The Afghan

by Frederick Forsyth

  ‘Crude oil does not explode,’ Seymour pointed out. ‘When the Torrey Canyon was ripped open southwest of the English coast it took phosphorus bombs to persuade the oil to ignite and burn off. A vented oil tanker will only cause eco-damage, not mass murder. But a quite small gas tanker could do it. Liquid gas, massively concentrated for transportation.’

  ‘Natural gas, liquid form?’ asked Gumienny. He was trying to think how many ports in the USA imported concentrates of gas for industrial power, and the number was becoming unsettling. But surely these docking facilities were miles from massed humanity?

  ‘Liquid natural gas, known as LNG, is hard to ignite,’ Seymour countered. ‘It is stored at minus two hundred and fifty-six degrees Fahrenheit in special double-hulled vessels. Even if you took one over, the stuff would have to leak into the atmosphere for hours before it became combustible. But according to the eggheads there is one that frightens the hell out of them. LPG. Liquid Petroleum Gas.

  ‘It is so awful that a quite small tanker, if torched within ten minutes of catastrophic rupture, would unleash the power of thirty Hiroshima bombs. It would be the biggest non-nuclear explosion on this planet.’

  There was total silence in the room above the Thames. Steve Hill rose, strolled to the window and looked down at the river flowing past in the April sunshine.

  ‘In layman’s language, what have you come here to say, Sam?’

  ‘I think we have been looking for the wrong ship in the wrong ocean. Our only break is that this is a tiny and very specialist market. But the biggest importer of LPG is the USA. I know there is a mood in Washington that all this may be a wild-goose chase. I think we should go the last mile. The USA can check out every LPG tanker expected in her waters, and not just from the Far East. And stop them until boarded. From Lloyd’s I can check out every other LPG cargo worldwide; from any point in the compass.’

  Marek Gumienny took the next flight back to Washington. He had conferences to attend and work to do. As he flew out of Heathrow the Countess of Richmond came round Cape Agulhas, South Africa, and entered the Atlantic.

  She had made good speed and her navigator, one of the three Indonesians, estimated the Agulhas Current and the north-running Benguela Current would give her an extra day and plenty of time to reach her intended destination.

  Further out into the seas off the Cape, and on into the Atlantic, other ships were moving from the Indian Ocean to head for Europe or North America. Some were huge ore carriers; others general cargo ships bringing the ever-increasing amount of Asian goods to both western continents as marketers ‘outsourced’ their manufacturing bases to the low-cost workshops of the East. Others still were supertankers too big even for the Suez Canal, their computers following the hundred-fathom line from the east to the west while their crews played cards.

  They were all noted. High above, out of sight and mind, the satellites drifted across inner space, their cameras passing back to Washington every line of their structure and the names on their sterns. More, under recent legislation they all carried transponders emitting their individual call-sign to the listening ears. Each identification was checked out, and that included the Countess of Richmond, vouched for by Lloyd’s and Siebart and Abercrombie as being a Liverpool-registered small freighter bringing a legitimate cargo on a foreseen route from Surabaya to Baltimore. For the USA there was no point in probing deeper; she was thousands of miles from the American coast.

  Within hours of the return of Marek Gumienny to Washington changes were made to the US precautions. In the Pacific the check-out-and-examine cordon was brought to a thousand-mile band off the coast. A similar cordon was established in the Atlantic from Labrador to Puerto Rico and across the Caribbean Sea to the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.

  Without fuss or announcement the emphasis abandoned the giant tankers and freighters (which by then had all been checked) and looked hard at the scores of smaller tankers that ply the seas from Venezuela to the St Lawrence River. Every P-3 Orion available was pressed into coastal patrol, flying over hundreds of thousands of square miles of tropical and subtropical sea looking for small tankers, and especially for those bearing gas.

  American industry cooperated to the full, supplying details of every cargo expected, where and when due. The data from industry was cross-indexed with the sightings at sea and they all checked out. Gas tankers were permitted to arrive and dock, but only after taking on board a posse of US Navy, Marines or Coast Guards to escort them in under guard, from a point two hundred miles out.

  The Doña Maria was back in Port of Spain when the two terrorists she harboured in her crew saw the signal they had been briefed to expect. As instructed, when they saw the signal they acted.

