet down. He took a deep breath, hit the release buckle and fell. With luck, he would have landed and stood up. In fact, he felt his left leg snap neatly at the shin as it slid between two stout branches under the snow. That told him that cold and shock would start to eat into his reserve without mercy. He, too, unhooked his transmitter and began to broadcast.

The Eagle had attempted to fly for a few seconds after its crew had ejected it. It turned its nose up, wallowed, tilted over, resumed its dive and, as it entered the cloud bank, simply blew up. The flames had reached the fuel tanks. As the Eagle disintegrated, both its engines tore themselves from their housing and fell away. Twenty thousand feet below, each engine-five tons of blazing metal roaring down at five hundred miles per hour-hit the Cascades. One engine destroyed twenty trees. The other did more.

The CIA special ops officer who commanded the garrison at the Cabin took over two minutes to regain consciousness and pull himself off the floor of the chow room where he had been eating lunch. He was dazed and felt sick. He leaned against the wall of the log cabin amid the swirling dust and called out some names. He was answered with groans. Twenty minutes later, he had made his inventory. The two men playing pool in the game room were dead. Three others were injured. The lucky ones had been those outside on a hiking break. They had been a hundred yards away when the meteorite, as they thought, hit the Cabin. When they had confirmed that, of twelve CIA staffers, two were dead, three needed emergency hospitalization, the two hikers were fine and the other five badly shaken, they checked on the prisoner.

They would later be accused of being slow on the uptake, but the inquiry found in the end that they were justified in looking out for themselves first. A glance through the spy hole into the Afghan’s room revealed there was too much light in there. When they burst in, the door from the living area to the walled exercise court was open. The room itself, being of reinforced concrete, had survived intact.

The wall of the compound was not so lucky. Concrete or not, the falling Fioo jet engine had taken a five-foot chunk out of the wall before ricocheting into the garrison quarters. And the Afghan was gone.

CHAPTER 15

AS THE GREAT AMERICAN sea trap closed around the Philippines, Borneo and eastern Indonesia, all the way across the Pacific to the U.S. coast, the Countess of Richmond slipped out of the Flores Sea, through the Lombok Strait between Bali and Lombok and into the Indian Ocean. Then she turned due west for Africa.

The distress call from the dying Eagle had been heard by at least three listeners. McChord AFB, of course, had it all on tape, because they had actually been talking to the crew. The Naval Air Station at Whidbey Island, north of McChord, also kept a listening watch on channel 16, and so did the U.S. Coast Guard unit up at Bellingham. Within seconds of the call, they were in contact, saying they were standing by to triangulate on the positions of the downed aircrew.

The days of pilots bobbing helplessly in a dinghy or lying in a forest waiting to be found are long gone. Modern aircrew have a life jacket with a state-of-the-art beacon, small but powerful, and a transmitter that permits voice communication.

The beacons were picked up at once, and the three listening posts had the men located within a few yards. Major Duval was down in the heart of the state park, and Captain Johns had fallen in a logging forest. Both were still closed for access due to the winter.

The cloud cover right on top of the trees would prevent extraction by helicopter, the fastest and the favored way. The cloud bank would force an old-fashioned rescue. Off-road vehicles or half-track vehicles would take the rescue parties in as near as possible; from there to the downed airman, it would be muscle and sweat all the way.

The enemy now was hypothermia, and in the case of Johns, with his broken leg, trauma. The sheriff of Whatcom County radioed to say he had deputies ready to move, and they would rendezvous in the small town of Glacier on the edge of the forest within thirty minutes. They were nearest to the Wizzo, Nicky Johns, with his broken leg. A number of the loggers lived around Glacier, and knew every logging road through the forest. The sheriff was given Johns’s exact position within a few yards and set off.

To keep up the injured man’s morale, McChord patched the sheriff right through to the communicator on the Wizzo’s life jacket so that the sheriff could encourage the airman as they came nearer and nearer. The Washington State Parks service opted for Major Duval. They had experience to spare; every year, they had to pull out the occasional camper who slipped and fell. They knew every road through the park, and, where the roads ran out, every trail. They went in with snowmobiles and quad bikes. Since their man was not injured, a full stretcher would not be necessary. But as the minutes ticked by, the body temperature of the airmen started slowly to drop, and faster with Johns, who could not move.

The race was on to bring the two men gloves, boots, Space blankets and piping-hot soup before the cold beat them to it. Nobody told the rescue parties-because nobody knew-that there was another man out in the wilderness that day, and he was very dangerous indeed.

The saving grace for the CIA team at the shattered Cabin was that their communications had survived the hit. The commander only had one number to call, but it was a good one. It went on a secure line to the desk of DDO Marek Gumienny at Langley. Three time zones east, just after four p.m., he took the call.

As he listened, he went very quiet. He did not rant or rave, even though he was being told of a major Company disaster. Before his junior colleague in the Cascade wilderness had finished, he was analyzing the catastrophe. In freezing temperatures, the two corpses might have to wait awhile. The three injured needed urgent CASEVAC. And the fugitive had to be hunted down. “Can a helo get in there to reach you?” he asked.

“No, sir, we have cloud right to the treetops, and threatening more snow.”

“What is your nearest town with a track leading to it?” “It’s called Mazama. It’s outside the wilderness, but there is a fair-weather track from the town to Hart’s Pass. That’s a mile away. No track from there to here.”

“You are a cover research facility, understand? You have had a major accident. You need urgent help. Raise the sheriff at Mazama, and get him to come in there for you with anything he has got. Halftracks, snowmobiles, off-roads-as near as possible. Skis, snowshoes and sleds for the last mile. Get those men to the hospital. Meanwhile, can you keep warm?”

“Yes, sir. Two rooms are shattered, but we have three sealed off. The central heating is down, but we are piling logs on the fire.” “Right. When the rescue party reaches you, lock everything down, smash all covert comms equipment, bring all codes with you, and come out with the injured.”

“Sir?”

“Yes.”

“What about the Afghan?”

“Leave him to me.”

Marek Gumienny thought of the original letter John Negroponte had given him at the start of Operation Crowbar. Powers plenipotentiary. No limits. Time the Army earned its tax dollars. He rang the Pentagon.

Thanks to years in the Company, and the new spirit of information sharing, he had close contacts with the Defense Intelligence Agency, and they, in turn, were best buddies with Special Forces. Twenty minutes later, he learned he might have had his first break of a very bad day.

No more than four miles from McChord Air Force Base is the Army’s Fort Lewis. Though a huge Army camp, there is a corner off-limits to nonauthorized personnel, and this is the home of the First Special Forces Group, known to its few friends as Operational Detachment (OD) Alpha 143. The terminal 3 means a mountain company, or A team. Its ops commander was Senior Captain Michael Linnett.

When the unit adjutant took the call from the Pentagon, he could not be very helpful, even though he was speaking to a two-star general. “Right now, sir, they are not on base. They are involved in a tactical exercise on the slopes of Mount Rainier.”

The Washington-based general had never heard of this bleak pinnacle way down southeast of Tacoma in Pierce County.

“Can you get them back to base by helicopter, Lieutenant?”

“Yessir. I believe so. The cloud base is just high enough.” “Can you airlift them to a place called Mazama, close to Hart’s Pass, on the edge of the wilderness?”

“I’ll have to check that, sir.” He would be back on the line in three minutes.

The general held on.

“No, sir. The cloud up there is right on the treetops, and snow pending. To get up there means going by truck.”

“Well, get them there, by the fastest possible route. You say they are on maneuver?”

“Yessir.”

“Do they have with them all they need to operate in the Pasayten Wilderness?”

“Everything for subzero rough-terrain operating. General.”

“Live ammunition?”

“Yessir. This was for a simulated terrorist hunt in Mount Rainier National Park.”

“Well, it ain’t ‘simulated’ anymore. Lieutenant. Get the whole unit to Mazama sheriff’s office. Check with a CIA spook called Olsen. Stay in contact with Alpha at all times, and report to me on any progress.” To save time, Captain Linnett, apprised of some kind of emergency while he was descending Mount Rainier, asked for exfiltration by air. Fort Lewis had its own Chinook troop carrier helicopter, which picked up the Alpha team from the empty visitor parking lot at the foot of the mountain thirty minutes later. The Chinook took the team as far north as the snow clouds would allow and set them down on a small airfield west of Burlington. The truck had been heading there for an hour, and they arrived almost at the same time. From Burlington, Highway 20 wound its bleak path along the Skagit River and into the Cascades. It is closed in winter to all but official and specially equipped traffic; the SF truck was equipped for every kind of terrain, and a few not yet invented. But progress was slow. It took four hours until the exhausted driver crunched into the town of Mazama.

The CIA team was also exhausted, but at least their injured colleagues, doped with morphine, were in real ambulances heading south for a helicopter pickup and a final transfer to Tacoma General.

Olsen told Captain Linnett what he thought was enough. Linnett snapped that he was security cleared, and insisted on more.

“This fugitive, has he got arctic clothing and footwear?”

“No. Hiking boots, warm trousers, a light quilted jacket.”

“No skies, snowshoes? Is he armed?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“It’s dark already. Does he have a night-vision goggles? Anything to help him move?”

“No, certainly not. He was a prisoner in close confinement.” “He’s toast,” said Linnett. “In these temperatures, plowing through a meter of snow with no compass, going round in circles. We’ll get him.” “There is just one thing. He’s a mountain man. Born and raised in them.”

“Round here?”

“No. In the Tora Bora. He’s an Afghan.”

Linnett stared in dumb amazement. He had fought in the Tora Bora. He had been in the first Afghan invasion when Coalition Special Forces, American and British, ranged through the Spin Gahr looking for a runaway party of Saudi Arabs, one of them six feet four inches tall. And he had been back to take part in Operation Anaconda. That had not gone well, either. Some good men had been lost on Anaconda. Linnett had a score to settle with Pashtun from the Tora Bora. “Saddle up,” he shouted, and the ODA climbed back in their truck. It would take them up the remainder of the track to Hart’s Pass. After that, their transportation would go back three thousand years to the ski and the snowshoe. As they left, the sheriff’s radio brought the news both airmen had been found and brought out, very cold but alive. Both were in a hospital in Seattle. The news was good, but a bit too late for a man called Lemuel Wilson.

The Anglo-American investigators of the merchant marine who had taken over Operation Crowbar were still concentrating on threat number one, the idea that Al Qaeda might be planning to close down a vital world highway by blocking a narrow strait.

In that contingency, the size of the vessel was paramount. The cargo was immaterial, save only that venting oil would make the job of demolition divers almost impossible. Inquiries were flying across the world to identify every vessel of huge tonnage on the seas.

