There the man trusted enough to go into the high peaks of South Waziristan was waiting at the named chai-khana and the sealed package changed hands again. The reply came back the same way. It took ten days.
But Dr Al-Khattab did not stay in the Arabian Gulf. He flew to Cairo and then due west to Morocco. There he interviewed and selected the four North Africans who would become part of the second crew. Because he was still not under surveillance, his journey appeared on no one’s radar.
When the handsome cards were dealt, Mr Wei Wing Li received a pair of twos. Short, squat and toad-like, his shoulders were surmounted by a football of a head and a face deeply pitted with smallpox scars. But he was good at his job.
He and his crew had arrived at the hidden creek on the Zamboanga Peninsula two days before the Java Star. Their journey from China, where they featured in the criminal underworld of Guangdong, had not involved the inconvenience of passports or visas. They had simply boarded a freighter whose captain had been amply rewarded and had thus arrived off Jolo Island where two speedboats out of the Filipino creeks had taken them off.
Mr Wei had greeted his host, Mr Lampong, and the local Abu Sayyaf chieftain who had recommended him, inspected the living quarters for his dozen crewmen, taken the fifty per cent of his fee ‘up front’ and asked to see the workshops. After a lengthy inspection he counted the tanks of oxygen and acetylene and pronounced himself satisfied. Then he studied the photos taken in Liverpool. When the Java Star was finally in the creek, he knew what had to be done and set about it.
Ship transformation was his speciality and over fifty cargo vessels plying the seas of South-East Asia with false names and papers also had false shapes thanks to Mr Wei. He had said he needed two weeks and had been given three, but not an hour longer. In that time the Java Star was going to become the Countess of Richmond. Mr Wei did not know that. He did not need to know.
In the photos he studied the actual name of the vessel had been airbrushed out. Mr Wei was not bothered with names or papers. It was shapes that concerned him.
There would be parts of the Java Star to cut out and others to cut off. There would be features to be fashioned from welded steel. But most of all he would create six long steel sea containers that would occupy the deck from below the bridge to the bow in three pairs.
Yet they would not be real. From all sides and from above they would appear authentic, down to the Hapag-Lloyd markings. They would pass inspection at a range of a few feet. Yet inside they would have no interior walls; they would constitute a long gallery with a hinged removable roof and access through a new door to be cut in the bulkhead below the bridge and then disguised to become invisible unless one knew the release catch.
What Mr Wei and his team would not do was the painting. The Filipino terrorists would do that, and the ship’s new name would be painted after he had left.
The day he fired up his oxy-acetylene cutters the Countess of Richmond was passing through the Suez Canal.
When Ali Aziz al-Khattab returned to the villa he was a changed man. He ordered the shackles removed from his prisoner and invited him to share his table at lunch. His eyes glittered with a deep excitement.
‘I have communicated with the Sheikh himself,’ he purred. Clearly the honour consumed him. The reply had not been written. I
t had been confided in the mountains to the messenger verbally and he had memorized it. This is also a practice common in the higher reaches of Al-Qaeda.
The messenger had been brought all the way to the Arabian Gulf and when the Rasha docked the message had been given word for word to Dr Al-Khattab.
‘There is one last formality,’ he said. ‘Would you please raise the hem of your dishdash to mid-thigh?’
Martin did so. He knew nothing of Al-Khattab’s scientific discipline; only that he had a doctorate. He prayed it was not in dermatology. The Kuwaiti examined the puckered scar with keen attention. It was exactly where he was told it would be. It had the six stitches sutured into place in a Jaji cave nineteen years earlier by a man he revered.
‘Thank you, my friend. The Sheikh himself sends his personal greetings. What an incredible honour. He and the doctor remembered the young warrior and the words spoken.
‘He has authorized me to include you in a mission that will inflict on the Great Satan a blow so terrible that even the destruction of the Towers will seem minor.
‘You have offered your life to Allah. The offer is accepted. You will die gloriously, a true shahid. You and your fellow martyrs will be spoken of a thousand years from now.’
After three weeks of wasted time Dr Al-Khattab was now in a hurry. The resources of Al-Qaeda down the entire coast were called upon. A barber came to trim the shaggy mane to a western-style haircut. He also prepared to shave off the beard. Martin protested. As a Muslim and an Afghan he wanted his beard. Al-Khattab conceded it could be clipped to a neat Vandyke around the point of the chin, but no longer.
Suleiman himself took full-face photos and twenty-four hours later appeared with a perfect passport showing the owner to be a marine engineer from Bahrain, known to be a staunchly pro-western sultanate.
A tailor came, took measurements and reappeared with shoes, socks, shirt, tie and dark grey suit, along with a small valise to contain them.
The travelling party prepared to leave the next day. Suleiman, who turned out to be from Abu Dhabi, would be going all the way, accompanying the Afghan. The other two guards were ‘muscle’, locally recruited and dispensable. The villa had served its purpose; it would be scoured and abandoned.
As he prepared to leave before them, Dr Al-Khattab turned to Martin.
‘I envy you, Afghan. You can never know how much. You have fought for Allah, bled for Him, taken pain and the foulness of the infidel for Him. And now you will die for Him. If only I could be with you.’
He held out his hand, English-style, then recalled that he was an Arab and embraced the Afghan. At the door he turned one final time.
‘You will be in paradise before me, Afghan. Save a place for me there. Inshallah.’
Then he was gone. He always parked his hire car several hundred yards away and round two corners. Outside the villa gates he crouched, as always, adjusting a shoe so he could glance up and down the road. There was nothing but some chit of a girl two hundred yards up, trying to start a scooter that refused to fire. But she was local, in jilbab, covering the hair and half the face. Still, it offended him that a woman would have any motorized vehicle at all.
He turned and walked away towards his car. The girl with the spluttering engine leaned forward and spoke into something inside the basket above the front mudguard. Her clipped English spoke of Cheltenham Ladies’ College.