In less than thirty minutes the first scattered lights of the Persian coast were visible to port and the smuggler raced east towards Gwador and Pakistan. This was the route Martin had covered under the sedate sails of the Rasha a month before. Now he was returning at ten times her speed.
Opposite the lights of Gwador the crew slowed and stopped. It was a welcome relief. With funnels and muscles they hoisted the drums to the stern and refilled each engine to the brim. Where they were going to fill up again for the return journey was their business.
Faisal bin Selim had told Martin these smugglers could get from Omani waters to Gwador in a single night and be back with a fresh cargo by dawn. This time they were clearly going further and would have to travel in daylight as well.
Dawn found them well inside Pakistani waters but close enough inshore to be taken for a fishing boat going about its business, save that no fish can swim that fast. However, there was no sign of officialdom and the bare brown coast sped past. By midday Martin realized their destination must be Karachi. As to why, he had no idea.
They refuelled at sea one more time and as the sun dipped to the west behind them were deposited at a reeking fishing village outside the sprawl of Pakistan’s biggest port and harbour.
Suleiman may not have been there before, but his briefing must have been by someone who had done a recce. Martin knew that Al-Qaeda did meticulous research, regardless of time and expense; it was one of the few things he could admire.
The Gulf Arab sought out the only vehicle for hire in the village and negotiated a price. The fact that two strangers had come ashore from a smuggler craft with no suggestion of legality raised not an eyebrow. This was Baluchistan; the rules of Karachi were for idiots.
The interior stank of fish and body odour, and the misfiring engine could manage no more than forty miles per hour. Neither could the roads. But they found the highway and reached the airport with time to spare.
The Afghan was appropriately bewildered and clumsy. He had only twice travelled by air, each time in an American C-130 Hercules and each time as a prisoner in shackles. He knew nothing of check-in desks, flight tickets, passport controls. With a mocking smile, Suleiman showed him.
Somewhere in the vast sprawling mass of pushing and shoving humanity that comprises the main concourse of Karachi International Airport, the Gulf Arab found the ticket desk of Malaysian Airlines and bought two single tickets in economy class to Kuala Lumpur. There were lengthy visa application forms to fill out, which Suleiman did, in English. He paid in cash, in American dollars, the world’s common currency.
The flight was on a European Airbus A330 and took six hours, plus three for time-zone changes. It landed at nine-thirty, after the serving of a snack breakfast. For the second time, Martin offered his new Bahraini passport and wondered if it would pass muster. It did; it was perfect.
From international arrivals Suleiman led the way to domestic departures and bought two single tickets. Only when Martin had to proffer his boarding pass did he see where they were heading: the island of Labuan.
He had heard of Labuan, but only vaguely. Situated off the northern coast of Borneo, it belonged to Malaysia. Though its tourist publicity spoke of a bustling cosmopolitan island with stunning coral in the surrounding waters, western briefings on the criminal underworld mentioned another and darker reputation.
It was once part of the Sultanate of Brunei, twenty miles across the water on the Borneo coast. The British took it in 1846 and kept it for 117 years barring three under Japanese occupation in World War II. Labuan was handed by the British to the state of Sabah in 1963 as part of decolonization, then ceded to Malaysia in 1984.
It is one of those oddities that has no visible economy within its fifty-square-mile oval territory, so it has created one. With a status of international offshore financial centre, tax free port, flag of convenience and smuggling mecca, Labuan has attracted some extremely dubious clientele.
Martin realized he was being flown into the heart of the world’s most ferocious ship-hijacking, cargo-stealing and crew-murdering industry. He needed to make contact with base to give a sign of life, and he needed to work out how. Fast.
There was a brief stopover at Kuching, first port of call on the island of Borneo but non-alighting travellers did not leave the aeroplane.
Forty minutes later it took off to the west, circled over the sea and turned north-east for Labuan. Far below the turning aircraft the Countess of Richmond, in ballast, was steaming for Kota Kinabalu to pick up her cargo of padauk and rosewood.
After take-off the stewardess distributed landing cards. Suleiman took them both and began to fill them in. Martin had to pretend he neither understood nor wrote English and could speak it only haltingly. He could hear it all around him. Besides, though he and Suleiman had changed into shirts and suits at Kuala Lumpur, he had no pen and no excuse for asking for the loan of one. Ostensibly they were a Bahraini engineer and an Omani accountant heading for Labuan on contract to the natural gas industry, and that was what Suleiman was filling in.
Martin muttered that he needed to go to the lavatory. He rose and went aft where there were two. One was vacant, but he pretended both were in use, turned and went forward. There was a point. The Boeing 737 had a two-cabin service: economy and business. Dividing the two was a curtain and Martin needed to get beyond it.
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 naivety 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 traveller. 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 speciality was.
Suleiman was scouring the access road to the concourse building which served both arrivals and departures on one level: he was looking for a taxi when
one appeared heading towards them. It was occupied but clearly about to deposit its cargo on the pavement.
Two men alighted and Martin caught the English accents immediately. Both were big and muscular; both wore khaki shorts and flowered beach shirts. Both were damp in the blazing sun and moist, thirty-degree pre-monsoon heat. One produced Malaysian currency to pay the driver, the other emptied the boot of their luggage. There were two hard-framed suitcases and two scuba diver’s kitbags. Both had been diving the offshore reefs on behalf of the British magazine Sport Diver.
The man by the boot 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 kitbags from the road to the pavement. As he did so the folded landing card went into one of the side pockets of which all divebags 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 connection 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 travellers 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 as a game-fisherman, by the harbour wall. Within minutes they were out of the harbour.