Clearly, the bigger the ships, the fewer there would be, and most would belong to respectable and gigantic companies. The principal five hundred ultralarge and very large crude carriers, the ULCCs and VLCCs, known to the public as “supertankers,” were checked and found to be unattacked. Then the tonnages were lowered in integers of ten thousand tons fully loaded. When all vessels of fifty thousand tons and up were accounted for, the strait-blockage panic began to subside.

Lloyd’s shipping list is probably still the world’s most complete archive, and the Edzell team set up a direct line to Lloyd’s, which was constantly in use. At Lloyd’s advice, they concentrated on vessels flying flags of convenience and those registered in “dodge” ports or owned by suspect proprietors. Both Lloyd’s and the Secret Intelligence Service’s Anti-Terrorist (Marine) desk joined with the American CIA and Coast Guard in slapping a “no approach to coast” label on over two hundred vessels without their captains or owners being aware of it. But still nothing showed up to set the wind socks flying in the breeze.

Captain Linnett knew his mountains, and was aware that a man without specialized footwear, trying to progress through snow over ground riddled with unseen trees, roots, ditches, gullies and streams, would be lucky to make a heartbreaking half a mile per hour across country.

Such a man would probably stumble through the snow crust into a trickling rivulet, and, with wet feet, start to lose body core temperature at an alarming rate, leading to hypothermia and frostbit toes. Olsen’s message from Langley had left no room for doubt: Under no circumstances was the fugitive to reach Canada, nor must he reach a functioning telephone. Just in case.

Linnett had few doubts. His target would wander in circles without a compass. He would stumble and fall at every second step. He could not see in the blackness under the tree canopy, where even the moon, had it not been hidden by twenty thousand feet of freezing cloud, could not penetrate. True, the man had a five-hour head start; but even in a straight line, that would give him under three miles of ground covered. Special Forces men on skis could treble that, and if rocks and tree trunks forced the use of snowshoes they could still do double the speed of the fugitive. He was right about the skis. From the drop-off point of the truck at the final end of the track, he reached the wrecked CIA cabin in under an hour. He and his men examined it briefly to see if the fugitive had come back to rifle it for better equipment. There was no sign of that. The two bodies, rigid in the cold, were laid out, hands crossed on chests in the now freezing refectory, safe from roaming animals. They would have to wait for the cloud to lift and a helicopter to land.

There are twelve men in an A team; Linnett was the only officer, and his number two was a chief warrant officer. The other ten were all senior enlisted men, the lowest rank being staff sergeant.

They broke down into two engineers for demolition, two radio operators, two medics, a team sergeant with not one but two specialties, an intelligence sergeant and two snipers. While Linnett was inside the wrecked cabin, his team sergeant, who was an expert tracker, scouted the ground outside. The threatening snow had not fallen; the area around the helipad and the front door, where the rescue team from Mazama had arrived, was a mush of snowshoe tracks. But from the shattered compound wall, a single trail of footprints led away due north.

Coincidental? thought Linnett. It was the one direction the fugitive must not take. It led to Canada, twenty-two miles away. But for the Afghan, forty-four hours of hiking. He would never make it, even if he could keep in a straight line. Anyway, the Alpha team would get him halfway there. It took another hour to cover the next mile on snowshoes. That was when they found the other cabin. No one had mentioned the other two or three cabins that were permitted in the Pasayten Wilderness because they predated the building prohibition. And this cabin had been broken into. The shattered triple glazing and the rock beside the gaping hole left no doubt. Captain Linnett went in first, carbine forward, safety catch off. Round the edges of the shattered glass, two men gave cover. It took them less than a minute to ensure there was no one present, either in the cabin, the adjacent log-storage shed or the empty garage. But the signs were everywhere. He tried the light switch, but the power clearly came from a generator that the owner shut down behind the garage when not in residence. They relied on their flashlights.

Beside the deep fireplace in the main sitting area was a box of matches and several long tapers, clearly for lighting the logs in the grate; also a bundle of candles in case the generator failed. The intruder had used both to find his way round. Captain Linnett turned to one of his comms sergeants. “Raise the county sheriff, and find out who owns this place,” he said. He began to explore. Nothing seemed to be smashed, but everything had been rifled. “It’s a surgeon from Seattle,” reported the sergeant. “Vacations up here in the summer, closes it all down in the fall.”

“Name and phone number. He must have left them with the sheriff’s office.” When the sergeant had them, he was told to contact Fort Lewis, have them call the surgeon at his Seattle home and put him on a direct patch-through. A surgeon was a lucky break; surgeons have pagers in case of an emergency. This situation definitely rated.

The ghost ship never went near Surabaya. There was no consignment of expensive oriental silks to be taken aboard, and the apparent six sea containers on the Countess of Richmond’s foredeck were in place anyway. She took the route south of Java, passed Christmas Island and headed out into the Indian Ocean. For Mike Martin, the onboard routines became a ritual. The psychopath Ibrahim remained mainly in his cabin, and the good news was that most of the time he was violently ill. Of the remaining seven men, the engineer tended his engines, set at maximum speed regardless of fuel use. Where the Countess was going, she would need no fuel for a return journey. For Martin, the twin enigmas remained unanswered. Where was she going, and what explosive power lay beneath her decks? No one seemed to know, with the possible exception of the chemical engineer. But he never spoke, and the subject was never raised.

The radio expert kept a listening watch and must have learned of a sea search taking place right across the Pacific and at the entrances to the Straits of Hormuz and the Suez Canal. He may have reported this to Ibrahim but made no mention of it to the rest.

The other five men took turns in the galley to turn out plate after plate of cold canned food, and took turns at the wheel. The navigator set the heading-always west, then south of due west to the Cape of Good Hope. For the rest, they prayed five times a day, read the Koran yet again and stared at the sea.

Martin considered attempting to take over the ship. He had no weapon other than the chance to steal a kitchen knife, and he would have to kill seven men, of whom he had to presume that Ibrahim had one or more firearms. And the men were scattered from the engine room to the radio shack to the fo’c’sle. If and when they came close to a clear target on shore, he knew he would have to do it. But across the Indian Ocean, he bided his time.

He did not know whether his message in the dive bag had ever been found or was tossed with the bag into some attic unread; and he did not know he had triggered a global ship hunt.

“This is Dr. Berenson. Who am I speaking with?”

Michael Linnett took over the speakerphone from the sergeant and lied. “I am with the sheriff’s office at Mazama,” he said. “Right now, I am in your cabin in the wilderness. I’m sorry I have to tell you there has been a break-in.”

“Hell, no. Dammit, is there damage done?” the tiny voice speaking from Seattle asked.

“He broke in by smashing the main front window with a rock, Doctor. That seems to be the only structural damage. I just want to check on theft. Did you have any firearms here?”

“Absolutely not. I keep two hunting rifles and a shotgun, but I bring them out with me in the fall.”

“Okay. Now, clothing. Do you have a closet with heavy winter clothing?”

“Sure. It’s a walk-in, right beside the bedroom door.” Captain Linnett nodded to his team sergeant, who led the way by flashlight. The closet was spacious, full of winter kit.

“There should be my pair of arctic snow boots, quilted pants and a parka with zippered hood.”

All gone.

“Any skis or snowshoes, Doctor?”

“Sure, both. In the same cupboard.”

Also gone.

“Any weapons at all? Compass?”

The big bowie knife in its sheaf should have been hanging inside the closet door, and the compass and flashlight should have been in the drawers of the desk. They were all taken. That apart, the fugitive had ransacked the kitchen, but there had been no fresh food left there to rot. A newly opened-and emptied-can of baked beans and a can opener lay on the countertop with two empty cans of soda. There was an empty pickle jar that had been full of quarters, but no one knew that.

“Thanks, Doc. I’d get up here when the weather clears with a team for a new window, and file a claim for the loss.”

The Alpha leader cut the connection, and looked round at his unit. “Let’s go,” was all he said. He knew the cabin, and what the Afghan had taken shortened the odds, and maybe even now they could be against him. He put the fugitive, who must have spent over an hour in the cabin to Linnett’s half hour, at two to three hours ahead, but now moving much faster. Swallowing his pride, he decided to bring up some cavalry. He called a pause, and spoke to Fort Lewis again.

“Tell McChord I want a Spectre and I want it now. Engage all the authority you need-the Pentagon, if you have to. I want it over the Cascades and talking to me directly.”

While waiting for their new ally to show up, the twelve men of Alpha 243 pressed on hard, pushing the pace. The sergeant tracker was at point, his flashlight picking up the marks of the snowshoes of the fugitive in the frozen snow. They were pushing the pace, but they were carrying much more equipment than the man ahead of them. Linnett estimated they had to be keeping up, but were they gaining? Then the snow started. It was a blessing and a curse. As the deceptively gentle flakes drifted down from the conifers around them, they covered the rocks and stumps, permitting another quick pause to switch from shoes to the faster skis. They also wiped out the trail. Linnett needed a guiding hand from heaven, and it came just after midnight in the form of a Lockheed-Martin Hercules AC -130 gunship, circling at twenty thousand feet, above the cloud layer but looking straight through it. Among the many toys that Special Forces are given to play with, the Spectre gunship is, from the viewpoint of the enemy on the ground, about as nasty as it gets.

The original Hercules transport plane was gutted and her innards replaced with a cockpit-to-tail array of technology designed to locate, target and kill an opponent on the ground. It is seventy-two million dollars’ worth of pure bad news.

In its first “locate” role, it does not depend on daylight or dark, wind or rain, snow or hail. Mr. Raytheon had been kind enough to provide a synthetic aperture radar and infrared thermal imager that can pick out any figure in a landscape emitting body heat. Nor is the image a vague blur; it is clear enough to differentiate between a four-legged beast and a two-legged one. But it still could not work out the weirdness of Mr. Lemuel Wilson. He, too, had a cabin, just outside the Pasayten Wilderness, on the lower slopes of Mount Robinson. Unlike the Seattle surgeon, Wilson prided himself on his capacity to overwinter up there, for he had no alternative metropolitan home. So he survived without electricity, using a roaring log fire for heat and kerosene lamps for lighting. Each summer, he hunted game, and air-dried the meat strips for winter. He cut his own logs, and foraged for his tough mountain pony. But he had another hobby.

He had enough CB equipment, powered by a tiny generator, to spend his winter hours scanning the wave bands of the sheriff, emergency services and the public utilities. That was how he heard the reports of a two-man aircrew down in the wilderness and teams of professionals struggling toward the spot. Lemuel Wilson was proud to call himself a concerned citizen. As so often, the authorities preferred the term “interfering busybody.” Hardly had the two airmen broadcast their plight, and the authorities replied with their exact positions, than Lemuel Wilson had saddled up and ridden out. He intended to cross the southern half of the wilderness to reach the park and rescue Major Duval. His band-scanning equipment was too cumbersome to bring along, so he never heard the two aviators were rescued anyway. But he did make human contact. He did not see the man come at him. One second, he was urging his pony through a deeper-than-usual snowdrift, the next a bank of snow came up to meet him. But the snowbank was a man in a space-age, quilted silver, two-piece suit. There was nothing space age about the bowie knife, invented around the time of the Alamo and still very efficient. One arm round his neck dragged Wilson off his pony; as he crashed down, the blade entered his rib cage from the back and sliced open his heart.