  The Republic of Trinidad and Tobago is a major supplier of petrochemical products across a wide spectrum to the United States. The Doña Maria was berthed at the offshore sea island, the tank farm where tankers large and small could approach, take cargo on board and leave without ever approaching the city itself.

  Doña Maria was one of the smaller tankers, a member of that fleet of vessels that service the islands whose facilities neither need nor can accommodate the giants. The big vessels are wont to bring in the Venezuelan crude, which is refined down to its various ‘fractions’ at the onshore refinery, then piped out to the sea island for loading into the onward handlers.

  Along with two other small tankers, the Doña Maria was at a specially remote section of the tank farm. Her cargo after all was liquefied petroleum gas, and no one wanted to be too close during the loading. It was late afternoon when she was finished and Captain Montalban prepared her for sea.

  There were still two hours of tropical daylight left when she slipped her mooring lines and eased away from the jetty. A mile offshore she passed close to a rigid inflatable launch in which four men sat with fishing rods. It was the awaited sign.

  The two Indians left their posts, ran below to their lockers and returned with handguns. One went to the waist of the tanker, where the scuppers were closest to the water and the men would board. The other went to the bridge and pointed his gun straight at the temple of Captain Montalban.

  ‘Do nothing, please, Captain,’ he said with great courtesy. ‘There is no need to slow down. My friends will board in a few minutes. Do not attempt to broadcast or I will have to shoot you.’

  The captain was simply too amazed to fail to obey. As he recovered he glanced at the radio at one side of the bridge but the Indian caught his glance and shook his head. At that, all resistance was snuffed out. Minutes later the four terrorists were aboard and opposition became futile.

  The last man out of the inflatable slashed it with a carving knife and it sank in the wake when the painter was released. The other three men had already hefted their canvas grips and stepped over the spaghetti-mix of pipes, tubes and tank hatches that define a tanker’s foredeck as they made their way aft.

  They appeared on the bridge seconds later: two Algerians and two Moroccans, the ones Dr Al-Khattab had sent over a month earlier. They spoke only Moorish Arabic but the two Indians, still courteous, translated. The four South American crewmen were to be summoned to the foredeck and would wait there. A new sea course would be calculated and adhered to.

  An hour after dark the four crewmen were coldly murdered and tossed overboard after a length of chain from the forward locker had been wired to each body’s ankle. If Captain Montalban had had any spirit to resist left in him, that was the end of it. The executions were very mechanical; the two Algerians had, back at home, been in the AIG, the Armed Islamic Group, and had slaughtered hundreds of helpless fellagha, outback farmers whose mass murder was simply a way of sending a message to the government in Algiers. Men, women, children, sick and old, they had killed them all many times, so four sailors was a formality.

  Through the night the Doña Maria steamed north, but no longer towards her scheduled destination of Puerto Rico. To her port side was the expanse of the Caribbean basin, unbroken all the way to Me
xico. To starboard, quite close, were the two chains called the Windward and Leeward Islands, whose warm seas are often thought of only as vacation targets but are alive with hundreds of small tramps and tankers who keep the islands victualled and alive for the tourists.

  Into this blizzard of coastal freighters and islands the Doña Maria would disappear and remain disappeared until she was logged overdue at Puerto Rico.

  When the Countess of Richmond reached the doldrums the sea calmed and Yusuf Ibrahim emerged from his cabin. He was pale and drained by nausea but the hate-filled black eyes were the same as he gave his orders. The crew brought out from its storage place in the engine room a twenty-foot inflatable speedboat. When it was fully rigid, it was suspended from the two davits above the stern.

  It took six men, sweating and grunting, to bring up the 100-hp outboard engine from below and fix it to the rear of the speedboat. Then it was winched down into the gentle swell beneath the stern.

  Fuel tanks were lowered and hooked up. After several false starts the engine coughed into life. The Indonesian navigator was at the helm and took the speedboat away for a fast circle round the Countess.

  Finally the other six men descended a ship’s ladder over the gunwales to join him, leaving only the crippled killer at the helm. It was evident this was a dress rehearsal.

  The point of the exercise was to allow the cameraman, Suleiman, to be taken three hundred yards from the freighter, turn and photograph her with his fully digital equipment. When linked through his laptop to the Mini-M satphone, his images could be transmitted to another website on the other side of the world for recording and broadcast.

