Frederick Forsyth - The Afghan

But he kept his rage under control for one of the oldest reasons in the world. He was afraid of the mountain man; and even though he carried a handgun in a saraband under his robe, and had sworn to die, he could not suppress his awe of the man from the Tora Bora. So he brooded, stared, waited and kept his own counsel.

For a second time, the West’s search for the ghost ship-if it even existed-had run into complete frustration. Steve Hill was being bombarded with requirements for information-anything-to appease the frustration that went right up to Downing Street.

The controller, Middle East, could offer no resolution to the four questions that were raining down upon him from the British premier and the U.S. president. Does this ship exist at all? If so, what is it, where is it and which city is its target? The daily conferences were becoming purgatory. The chief of the SIS, never known or greeted by anything other than “C,” was steely in his silences. After Peshawar, all the superior authorities had agreed there was a terrorist spectacular in preparation. But the world of smoke and mirrors is not a forgiving place for those who fail their political masters. Since the discovery at customs of the scrawled message on the folded landing card, there had been no sign of life from Crowbar. Was he dead or alive? No one knew, and some were ceasing to care. It had been nearly four weeks, and with each passing day the mood was swinging to the view that he was now past tense. Some muttered that he had done his job, been caught and killed, but had been the cause of the plot being abandoned. Only Hill counseled caution, and a continued search for the source of a still-unfound threat. In some gloom, he motored to Ipswich to talk to Sam Seymour and the two eggheads in the hazardous-cargo office of Lloyd’s List, who were helping him go through every possibility, however bizarre.

“You used a pretty hair-raising phrase in London, Sam. ‘Thirty times the Hiroshima bomb.’ How on earth can a small tanker be worse than the entire Manhattan Project?”

Sam Seymour was exhausted. At thirty-two, he could see a promising career in British Intelligence coming to a polite sidelining to the archives of the Central Registry, even though he had been saddled with a job that was looking every day more impossible to fulfill.

“With an atomic bomb, Steve, the damage comes in four waves. The flash is so searingly bright it can cauterize the cornea of a watcher unless he has black-lens shields. Then comes the heat, so bad it causes everything in its path to self-incinerate. The shock wave knocks down buildings miles away, and the gamma radiation is long term, causing carcinoma and malformations. With the LPG explosion, forget three of them-this explosion is all heat. “But it is a heat so fierce that it will cause steel to run like honey and concrete to crumble to dust. You’ve heard of the ‘fuel-air bomb’? It is so powerful it makes napalm seem mild, yet they both have the same source: petroleum.

“LPS is heavier than air. When transported, it is not, like LNG, kept at an amazingly low temperature; it is kept under pressure. Hence, the double-hulled skins of LPG tankers. If a tanker is ruptured, the LPG will gush out, quite invisible, and mix with the air. It is heavier than air, so it will swirl round the place it came from, forming one enormous fuel-air bomb. Ignite that and the entire cargo will explode in flame, terrible flame, rising quickly to five thousand degrees centigrade. Then it will start to roll. It creates its own wind. It will roll outward from the source, a roaring tide of flame, consuming everything in its path until it has completely consumed itself. Then it gutters like a fading candle and dies.”

“How far will the fireball roll?” asked Hill.

“Well, according to my newfound boffin friends, a small tanker of, say, eight thousand tons, fully vented and ignited, would consume everything, and extinguish all human life, within a five-kilometer radius. One last thing, I said it creates its own wind. It sucks in the air from periphery to center, to feed itself, so even humans in a protective shell five klicks away from the epicenter will die of asphyxia.”

Steve Hill had a mental image of a city cluttered round its harbor after such a horror exploded there. Not even the outer suburbs would survive. “Are these tankers being checked out?”

“Every one. Large and small, right down to tiny. The hazardous-cargo team here is only two guys, but they’re good. As a matter of fact, they are down to the last handful of LPG tankers.

“As for the general freighters, the sheer numbers mean that we had to cut off at those under ten thousand tons. Except when they enter the American forbidden zone along each seaboard. Then the Yanks spot them and investigate. “For the rest, every major port in the world has been apprised that Western intelligence thinks there may be a hijacked ghost ship on the high seas, and they must take their own precautions. But, frankly, any port likely to be targeted by Al Qaeda for massacre would be in a Western, developed country; not Lagos, Darak; not Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist. That leaves our non-American list of possible ports at under three hundred.”

There was a tap on the door, and a head came round. Pink-cheeked, very young, name of Conrad Phipps.

“Just got the last one in, Sam. Wilhelmina Santos, out of Caracas, bringing LPG to Galveston, confirms she is okay, Americans prepared to board her.” “That’s it?” asked Hill. “Every LPG tanker in the world accounted for?”

“It’s a small menu, Steve,” said Seymour.

“Still, it looks as if the LPG tanker idea was a blind alley,” said Hill. He rose to leave, and return to London.

“There is one thing that worries me, Mr. Hill,” said the cargo egghead. “It’s Steve,” said Hill. The SIS has always maintained the tradition of first names, from the highest to the humblest, with the sole exception of the chief himself. The informality underwrites the one-team ethos. “Well, three months ago an LPG tanker was lost with all hands.”

“So?”

“No one actually saw her go down. Her captain came on the radio in high distress to say he had a catastrophic engine-room fire, and did not think he could save his ship. Then… nothing. She was the Java Star.” “Any traces?” asked Seymour.

“Well, yes. Traces. Before the captain went off the air, he gave his exact position. First on the scene was a refrigerator ship coming up from the south. Her captain reported self-inflating dinghies, life belts and various flotsam at the spot. No sign of survivors. Captain and crew have never been heard from since.”

“Tragic, but so what?” asked Hill.

“It was where it happened, sir. Er… Steve. In the Celebes Sea. Two hundred miles from a place called Labuan Island.”

“Oh, shit,” said Steve Hill, and left for London.

While Hill was driving, the Countess of Richmond crossed the equator. She was heading north by northwest, and only her navigator knew exactly where. He was going for a spot eight hundred miles west of the Azores and twelve hundred miles east of the American coast. If extended due west, her track would bring her to Baltimore, at the top of the vastly populated Chesapeake Bay. Some of those on board the Countess began their early preparations for the entry into paradise. This involved the shaving of all body hair, and the writing of the last testaments of faith. These testaments were done into the camera lens, and were read aloud by each writer.

The Afghan read his as well, but he chose to speak in Pashto. Yusef Ibrahim, from his time in Afghanistan, had learned only a few words of the language, and he strained to understand, but even if he had been fluent he could not have faulted the testament.