A thermal imager is fine for detecting body heat, but Lemuel Wilson’s corpse, dropped into a crevasse ten yards from where he died, lost its heat fast. By the time the Hercules AC-130 Spectre began its circling mission high above the Cascades thirty minutes later, Lemuel Wilson did not show up at all. “This is Spectre-Echo-Foxtrot calling Team Alpha. Do you read me, Alpha?” “Strength-Five,” reported Captain Linnett. “We are twelve on skis down here. Can you see us?”

“Smile nicely and I’ll take your picture,” said the infrared operator four miles above them.

“Comedy comes later,” said Linnett. “About three miles due north of us is a fugitive. Single man, heading north on skis. Confirm?” There was a pause-a long pause.

“Negative. No such image,” said the voice in the sky.

“There must be,” argued Linnett. “He is up ahead of us somewhere.” The last of the maple and tamarack was well behind them. They emerged from the forest to a bare scree, always climbing north, and the snow fell straight on them without being filtered by branches. Way behind, in the darkness, stood Mount Lago and Monument Peak. Linnett’s men were looking like spectral figures, white zombies in a white landscape. If he was having trouble, so was the Afghan. There was only one explanation for the no-image scenario: the Afghan had taken shelter in a cave or snow hole. The overhang would mask the escaping heat. So Linnett was closing on him. The skis were sliding easily across the shoulder of the mountain, and there was more forest up ahead. The Spectre fixed his position to within a yard. Twelve miles to the Canadian border. Five hours to dawn, or for what passed for dawn in this land of snow, peaks, rocks and trees.

Linnett gave it another hour. The Spectre circled and watched but saw nothing to report.

“Check again,” asked Captain Linnett. He was beginning to think something had gone wrong. Had the Afghan died up here? Possible, and that would explain the absence of a heat signature. Crouching in a cave? Possible, but he would die in there or come out and run. And then…

Izmat Khan, urging the feisty but tired pony off the scree and into the forest, had actually lengthened his lead. The compass told him he was still going north, the angle of the pony beneath him that he was climbing. “I am scanning an arc subtending ninety degrees with you at the point,” said the imager operator. “Right up to the border. In that arc, I can see eight animals. Four deer; two black bear, who are very faint because they are hibernating under deep cover; what looks like a marauding mountain lion; and a single moose ambling north. About four miles ahead of you.”

The surgeon’s arctic clothing was simply too good. The pony was sweating as it neared exhaustion and showed up clearly, but the man on top of it, leaning forward along its neck to urge it onward, was so well muffled he blended with the animal.

“Sir,” said one of the engineer sergeants, “I’m from Minnesota.”

“Save your problems for the chaplain,” snapped Linnett. “What I mean, sir,” said the snow-caked face beside him, “is that moose do not move up into the mountains in weather like this. They come down to the valley to forage for lichen. It can’t be a moose.”

Linnett called a halt. It was welcomed. He stared at the falling snow ahead. He had not the faintest idea how the man had done it. Another isolated cabin, maybe, with an overwintering idiot with a stable. Somehow, the Afghan had gotten himself a pony and was riding away from him.

Four miles ahead, back in deep forest, Izmat Khan, who had ambushed Lemuel Wilson, was himself ambushed. The mountain lion was old, a bit slow for deer, but cunning and very hungry. It came down from a ledge between two trees, and the pony would have smelled it but for its own exhaustion. The first thing the Afghan knew, something fast and tawny had hit the pony, and the pony was going down sideways. The rider had time to grab Wilson ’s rifle from the sleeve alongside the pommel and go backward over the rump. He landed, turned, aimed and fired.

He had been lucky the mountain lion had gone for the pony and not himself, but he had lost his mount. The animal was still alive, but ripped round the head and shoulders by claws with 135 pounds of angry muscle behind them. The pony was not going to get up. He used a second bullet to finish its misery. The pony crumpled, lying half across the body of the mountain lion. It did not matter to the Afghan, but the torso and front legs of the mountain lion were under the pony.

He unhitched the snowshoes from behind the saddle, fitted them over his boots, shouldered the rifle, checked the compass and moved forward. A hundred yards ahead of him was a large rock overhang. He paused under it for a brief respite from the snow. He did not know it but it masked his escaping heat. “Take out the moose,” said Captain Linnett. “I think it’s a horse with the fugitive on it.”

The operator studied his image again.

“You’re right,” he said. “I can see six legs. He’s paused for a rest. Next circuit, down he goes.”

The “destroy” part of the Spectre’s role is provided by three systems. Heaviest is the 105mm M102 howitzer, which is so powerful that using it on a single human being would be a tad excessive.

Next comes the 40mm Bofors cannon, derived, long ago, from the Swedish antiaircraft weapon, a fast repeater with enough muscle to rip buildings or tanks to fragments. The Spectre crew, told their target was a man on a horse, chose the GAU-12/U Gatling gun. This horror fires eighteen hundred rounds per minute, and each round is a 25mm-one-inch diameter-slug, one of which will pull a human body apart. So intense is the fire of the rotating five-barrel gun that if used on a football field for thirty seconds, nothing much bigger than a mouse would be left alive. And that mouse will die of shock. The maximum altitude for the GAU-I2/U is twelve thousand feet, so the circling Spectre dropped to ten thousand feet, locked on its target and fired for ten seconds, loosing off three hundred rounds at the body of the pony in the forest. “There’s nothing left,” remarked the imager operator. “Man and beast, both gone.”

“Thank you. Echo-Foxtrot,” said Linnett. “We’ll take over now.”

The Spectre, mission accomplished, returned to McChord AFB. The snow stopped, the skis hissed over the new powder, making the sort of progress that skis ought to make with a skilled athlete on them, and the Alpha team came across the remains of the pony. Few fragments were bigger than a man’s arm, but they were definitely horse, not human. Except the bits with tawny fur. Linnett spent ten minutes looking for pieces of arctic clothing, boots, snowshoes, bowie knife, femurs, skull or beard. The skis were lying there, but one was broken. That had happened when the pony fell. There was a sheepskin sleeve but no rifle. No snowshoes. No Afghan. Two hours to dawn, and it had become a race. One man on snow-shoes, twelve on skis. All exhausted, all desperate. The Alpha team had their Global Positioning System, or GPS. As the sky lightened fractionally in the east, the team sergeant murmured, “Border half a mile.”

They arrived twenty minutes later on a bluff overlooking a valley that ran from their left to right. Below was a logging road that constituted the Canadian border. Right across from them was another bluff, with a clearing containing a cluster of log cabins, a facility for Canadian lumberjacks when the timber concessions resumed after the snows.

Linnett crouched, steadied his forearms and studied the landscape through binoculars. Nothing moved. The light increased. Unbidden, his snipers eased their weapons from the sleeves that had housed them throughout the mission, fixed their scopes, inserted one shell each and lay down to stare across the gulf through their scopes.

By the norms of soldiering, snipers are a strange breed. They never get near the men they kill, yet they see them with a clarity and an apparent proximity greater than anyone else. With hand-to-hand combat almost extinct, most men die not by the hand of the enemy but by his computer. They are blown away by a missile fired a continent away or from somewhere under the sea. They are destroyed by a smart bomb loosed by an aircraft so high they neither saw nor heard it. They died because someone fired a shell from two counties away. At the nearest, their killers, crouching behind a machine gun in a swooping helicopter, see them only as vague shapes, running, hiding, trying to fire back. But not as real humans.

The sniper sees the enemy like that. Lying in total silence, utterly immobile, he sees his target as a man with three days’ stubble, a man who stretches and yawns, who spoons beans out of a can, unzips his fly or simply stands and stares at a lens a mile away that he cannot see. And then he dies. Snipers are special-inside the head.

They also live in a private world. So total does the obsession with accuracy become that they lapse into a silence peopled only by the weights of projectile heads, the power of various powder loads, how much a bullet will wind-drift, how far it will drop over various distances, whether yet another tiny improvement can be made to the rifle.

Like all specialists, they have their passions for rival pieces of equipment. Some snipers like a really tiny bullet, like the Remington M700.308, a slug so small that it has to be sheathed in a detachable sleeve to go down the barrel at all.

Others stay with the M21, the sniper version of the M14 standard combat rifle. Heaviest of all is the Barrett “Light Fifty,” a monster that sends a bullet like a human forefinger over a mile with enough speed times weight to cause a human body to explode.

Lying prone at Captain Linnett’s feet was his leading sniper, Master Sergeant Peter Bearpaw He was a half-blood Santee Sioux with a Hispanic mother. He came from the slums of Detroit, and the Army was his life. He had high cheekbones, and eyes that sloped like a wolf’s. And he was the best marksman in the Green Berets.

What he cradled as he squinted across the valley was the.408 Cheyenne by CheyTac of Idaho. It was a more recent development than the others, but with over three thousand rounds on the range it had become his weapon of choice. It was a bolt-action rifle, which he appreciated because the total lockdown of a closed bolt gave that tiny extra stability at the moment of detonation. He had inserted the single slug-very long and slim-and he had burnished and buffed the nose tip to eradicate the tiniest vibration in flight. Along the top of the breech ran a Leatherwood X24 scope.

“I have him, Captain,” he whispered.

The binoculars had missed the fugitive, but the scope had found him. Set among the cabins across the valley, walled on three sides by timber, with a single, glass-paneled door, was a phone booth.

“Tall, long shaggy hair, bushy black beard?”

“Roger that.”

“What’s he doing?”

“He is in a phone booth, sir.”

Izmat Khan had had little concourse with his fellow inmates at Guantanamo, but one with whom he had spent many months in the same solitary confinement block had been a Jordanian who had fought in Bosnia in the midnineties before returning to become a trainer in the AQ camps. He was hardline. As security slackened around the Christmas period, they found they could whisper from one cell to another. If you ever get out of here, the Jordanian told him, I have a friend. We were in the camps together. He is safe, he will help a true believer. Mention my name.

There was a name. And a phone number, though Izmat Khan did not know where its owner lived. He was not quite sure of the complexities of subscriber trunk dialing, for which he actually had enough quarters; but, worse, he did not know the overseas code for dialing out of Canada. So he punched in a quarter and asked for the operator.

“What number are you trying, caller?” said the unseen Canadian telephone operator.

Slowly, in halting English, he read out the figures he had so painstakingly memorized.

“That is a UK number,” said the operator. “Are you using U.S. quarters?”

