The Afghan

by Frederick Forsyth

  The Al-Qaeda killer was standing at the wheel staring forward through the glass. On the horizon, bearing down at twenty-five knots, was a floating city, seventeen decks and 150,000 tonnes of lights, steel and people. Right under the bridge the gallery was open to the stars. For the first time Martin realized its purpose. Not to contain something: to hide something.

  The clouds moved away from the half-moon and the entire foredeck of the once-Java Star gleamed in its light. For the first time Martin realized this was not a general freighter containing explosives; it was a tanker. Running away from the bridge was the cat’s cradle of pipes, tubes, spigots and hydrant-wheels that gave away her purpose in life.

  Evenly spaced down the deck towards the bow were six circular steel discs – the venting hatches – above each of the cargo tanks beneath the deck.

  ‘You should have stayed on the boat, Afghan,’ said Ibrahim.

  ‘There was no room, my brother. Suleiman almost fell overboard. I stayed on the ladder. Then they were gone. Now I will die here with you, inshallah.’

  Ibrahim seemed appeased. He glanced at the ship’s clock and pulled his second lever. The flexes ran from the control down to the ship’s batteries, took their power and went forward into the gallery where the explosives man, entering through the secret door, had worked during his month at sea.

  Six more charges detonated. The six hatches blew away from above the tanks. What followed was invisible to the naked eye: six vertical columns rose like volcanoes from the domes as the cargo began to vent. The rising vapour cloud reached a hundred feet, lost its impetus and gravity took over. The unseen cloud, mixing furiously with the night air, fell back to the sea and began to roll outwards, away from the source in all directions.

  Martin had lost and he knew it. He was too late and he knew that too. He knew enough to realize he had been riding a floating bomb since the Philippines, and that what was pouring out of the six missing hatches was invisible death that could not now be controlled.

  He had always presumed the Countess of Richmond, now become again the Java Star, was going to drive herself into some inner harbour and detonate what lay below her decks.

  He had presumed she was going to ram something of value as she blew herself up. For thirty days he had waited in vain for a chance to kill seven men and take over her command. No such chance had appeared.

  Now, too late, he realized the Java Star was not going to deliver a bomb; she was the bomb. And with her cargo venting fast, she did not need to move an inch. The oncoming liner had only to pass within three kilometres of her to be consumed.

  He had heard the interchange on the bridge between the Pakistani boy and the Deck Officer of the Queen Mary 2. He knew too late the Java Star would not engage engines. The escorting cruisers would never allow that, but she did not need to.

  There was a third control by Ibrahim’s right hand, a button to be hammered downward. Martin followed the flexes to a Very pistol, a flare-gun mounted just forward of the bridge windows. One flare, one single spark . . .

  Through the windows the city of lights was over the horizon. Fifteen miles, thirty minutes’ cruising, optimum time for maximum fuel–air mixture.

  Martin’s glance flicked to the radio speaker on the console. A last chance to shout a warning. His right hand slid down towards the slit in his robe inside which was his knife, strapped to his thigh.

  The Jordanian caught the glance and the movement. He had not survived Afghanistan, a Jordanian jail and the relentless American hunt for him in Iraq without developing the instincts of a wild animal.

  Something told him that despite the fraternal language, the Afghan was not his friend. The raw hatred charged the atmosphere on the tiny bridge like a silent scream.

  Martin’s hand slipped inside his robe for the knife. Ibrahim was first; the gun had been underneath the map on the chart table. It was pointing straight at Martin’s chest. The distance to cross was twelve feet. Ten too many.

  A soldier is trained to estimate chances and do it fast. Martin had spent much of his life doing that. On the bridge of the Countess of Richmond, enveloped in her own death cloud, there were only two: go for the man; go for the button. There would be no surviving either.

  Some words came into his mind, words from long ago, in a schoolboy’s poem, ‘ To every man upon this earth Death cometh soon or late . . .’ And he recalled Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Lion of the Panjshir, talking by the camp fire. ‘We are all sentenced to die, Angleez. But only a warrior blessed of Allah may be allowed to choose how!’ Colonel Mike Martin made his choice . . .

  Ibrahim saw him coming; he knew the flicker in the eyes of a man about to die. The killer screamed and fired. The charging man took the bullet in the chest and began to die. But beyond pain and shock there is always willpower, just enough for another second of life.

  At the end of that second both men and ship were consumed in a rose-pink eternity.

  David Gundlach stared in stunned amazement. Fifteen miles ahead, where the world’s largest liner would have been in thirty-five minutes, a huge volcano of flame erupted out of the sea. From the other three men on the night watch came cries of ‘What the hell was that?’

  ‘Monterey to Queen Mary 2. Divert to port, I say divert to port. We are investigating.’

