Frederick Forsyth - The Afghan

They talked until sundown, then the Arab rose.

“I have much to check on,” he said. “If you are telling the truth, we will continue in a few days. If not, I’m afraid I shall have to issue Suleiman with the appropriate instructions.”

Martin went back to his cell. Dr. al-Khattab issued rapid orders to the guard team and left. He drove a modest rented car, and he returned to the Hilton Hotel in Ras al-Khaimah town, elegantly dominating the AI Saqr deepwater harbor. He spent the night and left the next day. By then, he was wearing a well-cut cream tropical suit. When he checked in with British Airways at Dubai International Airport, his English was impeccable.

In fact, Ali Aziz al-Khattab had been born a Kuwaiti, the son of a senior bank official. By Gulf standards, that meant that his upbringing had been effortless and privileged. In 1989, his father had been posted to London as deputy manager of the Bank of Kuwait. The family had gone with him, and avoided the invasion of their homeland by Saddam Hussein in 1990.

Ali Aziz, already a good English speaker, was enrolled in a British school at age fifteen and emerged three years later with accentless English and excellent grades. When his family returned home, he elected to stay on and go for a degree at Loughborough Technical College. Four years later, he emerged with a science degree in chemical engineering, and proceeded on to a doctorate. It was not in the Arabian Gulf but in London that he began to attend the mosque run by a firebrand preacher of anti-Western hatred and became what the media like to call “radicalized.” In truth, by twenty-one he was fully brainwashed, and a fanatical supporter of Al Qaeda.

A “talent spotter” suggested he might like to visit Pakistan; he accepted, and then went on, through the Khyber Pass, to spend six months at an Al Qaeda terrorist training camp. He had already been marked out as a “sleeper” who should lie low in England and never come to the attention of the authorities. Back in London, he did what they all do: He reported to his embassy that he had lost his passport and was issued a new one, which did not carry the telltale Pakistan entry stamp. As far as anyone who asked was concerned, he had been visiting family and friends in the Gulf and had never been near Pakistan, let alone Afghanistan. He secured a post as lecturer at Aston University, Birmingham, in 1999-Two years later, Anglo-American forces invaded Afghanistan. There were several weeks of panic in case any trace of him in the terror camps had been left lying round, but, in his case, AQ head of personnel, Abu Zubaydah, had done his job. No traces were found of any al-Khattab ever having been there. So he remained undiscovered, and rose to be AQ commanding agent in the UK.

As Dr. AL-KHATTAB’S London-bound airliner was taking off, the Java Star eased away from her berth in the Sultanate of Brunei on the coast of Indonesian North Borneo and headed for the open sea.

Her destination was the West Australian port of Fremantle, as usual, and her Norwegian skipper, Knut Herrmann, had no inkling his journey would be anything other than usual, routine and eventless.

He knew that the seas in those parts remain the most dangerous waters in the world, but not because of shoals, riptides, rocks, tempests, reefs or tsunamis. The danger here is pirate attacks.

Every year, between the Straits of Malacca to the west and the Celebes Sea to the east, there are over five hundred pirate attacks on merchant shipping, and up to a hundred hijackings. Occasionally, the crew are ransomed back to the shipowners. Sometimes they are all killed and never heard of again; in those cases, the cargo is stolen and sold on the black market. If Captain Herrmann sailed with an easy mind on the “milk run” to Fremantle, it was because he was convinced his cargo was useless to the dacoits of the sea. But on this trip, he was wrong.

The first leg of his course lay north, away from his eventual destination. It took him six hours to pass the ramshackle town of Kudat and come round the northernmost tip of Sabah and the island of Borneo. Only then could he run southeast for the Sulu Archipelago.

He intended to move through the coral-and-jungle islands by taking the deepwater strait between Tawitawi and Jolo islands.

South of the islands, it was a clear run down the Celebes Sea to the south and eventually Australia.

His departure from Brunei had been watched, and a cell phone call made. Even if it had been intercepted, the call referred only to the recovery of a sick uncle who would be out of hospital in twelve days. That meant: twelve hours to intercept.

The call was taken on a creek on Jolo Island, and the man who took it would have been recognized by Mr. Alex Siebart, of Crutched Friars, City of London. It was Mr. Lampong, who no longer affected being a businessman from Sumatra. The twelve men he commanded in the velvety tropical night were cutthroats, but they were well paid and would stay obedient. Criminality apart, they were also Muslim extremists. The Abu Sayyaf movement of the southern Philippines, whose last peninsula is only a few miles from Indonesia on the Sulu Sea, has the reputation not only for religious extremism but also of being killers for hire. The offer Mr. Lampong had put to them enabled them to fulfill both functions. The two speedboats they occupied put to sea at dawn, took up position between the two islands and waited. An hour later, the Java Star bore down on them, passing from the Sulu Sea into the Celebes. Taking her over was a simple task, and the gangsters were well practiced.

Captain Herrmann had taken the helm through the night, and as dawn came up over the Pacific, away to his left, he handed over to his Indonesian first officer and went below. His crew of ten lashkars were also in their bunks in the fo’c’sle.

The first thing the Indonesian officer saw was a pair of speedboats racing up astern, one on each side. Dark, barefoot, agile men leapt effortlessly from speedboat to deck and ran after toward the superstructure and bridge where he stood. He had just time to press the emergency buzzer to his captain’s cabin, and the men were bursting through the door from the flybridge. Then there was a knife at his throat, and a voice screaming, “Capitan, capitan…” There was no need. A tired Knut Herrmann was coming topside to see what was going on. He and Mr. Lampong arrived on the bridge together. Lampong held a mini Uzi. The Norwegian knew better than to begin to resist. The ransom would have to be sorted out between the pirates and his employer company HQ in Fremantle. “Captain Herrmann…”

The bastard knew his name. This had been prepared. “Please ask your first officer, did he in any circumstances make a radio transmission in the past five minutes?”

There was no need to ask. Lampong was speaking in English. For the Norwegian and his Indonesian officer, it was the common language. The first officer screamed that he had not touched the radio’s transmit button. “Excellent,” said Lampong, and issued a stream of orders in the local dialect. This the first officer understood, and opened his mouth to scream. The Norwegian understood not a word, but he understood everything when the dacoit holding his number two jerked the seaman’s head back and sliced his throat open with a single cut. The first officer kicked, jerked, slumped and died. Captain Herrmann had not been sick in forty years at sea, but he leaned against the wheel and emptied his stomach.

“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, international distress frequency. Lampong produced a written sheet.