“Yes.”

“That’s acceptable. Put in eight of them, and I will connect you. When you hear the pips, put in more if you wish to continue the call.” “Have you acquired the target?” asked Linnett.

“Yes, sir.”

“Take the shot.”

“He’s in Canada, sir.”

“Take the shot, Sergeant.”

Peter Bearpaw took a slow, calm breath, held it inside and squeezed. The range was a still-air 2.IOO yards on his range finder, well over a mile. Izmat Khan was pushing quarters into the slot. He was not looking up. The glass front of the booth disintegrated into pinpricks, and the bullet took away the occiput from the rest of his head.

The operator was as patient as she could be. The man down in the logging camp had inserted only two quarters, then apparently left the booth and left the handset hanging. Finally, she had no choice but to hang up on him and cancel the call.

Because of the sensitivity of the cross-border shot, no official report was ever made.

Captain Linnett reported to his commanding officer, who told Marek Gumienny in Washington. Nothing more was heard.

The body was found in the thaw when the lumberjacks returned. The hanging phone was disconnected. The coroner could do little but record an open verdict. The man wore U.S. clothing, but in the border country that was not odd. He had no ID; no one recognized him locally.

Unofficially, most people around the coroner’s office presumed the man had been victim of a tragic stray shot from a deer hunter, another death from careless shooting or ricochet. He was buried in an unmarked grave. Because no one south of the border wanted to make waves, it was never thought to ask what number the fugitive had asked for. To even make the inquiry would give away the source of the shot. So it was not made. In fact, the number he wanted was that of a small apartment off-campus near Aston University in Birmingham. It was the home of Dr. Ali Aziz al-Khattab, and the phone was on intercept by Britain ’s MI5. All they waited for was enough evidence to justify a raid and an arrest. They would get it a month later. But that morning the Afghan was trying to call the only man west of Suez who knew the name of the ghost ship.

CHAPTER 16

After two weeks, enthusiasm for the hunt for a seemingly nonexistent ghost ship was starting to fade, and the mood came from Washington. How much time, trouble and treasure could be expended on a vague scrawl on a boarding card stuffed into a dive bag on an island no one had ever heard of? Marek Gumienny had flown to London to confer with Steve Hill when the SIS expert in maritime terrorism, Sam Seymour, called up from the Ipswich HQ a Lloyd’s shipping list and made matters worse. He had changed his mind. Hill ordered him to London to explain.

“With hindsight,” said Seymour, “the option of Al Qaeda seeking to use a huge blocking ship to close down a vital sea highway to wreck global trade was always the likeliest option. But it was never the only one.” “What makes you think it was the wrong way to go?” asked Marek Gumienny. “Because, sir, every single vessel in the world big enough to achieve that has been checked out. They are all safe. That leaves options two and three, which are almost interchangeable but with different targets. I think we should now look at option three: mass murder in a seashore city. Bin Laden’s public switch to economic targets could have been a hoax, or he has changed his mind.” “Okay, Sam, convince me. Steve and I both have political masters demanding results or our heads. What kind of ship if not a blocking vessel?” “For threat number three, we do not look at the ship so much as the cargo. It need not be large so long as it is absolutely deadly. Lloyd’s have a hazardous cargo division-obviously, it changes the premium.” “Ammunition ship?” asked Hill. “Another Halifax wipeout?” “According to the boffins, military ordnance simply does not explode like that anymore. The modern stuff needs huge provocation to go off inside the hull. Youd get worse from an exploding firework factory, but it would not begin to deserve the term ‘spectacular,’ as in 9/11. The Bhopal chemical leak was far worse, and that was dioxin, a deadly weed killer.”

“So, a tanker truck driving dioxin up Park Avenue, and completing the job with Semtex,” suggested Hill.

“But these chemicals are closely guarded inside their manufacturing and storage base,” objected Gumienny “How do they get the cargo with no one noticing?” “And we were specifically told a ship would be the carrier,” said Seymour. “Any hijacking of such a cargo would bring immediate retaliation.” “Except in some parts of the Third World that are virtually lawless,” said Gumienny.

“But these ultralethal toxins are not made in such places anymore, not even for labor-cost savings, sir.”

“So, we are back to a ship?” said Hill. “Another exploding oil tanker?” “Crude oil does not explode,” Seymour pointed out. “When the Torrey Canyon was ripped open off the French coast, it took phosphorus bombs to persuade the oil to ignite and burn off. A vented oil tanker will only cause ecodamage, not mass murder. But a quite small gas tanker could do it. Liquid gas, massively concentrated for transportation.”

“Natural gas, liquid form?” asked Gumienny. He was trying to think how many ports in the USA imported concentrates of gas for industrial power, and the number was becoming unsettling. But surely these docking facilities were miles from massed humanity.

“Liquid natural gas, known as LNG, is hard to ignite,” Seymour countered. “It is stored at minus 256 Fahrenheit in special double-hulled vessels. Even if you took one over, the stuff would have to leak into the atmosphere for hours before it became combustible. But according to the eggheads, there is one that frightens the hell out of them. LPG Liquid petroleum gas. “It is so awful that a quite small tanker, if torched within ten minutes of catastrophic rupture, would unleash the power of thirty Hiroshima bombs, the biggest nonnuclear explosion on this planet.”

There was total silence in the room above the Thames. Steve Hill rose, strolled to the window and looked down at the river flowing past in the April sunshine. “In laymen’s language, what have you come here to say, Sam?” “I think we have been looking for the wrong ship in the wrong ocean. Our only break is that this is a tiny and very specialist market. But the biggest importer of LPG is the USA. I know there is a mood in Washington that all this may be a wild-goose chase. I think we should go the last mile. The USA can check out every LPG tanker expected in her waters, and not just from the Far East. And stop them until boarded. From Lloyd’s, I can check out every other LPG cargo worldwide, from any point on the compass.”

Marek Gumienny took the next flight back to Washington. He had conferences to attend and work to do. As he flew out of Heathrow, the Countess of Richmond came round Cape Agulhas, South Africa, and entered the Atlantic.

She had made good speed, and her navigator, one of the three Indonesians, estimated the Agulhas Current and the north-running Benguela Current would give her an extra day, and plenty of time to reach her intended destination. Farther out into the seas off the Cape, and on into the Atlantic, other ships were moving from the Indian Ocean to head for Europe or North America. Some were huge ore carriers, others general cargo ships bringing the ever-increasing amount of Asian manufactures to both Western continents as marketers “outsourced” manufacturing to the low-cost workshops of the East. Others still were supertankers too big even for the Suez Canal, their computers following the hundred-fathom line from the east to the west while their crews played cards. They were all noted. High above, out of sight and mind, the satellites drifted across inner space, their cameras relaying back to Washington every line of their structure and the names on their sterns. More, under recent legislation they all carried transponders emitting their individual call sign to the listening ears. Each identification was checked out, and that included the Countess of Richmond, vouched for by Lloyd’s and Siebart and Abercrombie as being a Liverpool-registered small freighter bringing a legitimate cargo on a foreseen route from Surabaya to Baltimore. For the USA, there was no point in probing deeper; she was thousands of miles from the American coast. Within hours of the return of Marek Gumienny to Washington, changes were made to the U.S. precautions. In the Pacific, the check-out-and-examine cordon was extended to a thousand-mile band off the coast. A similar cordon was established in the Atlantic from Labrador to Puerto Rico, and across the Caribbean Sea to the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.

Without fuss or announcement, the emphasis abandoned the giant tankers and freighters, which by then had all been checked, and looked hard at the scores of smaller tankers that ply the seas from Venezuela to the Saint Lawrence River. Every EP-3 Orion available was pressed into coastal patrol, flying over hundreds of thousands of square miles of tropical and subtropical sea looking for small tankers, and especially for those bearing gas.

American industry cooperated to the full, supplying details of every cargo expected, where and when due. The data from industry was cross-indexed with the sightings at sea, and they all checked out. Gas tankers were permitted to arrive and dock, but only after taking on board a posse of U.S. Navy, Marine or Coast Guard personnel to escort them in, under guard, from a point two hundred miles out.

The Dona Maria was back in Port of Spain when the two terrorists she harbored in her crew saw the signal they had been briefed to expect. As instructed, when they saw it they acted.

The Republic of Trinidad and Tobago is a major supplier of petrochemical products across a wide spectrum to the United States. The Dona Maria was berthed at the offshore island, the tank farm where tankers large and small could approach, take cargo on board and leave without ever approaching the city itself.

The Dona Maria was one of the smaller tankers, a member of that fleet of vessels that service the islands whose facilities neither need nor can accommodate the giants. The big vessels are wont to bring in the Venezuelan crude, which is refined down to its various “fractions” at the onshore refinery, then piped out to the island for loading into the tankers.

Along with two other small tankers, the Dona Maria was at a specially remote section of the tank farm. Her cargo after all was liquefied petroleum gas, and no one wanted to be too close during the loading. It was late afternoon when she was finished and Captain Montalban prepared her for sea. There were still two hours of tropical daylight left when she slipped her mooring lines and eased away from the jetty. A mile offshore, she passed close to a rigid inflatable launch in which four men sat with fishing rods. It was the awaited sign.

The two Indians left their posts, ran below to their lockers and returned with handguns. One went amidships, where the scuppers were closest to the water and the men would board.

The other went to the bridge, and pointed his gun straight at the temple of Captain Montalban.

“Do nothing, please. Captain,” he said with great courtesy. “There is no need to slow down. My friends will board in a few minutes. Do not attempt to broadcast or I will have to shoot you.”

The captain was simply too amazed to fail to obey. As he recovered, he glanced at the radio at one side of the bridge, but the Indian caught his glance and shook his head. At that, all resistance was snuffed out. Minutes later, the four terrorists were aboard and opposition became futile. The last man out of the inflatable slashed it with a carving knife and it sank in the wake when the painter was released. The other three men had already hefted their canvas grips and stepped over the spaghetti mix of pipes, tubes and tank hatches that define a tanker’s foredeck as they made their way aft. They appeared on the bridge seconds later: two Algerians and two Moroccans, the ones Dr. al-Khattab had sent over a month earlier. They spoke only Moorish Arabic, but the two Indians, still courteous, translated. The four South American crewmen were to be summoned to the foredeck, and would wait there. A new course would be calculated and adhered to.

An hour after dark, the four crewmen were coldly murdered and tossed overboard after a length of chain from the forward locker had been secured to each body’s ankle. If Captain Montalban had had any spirit to resist left in him, that was the end of it. The executions were very mechanical; the two Algerians had, back at home, been in the GIA-the Armed Islamic Group-and had slaughtered hundreds of helpless fellahim, outback farmers whose mass murder was simply a way of sending a message to the government in Algiers. Men, women, children, the sick and the old, they had killed them all many times, so four crewmen was just a formality. Through the night the Dona Maria steamed north, but no longer toward her scheduled destination of Puerto Rico. To her port side was the expanse of the Caribbean basin, unbroken all the way to Mexico. To her starboard side, quite close, were the two island chains called the Windward and the Leeward, whose warm seas are often thought of only as vacation destinations but are alive with hundreds of small tramps and tankers that keep the islands supplied and alive for the tourists.

