And no one knew that the Countess of Richmond was unloading her Jaguars at Singapore.
CHAPTER 13
Even though the traveling party could not know there were pursuers a few hours behind them, their escape was, for them, a lucky chance. Had they turned toward the coast housing the six emirates, they would probably have been caught. In fact, they headed east, over the mountainous isthmus, toward the seventh emirate, Fujairah, on the Gulf of Oman. They soon left the last paved road and took to rutted tracks, and lost themselves among the baking brown hills of Jabal Yibir. From the col at the height of the range, they descended toward the small port of Dibbah. Well to the south on the same coast, the police at Fujairah City received a request and a full description from Dubai and mounted a roadblock at the entrance to their town on the mountain road. Many vans were stopped, but none contained the four terrorists.
There is not much to Dibbah, just a cluster of white houses, a green-domed mosque, a small port for fishing vessels and the occasional charger boat for Western scuba divers. Two creeks away an aluminum boat waited, drawn up on the shingle, its huge outboards out of the water. Its cargo space amidships was occupied by chained-down tanks of extra fuel. Its two-man crew was sheltering in the shade of a single camel thorn among the rocks. For the two local youths, this was the end of their road. They would take the stolen van high into the hills and abandon it. Then they would simply disappear into the same streets that had produced Marwan al-Shehhi. Suleiman and the Afghan, their Western clothes still in bags to shield them from the flying salt water, helped push the cigarette boat backward into waist-deep water. With both passengers and the crew aboard, the smuggler craft idled its way up the coast almost to the tip of the Musandam Peninsula. The smugglers would only make the high-speed dash across the strait in darkness. Within twenty minutes of the sun’s setting, the helmsman bade his passengers hold on and opened up the power. The smuggler erupted out of the rocky waters of the last tip of Arabia and hurled itself toward Iran. With five hundred horsepower behind it, the nose rose, and the craft began to skim. Martin judged they were covering the water at almost fifty knots. The slightest ripple on the sea was like hitting a log, and the spray flayed them. All four, who had wrapped their keffiyehs round their faces as a shield from the sun, now kept them there to protect from the spray.
In less than thirty minutes, the first scattered lights of the Persian coast were visible to port, and the smuggler raced east toward Gwadar and Pakistan. This was the route Martin had covered under the sedate sails of the Rasha a month before. Now he was returning at ten times her speed. Opposite the lights of Gwadar, the crew slowed and stopped. It was a welcome relief. With funnels and muscles, they hoisted the drums to the stern and refilled each engine to the brim. Where they were going to fill up again for the return journey was their business.
Faisal bin Selim had told Martin these smugglers could get from Omani waters to Gwadar in a single night and be back with a fresh cargo by dawn. This time, they were clearly going farther, and would have to travel in daylight as well. Dawn found them well inside Pakistani waters, but close enough to shore to be taken for a fishing boat going about its business, save that no fish can swim that fast. However, there was no sign of officialdom, and the bare, brown coast sped past. By midday, Martin realized the destination must be Karachi. As to why, he had no idea.
They refueled at sea one more time, and, as the sun dipped to the west behind them, were deposited at a reeking fishing village outside the sprawl of Pakistan ’s biggest port and harbor.
Suleiman may not have been there before, but his briefing must have been by someone who had done a recce. Martin knew that Al Qaeda did meticulous research, regardless of time and expense; it was one of the few things he could admire. The Gulf Arab sought out the only vehicle for hire in the village and negotiated a price. The fact two strangers had come ashore from a smuggler craft with no suggestion of legality raised not an eyebrow. This was Baluchistan; the rules of Karachi were for idiots.
The interior stank offish and body odor, and the misfiring engine could manage no more than forty miles per hour. Neither could the roads. But they found the highway, and reached the airport with time to spare. The Afghan was appropriately bewildered and clumsy. He had only twice traveled by air, each time in an American AC-130 Hercules, and each time as a prisoner in shackles. He knew nothing of check-in desks, flight tickets, passport controls. With a mocking smile, Suleiman showed him.
Somewhere in the vast sprawling mass of pushing and shoving humanity that comprises the main concourse of Karachi International Airport, the Gulf Arab found the ticket desk of Malaysia Airlines and bought two single tickets in economy class to Kuala Lumpur. There were lengthy visa application forms to fill out. which Suleiman did, in English. He paid in cash American dollars, the world’s common currency.
The flight was on a European Airbus A330, and took six hours, plus two for time zone change. It landed at half past eight, after the serving of a snack breakfast. For the second time, Martin offered his new Bahraini passport, and wondered if it would pass muster. It did; it was perfect. From international arrivals, Suleiman led the way to domestic departures and bought two single tickets. Only when Martin had to proffer his boarding pass did he see where they were heading-the island of Labuan. He had heard of Labuan, but only vaguely. Situated off the northern coast of Borneo, it belonged to Malaysia. Though its tourist publicity spoke of a bustling cosmopolitan island with stunning coral in the surrounding waters, Western briefings on the criminal underworld mentioned another, darker reputation.
It was once part of the Sultanate of Brunei, twenty miles across the water on the Borneo coast. The British took it in 1846 and kept it for 115 years, barring three years under Japanese occupation during World War II. Labuan was handed by the British to the state of Sabab in 1963 as part of decolonization, then ceded to Malaysia in 1984.
It is one of those oddities that has no visible economy within its fifty-square-mile oval territory, so it has created one. With a status of international offshore financial center, no-tax free port, flag of convenience and smuggling mecca, Labuan has attracted some extremely dubious clientele. Martin realized he was being flown into the heart of the world’s most ferocious ship-hijacking, cargo-stealing, crew-murdering industry. He needed to make contact with base to give a sign of life, and he needed to work out how. Fast. There was a brief stopover at Kuching, first port of call on the island of Borneo, but nonalighting travelers did not leave the airplane. Forty minutes later, it took off to the west, circled over the sea and turned northeast for Labuan. Far below the turning aircraft, the Countess of Richmond, in ballast, was steaming for Kota Kinabalu, to pick up her cargo of padauk and rosewood.
After takeoff, the stewardess distributed landing cards. Suleiman took them both and began to fill them in. Martin had to pretend he neither understood nor wrote written English, and could speak it only haltingly. He could hear it all round him. Besides, though he and Suleiman had changed into shirts and suits at Kuala Lumpur, he had no pen, and no excuse for asking for the loan of one. Ostensibly, they were a Bahraini engineer and an Omani accountant heading for Labuan on contract to the natural gas industry, and that was what Suleiman was filling in. Martin muttered that he needed to go to the lavatory. He rose and went after where there were two. One was vacant, but he pretended both were in use, turned and went forward. There was a point. The Boeing 737 had a two-cabin service: economy and business. Dividing the two was a curtain, and Martin needed to get beyond it.