Finally the other six men descended a ship’s ladder over the gunwales to join him, leaving only the crippled killer at the helm. It was evident this was a dress rehearsal.
The point of the exercise was to allow the cameraman, Suleiman, to be taken three hundred yards from the freighter, turn and photograph her with his fully digital equipment. When linked through his laptop to the Mini-M satphone, his images could be transmitted to another website on the other side of the world for recording and broadcast.
Mike Martin knew what he was watching. For terrorism the internet and cyberspace have become must-have propaganda weapons. Every atrocity that can be read about in a newscast is good; every atrocity that can be seen by millions of Muslim youths in seventy countries is gold dust. This is where the recruits come from – actually seeing it happen and lusting to imitate.
At Forbes Castle Martin had watched the video recordings out of Iraq, with the suicide bombers grinning into the lens before driving away to die on camera. In such cases the cameraman survived; in the case of the circling speedboat it was clear that the target would have to be in vision as well, and photography would continue until the boat and its seven men were wiped out. Only Ibrahim, it seemed, would stay at the helm.
But he could not know when and where, or what horror lay inside the sea containers. He considered one possibility: being first back on the Countess, casting the inflatable adrift, killing Ibrahim and taking over the freighter. But there would be no such chance. The speedboat was so fast that the six men would be swarming over the rail in seconds.
When the exercise was over the speedboat was swung empty from the davits where it looked like any other ship’s dinghy, the engineer increased power and the Countess headed north-west to skirt the coast of Senegal.
Recovered from his nausea, Yusuf Ibrahim spent more time on the bridge or in the wardroom where the crew ate together. The atmosphere was already hyper-tense and his presence made it more so.
All eight men on board had made their decision to die shahid, a martyr. But that did not prevent the waiting and the boredom tearing at their nerves. Only constant prayer and the obsessive reading of the Holy Koran enabled them to stay calm and true to the belief in what they were doing.
No one but the explosives engineer and Ibrahim knew what lay beneath the steel containers that covered the foredeck of the Countess of Richmond from just in front of the bridge almost to the bow. And only Ibrahim appeared to know their eventual destination and planned target. The other seven had to take on trust the pledges that their glory would be everlasting.
Martin had realized within hours of the mission commander joining them that he was constantly the object of Ibrahim’s blank and crazy stare. He would not have been human if the phenomenon had not rattled him.
Disquieting questions began to haunt him. Had Ibrahim after all seen Izmat Khan in Afghanistan? Was he about to be asked some questions he simply could not answer? Had he slipped up, even by a few words, in the relentless reciting of the prayers? Would Ibrahim test him by asking for the recital of passages he had not studied?
He was in fact part-right, part-wrong. The Jordanian psychopath across the mess table had never seen Izmat Khan though he had heard of the legendary Taliban fighter. And there had been no mistakes in his prayers. He simply hated the Pashtun for his reputation in combat, something he had never acquired. Out of his hatred was born a desire that the Afghan should after all be a traitor, so that he could be unmasked and killed.
But he kept his rage under control for one of the oldest reasons in the world. He was afraid of the mountain man; and even though he carried a handgun in a sash under his robe, and was sworn to die, he could not suppress his awe of the man from the Tora Bora. So he brooded, stared, waited and kept his counsel.
For a second time the West’s search for the ghost ship, even if it existed, had run into complete frustration. Steve Hill was being bombarded with requirements for information, anything, to appease the frustration that went right up to Downing Street.
The Controller Middle East could offer no resolution to the four questions that were raining upon him from the British prime minister and the US presidency. Does this ship exist at all? If so, what is it, where is it and which city is its target? The daily conferences were becoming purgatory.
The Chief of the SIS, never known or greeted by any term other than ‘C’, was steely in his silences. After Peshawar all the superior authorities had agreed there was a terrorist spectacular in preparation. But the world created by a ‘wilderness of mirrors’ is not a forgiving place for those who fail their political masters.
Since the discovery at Customs of the scrawled message on the folded landing card there had been no sign of life from Crowbar. Was he dead or alive? No one knew and some were ceasing to care. It had been nearly four weeks and with each passing day the mood was swinging to the view he was something now in the past tense.
Some muttered that he had done his job, been caught and killed, but had been the cause of the plot being abandoned. Only Hill counselled caution and a continuation of the search for the source of a still unfound threat. In some gloom he motored to Ipswich to talk to Sam Seymour and the two eggheads in the hazardous cargo office of Lloyd’s Register who were helping him go through every possibility, however bizarre.
‘You used a pretty hair-raising phrase in London, Sam. Thirty times the Hiroshima bomb. How on earth can a small tanker be worse than the entire Manhattan project?’
Sam Seymour was exhausted. At thirty-two he could see a promising career in British Intelligence ending in a polite side-lining to the archives of Central Registry, even though he had been saddled with a job that was looking every day more impossible to fulfil.
‘With an atomic bomb, Steve, the damage comes in four waves. The flash is so searingly bright it can cauterize the cornea of a watcher unless he has black lens shields. Then comes the heat, so bad it causes everything in its path to self-incinerate. The shock wave knocks down buildings miles away and the gamma-ray radiation is long term, causing carcinoma and malformations. With the LPG explosion forget three – this explosion is all heat.
‘But it is a heat so fierce that it will cause steel to run like honey and concrete to crumble to dust. You’ve heard of the fuel-air bomb? It is so powerful it makes napalm seem mild, yet they both have the same source: petroleum.
‘LPG is heavier than air. In transportation it is not, like LNG, at an amazingly low temperature; it is under pressure. Hence the double-hulled skins of LPG tankers. When ruptured the LPG will gush out, quite invisible, and mix with the air. It is heavier than air so it will swirl around the place it came from, forming one enormous fuel-air bomb. Ignite that, and the entire cargo will explode in flame, terrible flame, rising quickly to five thousand degrees Centigrade. Then it will start to roll.
‘Now it cre
ates its own wind. It will roll outwards from the source, a roaring tide of flame, consuming everything in its path until it has consumed itself. Then it gutters like a fading candle and dies.’
‘How far will the fireball roll?’
‘Well, according to my new-found boffin friends a small tanker of, say, eight thousand tonnes, fully vented and ignited, would consume everything and extinguish all human life within a five-kilometre radius.
‘One last thing, I said it creates its own wind. It sucks in the air from periphery to centre, to feed itself, so even humans in a protective shell five clicks away from the epicentre will die of asphyxia.’
Steve Hill had a mental image of a city clustered round its harbour and port after such a horror exploded within it. Not even the outer suburbs would survive.
‘Are these tankers being checked out?’