Into this blizzard of coastal freighters and islands, the Dona Maria would disappear, and remain so, until she was logged overdue at Puerto Rico.

When the Countess of Richmond reached the doldrums, the sea calmed, and Yusef Ibrahim emerged from his cabin. He was pale, and drained by nausea, but the hate-filled black eyes were the same as he gave his orders. The crew brought out from its storage place in the engine room a twenty-foot inflatable speedboat. When it was fully rigid, it was suspended from the two davits above the stern. It took six men, sweating and grunting, to bring up the one-hundred-horsepower outboard engine from below and fix it to the rear of the speedboat. Then it was winched down to the gentle swell beneath the stern. Fuel tanks were lowered and hooked up. After several false starts, the engine coughed to life. The Indonesian navigator was at the helm, and he took the speedboat away for a fast circle round the Countess. Finally, the other six men descended down a ship’s ladder over the gunwales to join him, leaving only the crippled killer at the helm. It was evident this was a dress rehearsal.

The point of the exercise was to allow the cameraman, Suleiman, to be taken three hundred yards from the freighter, turn and photograph her with his fully digital equipment. When linked through his laptop to the Mini-M sat phone, his images could be transmitted to another website on the other side of the world for recording and broadcast.

Mike Martin knew what he was watching. For terrorism, the Internet and cyberspace have become must-have propaganda weapons. Every atrocity that can be broadcast on the news is good; every atrocity that can be seen by millions of Muslim youths in seventy countries is gold dust. This is where the recruits come from-actually seeing it happen and lusting to imitate. At Forbes Castle, Martin had watched the video recordings out of Iraq, with the suicide bombers grinning into the lens before driving away to die on camera. In such cases, the cameraman survived; in the case of the circling speedboat, it was clear that the target would have to be monitored visually as well, and filming would continue until the boat and its seven men were wiped out. Only Ibrahim, it seemed, would stay at the helm.

But he could not know when and where, or what horror lay inside the sea containers. He considered a possible idea to be first back on the Countess, cast the inflatable adrift, kill Ibrahim and take over the freighter. But there was no such chance. The speedboat was much faster, and the six men would be swarming over the rail in seconds.

When the exercise was over, the speedboat was swung empty from the davits, where it looked like any other ship’s dinghy, the engineer increased power and the Countess headed northwest to skirt the coast of Senegal. Recovered from his nausea, Yusef Ibrahim spent more time on the bridge or in the wardroom, where the crew ate together. The atmosphere was already hypertense, and his presence made it more so.

All eight men on board had made their decision to die shahid, a martyr. But that did not prevent the waiting and the boredom tearing at their nerves. Only constant prayer and the obsessive reading of the Koran enabled them to stay calm and true to the belief in what they were doing. No one but the explosives engineer and Ibrahim knew what lay beneath the steel containers that covered the foredeck of the Count ess of Richmond from just in front of the bridge almost to the forepeak. And only Ibrahim appeared to know the eventual designation and planned target. The other seven had to take on trust the pledges that their glory would be everlasting. Martin realized within hours of the mission commander’s presence among them that he was constantly the object of Ibrahim’s blank and crazy stare. He would not have been human if the phenomenon had not rattled him. Disquieting questions began to haunt him. Had Ibrahim after all seen Izmat Khan in Afghanistan? Was he about to be asked some questions he simply could not answer? Had he slipped up, even by a few words, in the relentless reciting of the prayers? Would Ibrahim test him by asking to recite passages he had not studied?

He was, in fact, part right, part wrong. The Jordanian psychopath across the mess table had never seen Izmat Khan, though he had heard of the legendary Taliban fighter. And there had been no mistakes in his prayers. He simply hated the Pashtun for his reputation in combat, something he had never acquired. Out of his hatred was born a desire that the Aghan should, after all, be a traitor, so that he could be unmasked and killed.

But he kept his rage under control for one of the oldest reasons in the world. He was afraid of the mountain man; and even though he carried a handgun in a saraband under his robe, and had sworn to die, he could not suppress his awe of the man from the Tora Bora. So he brooded, stared, waited and kept his own counsel.

For a second time, the West’s search for the ghost ship-if it even existed-had run into complete frustration. Steve Hill was being bombarded with requirements for information-anything-to appease the frustration that went right up to Downing Street.

The controller, Middle East, could offer no resolution to the four questions that were raining down upon him from the British premier and the U.S. president. Does this ship exist at all? If so, what is it, where is it and which city is its target? The daily conferences were becoming purgatory. The chief of the SIS, never known or greeted by anything other than “C,” was steely in his silences. After Peshawar, all the superior authorities had agreed there was a terrorist spectacular in preparation. But the world of smoke and mirrors is not a forgiving place for those who fail their political masters. Since the discovery at customs of the scrawled message on the folded landing card, there had been no sign of life from Crowbar. Was he dead or alive? No one knew, and some were ceasing to care. It had been nearly four weeks, and with each passing day the mood was swinging to the view that he was now past tense. Some muttered that he had done his job, been caught and killed, but had been the cause of the plot being abandoned. Only Hill counseled caution, and a continued search for the source of a still-unfound threat. In some gloom, he motored to Ipswich to talk to Sam Seymour and the two eggheads in the hazardous-cargo office of Lloyd’s List, who were helping him go through every possibility, however bizarre.

“You used a pretty hair-raising phrase in London, Sam. ‘Thirty times the Hiroshima bomb.’ How on earth can a small tanker be worse than the entire Manhattan Project?”

Sam Seymour was exhausted. At thirty-two, he could see a promising career in British Intelligence coming to a polite sidelining to the archives of the Central Registry, even though he had been saddled with a job that was looking every day more impossible to fulfill.

“With an atomic bomb, Steve, the damage comes in four waves. The flash is so searingly bright it can cauterize the cornea of a watcher unless he has black-lens shields. Then comes the heat, so bad it causes everything in its path to self-incinerate. The shock wave knocks down buildings miles away, and the gamma radiation is long term, causing carcinoma and malformations. With the LPG explosion, forget three of them-this explosion is all heat. “But it is a heat so fierce that it will cause steel to run like honey and concrete to crumble to dust. You’ve heard of the ‘fuel-air bomb’? It is so powerful it makes napalm seem mild, yet they both have the same source: petroleum.

“LPS is heavier than air. When transported, it is not, like LNG, kept at an amazingly low temperature; it is kept under pressure. Hence, the double-hulled skins of LPG tankers. If a tanker is ruptured, the LPG will gush out, quite invisible, and mix with the air. It is heavier than air, so it will swirl round the place it came from, forming one enormous fuel-air bomb. Ignite that and the entire cargo will explode in flame, terrible flame, rising quickly to five thousand degrees centigrade. Then it will start to roll. It creates its own wind. It will roll outward from the source, a roaring tide of flame, consuming everything in its path until it has completely consumed itself. Then it gutters like a fading candle and dies.”

“How far will the fireball roll?” asked Hill.

“Well, according to my newfound boffin friends, a small tanker of, say, eight thousand tons, fully vented and ignited, would consume everything, and extinguish all human life, within a five-kilometer radius. One last thing, I said it creates its own wind. It sucks in the air from periphery to center, to feed itself, so even humans in a protective shell five klicks away from the epicenter will die of asphyxia.”

Steve Hill had a mental image of a city cluttered round its harbor after such a horror exploded there. Not even the outer suburbs would survive. “Are these tankers being checked out?”

“Every one. Large and small, right down to tiny. The hazardous-cargo team here is only two guys, but they’re good. As a matter of fact, they are down to the last handful of LPG tankers.

“As for the general freighters, the sheer numbers mean that we had to cut off at those under ten thousand tons. Except when they enter the American forbidden zone along each seaboard. Then the Yanks spot them and investigate. “For the rest, every major port in the world has been apprised that Western intelligence thinks there may be a hijacked ghost ship on the high seas, and they must take their own precautions. But, frankly, any port likely to be targeted by Al Qaeda for massacre would be in a Western, developed country; not Lagos, Darak; not Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist. That leaves our non-American list of possible ports at under three hundred.”

There was a tap on the door, and a head came round. Pink-cheeked, very young, name of Conrad Phipps.

“Just got the last one in, Sam. Wilhelmina Santos, out of Caracas, bringing LPG to Galveston, confirms she is okay, Americans prepared to board her.” “That’s it?” asked Hill. “Every LPG tanker in the world accounted for?”

“It’s a small menu, Steve,” said Seymour.

“Still, it looks as if the LPG tanker idea was a blind alley,” said Hill. He rose to leave, and return to London.

“There is one thing that worries me, Mr. Hill,” said the cargo egghead. “It’s Steve,” said Hill. The SIS has always maintained the tradition of first names, from the highest to the humblest, with the sole exception of the chief himself. The informality underwrites the one-team ethos. “Well, three months ago an LPG tanker was lost with all hands.”

“So?”

“No one actually saw her go down. Her captain came on the radio in high distress to say he had a catastrophic engine-room fire, and did not think he could save his ship. Then… nothing. She was the Java Star.” “Any traces?” asked Seymour.

“Well, yes. Traces. Before the captain went off the air, he gave his exact position. First on the scene was a refrigerator ship coming up from the south. Her captain reported self-inflating dinghies, life belts and various flotsam at the spot. No sign of survivors. Captain and crew have never been heard from since.”

“Tragic, but so what?” asked Hill.

“It was where it happened, sir. Er… Steve. In the Celebes Sea. Two hundred miles from a place called Labuan Island.”

“Oh, shit,” said Steve Hill, and left for London.

While Hill was driving, the Countess of Richmond crossed the equator. She was heading north by northwest, and only her navigator knew exactly where. He was going for a spot eight hundred miles west of the Azores and twelve hundred miles east of the American coast. If extended due west, her track would bring her to Baltimore, at the top of the vastly populated Chesapeake Bay. Some of those on board the Countess began their early preparations for the entry into paradise. This involved the shaving of all body hair, and the writing of the last testaments of faith. These testaments were done into the camera lens, and were read aloud by each writer.

The Afghan read his as well, but he chose to speak in Pashto. Yusef Ibrahim, from his time in Afghanistan, had learned only a few words of the language, and he strained to understand, but even if he had been fluent he could not have faulted the testament.

