The Afghan (27 page)

Martin realized he was being flown into the heart of the world’s most ferocious ship-hijacking, cargo-stealing and 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 non-alighting travellers did not leave the aeroplane.

Forty minutes later it took off to the west, circled over the sea and turned north-east 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 take-off the stewardess distributed landing cards. Suleiman took them both and began to fill them in. Martin had to pretend he neither understood nor wrote English and could speak it only haltingly. He could hear it all around 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 aft 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 naivety 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 traveller. 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 speciality was.

Suleiman was scouring the access road to the concourse building which served both arrivals and departures on one level: he was looking for a taxi when one appeared heading towards them. It was occupied but clearly about to deposit its cargo on the pavement.

Two men alighted and Martin caught the English accents immediately. Both were big and muscular; both wore khaki shorts and flowered beach shirts. Both were damp in the blazing sun and moist, thirty-degree pre-monsoon heat. One produced Malaysian currency to pay the driver, the other emptied the boot of their luggage. There were two hard-framed suitcases and two scuba diver’s kitbags. Both had been diving the offshore reefs on behalf of the British magazine
Sport Diver
.

The man by the boot 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 kitbags from the road to the pavement. As he did so the folded landing card went into one of the side pockets of which all divebags 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 connection 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 travellers 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 as a game-fisherman, by the harbour wall. Within minutes they were out of the harbour.

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

It had been a gruelling journey, with only catnaps on the aeroplanes. 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 matting, 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 dollar 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, 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 tinned butter in the monthly drop-off, had to pour it on to the bread from a small jug.

Captain McKendrick ran his bandanna kerchief 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, it not being a ‘dry’ airline, had consumed enough beer to send them into a deep sleep. The flight might be twelve hours but they would be gaining eight on the time zones and touching down at Heathrow at dawn. The hard-frame suitcases were in the hold but the divebags were above their heads as they slept.

They contained fins, masks, wetsuits, regulators and buoyancy control jackets, with only the diving knives in the suitcases in the hold. One of the divebags 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 were the words ‘Countess of Richmond’ and, at the stern only, the word ‘Liverpool’ beneath. 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 ultra-modern but the stevedores knew their business and chained logs of rare timber swung inboard and were stowed in the hold below by the crew that toiled and sweated down there.

In the heat of 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 per cent, was edging towards 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 below decks.

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 north-east 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 longhouse on stilts above the water that 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 longhouse would be staying behind. It was their labours that had prepared the hijacked
Java Star
for sea.

These were a mix of Indonesians from Jemaat Islamiya, 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 further 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 satphone the entire datastream 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 as 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 mid-morning 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 around sundown. The speedboat crews that would intercept her still had four hours before they need leave. Suleiman and Martin had changed from their western suits into trousers, flowered local shirts and sandals that had been 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 to 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 divebag. His expression indicated it was a pretty daft question, given that the divebags bore the logo of a famous scuba-equipment company. It is, however, a mistake to mock a customs officer. The official’s 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 divebags.

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 drew a folded card, looked 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, and walked through a door behind him. Those ample mirrors in customs halls are not for the vain to touch up their make-up. They have one-way vision and behind them are the duty shift of one of the arms of British internal security – in this case Scotland Yard’s Special Branch.