The Afghan (35 page)

‘LPG is heavier than air. In transportation it is not, like LNG, at an amazingly low temperature; it is under pressure. Hence the double-hulled skins of LPG tankers. When ruptured the LPG will gush out, quite invisible, and mix with the air. It is heavier than air so it will swirl around 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.

‘Now it creates its own wind. It will roll outwards from the source, a roaring tide of flame, consuming everything in its path until it has consumed itself. Then it gutters like a fading candle and dies.’

‘How far will the fireball roll?’

‘Well, according to my new-found boffin friends a small tanker of, say, eight thousand tonnes, fully vented and ignited, would consume everything and extinguish all human life within a five-kilometre radius.

‘One last thing, I said it creates its own wind. It sucks in the air from periphery to centre, to feed itself, so even humans in a protective shell five clicks away from the epicentre will die of asphyxia.’

Steve Hill had a mental image of a city clustered round its harbour and port after such a horror exploded within it. 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 tonnes. 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 a human-carnage massacre would be in a western, developed country; not Lagos, Dakar; 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 OK, 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 he 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, lifebelts, and various flotsam at the spot. No sign of survivors. Captain and crew have never been heard of 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 Martin was driving, the
Countess of Richmond
crossed the Equator. She was heading north by north-west, 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 were done into the camera lens and the last wills were read out by each writer.

The Afghan did his as well, but he chose to speak in Pashto. Yusuf Ibrahim, from his time in Afghanistan, had a few words of the language, and 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 that he would soon see 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 in datastream before he too died and his equipment 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 tinned 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 to a razor edge with the whetstone in the knife drawer. 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 crew quarters up in the bow. 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 radio expert 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 put a 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 for and what lay inside the sea containers that he might be able to sabotage to destruction. Neither answer appeared, and the
Countess
steamed north by north-west.

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 course and tracks conformed to their predicted journeys; three thousand captains had spoken in voice to their head offices and agents, giving personal birth and background details so that, even if they were under duress, no hijacker 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.

After the tip from Ipswich the origins and ownership of the
Java Star
were checked with a toothcomb. 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. Her builders were traced – she had had six owners in her life – and provided plans. A sister ship was found and swarmed over by Americans with measuring tapes. Computer imaging produced an exact replica of the
Java Star
, but not the ship itself.

The government of the 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 she 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
.

In the first week of April the joint operation at Edzell air base in Scotland was 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 centres 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 September.

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 were 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 kitbag 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 goddam 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 tonnes. 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 Keyhole KH-11 satellite that found her, six hours after the complaint from Puerto Rico to the head office of the oil-company owners of the refinery, based in Houston, was turned into a major alarm situation.

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

The knowledge 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 US Navy and the Coast Guards. 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 their 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, save only a few catnaps before he was kicked awake again. She had slipped past Puerto Rico in the darkness, passed west of the Turks and Caicos Islands 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 whole 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 into 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-size.

‘Jesus, would you look at that,’ murmured an operator to no one in particular.

While at sea someone had gone over the stern of the tanker with a brush and white paint to daub a cross-bar over the letter ‘i’ in Maria. It attempted to rechristen her the
Doña Marta
but the white smear was simply too crude to dupe any onlooker for more than a few seconds.

There are two coastguard 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 towards the hijacked fugitive, moved from optimum cruise revolutions to flank speed. Her navigator rapidly plotted her intercept at ninety minutes, just before sundown.

The word ‘cutter’ hardly does the
Mellon
justice; she can perform like a small destroyer at 150 metres in length and 3,300 tons deadweight. As she raced through the Atlantic swell of early April her crew ran to prepare her armament – just in case. The missing tanker was already rated as ‘likely hostile’.