The man from the Tora Bora spoke of the destruction of his family by an American rocket, and his joy at soon seeing them again while bringing justice at last to the Great Satan. As he spoke, he realized that none of this was ever going to reach any shore in physical form. It would all have to be transmitted by Suleiman by data stream before he, too, died, and his equipment died with him. What no one seemed to know was how they would die, and what justice would be visited upon the USA -the exceptions being the explosives expert and Ibrahim himself. But they revealed nothing.

Given that the entire crew was surviving on cold canned food, no one noticed that a steel carving knife with a seven-inch blade was missing from the galley. When he was unobserved Martin was quietly honing its blade with the whetstone in the knife drawer to a razor-edge. He thought of using the dead of night to drop over the stern to slash the dinghy but rejected the idea. He was with the four men who slept in bunks in the fo’c’sle. There was always a helmsman at the wheel, which was right next to the access point for going over the stern on a rope. The radioman practically lived in his tiny communications shack behind the bridge, and the engineer was always down in his engine room, below the bridge at the stern. Any of them could stick their head outside and see him.

And the damage would be spotted. A saboteur would be known about at once. The loss of the dinghy would be a setback, but not enough to abort the mission. And there might be time to patch the damage. He dropped the idea, but kept the rag-sheathed knife strapped to the small of his back. Each spell at the bridge, he tried to work out which port they were going to and what was inside the sea containers that he might be able to sabotage. Neither answer surfaced, and the Countess steamed north by northwest.

The global hunt switched and narrowed. All the marine giants, all the tankers and all the gas ships had been checked and verified. All the ID transponders conformed to their required transmissions; all the courses conformed to their predicted routes; three thousand captains had personally spoke to their head offices and agents, giving date of birth and other personal background details, so that even if the captains were under duress no hijackers could know whether they were lying or not.

The USA, her Navy, Marines and Coast Guards stretched to the limits without furlough or time off, was boarding and escorting in every cargo vessel seeking berth in a major port. This was causing economic inconvenience, but nothing big enough to inflict real damage to the biggest economy on earth. Following the tip from Ipswich, the origins and ownership of the Java Star were checked with a fine-tooth comb. Because she was small, her owning company concealed itself behind a “shell” company lodged with a bank that turned out to be a brass plate in a Far Eastern tax haven. The Borneo refinery that had provided the cargo was legitimate, but knew little about the ship itself. The freighter’s builders were traced-she had had six owners in her lifetime-and they provided plans. A sister ship was found, and swarmed over by Americans with tape measures. Computer imaging produced an exact replica of the Java Star, but not the ship itself.

The government whose flag of convenience she flew when last seen was visited in force. But it was a Polynesian atoll republic, and the checkers were soon satisfied that the gas tanker had never even been there. The Western world needed answers to three questions: Was the Java Star really dead? If not, where was she now? And what was her new name? The KH-11 satellites were instructed to narrow their search to something resembling the Java Star.

DURING THE first week of April, the joint operation at Edzell air base in Scotland stood down. There was no more it could do that was not now being done far more officially by the main Western intel-gathering agencies. Michael McDonald returned with relief to his native Washington. He stayed with the hunt for the ghost ship, but out of Langley. Part of the CIA’s mission was to reinterrogate any detainee in any of its covert detention centers who might, before capture, have heard a whisper of a project called al-Isra. And they called in every source they had out in the shadowy world of Islamist terrorism. There were no takers. The very phrase referring to the magical journey through the night to great enlightenment seemed to have been born and died with an Egyptian terror financier who went off a balcony in Peshawar in October. With regret, Colonel Mike Martin was presumed to have been lost on mission. He had clearly done what he could, and if the Java Star, or another floating bomb, was discovered heading for the USA, he would be deemed to have succeeded. But no one expected to see him again. It had simply been too long since his last sign of life in a diver’s bag on Labuan.

Three days before the G8 meeting, patience finally ran out-and at the highest level-with the global search based on the British tip-off. Marek Gumienny at his desk in Langley, called Steve Hill on a secure line with the news. “Steve, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for you, and even more so for your man Mike Martin. But the conviction here is that he’s gone, and, with the biggest trawl of global shipping ever attempted, he must have been wrong.” “And Sam Seymour’s theory?” asked Hill.

“Same thing. No dice. We have checked out just about every goddamn tanker on the planet, all categories. About fifty left to locate and identify then it’s over. Whatever this al-Isra phrase meant, either we’ll never find out, or it means nothing, or it has been long discontinued. Hold on… I’ll kill the other line.”

In a moment, he came back on. “There’s a ship overdue. Left Trinidad for Puerto Rico four days ago. Due yesterday. Never showed. Won’t answer.” “What kind of ship?” asked Hill.

“A tanker. Three thousand tons. Look, she may have foundered. But we’re checking now.”

“What was she carrying?” asked Hill. “Liquefied petroleum gas,” was the answer.

It was a KH-n “Keyhole” satellite that found her six hours after the complaint from Puerto Rico to head office of the oil company owners of the refinery, based in Houston, was turned into a major alarm.

Sweeping through the eastern Caribbean with its cameras and listening sensors checking on a five-hundred-mile-wide swath of sea and islands, the Keyhole heard a transponder signal from far below, and its computer confirmed it was from the missing Dona Maria.

The intelligence went instantly to a variety of agencies, which was why Marek Gumienny was interrupted in his phone call to London. Others in the loop were SOCOM headquarters at Tampa, Florida, the U.S. Navy and the Coast Guard. All were given the exact grid reference of the missing vessel. In not switching off the transponder, the hijackers were either being very stupid or hoping to get very lucky. But they were only following orders. With the transponder emitting, they gave away their name and position. With it switched off, they became immediately suspect as a possible rogue ship. The small LPG tanker was still being navigated and steered by a terrified Captain Montalban, four days without sleep, stealing only a few catnaps before being kicked awake again. She had slipped past Puerto Rico in the darkness, passing west of the Turks and Caicos, and lost herself for a while in the cluster of seven hundred islands that make up the Bahamas. When the Keyhole found her, she was steaming due west just south of Bimini, the westernmost island of the archipelago.

At Tampa, her course was plotted and extended forward. It went straight into the open mouth of the port of Miami, a waterway that leads to the heart of the city. Within ten minutes, the small tanker was attracting real company. A P-3 Orion sub hunter, aloft from the Naval Air Station at Key West, found her, dropped to a few thousand feet and began to circle, filming her from every angle. She appeared on a wall-sized plasma screen in the near darkness of the ops room at Tampa, almost life-sized.

“Jesus, would you look at that,” murmured an operator to no one in particular. While the freighter was at sea, someone had gone over the stern with a brush and white paint and daubed a crossbar over the letter i in Maria. It attempted to rechristen her the Dona Marta, but the white smear was simply too crude to dupe any onlooker for more than a few seconds.

There are two Coast Guard cutters operating out of Charleston, South Carolina, both Hamilton class, and both were at sea. They are the 717 USCG Mellon and her sister ship, the Morgenthau. The Mellon was closer, and turned toward the hijacked fugitive, moved from optimum cruising speed to flanking speed. Her navigator rapidly plotted her intercept at ninety minutes, just before sundown. The term “cutter” hardly does the Mellon justice; she can perform like a small destroyer, at 150 meters in length and 3,300 tons deadweight. As she raced through the early-April Atlantic swell, her crew ran to prepare her armament-just in case. The missing tanker was already rated as “likely hostile.” Then two figures appeared from the door of the sterncastle, just behind the bridge. One had an M6o machine gun slung round his neck. It was a futile gesture, and sealed the tanker’s fate. He was clearly North African, and clearly visible in the setting sun. He loosed off a short burst of gunfire that went over the top of the Mellon, then took a bullet in the chest from one of the four M16 carbines being aimed at him from the deck of the Mellon. That was the end of negotiations. As the Algerian’s body slumped backward, and the steel door through which he had stepped slammed shut, the captain of the Mellon asked for permission to sink the runaway. But permission was denied. The message from the base was unequivocal.

“Pull away from her. Make distance now, and make it fast. She’s a floating bomb.

Resume station a mile from the tanker.”

Regretfully, the Mellon turned away, powering up to maximum speed and leaving the tanker alone to her fate. The two F-16 Falcons were already airborne, and three minutes distant.

There is a squadron at Pensacola Air Force Base, on the Florida panhandle, that maintains a five-minutes-to-scramble standby readiness round the clock. Its primary use is against drug smugglers, airborne and sometimes seaborne, trying to slip into Florida and neighboring states with mostly cocaine. They came out of the sunset in a clear, darkling sky, locked on to the tanker west of Bimini and armed their Maverick missiles. Each pilot’s visual display showed him the SMART… MISSILES… LOCK on the target, and the death of the tanker was very mechanical, very precise, very devoid of emotion. There was a clipped command from the element leader, and both Mavericks left their housing beneath the fighters and followed their noses. Seconds later, two warheads involving some 135 kilograms of unpleasantness hit the tanker. Even though the Dona Marias cargo was not air-mixed for maximum power, the detonations of the Mavericks deep inside her petrol jelly were enough. From a mile away, the crew of the Mellon watched the Dona Maria burn and were duly impressed. They felt the heat wash over their faces and smelled the stench of concentrated gasoline on fire. It was quick. There was nothing left to smolder on the surface. The forward and stern ends of the tanker went down as two separate pieces of molten junk. The last of her heavier fuel oil flickered for five minutes, then the sea claimed it all.

Just as Ali Aziz al-Khattab had intended.

Within an hour, the president of the USA was interrupted at a state banquet with a brief, whispered message. He nodded, demanded a full verbal report at eight the next morning in the Oval Office and returned to his soup. At five minutes before eight, the director of the CIA, with Mark Gumienny at his side, were shown into the Oval Office. Gumienny had been there twice before, and it still impressed the hell out of him. The president and the other five of the six principals were there.

The formalities were brief. Marek Gumienny was asked to report on the progress and termination of a lengthy exercise in counter-terrorism known as Crowbar. He kept it short, aware that the man sitting under the round window overlooking the Rose Garden, with its six-inch bulletproof glass, loathed long explanations. The rule of thumb was always “Fifteen minutes, and then shut up.” Marek Gumienny telescoped the complexities of Crowbar into twelve. There was silence when he finished.

“So, the tip from the Brits turned out to be right?” said the vice president. “Yes, sir. The agent they slipped inside Al Qaeda, a very brave officer whom I had the privilege of meeting last fall, must be presumed dead. If not, he would have shown sign of life by now. But he got the message out. The terror weapon was indeed a ship.”

“I had no idea cargoes that dangerous were being carried around the world on a daily basis,” marveled the secretary of state in the ensuing silence. “Nor I,” said the president. “Now, regarding the G8 conference, what is your advice to me?”

