Frederick Forsyth - The Afghan

“Would you remain here, please?” said the first officer, and walked through a door behind him. Those ample mirrors in customs halls are not for the vain to rearrange their makeup. They have oneway vision, and behind them are the duty shift of internal security-in the case of Britain, MI5. Within minutes, both divers, with their luggage, were in separate interview rooms. The customs men went through the luggage, fin by fin, mask by mask and shirt by shirt. There was nothing illegal.

The man in plain clothes studied the now-unfolded card.

“It must have been put there by someone, but not by me,” protested the diver. By now, it was nine-thirty. Steve Hill was at his desk in Vauxhall Cross when his private and very unlisted phone rang.

“To whom am I speaking?” asked a voice. Hill bristled. “Perhaps I should ask the same question. I think you may have a wrong number,” he replied.

The M15 officer had read the text of the message stuffed into the diver’s bag.

He tended to believe the man’s explanation. In which case… “I am speaking from Heathrow, Terminal 3. The internal security office. We have intercepted a passenger from the Far East. Stuffed into his dive bag was a short handwritten message. Does ‘Crowbar’ mean anything to you?” To Steve Hill, it was like a punch in the stomach. This was no wrong number; this was no crossed line. He identified himself by service and rank, asked that both men be detained and that he was on his way. Within five minutes, his car swept out of the underground garage, crossed Vauxhall Bridge and turned down Cromwell Road to Heathrow.

It was bad luck on the divers to have lost their whole morning, but after an hour’s interrogation Steve Hill was sure they were just innocent dupes. He secured for them a full with-trimmings breakfast from the staff canteen, and asked them to rack their brains for a clue as to who had stuffed the folded note in the side pocket.

They went over everyone they had met since packing the bags. Finally one said, “Mark, do you remember that Arab-looking fella who helped you unload at the airport?”

“What Arab-looking fellow?” asked Hill.

They described the man as best they could. Black hair, black beard. Neatly trimmed. Dark eyes, olive skin. About forty-five, fit-looking. Dark suit. Hill had had the descriptions from the barber and the sailor of Ras al-Khaimah. It was Crowbar. He thanked them sincerely, and asked that they be given a chauffeured ride back to their Essex home.

When he called Gordon Phillips at Edzell and Marek Gumienny over breakfast in Washington, he could reveal the scrawl in his hand. It said simply: “If you love your country, get home and ring XXX XXXXXX. Just tell them Crowbar says it will be some kind of ship.”

“Pull out all the stops,” he told Edzell. “Just scour the world for a missing ship.”

As with Captain Herrmann of the Java Star, Liam McKendrick had chosen to bring his vessel round the various headlands himself and hand over after clearing the strait between the islands of Tawi-tawi and Jolo. Ahead was the great expanse of the Celebes Sea, and the course directly south for Makassar Strait. He had a crew of six: five Indians from Kerala, all Christians, loyal and efficient: and his first officer, a Gibraltarian. He had handed over the helm and gone below when the speedboats swept up from astern. As with the Java Star, the crew had no chance. Ten dacoits were over the rails in seconds and running for the bridge. Mr. Lam-pong, in charge of the hijack, came at a more leisurely pace.

This time, there was no need for ceremony or threats of violence unless instructions were obeyed. The only task the Countess of Richmond had to perform was to disappear, with her crew, and forever. Her valuable cargo, what had lured her to these waters in the first place, would be a total write-off, which was a pity but could not be helped.

The crew were simply marched to the taffrail and machine-gunned. Their bodies, jerking in protest at the unfairness of death, went straight over the rail. There was not even any need for weights or ballast to send them to the bottom.

Lampong knew his sharks.

Liam McKendrick was the last to go, roaring his rage at the killers, calling Lampong a heathen pig. The Muslim fanatic did not like being called a pig, and made sure the Liverpudlian mariner was riddled but still alive when he hit the sea.

The Abu Sayyaf pirates had sunk enough ships to know where the sea cocks were. As the keelson began to flood below the cargo, the raiders left the Countess and bobbed on the water a few cables away until she reared on her stern, prow in the air, and slid backward, tumbling slowly to the bottom of the Celebes Sea. When she was gone, the killers turned and raced for home.

For the party in the long house of the Filipino creek, it was another brief call on a sat phone from Lampong out at sea that triggered the hour of departure. They filed down to the cruiser moored at the foot of the steps. As they went, Martin realized that the ones being left behind were not showing any sense of relief but only deep envy.

In a career in Special Forces, he had never actually met a suicide bomber before the act. Now he was surrounded by them, had become one of them. At Forbes Castle, he had read copiously about the state of mind: the total conviction that the deed being done is for a truly holy cause, that it is automatically blessed by Allah Himself, that a guaranteed and immediate passage to paradise is ensured and that this sacrifice vastly outweighs any residual love of life.

He had also come to realize the level and depth of hatred that must be imbued in the shahid alongside the love of Allah. One half alone will not work. The hatred must be like a corrosive acid inside the soul, and he was surrounded by it. He had seen it in the faces of the dacoits of Abu Sayyaf who relished every chance to kill a Westerner; he had watched it in the hearts of the Arabs as they prayed for a chance to kill as many Christians, Jews and secular or insufficient Muslims as possible in the act of death; most of all, he had seen the hatred in the eyes of al-Khattab and Lampong, precisely because they sullied themselves in order to pass unnoticed among the enemy.

As they chugged slowly farther up the creek, the jungle closing in on every side and beginning to shut out the sky above them, he studied his companions. They all shared the hate and the fanaticism. They all counted themselves more blessed than any other true believers on earth.

Martin was convinced that the men around him had no more clue than he exactly what the sacrifice would entail: where they would be going, to target what and with what weapon.

They only knew, because they had offered themselves to die and been accepted and carefully selected, that they were going to strike the Great Satan in a manner that would be spoken of for a hundred years. They, like the prophet so long ago, were going on a great journey to heaven itself-the journey called al-Isra. Up ahead, the creek split. The chugging cruiser took the wider branch, and round a corner a moored vessel came into sight. She was facing downstream, ready to depart for the open sea. Her cargo was apparently stored in the six sea containers that occupied her fore-deck. And she was called the Countess of Richmond.

For a moment, Martin toyed with the thought of escaping into the surrounding jungle. He had had weeks of jungle training in Belize, the SAS’s tropical training school. But he realized as soon as the thought crossed his mind that it was hopeless. He would not make a mile without compass or machete, and the hunting party would have him within the hour. Then would come days of unspeakable agony, as the details of his mission were wrenched out of him. There was no point. He would have to wait for a better opportunity, if one ever came. One by one, they climbed the ladder to the deck of the freighter: the engineer, navigator and radioman, all Indonesians; the chemist and photographer, both Arabs; the Pakistani from the UK with the flat northern accent, should anyone insist on speaking to the Countess by radio; and the Afghan, who could be taught to hold the wheel and steer a course. In all his training at Forbes, in all the hours of studying faces of known suspects, he had never seen any of them. When he reached the deck, the man who would command them all on their mission to eternal glory was there to meet them. Him, the ex-SAS man, he did recognize. From the rogues’ gallery he had been shown at Castle Forbes, he knew he was staring at Yusef Ibrahim, deputy and right-hand man of al-Zarqawi, the butcher of Baghdad.