‘Every one. Large and small, right down to tiny. The hazardous cargo team here is only two guys but they’re good. As a matter of fact they are down to the last handful of LPG tankers.
‘As for the general freighters, the sheer numbers mean that we had to cut off at those under ten thousand tonnes. Except when they enter the American forbidden zone along each seaboard. Then the Yanks spot them and investigate.
‘For the rest, every major port in the world has been apprised that western intelligence thinks there may be a hijacked ghost ship on the high seas and they must take their own precautions. But frankly any port likely to be targeted by Al-Qaeda for a human-carnage massacre would be in a western, developed country; not Lagos, Dakar; not Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist. That leaves our non-American list of possible ports at under three hundred.’
There was a tap on the door and a head came round. Pink-cheeked, very young, name of Conrad Phipps.
‘Just got the last one in, Sam. Wilhelmina Santos, out of Caracas, bringing LPG to Galveston, confirms she is OK, Americans prepared to board her.’
‘That’s it?’ asked Hill. ‘Every LPG tanker in the world accounted for?’
‘It’s a small menu, Steve,’ said Seymour.
‘Still, it looks as if the LPG tanker idea was a blind alley,’ said Hill. He rose to leave and return to London.
‘There is one thing that worries me, Mr Hill,’ said the cargo egghead.
‘It’s Steve,’ said Hill. The SIS has always maintained the tradition of first names, from the highest to the humblest, with the sole exception of the Chief himself. The informality underwrites the one-team ethos.
‘Well, three months ago an LPG tanker was lost with all hands.’
‘So?’
‘No one actually saw her go down. Her captain came on the radio in high distress to say he had a catastrophic engine-room fire and did not think he could save his ship. Then . . . nothing. She was the Java Star.’
‘Any traces?’ asked Seymour.
‘Well, yes. Traces. Before he went off the air he gave his exact position. First on the scene was a refrigerator ship coming up from the south. Her captain reported self-inflating dinghies, lifebelts, and various flotsam at the spot. No sign of survivors. Captain and crew have never been heard of since.’
‘Tragic, but so what?’ asked Hill.
‘It was where it happened, sir . . . er . . . Steve. In the Celebes Sea. Two hundred miles from a place called Labuan Island.’
‘Oh, shit,’ said Steve Hill and left for London.
While Martin was driving, the Countess of Richmond crossed the Equator. She was heading north by north-west, and only her navigator knew exactly where. He was going for a spot eight hundred miles west of the Azores and twelve hundred miles east of the American coast. If extended due west, her track would bring her to Baltimore at the top of the vastly populated Chesapeake Bay.
Some of those on board the Countess began their early preparations for the entry into paradise. This involved the shaving of all body hair and the writing of the last testaments of faith. These were done into the camera lens and the last wills were read out by each writer.
The Afghan did his as well, but he chose to speak in Pashto. Yusuf Ibrahim, from his time in Afghanistan, had a few words of the language, and strained to understand, but even if he had been fluent he could not have faulted the testament.
The man from the Tora Bora spoke of the destruction of his family by an American rocket and his joy that he would soon see them again while bringing justice at last to the Great Satan. As he spoke, he realized that none of this was ever going to reach any shore in physical form. It would all have to be transmitted by Suleiman in datastream before he too died and his equipment with him. What no one seemed to know was how they would die and what justice would be visited upon the USA – the exceptions being the explosives expert and Ibrahim himself. But they revealed nothing.
Given that the entire crew was surviving on cold tinned food, no one noticed that a steel carving knife with a seven-inch blade was missing from the galley.
When he was unobserved Martin was quietly honing its blade to a razor edge with the whetstone in the knife drawer. He thought of using the dead of night to drop over the stern to slash the dinghy, but rejected the idea.
He was with the four men who slept in bunks in the crew quarters up in the bow. There was always a helmsman at the wheel, which was right next to the access point for going over the stern on a rope. The radio expert practically lived in his tiny communications shack behind the bridge and the engineer was always down in his engine room, below the bridge at the stern. Any of them could put a head outside and see him.
And the damage would be spotted. A saboteur would be known about at once. The loss of the dinghy would be a setback but not enough to abort the mission. And there might be time to patch the damage. He dropped the idea but kept the rag-sheathed knife strapped to the small of his back. Each spell at the bridge he tried to work out which port they were going for and what lay inside the sea containers that he might be able to sabotage to destruction. Neither answer appeared, and the Countess steamed north by north-west.
The global hunt switched and narrowed. All the marine giants, all the tankers and all the gas ships had been checked and verified. All the ID transponders conformed to their required transmissions; all the course and tracks conformed to their predicted journeys; three thousand captains had spoken in voice to their head offices and agents, giving personal birth and background details so that, even if they were under duress, no hijacker could know whether they were lying or not.
The USA, her Navy, Marines and Coast Guards, stretched to the limits without furlough or time off, was boarding and escorting in every cargo vessel seeking berth in a major port. This was causing economic inconvenience, but nothing big enough to inflict real damage to the biggest economy on earth.
After the tip from Ipswich the origins and ownership of the Java Star were checked with a toothcomb. Because she was small, her owning company concealed itself behind a ‘shell’ company lodged with a bank that turned out to be a brass plate in a Far-Eastern tax haven. The Borneo refinery that had provided the cargo was legitimate but knew little about the ship itself. Her builders were traced – she had had six owners in her life – and provided plans. A sister ship was found and swarmed over by Americans with measuring tapes. Computer imaging produced an exact replica of the Java Star, but not the ship itself.
The government of the flag of convenience she flew when last seen was visited in force. But it was a Polynesian atoll republic and the checkers were soon satisfied that the gas tanker had never even been there.