The secretary of defense glanced at the director of National Security and nodded. They had clearly prepared their joint advice to go ahead. “Mr. President, we have every reason to believe the terrorist threat to this country, notably, the city of Miami, was destroyed last night. The peril is over. Regarding the G8, during the entire conference you will be under the protection of the U.S. Navy, and the Navy has pledged its word that no harm will come to you. Our advice, therefore, is that you go ahead to your G8 with an easy mind!”

“Why, then, that’s what I shall surely do,” said the president of the USA.

CHAPTER 17

David Gundlach reckoned he had the best job in the world. Second best, anyway. To have that fourth gold stripe on the sleeve or epaulette and be the captain of the vessel would be even better, but he happily settled for first officer. On an April evening, he stood at the starboard wing of the huge bridge and looked down at the swarming humanity on the dock of the new Brooklyn Terminal two hundred feet below him. The borough of Brooklyn was not above him; from the height of a twenty-three-story building, he was looking down on most of it. Pier 12 on Buttermilk Channel, being inaugurated that very evening, is not a small dock, but this liner took up all of it. At 1,132 feet long, 135 feet in the beam and drawing thirty-nine feet so that that whole channel had had to be deepened for her, she was the biggest passenger liner afloat by a large margin. The more First Officer Gundlach, on his first crossing since his promotion, looked at her, the more magnificent she seemed. Far below, and away in the direction of the streets beyond the terminal buildings, he could make out the banners of the frustrated and angry demonstrators. New York ’s police had with great effectiveness simply cordoned off the entire terminal. Harbor police boats skimmed and swerved round the terminal to ensure that no protesters in boats could come near. Even if the protesters had been able to approach at sea level, it would have done them no good. The steel hull of the liner simply towered above the waterline, its lowest ports more than fifty feet up. So those passengers boarding that evening could do so in complete privacy. Not that they were of interest to the protesters. So far, the liner was simply taking on board the lowly ones: stenographers, secretaries, junior diplomats, special advisers and all the human ants without whom the great and good of the world could apparently not discuss hunger, poverty, security, trade barriers, defense and alliances.

As the notion of security crossed his mind, David Gundlach frowned. He and his fellow officers had spent the day escorting scores of American Secret Service men over every inch of the ship. They all looked the same; they all scowled in concentration, they all jabbered into their sleeves where the mikes were hidden and they all got their answers in earpieces, without which they felt naked. Gundlach finally concluded they were professionally paranoid-and they found nothing amiss.

The backgrounds of the twelve hundred crew had been vetted, and not a shred of evidence had been found against any of them. The Grand Duplex apartment set aside for the U.S. president and First Lady was already sealed and guarded by the Secret Service, having been given an inch-by-inch search. Only after seeing it for the first time did David Gundlach realize the enveloping cocoon that must surround this president at all times.

He checked his watch. Two hours to completion of boarding of the three thousand passengers before the eight heads of state or government were due to arrive. Like the diplomats in London, he was admiring of the simplicity of chartering the biggest and most luxurious liner in the world to host the biggest and most prestigious conference in the world; and to do so during a five-day crossing of the Atlantic from New York to Southampton.

The ruse confounded all the forces that habitually sought to bring chaos to the G8 conference every year. Better than a mountain, better than an island, with accommodation for forty-two hundred souls, the Queen Mary 2 was untouchable. Gundlach would stand beside his captain as the typhoon hooters sounded their deep bass A note to bid farewell to New York. He would give the required power settings from her four “Mermaid pod” motors, and the captain, using only a tiny joystick on the control console, would ease her out into the East River and turn her toward the waiting Atlantic. So delicate were her controls, and so versatile her two aft pods that swivel through 360 degrees, that she needed no tugs to bring her out of the terminal.

Far TO the east, the Countess of Richmond was passing the Canary Islands, to her starboard. The holiday islands, where so many Europeans sought to leave the snow and sleet of their winter homes to find December sunshine off the African coast, were out of view. But the tip of Mount Tiede could be seen on the horizon with binoculars.

She had two days before her rendezvous with history. The Indonesian navigator had instructed his compatriot in the engine room to cut power to SLOW AHEAD, and she was moving at a walking pace through the gentle swell of the April evening. The tip of Mount Tiede dropped out of sight, and the helmsman eased her a few more degrees to port where, sixteen hundred miles away, lay the American coast. From high in space, she was spotted yet again; and again, when consulted, the computers read her transponder, checked the records, noted her harmless position so far out at sea and repeated her clearance: “Legitimate trader, no danger.”

The first government party to arrive was the prime minister of Japan and his entourage. As agreed, they had flown into Kennedy direct from Tokyo. Staying air side, out of sight and sound of the demonstrators, the party had transferred to the passenger cabins of a small fleet of helicopters, which lifted them straight out of Jamaica Bay and brought them to Brooklyn. The landing zone was inside the perimeter of the great halls and sheds that made up the new terminal. From the Japanese passengers’ point of view, the protesters beyond the barriers, mouthing silently whatever point it was they wished to make, simply dropped out of sight. As the rotor blades slowed to a gentle twirl, the delegation was greeted by ship’s officers, and conducted along the covered tunnel to the entrance in the side of the hull, and from there to one of the Royal Suites.

The helicopters left for Kennedy to collect the Canadians, who had just arrived. David Gundlach remained on the bridge, fifty yards from side to side, with huge panoramic windows looking forward out over the sea. Even though the bridge was two hundred feet in the air, the wipers in front of each window revealed that when the bow of the Queen hit the sixty-foot midwinter Atlantic waves, spray would still drench the bridge.

But this crossing, so went the forecasts, would be gentle, with a slow swell and light winds. The liner would be taking the southern great circle route, always more popular with guests because of its milder weather and calmer sea. This would bring her in an arc sweeping across the Atlantic at its shortest point, and, at its southernmost, just north of the Azores. The Russians, French, Germans and Italians succeeded each other in smooth sequence, and dusk fell as the British, owners of the Queen Mary 2, took the last flights of the helicopter shuttle.

The U.S. president, who would be hosting the first dinner just after eight p.m., came in his customary dark blue White House helicopter at six on the dot. A Marine band on the dock struck up “Hail to the Chief” as he strode into the hull and the steel doors closed, shutting out the outside world. At six-thirty, the last mooring ropes were cast off, and the Qween, dressed overall and lit like a floating city, eased out into the East River.

Those people on smaller vessels in the river and along the roads round the harbor watched her go and waved. High above them, behind toughened plate glass, the state and government heads of the eight richest nations in the world waved back. The brilliantly illuminated Statue of Liberty slid by, the islands dropped away and the Queen sedately increased her power. Either side, her two escorting missile cruisers of the U.S. Navy’s Atlantic Fleet took up position several cables away and announced themselves to the captain. To port was the USS Leyte Gulf and to starboard the USS Monterey. In accordance with the courtesies of the sea, he acknowledged their presence and thanked them. Then he left the bridge to change for dinner. David Gundlach had the helm and the command.

There would be no escorting submarine, for this was not a carrier group, and the submarine was absent for two reasons. No nation possessed the kind of submarine that could evade the missile cruiser’s detect-and-sink capacity, and the Queen was so fast that no submarine could keep up with her. As the lights of Long Island dropped away, First Officer Gund-lach increased the power to optimum cruise. The four Mermaid pods, pounding out 157,000 horsepower between them, could push the Queen to thirty knots, if needed. Normal cruising speed is twenty-five knots, and the escorts had to move to maximum cruise to keep up.

Overhead, the aerial escort appeared: one U.S. Navy EC2 Hawk-eye, with radarscopes that could illuminate the surface of the Atlantic for five hundred miles in any direction around the convoy, and an EA-6B Prowler, capable of jamming any offensive weapons system that might dare to lock on to the convoy and destroying it with HARM missiles.

The air cover would be refueled and replaced at end of shift out of the USA until its mission could be relieved by identical cover coming out of the US.-leased base in the Azores. That, in turn, would continue until it could be replaced by cover out of the UK. Nothing had been unforeseen. The dinner was a triumphant success. The statesmen beamed, the wives sparkled, the cuisine, it was agreed, was superb and the crystal glittered as it was filled with vintage wines.

Following the example of the American president, the more so as the other delegations had long flights behind them, the diners broke early and retired for the night.

The conference met in full plenum the following morning. The Royal Court Theatre had been transformed to accommodate all eight delegations, with, sitting behind the principals, the small army of minions that each seemed to need. The second night was as the first, save that the host was the British prime minister in the two-hundred-seat Queen’s Grill. Those of less eminence spread themselves through the huge Britannia Restaurant or the various pubs and bars that also serve food. The younger element, freed from their diplomatic labors, favored the Ballroom after dinner, or the G32 Nightclub. High above them, all the lights were dimmed on the sweeping bridge where David Gundlach presided through the night hours. Spread out in front of him, just beneath the forward windows, was the array of plasma screens that described every system in the ship.

Foremost among these was the ship’s radar, casting its gaze twenty-five miles in all directions. He could see the blips made by the two cruisers either side of him, and, beyond them, those of other vessels going about their business. He also had at his disposal an Automatic Identification System, or AIS, which would read the transponder of any ship for miles around, and a cross-checking computer based on Lloyd’s records that would identify not just who she was but her known route and cargo, and her radio channel. Either side of the Queen, also on darkened bridges, the radar men of the two cruisers pored over their screens with the same task. Their duty was to ensure nothing remotely threatening got near the huge monster thundering between them. Even for a harmless and checked-out freighter, the closeness limit was three kilometers. On the second night, there was nothing nearer than ten. The picture created by the E2C Hawkeye was inevitably bigger because of its altitude. The image was like an immense circular torch beam moving across the Atlantic from west to east. But the great majority of what it saw was miles away and nowhere near the convoy. What it could do was create a ten-mile-wide corridor thrusting forward of the moving ships, and tell the cruisers what lay ahead of them. For the purpose of realism, it chose a limit on this projection as well. The limit was twenty-five miles, or one hour’s cruising. Just before eleven on the third night, the Hawkeye posted a low-level warning. “There is a small freighter twenty-five miles ahead, two miles south of intended track. It seems to be motionless in the water.”

The Countess of Richmond was not quite motionless. Her engines were set to MIDSHIPS, so that her propellers idled in the water. But there was a four-knot current that gave her just enough “way” to keep her nose into the flow, and that meant toward the west.

The inflatable speedboat was in the water, tethered to her port side with a rope ladder running down from the rail to the sea. Four men were already in it, bobbing on the current beside the hull of the freighter. The other four were on the bridge. Ibrahim held the wheel, staring at the horizon, seeking the first glimmer of the approaching lights. The Indonesian radio expert was adjusting the transmitting microphone for strength and clarity. Beside him stood the Pakistani teenager born and raised in a suburb of the Yorkshire city of Leeds. The fourth was the Afghan. When the radioman was satisfied, he nodded at the boy, who nodded back and took a stool beside the ship’s console, waiting for the call.

