Standing outside the door of the business-class toilet, he beamed at the stewardess who had distributed the landing cards, uttered an apology and plucked from her top pocket a fresh landing card and her pen. The lavatory door clicked open, and he went in. There was only time to scrawl a brief message on the reverse of the landing card, fold it into his breast pocket, emerge and return the pen. Then he went back to his seat.
Suleiman may have been told the Afghan was trustworthy, but he stuck like a clam. Perhaps he wanted his charge to avoid making any mistakes through naivete or inexperience; perhaps it was the years of training in the ways of Al Qaeda, but his watchfulness never faltered, even during prayers. Labuan airport was a contrast to Karachi: small and trim. Martin still had no idea exactly where they were headed, but suspected the airport might be the last chance to get rid of his message, and hoped for a stroke of luck. It was only a fleeting moment, and it came on the pavement outside the concourse. Suleiman’s memorized instructions must have been extraordinarily precise. He had brought them halfway across the world, and was clearly a seasoned traveler. Martin could not know that the Gulf Arab had been with Al Qaeda for ten years, and had served the movement in Iraq and the Far East, notably Indonesia. Nor could he know what Suleiman’s specialty was. Suleiman was scouring the access road to the concourse building that served both arrivals and departures on one level, and he was looking for a taxi when one appeared heading toward them. It was occupied, but clearly about to deposit its cargo on the pavement.
There were two men, and Martin caught the English accent immediately. Both were big and muscular; both wore khaki shorts and flowered beach shirts. Both were damp in the blazing sun and moist, eighty-six-degree, premonsoon heat. One produced Malaysian currency to pay the driver, the other emptied the trunk of their luggage. They were scuba divers’ kit bags. Both had been diving the offshore reefs on behalf of the British magazine Sport Diver. The man by the trunk could not handle all four bags, one each for clothes, one each for diving tackle. Before Suleiman could utter a word, Martin helped the diver by hefting one of the kit bags from the pavement to the curb. As he did so, the folded landing card went into one of the side pockets, of which all kit bags have an array.
“Thanks, mate,” said the diver, and the pair of them headed for departure check-in to find their flight to Kuala Lumpur, with a connector to London. Suleiman’s instructions to the Malay driver were in English: a shipping agency in the heart of the docks. Here, at last, the travelers met someone waiting to receive them. Like the newcomers, he excited no interest by the wearing of ostentatious clothing or facial hair. Like them, he was takfir. He introduced himself as Mr. Lampong, and took them to a fifty-foot cabin cruiser, tricked out for game fishing, by the harbor wall. Within minutes, they were out of the harbor.
The cruiser steadied her speed at ten knots and turned northeast for Kudat, the access to the Sulu Sea and the terrorist hideout in Zamboanga Province in the Philippines.
It had been a grueling journey, with only catnaps on the airplanes. The rocking of the sea was seductive, the breeze after the sauna heat of Labuan refreshing. Both passengers fell asleep. The helmsman was from the Abu Sayyaf terror group; he knew his way-he was going home. The sun dropped, and the tropical darkness was not long behind. The cruiser motored on through the night, past the lights of Kudat, through the Balabac Strait and over the invisible border into Filipino waters.
Mr. Wei had finished his commission before schedule and was already heading home to his native China. For him, it could not have come too quickly. But at least he was on a Chinese vessel, eating good Chinese food rather than the rubbish the sea dacoits served in their camp up the creek.
What he had left behind he neither knew nor cared. Unlike the Abu Sayyaf killers or the two or three Indonesian fanatics who prayed on their knees, foreheads to the mat, five times a day, Wei Wing Li was a member of a Snakehead triad and prayed to nothing. In fact, the results of his work were a to-the-rivet replica of the Countess of Richmond, fashioned from a ship of similar size, tonnage and dimensions. He never knew what the original ship had been called, nor what the new one would be. All that concerned him was the bulbous roll of high-denomination bills drawn from a Labuan bank against a line of credit arranged by the late Mr. Tewfik al-Qur, formerly of Cairo, Peshawar and the morgue.
Unlike Mr. Wei, Captain McKendrick prayed. Not as often, he knew, as he ought to, but he had been raised a good Liverpool Irish Catholic; there was a figurine of the Blessed Virgin on the bridge just forward of the wheel, and a crucifix on the wall of his cabin. Before sailing, he always prayed for a good voyage, and on returning thanked his Lord for a safe return. He did not need to pray as the Sabah pilot eased the Countess past the shoals and into her assigned berth by the quay at Kota Kinabalu, formerly the colonial port of Jesselton, where British traders, in the days before refrigeration and if they had acquired canned butter in the monthly drop-off, had to pour it onto the bread from a small jug.
Captain McKendrick ran his bandanna round his wet neck once again, and thanked the pilot. At last, he could close up all the doors and portholes and take relief in the air-conditioning. That, he reckoned, and a cold beer would do him nicely. The water ballast would be evacuated in the morning, and he could see his log cargo under the lights of the dock. With a good loading crew, he could be back at sea the evening of the next day.
The two young divers, having changed planes at Kuala Lumpur, were on a British Airways jet for London, and not being a dry airline the divers had consumed enough beer to send them into a deep sleep. The flight might be twelve hours, but they would be gaining seven on the time zones and touching down at Heathrow at dawn. The hard-shell suitcases were in the hold, but the dive bags were above their heads as they slept.
They contained fins, masks, wet suits, regulators and buoyancy-control jackets, with only the diving knives in the suitcases in the hold. One of the dive bags also contained an as-yet-undiscovered Malaysian landing card.
In a creek off the Zamboanga peninsula, working by floodlights from a platform hung over the stern, a skilled painter was affixing the last D to the name of the moored ship. From her mast fluttered a limp Red Ensign. On either side of her bow and round her stern was the name Countess of Richmond, and, on the stern only, the city Liverpool beneath the name. As the painter descended and the lights flickered out, the transformation was complete. At dawn, a cruiser disguised as a game fisherman motored slowly up the creek. It brought the last two members of the new crew of the former Java Star, the ones who would take the ship on her-and their-last voyage.
The loading of the Countess of Richmond began at dawn, when the air was still cool and agreeable. Within three hours, it would return to its habitual sauna heat. The dockside cranes were not exactly ultramodern, but the stevedores knew their business, and chained cargo of rare timber swung onboard and were stowed in the hold below by the crew that toiled and sweated down there. In the heat of the midday, even the local Borneans had to stop, and for four hours the old logging port slumbered in whatever shade it could find. The spring monsoon was only a month away, and already the humidity, never much less than ninety percent, was edging toward a hundred.