Some of the more penetrating minds at Edzell realized that Crowbar was ready and waiting for something, but they were not quite sure what.
SHORTLY BEFORE Christmas 2006, Mr. Alex Siebart recontacted Mr. Lampong at his Indonesian company office to propose one of the two general cargo freighters registered in Liverpool as suitable for his purpose. By chance, both were owned by the same small shipping company, and Siebart and Abercrombie had chartered them before on behalf of clients who had been amply satisfied. McKendrick Shipping was a family business; it had been in the merchant marine for a century. The company chief was also the family patriarch, Liam McKendrick. who captained the Countess of Richmond, and his son, Sean, captained the other. The Countess of Richmond was eight thousand tons, flew the Red Ensign, was moderately priced and would be available for a fresh cargo out of a British port by March 1.
What Alex Siebart did not add was that he had warmly recommended the contract to Liam McKendrick if it came their way, and the old skipper had concurred. If Siebart and Abercrombie could find him a cargo from the USA back to the UK, it would make a very nice and profitable triangular voyage for the spring. Unbeknownst to either man, Mr. Lampong contacted someone in the British city of Birmingham, an academic at Aston University, who drove himself to Liverpool. With high-powered binoculars, the Countess of Richmond was examined in detail, and a long-range lens took over a hundred pictures of her from different angles. A week later, Mr. Lampong e-mailed back. He apologized for the delay, explaining that he had been up-country examining his sawmills, but that the Countess of Richmond sounded exactly right. His friends in Singapore would be in touch with details of the cargo of limousines to be brought from the UK to the Far East. In truth, the friends in Singapore were not Chinese but Malaysians; and not simply Muslims but ultrafanatical Islamists. They had been put in funds out of a new account created in Bermuda by the late Mr. Tewfik al-Qur, who had deposited the original monies, before transfer with a small private bank in Vienna that suspected nothing. They did not even intend to make a loss on the limousines, but to recoup their investment by selling them once their purpose had been served.
Marek Gumienny’s explanation to the CIA interrogators that Izmat Khan might be coming up for trial was not untrue. He intended to arrange exactly that, and to secure an acquittal and release.
In 2005, a U.S. Appeals Court had decreed that the rights of prisoners of war did not apply to members of Al Qaeda. The Federal Court had upheld President Bush’s intention to order the trials of terrorist suspects by special military tribunals. That, for the first time in four years, gave the detainees the chance of a defense attorney. Gu-mienny intended that Izmat Khan’s defense would be that he had never been in Al Qaeda, but a serving Afghan Army officer, albeit under the Taliban, and had nothing whatever to do with 9/11 or Islamist terrorism. And he intended that the court should accept that. It would require John Negroponte, as director of National Intelligence, to request his colleague Donald Rumsfeld, as secretary of defense, to “have a word” with the military judges of the case.
Mike Martin’s leg was healing nicely. He had noted when he read Izmat Khan’s slim file after the concordat in the orchard that the man had never described how he had acquired the scar on the right thigh. Martin saw no reason to mention it either. But when Michael McDonald arrived back from Langley with the more copious notes over Izmat Khan’s numerous interrogations, he had been concerned that the questioners had pressed the Afghan for an explanation of the scar and never received one. If the existence of the scar was by any chance known to anyone inside Al Qaeda and Mike Martin bore no such scar, his cover would be “blown.”
Martin had no objection, for he had something in mind. A surgeon was flown from London to Edzell, and then by the newly acquired Bell JetRanger helicopter to the lawn of Forbes Castle. He was the Harley Street surgeon with full security clearance who could be relied on to remove the occasional bullet and say nothing more about it.
It was all done with a local anesthetic. The incision was easy, for there was no bullet or fragment to be extracted. The problem was, make it heal in a few weeks but look much older than that.
The surgeon, James Newton, excised a quantity of tissue beneath and around the incision to make it deeper, as if something had come out, and created a concavity in the flesh. His sutures were large, clumsy, unstraight stitches, drawing the edges of the wound together so that they would pucker as they healed. He sought to make it look like the work done in a field hospital in a cave, and there were six stitches.
“You must understand,” he said as he left, “if a surgeon looks at that, he will probably spot that it cannot be fifteen years old. A nonmedical man should accept it. But it needs twelve weeks to settle down.” That was in early November. By Christmas, nature and the body of a very fit forty-four-year-old had done an excellent job. The puffiness and redness were gone.
CHAPTER 9
“IF YOU ARE GOING where I think you are going, young Mike,” said Tamian Godfrey on one of their daily hikes, “you will have to master the various levels of aggressiveness and fanaticism that you will be likely to encounter. At the core is self-arrogated jihad, or holy war, but various factions arrive at this via various routes and behave in various ways. They are not all the same by a long chalk.”
“It seems to start with Wahhabism,” said Martin. “In a way, but let us not forget that Wahhabism is the state religion of Saudi Arabia, and Osama bin Laden has declared war on the Saudi establishment for being heretics. There are many groups way out on the extremist wing beyond the teachings of Muhammad al-Wahhab.
“He was an eighteenth-century preacher who came out of the Nejd, the bleakest and harshest part of the interior of the Saudi peninsula. He left behind him the harshest and most intolerant of all the many, many interpretations of the Koran. That was then; this is now. He has been superseded. Saudi Wahhabism has not declared war on the West, or on Christianity; nor does it propose indiscriminate mass murder of anyone, let alone women and children. What Wahhab did was leave behind the seedbed of total intolerance in which today’s terror masters could plant the young seedlings before turning them into killers.” “Then how come they are not still confined to the Arabian peninsula?” asked Martin.
“Because,” cut in Najib Qureshi, “for thirty years Saudi Arabia has used its petrodollars to fund the internationalization of its state creed, and that includes every Muslim country in the world, including the place of my birth. There is no reason to think any of them realized what a monster was being set free or how it would be diverted to mass murder. Indeed, there is ample reason to believe now, a bit late in the day, that Saudi Arabia is terrified of the creature it has funded for three decades.”
“Then why has Al Qaeda declared war on the source of its creed and its funding?”
“Because other prophets have arisen, even more intolerant, even more extreme. These have preached the creed not simply of intolerance of anything not Islamic, but of the duty of attack and destruction. The Saudi government is denounced for dealing with the West, permitting U.S. troops on its holy soil. And that applies to every secular Muslim government as well. For the fanatics they are all as guilty as Christians and Jews.”