The call came from the cruiser, plunging through the sea six cable lengths to the starboard of the Queen. David Gundlach heard it loud and clear, as did all on the night watch. The channel used was the common wavelength for ships in the North Atlantic. The voice had the drawl of the Deep South. “Countess of Richmond, Countess of Richmond, this is U.S. Navy cruiser Monterey.

Do you read me?”

The voice that came back was slightly distorted by less-than-state-of-the-art radio equipment aboard the old freighter. And the voice had the flat vowels of Lancashire, or maybe Yorkshire.

“Oh, aye, Monterey, Countess ere.”

“You appear to be hove to. State your situation.” “Countess o Richmond. Aving a bit of overheating”-click click-“prop shaft”-static-“repairing as fast as we can.”

There was a brief silence from the bridge of the cruiser. Then…

“Say again, Countess of Richmond. I repeat, say again.” The reply came back, and the accent was thicker than ever. On the bridge of the Queen, the first officer had the blip entering his radar screen slightly south of dead ahead and fifty minutes away. Another display gave all the details of the Countess of Richmond, including confirmation her transponder was genuine and the signal from it accurate. He cut into the radio exchange. “ Monterey, this is Queen Mary 2. Let me try.”

David Gundlach was born and raised in the Wirral County of Cheshire, not fifty miles from Liverpool. The voice from the Countess he put at either Yorkshire or Lancashire, next door to his native Cheshire.

“Countess of Richmond, this is Queen Mary 2. I read you have an overheat of main bearing in the prop shaft, and you are carrying out repairs at sea. Confirm.” “Aye, that’s reet. ‘Ope to be finished in another hour,” said the voice on the speaker.

“Countess, give your details, please. Port of registry, port of departure, destination, cargo.”

“Queen Moory, we’re registered in Liverpool, eight thousand tons, general cargo freighter, coming from Java with brocades and oriental timber, heading for Baltimore.”

Gundlach ran his eye down the screened information provided by the head office of McKendrick Shipping in Liverpool, brokers Sie-bart and Abercrombie in London and insurers Lloyd’s. All accurate.

“Who am I speaking to, please?” he asked.

“This is Captain McKendrick. ‘Oo are you?”

“First Officer David Gundlach speaking.”

The Monterey, following the exchange with difficulty, came back.

“ Monterey, Queen. Do you want to alter course?” Gundlach consulted the displays. The bridge computer was guiding the Queen along the preplanned track, and would adjust for any change of sea, wind, current or waves. To divert would mean going to manual, or resetting the program, and then returning to original course. He would pass the hove-to freighter in forty-one minutes, and he would be two miles, or three kilometers, to his starboard. “No need, Monterey. We’ll be past her in forty minutes. Over two miles of sea between us.”

Formatting on the Queen, the Monferey would be less than that, but there was still ample room. High above, the Hawkeye and the EA-6B scanned the helpless freighter for any sign of missile lock-on, or any electronic activity at all. There was none, but they would keep watching until the Countess was well behind the convoy. Two other ships were also in the no-entry alley, but much farther ahead, and would be asked to divert, left and right. “Roger that,” said the Monferey.

It had all been heard on the bridge of the Countess. Ibrahim nodded that they should leave him. The radio engineer and the youth scuttled down the ladder to the speedboat, and all six in the inflatable waited for the Afghan. Still convinced that the crazed Jordanian would reengage the engine and attempt to ram one of the oncoming vessels, Martin knew he could not leave the Countess of Richmond. His only hope was to take her over after killing the crew. He went down the rope ladder backward. In the thwarts, Suleiman was setting up his digital photography equipment. A rope trailed from the rail of the Countess; one of the Indonesians stood near the speedboat’s bow, gripping the rope and holding her against the flow of the current running past the ship’s side. Martin held the ladder fast, turned, reached down and slashed the gray, rock-hard fabric over a six-foot length. The act was so fast and so unexpected that for two or three seconds no one reacted, save the sea itself. The escaping air made a low roar, and, with six on board, that side of the inflatable dipped downward and began to ship water.

Leaning farther out, Martin slashed at the retaining rope. He missed, but cut open the forearm of the Indonesian. Then the men reacted. But the Indonesian released his grip, and the sea took them.

There were vengeful hands reaching out at him, but the sinking speedboat dropped astern. The weight of the great outboard pulled down the rear end, and more salt water rushed in. The wreckage cleared the stern of the freighter and went away into the blackness of the Atlantic night. Somewhere downcurrent, it simply sank, dragged down by the outboard. In the gleam of the ship’s stern light, Martin saw waving hands in the water, and then they, too, were gone. No one can swim against four knots. He went back up the ladder. At that moment, Ibrahim jerked one of the three controls the explosives expert had left him. As Martin climbed, there was a series of sharp cracks as tiny charges went off.

When Mr. Wei had built the gallery masquerading as six sea containers along the deck of the Java Star from bridge to bow, he had created the roof, or “lid,” over the empty space beneath using a single sheet of steel held down by four strongpoints.

To these, the explosives man had fitted shaped charges, and linked all four to wires, taking power from the ship’s engines. When they blew, the sheet metal lid of the cavern beneath lifted upward several feet. The power of the charges was asymmetric, so one side of the sheet rose higher than the other. Martin was at the top of the rope ladder, knife clenched in teeth, when the charges blew. He crouched there as the huge sheet of steel slid sideways into the sea. He put the knife away, and entered the bridge. The Al Qaeda killer was standing at the wheel, staring ahead through the glass. On the horizon, bearing down at twenty-five knots, was a floating city, seventeen decks and 150,000 tons of lights, steel and people. Right beneath the bridge, the gallery was open to the stars. For the first time, Martin realized its purpose. Not to contain something; to hide something. The clouds moved away from the half-moon, and the entire fore-deck of the onetime Java Star gleamed in its light. For the first time, Martin realized this was not a general freighter containing explosives; it was a tanker. Running away from the bridge was the cat’s cradle of pipes, tubes, spigots and hydrant wheels that gave away her purpose in life.

Evenly spaced down the deck toward the forepeak were six circular steel disks-the venting hatches-above each of the cargo tanks beneath the deck. “You should have stayed on the boat, Afghan,” said Ibrahim. “There was no room, my brother. Suleiman almost fell overboard. I stayed on the ladder. Then they were gone. Now I will die here with you, inshallah.” Ibrahim seemed appeased. He glanced at the ship’s clock, and pulled his second lever. The flexes ran from the control down to the ship’s batteries, took their power and went forward into the gallery where the explosives man, entering through the secret door, had worked during his month at sea. Six more charges detonated. The six hatches blew away from above the tanks. What followed was invisible to the naked eye. Had it been possible to see, six vertical columns rose like volcanoes from the domes as the cargo began to vent. The rising vapor cloud reached a hundred feet, lost its impetus, and gravity took over. The unseen cloud, mixing furiously with the night air, fell back to the sea and began to roll outward, away from the source, in all directions. Martin had lost, and he knew it. He was too late, and he knew that, too. He knew enough to realize what a floating bomb he had been riding since the Philippines, and that what was pouring out of the six missing hatches was invisible death that could not now be controlled.

He had always presumed the Countess of Richmond, now become again the Java Star, was going to drive herself into some inner harbor and detonate what lay below her decks.

He had presumed she was going to ram something of value as she blew herself up. For thirty days, he had waited in vain for a chance to kill seven men and take over her command. No such chance had appeared.

Now, too late, he realized the Java Star was not going to deliver a bomb; she was the bomb. And with her cargo venting fast, she did not need to move an inch. The oncoming liner had to pass only within three kilometers of her to be consumed.

He had heard the interchange on the bridge between the Pakistani boy and the deck officer of the Queen Mary 2. He knew too late the Java Star would not engage engines. The escorting cruisers would never allow that, but she did not need to.

There was a third control by Ibrahim’s right hand, a button to be hammered downward. Martin followed the flexes to a Very pistol, a flare gun, mounted just forward of the bridge windows. One flare, one single spark… Through the windows, the city of lights was over the horizon. Fifteen miles, thirty minutes cruising, optimum time for maximum fuel-air mixture. Martin’s glance flicked to the radio speaker on the console. A last chance to shout a warning. His right hand slid down toward the slit in his robe, inside which was his knife strapped to his thigh.

The Jordanian caught the glance and the movement. He had not survived Afghanistan, a Jordanian jail and the relentless American hunt for him in Iraq without developing the instincts of a wild animal. Something told him that despite the fraternal language, the Afghan was not his friend. The raw hatred charged the atmosphere on the tiny bridge like a silent scream.

Martin’s hand slipped inside his robe for the knife. Ibrahim was first; the gun had been underneath the map on the chart table. It was pointing straight at Martin’s chest. The distance to cross was twelve feet. Ten too many. A soldier is trained to estimate chances, and do it fast. Martin had spent much of his life doing that. On the bridge of the Countess of Richmond, enveloped in her own death cloud, there were only two: go for the man, or go for the button. There would be no surviving either.

Some words came into his mind, words from long ago, in a schoolboy’s poem: “To every man upon this earth / Death cometh soon or late…” And he recalled Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Lion of the Panjshir, talking by the campfire. “We are all sentenced to die, Angleez. But only a warrior blessed of Allah may be allowed to choose how!” Colonel Mike Martin made his choice… Ibrahim saw him coming; he knew the flicker in the eyes of a man about to die. The killer screamed and fired. The charging man took the bullet in the chest, and began to die. But beyond pain and shock, there is always willpower, just enough for another second of life.

At the end of that second, both men and ship were consumed in a rose pink eternity.

David Gundlach stared in stunned amazement. Fifteen miles ahead, where the world’s largest liner would have been in thirty-five minutes, a huge volcano of flame erupted out of the sea. From the other three men on the night watch came cries of “What the hell was that?”

“ Monterey to Queen Mary 2. Divert to port. I say, divert to port. We are investigating.”

To his right, Gundlach saw the U.S. cruiser move up to attack speed and head for the flames. Even as he watched, they began to flicker and die upon the water. It was clear the Countess of Richmond had sustained some terrible accident. His job was to stay clear; if there were men in the water, the Monferey would find them. But it was still wise to summon his captain. When the ship’s master arrived on the bridge, his first officer explained what he had seen. They were now a full eighteen miles from the estimated spot, and heading away fast. To port, the USS Leyfe Gulf stayed with them. The Monferey was heading straight for the fireball miles up ahead. The captain agreed that in the unlikely event of survivors, the Monterey should search for them. As the two men watched from the safety of their bridge, the flames began to flicker and die. The last blotches of flame upon the sea would be the remnants of the vanished ship’s fuel oil. All the hy-pervolatile cargo was gone before the Monferey reached the spot.

The captain of the Cunarder ordered that the computers resume course for Southampton.