For the party in the longhouse in the Filipino creek it was another brief call on a satphone 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 a 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 of their state of mind; of their total conviction that the deed is being done in a truly holy cause; that it is automatically blessed by Allah himself; that a guaranteed and immediate passage to paradise will ensue; and that this vastly outweighs any residual love of life.
He had also come to realize the depth of hatred that must be imbued in the shahid alongside the love of Allah. One of the two 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 seen 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 further 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.
They only knew, because they had offered themselves to die, and been accepted and carefully selected, that they were going to strike at 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 deck cargo was apparently stored in the six sea containers that occupied her foredeck. 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 Brunei, 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 his mission details 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 radio man, all Indonesians; the chemist and photographer, both Arabs; the Pakistani from the UK with the flat northern accent, who it turned out was there in case anyone should 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 did recognize. From the rogues’ gallery he had been shown at Castle Forbes he knew he was staring at Yusuf Ibrahim, deputy and right-hand man of Al-Zarqawi, his homicidal fellow-Jordanian.
The face had been one of the ‘first division’ in the gallery he had been shown at Castle Forbes. The man was short and stocky, as expected, and the stunted left arm hung by his side. He had fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets and his left arm had stopped several shards of shrapnel during an air attack. Rather than accept a clean amputation he preferred to let it hang, useless.
There had been rumours that he had died there: not true. He had been patched up in the caves, then smuggled into Pakistan for more advanced surgery. After the Soviet evacuation he had disappeared.
The man with the withered left arm reappeared after the 2003 Coalition invasion of Iraq, having spent the missing time as chief of security in one of the AQ camps under Taliban rule.
For Mike Martin there was a heart-stopping moment in case the man recognized Izmat Khan from those Afghan days and wished to discuss it. But the mission commander just stared at him with black-pebble expressionless eyes.
For twenty years this man had killed and killed, and he loved it. In Iraq, as aide to Musab al-Zarqawi, he had hacked off heads on camera and loved it. He loved to hear them plead and scream. Martin gazed into the blank, manic eyes and gave the habitual greeting. Peace be unto you, Yusuf Ibrahim, Butcher of Karbala.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The former Java Star emerged from the hidden Filipino creek twelve hours after the destruction of the Countess of Richmond. She cleared the Moro Gulf and headed into the Celebes Sea, heading south by south-west to join the sea-track the Countess would have taken through the Makassar Strait.
The Indonesian helmsman had the wheel but beside him stood the British/Pakistani teenager and the Afghan, to whom he gave instruction on the keeping of a true course at sea.
Though neither of his pupils could be aware of it, counter-terrorist agencies within the world of merchant marine had for years known and been perplexed by the times a ship in these waters had been hijacked, steered round in circles for several hours with her crew down below, then abandoned.
The reason was simply that just as the hijackers of 9/11 had achieved their practice in US flying schools, the marine hijackers of the Far East had been practising the handling of a large ship at sea. The Indonesian at the helm of the new Countess was one of these.
The engineer down below really had been a marine engineer before the ship he worked on had been hijacked by Abu Sayyaf. Rather than die, he had agreed to join the terrorists and become one of them.
The third Indonesian had learned all about ship-to-shore radio procedures while working in the harbour master’s office of a North Borneo trading port until he was radicalized within Islam and accepted into the ranks of Jemaat Islamiya, later helping to plant the Bali disco bombs.
These were the only three of eight who needed technical knowledge of ships. The Arab chemist would eventually be in charge of cargo-detonation; the man from the UAE, Suleiman, would take the datastream images that would rock the world; the Pakistani youth would, if need be, emulate the North Country voice of Captain McKendrick, and the Afghan would spell the helmsman at the wheel through the days of cruising that lay ahead.
By the end of March spring had not even attempted to touch the Cascades mountain range. It was still bitterly cold and snow lay thick in the forest beyond the walls of the Cabin.
Inside, it was snug and warm. The enemy, despite TV day and night, movies on DVD, music and board games, was boredom. As with lighthouse-keepers, the men had not much to do and the six-month term was a great test of their capacity for internal solitude and self-sufficiency.
Nevertheless the guard detail could don skis or snowshoes and slog through the forest to keep fit and get a break from the bunkhouse, eatery and games room. For the prisoner, immune to fraternization, the strain was that much greater.
Izmat Khan had listened to the president of the military court at Guantanamo pronounce him free to go and was convinced Pul-i-Charki jail would not have held him for more than a year. When he was brought to this lonely wilderness, so far as he knew for ever, it was hard to hide the screaming rage inside.
So he donned the kapok-lined jacket they had issued him, let himself outside and paced up and down the walled enclosure. Ten paces long, five paces wide. He could do it with eyes shut and never bump into the concrete. The only variety was occasionally in the sky above.