  Mike Martin knew what he was watching. For terrorism the internet and cyberspace have become must-have propaganda weapons. Every atrocity that can be read about in a newscast is good; every atrocity that can be seen by millions of Muslim youths in seventy countries is gold dust. This is where the recruits come from – actually seeing it happen and lusting to imitate.

  At Forbes Castle Martin had watched the video recordings out of Iraq, with the suicide bombers grinning into the lens before driving away to die on camera. In such cases the cameraman survived; in the case of the circling speedboat it was clear that the target would have to be in vision as well, and photography would continue until the boat and its seven men were wiped out. Only Ibrahim, it seemed, would stay at the helm.

  But he could not know when and where, or what horror lay inside the sea containers. He considered one possibility: being first back on the Countess, casting the inflatable adrift, killing Ibrahim and taking over the freighter. But there would be no such chance. The speedboat was so fast that the six men would be swarming over the rail in seconds.

  When the exercise was over the speedboat was swung empty from the davits where it looked like any other ship’s dinghy, the engineer increased power and the Countess headed north-west to skirt the coast of Senegal.

  Recovered from his nausea, Yusuf Ibrahim spent more time on the bridge or in the wardroom where the crew ate together. The atmosphere was already hyper-tense and his presence made it more so.

  All eight men on board had made their decision to die shahid, a martyr. But that did not prevent the waiting and the boredom tearing at their nerves. Only constant prayer and the obsessive reading of the Holy Koran enabled them to stay calm and true to the belief in what they were doing.

  No one but the explosives engineer and Ibrahim knew what lay beneath the steel containers that covered the foredeck of the Countess of Richmond from just in front of the bridge almost to the bow. And only Ibrahim appeared to know their eventual destination and planned target. The other seven had to take on trust the pledges that their glory would be everlasting.

  Martin had realized within hours of the mission commander joining them that he was constantly the object of Ibrahim’s blank and crazy stare. He would not have been human if the phenomenon had not rattled him.

  Disquieting questions began to haunt him. Had Ibrahim after all seen Izmat Khan in Afghanistan? Was he about to be asked some questions he simply could not answer? Had he slipped up, even by a few words, in the relentless reciting of the prayers? Would Ibrahim test him by asking for the recital of passages he had not studied?

  He was in fact part-right, part-wrong. The Jordanian psychopath across the mess table had never seen Izmat Khan though he had heard of the legendary Taliban fighter. And there had been no mistakes in his prayers. He simply hated the Pashtun for his reputation in combat, something he had never acquired. Out of his hatred was born a desire that the Afghan should after all be a traitor, so that he could be unmasked and killed.

  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 sash under his robe, and was sworn to die, he could not suppress his awe of the man from the Tora Bora. So he brooded, stared, waited and kept his counsel.

  For a second time the West’s search for the ghost ship, even if it 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 upon him from the British prime minister and the US presidency. 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 any term 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 created by a ‘wilderness of 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 he was something now in the 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 counselled caution and a continuation of the 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 Register 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 ending in a polite side-lining to the archives of Central Registry, even though he had been saddled with a job that was looking every day more impossible to fulfil.

  ‘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-ray radiation is long term, causing carcinoma and malformations. With the LPG explosion forget three – 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.

  ‘LPG is heavier than air. In transportation it is not, like LNG, at an amazingly low temperature; it is under pressure. Hence the double-hulled skins of LPG tankers. When ruptured the LPG will gush out, quite invisible, and mix with the air. It is heavier than air so it will swirl around 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.

  ‘Now it cre
ates its own wind. It will roll outwards from the source, a roaring tide of flame, consuming everything in its path until it has consumed itself. Then it gutters like a fading candle and dies.’

  ‘How far will the fireball roll?’

  ‘Well, according to my new-found boffin friends a small tanker of, say, eight thousand tonnes, fully vented and ignited, would consume everything and extinguish all human life within a five-kilometre radius.

  ‘One last thing, I said it creates its own wind. It sucks in the air from periphery to centre, to feed itself, so even humans in a protective shell five clicks away from the epicentre will die of asphyxia.’

  Steve Hill had a mental image of a city clustered round its harbour and port after such a horror exploded within it. 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 tonnes. 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 a human-carnage massacre would be in a western, developed country; not Lagos, Dakar; 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 OK, Americans prepared to board her.’

  ‘That’s it?’ asked Hill. ‘Every LPG tanker in the world accounted for?’