This time, there was no need for ceremony or threats of violence unless instructions were obeyed. The only task the Countess of Richmond had to perform was to disappear, with her crew, and forever. Her valuable cargo, what had lured her to these waters in the first place, would be a total write-off, which was a pity but could not be helped.
The crew were simply marched to the taffrail and machine-gunned. Their bodies, jerking in protest at the unfairness of death, went straight over the rail. There was not even any need for weights or ballast to send them to the bottom.
Lampong knew his sharks.
Liam McKendrick was the last to go, roaring his rage at the killers, calling Lampong a heathen pig. The Muslim fanatic did not like being called a pig, and made sure the Liverpudlian mariner was riddled but still alive when he hit the sea.
The Abu Sayyaf pirates had sunk enough ships to know where the sea cocks were. As the keelson began to flood below the cargo, the raiders left the Countess and bobbed on the water a few cables away until she reared on her stern, prow in the air, and slid backward, tumbling slowly to the bottom of the Celebes Sea. When she was gone, the killers turned and raced for home.
For the party in the long house of the Filipino creek, it was another brief call on a sat phone from Lampong out at sea that triggered the hour of departure. They filed down to the cruiser moored at the foot of the steps. As they went, Martin realized that the ones being left behind were not showing any sense of relief but only deep envy.
In a career in Special Forces, he had never actually met a suicide bomber before the act. Now he was surrounded by them, had become one of them. At Forbes Castle, he had read copiously about the state of mind: the total conviction that the deed being done is for a truly holy cause, that it is automatically blessed by Allah Himself, that a guaranteed and immediate passage to paradise is ensured and that this sacrifice vastly outweighs any residual love of life.
He had also come to realize the level and depth of hatred that must be imbued in the shahid alongside the love of Allah. One half alone will not work. The hatred must be like a corrosive acid inside the soul, and he was surrounded by it. He had seen it in the faces of the dacoits of Abu Sayyaf who relished every chance to kill a Westerner; he had watched it in the hearts of the Arabs as they prayed for a chance to kill as many Christians, Jews and secular or insufficient Muslims as possible in the act of death; most of all, he had seen the hatred in the eyes of al-Khattab and Lampong, precisely because they sullied themselves in order to pass unnoticed among the enemy.
As they chugged slowly farther up the creek, the jungle closing in on every side and beginning to shut out the sky above them, he studied his companions. They all shared the hate and the fanaticism. They all counted themselves more blessed than any other true believers on earth.
Martin was convinced that the men around him had no more clue than he exactly what the sacrifice would entaiclass="underline" where they would be going, to target what and with what weapon.
They only knew, because they had offered themselves to die and been accepted and carefully selected, that they were going to strike the Great Satan in a manner that would be spoken of for a hundred years. They, like the prophet so long ago, were going on a great journey to heaven itself-the journey called al-Isra. Up ahead, the creek split. The chugging cruiser took the wider branch, and round a corner a moored vessel came into sight. She was facing downstream, ready to depart for the open sea. Her cargo was apparently stored in the six sea containers that occupied her fore-deck. And she was called the Countess of Richmond.
For a moment, Martin toyed with the thought of escaping into the surrounding jungle. He had had weeks of jungle training in Belize, the SAS’s tropical training school. But he realized as soon as the thought crossed his mind that it was hopeless. He would not make a mile without compass or machete, and the hunting party would have him within the hour. Then would come days of unspeakable agony, as the details of his mission were wrenched out of him. There was no point. He would have to wait for a better opportunity, if one ever came. One by one, they climbed the ladder to the deck of the freighter: the engineer, navigator and radioman, all Indonesians; the chemist and photographer, both Arabs; the Pakistani from the UK with the flat northern accent, should anyone insist on speaking to the Countess by radio; and the Afghan, who could be taught to hold the wheel and steer a course. In all his training at Forbes, in all the hours of studying faces of known suspects, he had never seen any of them. When he reached the deck, the man who would command them all on their mission to eternal glory was there to meet them. Him, the ex-SAS man, he did recognize. From the rogues’ gallery he had been shown at Castle Forbes, he knew he was staring at Yusef Ibrahim, deputy and right-hand man of al-Zarqawi, the butcher of Baghdad.
The face had been one of the “first division” in the gallery he had been shown at Castle Forbes. The man was short and stocky, as expected, and the stunted left arm hung by his side. He had fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets, and his left arm had stopped several shards of shrapnel during an air attack. Rather than accept a clean amputation, he preferred to let it hang, useless. There had been rumors that he had died there. Not true. He had been patched up in the caves, then smuggled into Pakistan for more advanced surgery. After the Soviet evacuation, he had disappeared.
The man with the withered left arm reappeared after the 2003 coalition invasion of Iraq, having spent the missing time as chief of security in one of the AO^camps under Taliban rule.
For Mike Martin, there was a heart-stopping moment in case the man recognized Izmat Khan from those Afghan days and wished to discuss it. But the mission commander just stared at him with featureless black-pebble eyes. For twenty years, this man had killed and killed, and he loved it. In Iraq, as aide to Musab al-Zarqawi, he had hacked off heads on camera and loved it. He loved to hear them plead and scream. Martin gazed into the blank, manic eyes and gave the habitual greeting. Peace be unto you, Yusef Ibrahim, Butcher of Karbala.
CHAPTER 14
The former Java Star emerged from the hidden Filipino creek twelve hours after the destruction of the Countess of Richmond. She cleared the Moro Gulf, and headed into the Celebes Sea, heading south by southwest, to join the sea track the Countess would have taken though the Makassar Strait. The Indonesian helmsman had the wheel, but beside him stood the British/Pakistani teenager and the Afghan, to whom he gave instruction on the keeping of a true course at sea.
Though neither of his pupils could be aware of it, counterterror-ist agencies within the world of the merchant marine had known for years, and been perplexed by the times a ship in these waters had been hijacked, steered round in circles for several hours with her crew in the chain locker, then abandoned. The reason was simply that just as the hijackers of 9/11 had achieved their practice in U.S. flying schools, the marine hijackers of the Far East have been practicing the handling of a large ship at sea. The Indonesian at the helm of the new Countess was one of these.
The engineer down below really had been a marine engineer before the ship he worked on had been hijacked by Abu Sayyaf. Rather than die, he had agreed to join the terrorists and become one of them.