The Afghan (24 page)

‘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, the 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 marshalled 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 liferafts, lifebelts 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 ten hours 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 towards the Norwegian.

The new course was back towards the north-east, 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 with 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 Lascar 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, shark 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 tumbled back from the fly-bridge into the sea. Half an hour later, towed by two small tugs, which had been stolen weeks earlier, and with much shrieking 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 liferafts, small tents on the ocean swell which had opened and inflated automatically as designed. He circled once and spotted the lifebelts and two inflated jackets. All were marked with the name: MV
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 Register of Shipping
logged the loss. For the world the
Java Star
had simply ceased to exist.

CHAPTER TWELVE

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 becoming very tense. They had lost their man, and the enquiries 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 they were telling the truth.

To make it harder, Izmat Khan had spent so long in solitary for non-cooperation 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 break-out 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 Yusuf 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 enquiries.

‘Let us go back to your early days in the Tora Bora,’ Al-Khattab proposed when the interrogation resumed. ‘Tell me about your boyhood.’

Al-Khattab was a clever man but what he could not know was 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 which proved a crucial hinge in the life of Izmat Khan: 20 August 1998, the day the Tomahawk cruise missile 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 in 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 camp fires 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 two thousand and one,’ said Al-Khattab.

‘The Americans first came in the autumn of two thousand and one,’ 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; of 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 honoured 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 cellphone which then went into the deep-water harbour. 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 free 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, cellphone and satphone 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 in a described manner.

Given the tens of millions of Muslims who send money back to families in the old home country, and given that there are neither computers nor even checkable dockets; 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 across the world. Only the recipient with the 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 across the world.