Frederick Forsyth - The Afghan

Somewhere in the vast sprawling mass of pushing and shoving humanity that comprises the main concourse of Karachi International Airport, the Gulf Arab found the ticket desk of Malaysia Airlines and bought two single tickets in economy class to Kuala Lumpur. There were lengthy visa application forms to fill out. which Suleiman did, in English. He paid in cash American dollars, the world’s common currency.

The flight was on a European Airbus A330, and took six hours, plus two for time zone change. It landed at half past eight, after the serving of a snack breakfast. For the second time, Martin offered his new Bahraini passport, and wondered if it would pass muster. It did; it was perfect. From international arrivals, Suleiman led the way to domestic departures and bought two single tickets. Only when Martin had to proffer his boarding pass did he see where they were heading-the island of Labuan. He had heard of Labuan, but only vaguely. Situated off the northern coast of Borneo, it belonged to Malaysia. Though its tourist publicity spoke of a bustling cosmopolitan island with stunning coral in the surrounding waters, Western briefings on the criminal underworld mentioned another, darker reputation.

It was once part of the Sultanate of Brunei, twenty miles across the water on the Borneo coast. The British took it in 1846 and kept it for 115 years, barring three years under Japanese occupation during World War II. Labuan was handed by the British to the state of Sabab in 1963 as part of decolonization, then ceded to Malaysia in 1984.

It is one of those oddities that has no visible economy within its fifty-square-mile oval territory, so it has created one. With a status of international offshore financial center, no-tax free port, flag of convenience and smuggling mecca, Labuan has attracted some extremely dubious clientele. Martin realized he was being flown into the heart of the world’s most ferocious ship-hijacking, cargo-stealing, 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 nonalighting travelers did not leave the airplane. Forty minutes later, it took off to the west, circled over the sea and turned northeast 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 takeoff, the stewardess distributed landing cards. Suleiman took them both and began to fill them in. Martin had to pretend he neither understood nor wrote written English, and could speak it only haltingly. He could hear it all round 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 after 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 naivete 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 traveler. 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 specialty was. Suleiman was scouring the access road to the concourse building that served both arrivals and departures on one level, and he was looking for a taxi when one appeared heading toward them. It was occupied, but clearly about to deposit its cargo on the pavement.

There were two men, and Martin caught the English accent immediately. Both were big and muscular; both wore khaki shorts and flowered beach shirts. Both were damp in the blazing sun and moist, eighty-six-degree, premonsoon heat. One produced Malaysian currency to pay the driver, the other emptied the trunk of their luggage. They were scuba divers’ kit bags. Both had been diving the offshore reefs on behalf of the British magazine Sport Diver. The man by the trunk 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 kit bags from the pavement to the curb. As he did so, the folded landing card went into one of the side pockets, of which all kit bags 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 connector 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 travelers 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 for game fishing, by the harbor wall. Within minutes, they were out of the harbor.

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

It had been a grueling journey, with only catnaps on the airplanes. 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 mat, 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 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.