  To his right Gundlach saw the US cruiser move up to attack speed and head for the flames. It was clear the Countess of Richmond had sustained some terrible accident. His job was to stay clear; if there were men in the water the Monterey would find them. But it was still wise to summon his captain. When the ship’s master arrived on the bridge his First Officer explained what he had seen. They were now a full eighteen miles from the estimated spot and heading away fast.

  To port the USS Leyte Gulf stayed with them. The Monterey was heading straight for the fireball miles up ahead. The captain agreed that in the unlikely event of survivors the Monterey should search for them.

  As the two men watched from the safety of their bridge, the flames began to flicker and die. The last blotches of flame upon the sea would be the remnants of the vanished ship’s fuel oil. All the hyper-volatile cargo was gone before the Monterey reached the spot.

  The captain of the Cunarder ordered that the computers resume course for Southampton.

  EPILOGUE

  There was an inquiry. of course. It took almost two years. These things are never done in a few hours, except on television.

  One team took the real Java Star: from the laying of her keel to the moment she steamed out of Brunei loaded with LPG, destination Fremantle, Western Australia.

  It was confirmed by independent witnesses with no reason to lie that Captain Herrmann was in charge and that all was well. She was seen by two other ships’ masters rounding the north-eastern tip of Borneo Island shortly after that. Precisely because of her cargo, both masters noted she was well away from them, and recalled her name.

  The single recording of her captain’s last Mayday message was played to a Norwegian psychiatrist who confirmed that the voice was a fellow-Norwegian speaking good English, but that he appeared to be speaking under duress.

  The captain of the fruit ship that had noted her given position and diverted to the spot was traced and interviewed. He repeated what he had heard and seen. But experts in fire at sea reckoned that if the fire in the Java Star’s engine room was so catastrophic that Captain Herrmann could not save her, it must have ignited her cargo eventually. In which case there would be no fabric-tented life-rafts left floating on the water where she sank.

  Filipino commandos carried out a raid, supported by US helicopter gunships, on the Zamboanga Peninsula, ostensibly on Abu Sayyaf bases. They trawled and brought back two jungle-dwelling Huq trackers who occasionally worked for the terrorists but were not prepared to face a firing squad for them.

  They reported they had seen a small tanker in a narrow creek in the heart of the jungle being worked on by men with oxyacetylene torches.

  The Java Star team entered its repo
rt within a year. It declared the Java Star had not been sunk by an onboard fire, but had been hijacked intact; and, further, that a lot of trouble had been gone to in order to persuade the marine world that she no longer existed when in fact she did. The entire crew was presumed dead already, and this had to be confirmed.

  Owing to need-to-know, all the arms of the inquiry were working on the various facets without knowing why. They were told, and believed, that it was an insurance investigation.

  Another team followed the fortunes of the real Countess of Richmond. They proceeded from the office of Alex Siebart in Crutched Friars, City of London, to Liverpool and checked out the family and crew. They confirmed all was in good order when the Countess unloaded her Jaguars at Singapore. Captain McKendrick had run into a friend from Liverpool on the docks and they shared a few beers before he sailed. And he telephoned home.

  Independent witnesses confirmed she was still in the command of her lawful captain when she took on valuable timber at Kinabalu.

  But an on-the-spot visit to Surabaya, Java, revealed she never even stopped there to take on her second part-cargo of Asian silks. Yet Siebart and Abercrombie in London had received confirmation from the shippers that she had. So it was forged.

  A likeness of ‘Mr Lampong’ was created and Indonesian Homeland Security recognized a suspected but never-proven financial supporter of Jemaat Islamiya. A search was mounted but the terrorist had vanished into the human tides of South-East Asia.

  The team concluded that the Countess of Richmond had been boarded and hijacked in the Celebes Sea. With all her papers, ID radio codes and transponder stolen, she would have been sunk with all hands. Next of kin were advised.

  The clincher came from Dr Ali Aziz al-Khattab. The wiretaps on his phones revealed he was booking a departure to the Middle East. After a conference at Thames House, home of MI5, it was decided that enough was enough. Birmingham police and Special Branch took down the apartment door of the Kuwaiti academic when the listeners confirmed he was in the bath, and he was escorted away in a towelling robe.

  But Al-Khattab was clever. A total strip search of his apartment, car and office, cellphone and laptop revealed not one incriminating detail about him.

  He smiled blandly, and his lawyer protested, through the statutory twenty-eight days allowed to the British police for holding a suspect without preferring a formal charge. His smile faded when, as he stepped out of Her Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh, he was rearrested, this time on an extradition warrant lodged by the government of the United Arab Emirates.

  Under this legislation there is no limit of time. Al-Khattab went straight back to his cell. This time, his lawyer lodged a vigorous appeal against extradition. As a Kuwaiti he was not even a citizen of the UAE but that was not the point.

