To the world he remained the courteous, frugally living, fastidious, devout master and owner of the Rasha. He plied his trade along the entire Gulf coast and round into the Arabian Sea. He did not seek trouble, but if a True Believer sought his help, whether in alms or a passage to safety, he would do what he could.
He had come to the attention of western security forces because a Saudi AQ activist, captured in the Hadramaut and confessing all in a cell in Riyadh, let slip that messages of the utmost secrecy destined for Bin Laden himself, so secret that they could only be confided verbally to a messenger who would memorize them verbatim and take his own life before capture, would occasionally leave the Saudi peninsula by boat. The emissary would be deposited on the Baluchi coast whence he would take his message north to the unknown caves of Waziristan where the Sheikh resided. The boat was the Rasha. With the agreement and assistance of the ISI it was not intercepted, just watched.
Faisal bin Selim arrived in Gwador with a cargo of white goods from the duty-free entrepôt of Dubai. Here the refrigerators, washing machines, microwave cookers and televisions were sold at a fraction of their retail price outside the free-port warehouses.
He was commissioned to take back with him to the Gulf a cargo of Pakistani carpets, knotted by the thin fingers of little boy slaves, destined for the feet of the rich westerners buying luxury villas on the sea islands being built off Dubai and Qatar.
He listened gravely to the small boy with the message, nodded, and two hours later, with his cargo safely inland without disturbing Pakistani Customs, left the Rasha in the charge of his Omani deck hand and walked sedately through Gwador to the mosque.
From years of trading with Pakistan, the courtly Arab spoke good Urdu and he and the imam conversed in that language. He sipped his tea, took sweet cakes and wiped his fingers on a small cambric handkerchief. The while, he nodded and glanced at the Afghan. When he heard of the break-out from the prison van he smiled in approval. Then he broke into Arabic.
‘And you wish to leave Pakistan, my brother?’
‘There is no place for me here,’ said Martin. ‘The imam is right. The secret police will find me and hand me back to the dogs of Kabul. I will end my life before that.’
‘Such a pity,’ murmured the Qatari, ‘so far . . . such a life. And if I take you to the Gulf States, what will you do?’
‘I will try to find other True Believers and offer what I can.’
‘And what would that be? What can you do?’
‘I can fight. And I am prepared to die in Allah’s holy war.’
The courtly captain thought for a while.
‘The loading of the carpets takes place at dawn,’ he said. ‘It will take several hours. They must be well below decks lest the sea-spray touch them. Then I shall depart, sails down. I shall cruise close past the end of the harbour mole. If a man were to leap from the concrete to the deck, no one would notice.’
After the ritual salutations he left. In the darkness Martin was led by the boy to the dock. Here he studied the Rasha so that he would recognize her in the morning. She came past the mole just before eleven. The gap was eight feet and Martin made it with inches to spare after a short run.
The Omani had the helm. Faisal bin Selim greeted Martin with a gentle smile. He offered his guest fresh water to
wash his hands and delicious dates from the palms of Muscat.
At noon the elderly man spread two mats on the broad coaming about the cargo hold. Side by side the two men knelt for the midday prayers. For Martin it was the first occasion of prayer other than in a crowd where a single voice can be drowned by all the others. He was word perfect.
When an agent is way out there in the cold, on a ‘black’ and dangerous job, his controllers at home are avid for some sign that he is all right; still alive, still at liberty, still functioning. This indication may come from the agent himself, by a phone call, a message in the small ads column of a paper or a chalk mark on a wall, a pre-agreed drop. It may come from a watcher who makes no contact but observes and reports back. It is called ‘sign of life’. After days of silence, controllers become very twitchy waiting for some sign of life.
It was midday in Thumrait; breakfast time in Scotland; the wee small hours in Tampa. The first and the third could see what the Predator could see but did not know its significance. Need to know; they had not been told. But Edzell air base knew.
Clear as crystal, alternately lowering the forehead to the deck and raising the face to the sky, the Afghan was saying his prayers on the deck of the Rasha. There was a roar from the terminal operators in the ops room. Seconds later Steve Hill took a call at his breakfast table and gave his wife a passionate and unexpected kiss.
Two minutes later Marek Gumienny took a call in bed in Old Alexandria. He woke up, listened, smiled, murmured ‘way to go’ and went back to sleep. The Afghan was still on course.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
With a good wind from the south, the Rasha hoisted sail, closed down her engine and the rumbling below was replaced by the calm sounds of the sea: the lapping of the water under the bow, the sigh of the wind in the sail, the creak of block and tackle.
The dhow, shadowed by the invisible Predator four miles above her, crept along the coast of southern Iran and into the Gulf of Oman. Here she bore away to starboard, reset her sail as the wind took her full astern and headed for the narrow gap between Iran and Arabia called the Strait of Hormuz.
Through this narrow gap, where the tip of Oman’s Musandam Peninsula is only eight miles from the Persian shore, a constant stream of mighty tankers went past; some low in the water, full of crude oil for the energy-hungry West, others riding high, going up-Gulf to fill with Saudi or Kuwaiti crude.
The smaller boats like the dhow stayed closer to the shore to allow the leviathans the freedom of the deep channel. Supertankers, if there is something in their way, simply cannot stop.
The Rasha, being in no hurry, spent one night hove-to amid the islands east of the Omani naval base at Kumzar. Sitting on the raised poop deck in the balmy night, still clearly visible on a plasma screen in a Scottish air base, Martin caught sight of two ‘cigarette boats’ by the light of the moon and heard the roar of their huge outboards as they sped out of Omani waters to make the crossing to south Iran.
These were the smugglers he had heard about; owing allegiance to no country, their operators ran the smuggling trade. On some empty Iranian or Baluchi beach they would make rendezvous at dawn with the receivers, offload their cargo of cheap cigarettes and take on board, surprisingly, angora goats so valued in Oman.
On a flat sea their pencil-slim aluminium boats, with the cargo lashed midships and the crew clinging on for dear life, would be powered by two immense 250-hp outboards to over fifty knots. They are virtually uncatchable, know every creek and inlet, and are accustomed to driving without lights and in complete darkness right across the paths of the tankers to the shelter of the other side.