The third Indonesian had learned all about ship-to-shore radio procedures while working in the harbormaster’s office of a North Borneo trading port until he was radicalized in Islam and accepted into the ranks of Jemaat Islamiyah, later helping to plant the Bali disco bombs.
These were the only three of eight who needed technical knowledge of ships. The Arab chemist would eventually be in charge of cargo detonation; the man from the UAE Suleiman would take the data stream images that would rock the world; the Pakistani youth would, if need be, emulate the North Country voice of Captain McKendrick; and the Afghan would “spell” the helmsman at the wheel through the days of cruising that lay ahead.
By the end of March, spring had not even attempted to touch the Cascade range. It was still bitterly cold, and snow lay thick in the forest beyond the walls of the Cabin.
Inside, it was snug and warm. The enemy, despite TV day and night, movies on DVD, music and board games, was boredom. As with lighthouse keepers, the men had not much to do, and the six-month term was a great test of the capacity of internal solitude and self-sufficiency.
Nevertheless, the guard detail could don skis or snowshoes and slog through the forest to keep fit and to get a break from the bunk-house, eatery and game room. For the prisoner, immune to fraternization, the strain was that much greater. Izmat Khan had listened to the president of the military court at Guantanamo pronounce him free to go, and was convinced Pul-i-Charki jail would not have held him for more than a year. When he was brought to this lonely wilderness-so far as he knew, forever-it was hard to hide the screaming rage inside. So he donned the kapok-lined jacket they had issued him, let himself outside and paced up and down the walled enclosure. Ten paces long, five paces wide. He could do it with eyes shut and never bump into the concrete. The only variety was occasionally in the sky above.
Mostly, it was of heavy, leaden gray cloud, from which the snow drifted down. But earlier, in that period when the Christians decorated trees and sang songs, the skies had been freezing cold but blue.
Then he had seen eagles and ravens wheeling overhead. Smaller birds had fluttered to the top of the wall and looked down at him, perhaps wondering why he could not come and join them in freedom. But what he liked most to watch were the airplanes.
Some he knew were warplanes, though he had heard of neither the Cascade range, where he was, nor McChord Air Force Base, fifty miles to the west. But he had seen American combat aircraft turning into their bombing runs over northern Afghanistan and he knew these were the same.
And there were the airliners. They were in different liveries, with varying designs on their tails, but he knew enough to know these were not national but company insignias. Except for the maple leaf. Some always had that leaf on the tail; they were always climbing, and they always came from the north. North was easy to work out; to the west, he could see the sun set, and he prayed the opposite way, toward Mecca, far to the east. He suspected he was in the USA because the voices of his guards were clearly American. So why did airliners with different national in-signias come from the north? It could only be because there was another land up there somewhere, a land where people prayed to a red leaf on a white ground. So he paced up and down, up and down, and wondered about the land of the red leaf. In fact, he was watching the Air Canada flights out of Vancouver.
In a sleazy dockside bar in Port of Spain, Trinidad, two merchant seamen were attacked by a local gang and left dead. Both had been skillfully knifed. By the time the Trinidadian police arrived, the witnesses had acquired amnesia, and could recall only that there had been five attackers who had provoked the bar fight and that they were islanders. The police would never get further than that, and no arrests were ever made.
In fact, the killers were local lowlife, and they had nothing to do with Islamist terrorism. But the man who had paid them was a senior terrorist in the Jamaat al-Muslimeen, the principal Trinidadian group on the side of Al Qaeda. Though still low profile across the Western media, JaM has been growing steadily for years, as have other groups right across the Caribbean basin. In an area known for its down-home Christian worship, Islam has been quietly growing with wholesale immigration from the Middle East, Central Asia and the Indian Subcontinent.
The money paid out by JaM for the killings came from a line of credit set up by the late Mr. Tewflk al-Qur, and the specific orders had come from an emissary of Dr. al-Khattab, who was still on the island.
No attempt had been made to steal the wallets of the dead men, so the Port of Spain police could quickly identify them as Venezuelan citizens and deck crew from a Venezuelan ship then in port.
Her master, Captain Pablo Montalban, was shocked and saddened to be informed of the loss of his crewmen, but he could not wait for too long in harbor. The details of shipping the bodies back to Caracas fell to the Venezuelan Embassy while Captain Montalban contacted his local agent for replacement sailors. The man asked around and got lucky. He came up with two polite and eager young Indians from Kerala who had worked their passage across the world, and who, even if they lacked naturalization papers, had perfectly good seamen’s tickets.
They were taken on, joining the other four seamen who made up the crew, and the Dona Maria sailed only a day late.
Captain Montalban knew vaguely that most of India is Hindu, but he had no idea that there are also a hundred and fifty million Muslims. He was not aware that the radicalization of Indian Muslims has been just as vigorous as in Pakistan, or that Kerala, once the hotbed of communism, has been particularly receptive territory for Islamist extremism.
His two new crewmen had indeed worked their way from India as deckhands, but on orders and to gain experience. And finally the Catholic Venezuelan had no idea that though neither had suicide in mind, they were working with, and for, Jamaat al-Muslimeen. The two unfortunates in the bar had been killed precisely to put the two Indian matelots on his ship.
Marek Gumienny chose to fly the Atlantic when he heard the report from the Far East. But he brought with him a specialist in a different discipline. “Arab experts have served their purpose, Steve,” he told Hill before he flew.
“Now we need people who know the world’s merchant marine.” The man he brought was from America ’s Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, merchant marine division. Steve Hill came north from London accompanied by another of his colleagues; he came from the SIS’s antiterrorism desk, maritime section.
At Edzell, the two younger men met: Chuck Hemingway from New York and Sam Seymour from London. Both had heard of the other from the reading of papers and briefings within the West’s antiterror community. They were told they had twelve hours to go into a huddle and come up with an evaluation of the threat and a game plan for coping with it. When they addressed Gumienny Hill, Phillips and McDonald, Chuck Hemingway went first.
“This is not just a hunt; this is a search for a needle in a haystack. A hunt has a known target. All we have is something that floats. Maybe. Let me lay it on the line.
“There are forty-six thousand merchant ships plying their trade on the world’s oceans as of now. Half of them are flying flags of convenience, which can be switched almost at the whim of the captain.
“Six-sevenths of the world’s surface is covered by ocean, an area so vast that literally thousands of ships are out of sight of land or any other vessel at any given time.
“Eighty percent of the world’s trade is still carried out by sea, and that means just under six billion tons. And there are four thousand viable merchant ports around the world.