  The Counter-Terrorist Centre at Dubai had amazingly come into possession of a sheaf of photos. These showed Al-Khattab conferring closely with a known Al-Qaeda courier, a dhow captain already under surveillance. Others showed him arriving at, and leaving, a villa in the outback of Ras-al-Khaimah, known to be a terrorist hideaway. The London judge was impressed and granted the extradition.

  Al-Khattab appealed . . . and lost again. Faced with the dubious charms of HMP Belmarsh or an athletic interrogation by UAE Special Forces at their desert base in the Gulf, he asked to stay as a guest of Queen Elizabeth.

  That posed a problem. The British explained they had nothing to hold him on, let alone try and convict him. He was halfway to Heathrow airport when he struck his deal and began to talk.

  Once started, he caused CIA guests who sat in on the sessions to report back that it was like watching the Boulder Dam give way. He blew away over one hundred AQ agents who until then had been lily-whites, unknown to Anglo-American intelligence, and twenty-four sleeping bank accounts.

  When the interrogators mentioned the AQ project code-named Al-Isra, the Kuwaiti was stunned into silence. He had no idea anyone knew. Then he started to talk again.

  He confirmed everything London and Washington already knew or suspected, then added more. He could identify all the eight men aboard the Countess of Richmond on her final voyage except the three Indonesians.

  He knew the origins and parentage of the teenager of Pakistani derivation who, born and raised in the English county of Yorkshire, could speak in place of Captain McKendrick on the ship’s radio and fool First Officer David Gundlach.

  And he admitted the Doña Maria and the men on board her had been a deliberate sacrifice, though unaware of it themselves; a mere diversion lest there be any hesitation for any reason in sending the American President to sea in a liner.

  Gently the interrogators brought the subject round to an Afghan whom they knew Al-Khattab had interrogated in the UAE villa. In fact they did not know it at all: they suspected it, but Al-Khattab hardly hesitated.

  He confirmed the arrival of the mysterious Taliban commander in Ras-al-Khaimah after a daring and bloody escape from custody outside Kabul. He claimed these details had been carefully checked by AQ sympathizers in Kabul and authenticated.

  He admitted he had been instructed by Ayman al-Zawahiri himself to go to the Gulf and question the fugitive for as long as it took. And he revealed that it was the Sheikh, no less, who had verified the Afghan’s identity on the basis of a conversation years earlier in a hospital cave in the Tora Bora.

  It was the Sheikh who permitted the Afghan the privilege of joining Al-Isra, and he, Al-Khattab, had despatched the man to Malaysia with others.

  It gave his Anglo-American interrogators exquisite pleasure to wreck what was left of his life by telling him who the Afghan really was.

  In a final detail a handwriting expert confirmed that the hand of the missing colonel and the person who had scrawled the message thrust into the divebag at Labuan Island were one and the same.

  The Crowbar Committee finally agreed that Mike Martin had boarded the Countess of Richmond, still posing as a terrorist, somewhere after Labuan and that there was not a shred of evidence that he had been able to get off in time.

  Theories as to why the Countess blew up forty minutes prematurely were left open on the file.

  It is customary in the UK for seven years to be required to elapse before a person missing without trace can legally be presumed dead and a certificate issued.

  But when the interrogation of Dr Al-Khattab reached its conclusion the coroner for the City of Westminster, London, was entertained to a very discreet dinner in a private room at Brooks’s Club, St James’s Street. There were only three others present and they explained many things to the coroner when the stewards had left them alone.

  The following week the coroner issued a certificate of death to an academic from the School of Oriental and African Studies, a Dr Terry Martin, in respect of his late brother, Colonel Mike Martin of the Parachute Regiment, who had vanished without trace eighteen months earlier.

  In the grounds of the headquarters of the SAS Regiment outside the town of Hereford stands a rather odd-looking structure known simply as the Clock Tower. The tower was dismantled piece by piece when the regiment moved several years ago from its old base to the newer premises. Then it was reconstructed.

  Predictably, it has a clock at the top, but the points of interest are the four faces of the tower on which are inscribed the names of all SAS men killed in combat.

  Shortly after the issue of the death certificate a memorial service was held at the foot of the Clock Tower. There were a dozen men in uniform and ten in civilian clothes, and two women. One of these was the Director-General of MI5, the Security Service, and the other the dead man’s ex-wife.

  The missing-in-action status had needed a bit of persuasion but the pressure came from very high indeed. When apprised of all the known facts the Director, Special Forces, and the Commanding Officer of the Regiment had agreed that the status was justified. Colonel Mike Martin was certainly not the first, nor would be the last SAS man to be lost in a faraway place and never recovered.

  Acro
ss the border to the west the sun was dipping across the Black Mountains of Wales on a bleak February day when the brief ceremony was held. At the end the chaplain spoke the habitual words from the Gospel of St John: ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’

  Only those grouped round the Clock Tower knew that Mike Martin, Parachute Regiment and SAS Colonel, retired, had done this for four thousand complete strangers, none of whom ever knew he existed.

  THE END