The Afghan (28 page)

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 MI5 officer had read the text of the message stuffed into the diver’s kitbag. He tended to believe the man’s explanation. In which case . . .

‘I am speaking from Heathrow, Terminal Three. The internal security office. We have intercepted a passenger from the Far East. Stuffed into his divebag 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 said that he was on his way. Within five minutes his car swept out of the underground car park, crossed Vauxhall Bridge and turned down the 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 into 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 tailor 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 XXXXXXXXXXX. 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 Tawitawi and Jolo. Ahead was the great expanse of the Celebes Sea, and the course directly south for the Strait of the Makassar.

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 Lampong, 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 for ever. What had lured her to these waters in the first place – her valuable cargo – 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 what to do. As the bilges 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, bow in the air, and slid backwards to tumble slowly to the bottom of the Celebes Sea. When she was gone the killers turned and raced for home.

For the party in the longhouse in the Filipino creek it was another brief call on a satphone 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 a 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 of their state of mind; of their total conviction that the deed is being done in a truly holy cause; that it is automatically blessed by Allah himself; that a guaranteed and immediate passage to paradise will ensue; and that this vastly outweighs any residual love of life.

He had also come to realize the depth of hatred that must be imbued in the
shahid
alongside the love of Allah. One of the two 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 seen 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 further 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.

They only knew, because they had offered themselves to die, and been accepted and carefully selected, that they were going to strike at 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 deck cargo was apparently stored in the six sea containers that occupied her foredeck. 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 Brunei, 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 his mission details 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 radio man, all Indonesians; the chemist and photographer, both Arabs; the Pakistani from the UK with the flat northern accent, who it turned out was there in case anyone should 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 did recognize. From the rogues’ gallery he had been shown at Castle Forbes he knew he was staring at Yusuf Ibrahim, deputy and right-hand man of Al-Zarqawi, his homicidal fellow-Jordanian.

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 rumours 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 AQ 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 black-pebble expressionless 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, Yusuf Ibrahim, Butcher of Karbala.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

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 south-west to join the sea-track the
Countess
would have taken through 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, counter-terrorist agencies within the world of merchant marine had for years known and been perplexed by the times a ship in these waters had been hijacked, steered round in circles for several hours with her crew down below, then abandoned.

The reason was simply that just as the hijackers of 9/11 had achieved their practice in US flying schools, the marine hijackers of the Far East had been practising 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 harbour master’s office of a North Borneo trading port until he was radicalized within Islam and accepted into the ranks of Jemaat Islamiya, 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 datastream 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 Cascades mountain 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 their capacity for internal solitude and self-sufficiency.

Nevertheless the guard detail could don skis or snowshoes and slog through the forest to keep fit and get a break from the bunkhouse, eatery and games 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 for ever, 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-grey 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 aeroplanes.

Some he knew were warplanes, though he had never heard of either the Cascades 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 tailfins, but he knew enough to know these were not national but company insignia. Except for the maple leaf. Some always had that leaf on the fin, 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, towards 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 a different national emblem 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.