The Afghan (29 page)

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 skilfully 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 low-life 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 Tewfik 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 harbour.

The details of shipping the bodies back to Caracas fell to the Venezuelan Embassy and Consulate while Captain Montalban contacted his local agent for replacement sailors. The man asked around and struck 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, joined the other four seamen who made up the crew and the
Doña 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 deck hands, 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, who came from the SIS’s anti-terrorism 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 anti-terror community. They were told they had twelve hours to go into a huddle and come up with an evaluation of the threat and 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 this 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, giving an area so vast that literally thousands of ships are out of sight of land or any other vessel all the time.

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

‘Finally, you want to find a vessel; but you do not 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 than 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 at, then check out any ship heading towards 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 for?’

‘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 Trade Center towers, and even then they were incredibly lucky. All that time the sea has been beckoning to them.’

‘Security of ports and harbours 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 is closed for a decade.’

‘OK,’ 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 two thousand and four 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 any more. The T-shirt made in China 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-on 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 counter-measures. Dammit, we are not without resources of self-defence.’

Chuck Hemingway produced a paper he and Seymour had worked on earlier.

‘OK, sir, we feel probability one is likely to be the taking-over of a very large vessel – tanker, freighter, ore-carrier – and sinking her in a narrow but vital marine 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 ship owners will see it our way.’

‘Probability two?’ queried Steve Hill.

‘Running the ghost ship, crammed with explosives, into a major facility like a sea island of oil pipes or an oil rig and blowing it to pieces. It causes astronomical eco-damage 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. Counter-measure: 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 sea 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 harbour. It wiped the city off the map. It still rates as the biggest non-nuclear explosion in history.’

‘I am going to have to report all this to the principals, Steve, and they are not going to like it,’ Gumienny said as they shook hands on the tarmac. ‘By the way, if counter-measures 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 the flight dispersal hut in the Arizona sunshine and marvelled 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-111 Aardvark and the F-4G Wild Weasel and they were both serious pieces of machinery that the US 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. Immune to love or lust, hate or fear, it crouched silently amid the teeming swarm of men and women in coveralls who crawled over its burly frame. Larry Duval envied his Eagle; for all its myriad complexities, it could not feel anything. It could never be afraid.

The aeroplane 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 proving flight.

So it waited in the bright spring sunshine of an Arizona morning; 63 feet long, 18 high and 42 across, weighing in at 40,000 lb bone dry and 81,000 at maximum take-off 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 pre-flight 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 F-100 engines, the canopy hissed down into its seals and the Eagle began to roll. It turned into the light breeze down the runway, paused, received clearance and crouched for one last testing of the brakes. Then thirty-foot flames leapt back 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 their destination. At thirty thousand feet in a pure blue sky the Eagle levelled out and pointed her nose north-west towards 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 US Secretary of State.

The other six non-American delegations would fly in from six different capitals to the same Kennedy International.

All the delegations would remain ‘airside’ within the airport, a mile away from the nearest demonstrators and protesters outside the perimeter. The President was simply not going to allow those whom he called ‘loony-toons’ to scream insults at his guests or harass them in any way. Repeats of Seattle and Genoa were not to be entertained.