Frederick Forsyth - The Afghan

The man from the Tora Bora spoke of the destruction of his family by an American rocket, and his joy at soon seeing them again while bringing justice at last to the Great Satan. As he spoke, he realized that none of this was ever going to reach any shore in physical form. It would all have to be transmitted by Suleiman by data stream before he, too, died, and his equipment died with him. What no one seemed to know was how they would die, and what justice would be visited upon the USA -the exceptions being the explosives expert and Ibrahim himself. But they revealed nothing.

Given that the entire crew was surviving on cold canned food, no one noticed that a steel carving knife with a seven-inch blade was missing from the galley. When he was unobserved Martin was quietly honing its blade with the whetstone in the knife drawer to a razor-edge. He thought of using the dead of night to drop over the stern to slash the dinghy but rejected the idea. He was with the four men who slept in bunks in the fo’c’sle. There was always a helmsman at the wheel, which was right next to the access point for going over the stern on a rope. The radioman practically lived in his tiny communications shack behind the bridge, and the engineer was always down in his engine room, below the bridge at the stern. Any of them could stick their head outside and see him.

And the damage would be spotted. A saboteur would be known about at once. The loss of the dinghy would be a setback, but not enough to abort the mission. And there might be time to patch the damage. He dropped the idea, but kept the rag-sheathed knife strapped to the small of his back. Each spell at the bridge, he tried to work out which port they were going to and what was inside the sea containers that he might be able to sabotage. Neither answer surfaced, and the Countess steamed north by northwest.

The global hunt switched and narrowed. All the marine giants, all the tankers and all the gas ships had been checked and verified. All the ID transponders conformed to their required transmissions; all the courses conformed to their predicted routes; three thousand captains had personally spoke to their head offices and agents, giving date of birth and other personal background details, so that even if the captains were under duress no hijackers could know whether they were lying or not.

The USA, her Navy, Marines and Coast Guards stretched to the limits without furlough or time off, was boarding and escorting in every cargo vessel seeking berth in a major port. This was causing economic inconvenience, but nothing big enough to inflict real damage to the biggest economy on earth. Following the tip from Ipswich, the origins and ownership of the Java Star were checked with a fine-tooth comb. Because she was small, her owning company concealed itself behind a “shell” company lodged with a bank that turned out to be a brass plate in a Far Eastern tax haven. The Borneo refinery that had provided the cargo was legitimate, but knew little about the ship itself. The freighter’s builders were traced-she had had six owners in her lifetime-and they provided plans. A sister ship was found, and swarmed over by Americans with tape measures. Computer imaging produced an exact replica of the Java Star, but not the ship itself.

The government whose flag of convenience she flew when last seen was visited in force. But it was a Polynesian atoll republic, and the checkers were soon satisfied that the gas tanker had never even been there. The Western world needed answers to three questions: Was the Java Star really dead? If not, where was she now? And what was her new name? The KH-11 satellites were instructed to narrow their search to something resembling the Java Star.

DURING THE first week of April, the joint operation at Edzell air base in Scotland stood down. There was no more it could do that was not now being done far more officially by the main Western intel-gathering agencies. Michael McDonald returned with relief to his native Washington. He stayed with the hunt for the ghost ship, but out of Langley. Part of the CIA’s mission was to reinterrogate any detainee in any of its covert detention centers who might, before capture, have heard a whisper of a project called al-Isra. And they called in every source they had out in the shadowy world of Islamist terrorism. There were no takers. The very phrase referring to the magical journey through the night to great enlightenment seemed to have been born and died with an Egyptian terror financier who went off a balcony in Peshawar in October. With regret, Colonel Mike Martin was presumed to have been lost on mission. He had clearly done what he could, and if the Java Star, or another floating bomb, was discovered heading for the USA, he would be deemed to have succeeded. But no one expected to see him again. It had simply been too long since his last sign of life in a diver’s bag on Labuan.

Three days before the G8 meeting, patience finally ran out-and at the highest level-with the global search based on the British tip-off. Marek Gumienny at his desk in Langley, called Steve Hill on a secure line with the news. “Steve, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for you, and even more so for your man Mike Martin. But the conviction here is that he’s gone, and, with the biggest trawl of global shipping ever attempted, he must have been wrong.” “And Sam Seymour’s theory?” asked Hill.

“Same thing. No dice. We have checked out just about every goddamn tanker on the planet, all categories. About fifty left to locate and identify then it’s over. Whatever this al-Isra phrase meant, either we’ll never find out, or it means nothing, or it has been long discontinued. Hold on… I’ll kill the other line.”

In a moment, he came back on. “There’s a ship overdue. Left Trinidad for Puerto Rico four days ago. Due yesterday. Never showed. Won’t answer.” “What kind of ship?” asked Hill.

“A tanker. Three thousand tons. Look, she may have foundered. But we’re checking now.”

“What was she carrying?” asked Hill. “Liquefied petroleum gas,” was the answer.

It was a KH-n “Keyhole” satellite that found her six hours after the complaint from Puerto Rico to head office of the oil company owners of the refinery, based in Houston, was turned into a major alarm.

Sweeping through the eastern Caribbean with its cameras and listening sensors checking on a five-hundred-mile-wide swath of sea and islands, the Keyhole heard a transponder signal from far below, and its computer confirmed it was from the missing Dona Maria.

The intelligence went instantly to a variety of agencies, which was why Marek Gumienny was interrupted in his phone call to London. Others in the loop were SOCOM headquarters at Tampa, Florida, the U.S. Navy and the Coast Guard. All were given the exact grid reference of the missing vessel. In not switching off the transponder, the hijackers were either being very stupid or hoping to get very lucky. But they were only following orders. With the transponder emitting, they gave away their name and position. With it switched off, they became immediately suspect as a possible rogue ship. The small LPG tanker was still being navigated and steered by a terrified Captain Montalban, four days without sleep, stealing only a few catnaps before being kicked awake again. She had slipped past Puerto Rico in the darkness, passing west of the Turks and Caicos, and lost herself for a while in the cluster of seven hundred islands that make up the Bahamas. When the Keyhole found her, she was steaming due west just south of Bimini, the westernmost island of the archipelago.

At Tampa, her course was plotted and extended forward. It went straight into the open mouth of the port of Miami, a waterway that leads to the heart of the city. Within ten minutes, the small tanker was attracting real company. A P-3 Orion sub hunter, aloft from the Naval Air Station at Key West, found her, dropped to a few thousand feet and began to circle, filming her from every angle. She appeared on a wall-sized plasma screen in the near darkness of the ops room at Tampa, almost life-sized.