The Afghan

“Thanks, mate,” said the diver, and the pair of them headed for departure check-in to find their flight to Kuala Lumpur, with a co

The cruiser steadied her speed at ten knots and turned northeast for Kudat, the access to the Sulu Sea and the terrorist hideout in Zamboanga Province in the Philippines.

It had been a grueling journey, with only catnaps on the airplanes. The rocking of the sea was seductive, the breeze after the sauna heat of Labuan refreshing. Both passengers fell asleep. The helmsman was from the Abu Sayyaf terror group; he knew his way-he was going home. The sun dropped, and the tropical darkness was not long behind. The cruiser motored on through the night, past the lights of Kudat, through the Balabac Strait and over the invisible border into Filipino waters.

Mr. Wei had finished his commission before schedule and was already heading home to his native China. For him, it could not have come too quickly. But at least he was on a Chinese vessel, eating good Chinese food rather than the rubbish the sea dacoits served in their camp up the creek.

What he had left behind he neither knew nor cared. Unlike the Abu Sayyaf killers or the two or three Indonesian fanatics who prayed on their knees, foreheads to the mat, five times a day, Wei Wing Li was a member of a Snakehead triad and prayed to nothing. In fact, the results of his work were a to-the-rivet replica of the Countess of Richmond, fashioned from a ship of similar size, to

Unlike Mr. Wei, Captain McKendrick prayed. Not as often, he knew, as he ought to, but he had been raised a good Liverpool Irish Catholic; there was a figurine of the Blessed Virgin on the bridge just forward of the wheel, and a crucifix on the wall of his cabin. Before sailing, he always prayed for a good voyage, and on returning thanked his Lord for a safe return. He did not need to pray as the Sabah pilot eased the Countess past the shoals and into her assigned berth by the quay at Kota Kinabalu, formerly the colonial port of Jesselton, where British traders, in the days before refrigeration and if they had acquired ca

Captain McKendrick ran his banda

The two young divers, having changed planes at Kuala Lumpur, were on a British Airways jet for London, and not being a dry airline the divers had consumed enough beer to send them into a deep sleep. The flight might be twelve hours, but they would be gaining seven on the time zones and touching down at Heathrow at dawn. The hard-shell suitcases were in the hold, but the dive bags were above their heads as they slept.

They contained fins, masks, wet suits, regulators and buoyancy-control jackets, with only the diving knives in the suitcases in the hold. One of the dive bags also contained an as-yet-undiscovered Malaysian landing card.

In a creek off the Zamboanga peninsula, working by floodlights from a platform hung over the stern, a skilled painter was affixing the last D to the name of the moored ship. From her mast fluttered a limp Red Ensign. On either side of her bow and round her stern was the name Countess of Richmond, and, on the stern only, the city Liverpool beneath the name. As the painter descended and the lights flickered out, the transformation was complete. At dawn, a cruiser disguised as a game fisherman motored slowly up the creek. It brought the last two members of the new crew of the former Java Star, the ones who would take the ship on her-and their-last voyage.

The loading of the Countess of Richmond began at dawn, when the air was still cool and agreeable. Within three hours, it would return to its habitual sauna heat. The dockside cranes were not exactly ultramodern, but the stevedores knew their business, and chained cargo of rare timber swung onboard and were stowed in the hold below by the crew that toiled and sweated down there. In the heat of the midday, even the local Borneans had to stop, and for four hours the old logging port slumbered in whatever shade it could find. The spring monsoon was only a month away, and already the humidity, never much less than ninety percent, was edging toward a hundred.

Captain McKendrick would have been happier at sea, but loading and the replacement of the deck covers was achieved at sundown, and the pilot would come aboard only in the morning to guide the freighter back to the open sea. It meant another night in the hothouse, so McKendrick sighed, and again found refuge in the air-conditioning belowdecks.

The local agent came bustling aboard with the pilot at six in the morning, and the last paperwork was signed. Then the Countess eased away into the South China Sea.

Like the Java Star before her, she turned northeast to round the tip of Borneo, then south through the Sulu Archipelago for Java, where the skipper believed six sea containers full of Eastern silks awaited him at Surabaya. He was not to know that there were not, nor ever had been, any silks at Surabaya.

The CRUISER deposited its cargo of three at a ramshackle jetty halfway up the creek. Mr. Lampong led the way to a long house on stilts above the water, which served as a sleeping area and mess hall for the men who would depart on the mission that Martin knew as Stingray and Lampong as al-Isra. Others in the long house would be staying behind. It was their labors that had prepared the hijacked Java Star for sea.

These were a mix of Indonesians from Jemaat Islamiyah, the group who had planted the Bali bombs and others up the island chain, and Filipinos from Abu Sayyaf. The languages varied from local Tagalog to Javanese dialect, with an occasional muttered aside in Arabic from those farther west. One by one, Martin was able to identify the crew and the special task of each of them. The engineer, navigator and radio operator were all Indonesians. Suleiman revealed that his expertise was photography. Whatever was going to happen, his job-before dying a martyr -would be to photograph the climax on a digital radio camera and transmit, via a laptop computer and sat phone, the entire data stream for transmission on the Al Jazeera TV network.

There was a teenager who looked Pakistani, yet Lampong addressed him in English. When he replied, the boy revealed he could only have been British born and raised but of Pakistani parentage. His accent was broad English North Country: