The Afghan

Mostly, it was of heavy, leaden gray cloud, from which the snow drifted down. But earlier, in that period when the Christians decorated trees and sang songs, the skies had been freezing cold but blue.

Then he had seen eagles and ravens wheeling overhead. Smaller birds had fluttered to the top of the wall and looked down at him, perhaps wondering why he could not come and join them in freedom. But what he liked most to watch were the airplanes.

Some he knew were warplanes, though he had heard of neither the Cascade range, where he was, nor McChord Air Force Base, fifty miles to the west. But he had seen American combat aircraft turning into their bombing runs over northern Afghanistan and he knew these were the same.

And there were the airliners. They were in different liveries, with varying designs on their tails, but he knew enough to know these were not national but company insignias. Except for the maple leaf. Some always had that leaf on the tail; they were always climbing, and they always came from the north. North was easy to work out; to the west, he could see the sun set, and he prayed the opposite way, toward Mecca, far to the east. He suspected he was in the USA because the voices of his guards were clearly American. So why did airliners with different national in-signias come from the north? It could only be because there was another land up there somewhere, a land where people prayed to a red leaf on a white ground. So he paced up and down, up and down, and wondered about the land of the red leaf. In fact, he was watching the Air Canada flights out of Vancouver.

In a sleazy dockside bar in Port of Spain, Trinidad, two merchant seamen were attacked by a local gang and left dead. Both had been skillfully knifed. By the time the Trinidadian police arrived, the witnesses had acquired amnesia, and could recall only that there had been five attackers who had provoked the bar fight and that they were islanders. The police would never get further than that, and no arrests were ever made.

In fact, the killers were local lowlife, and they had nothing to do with Islamist terrorism. But the man who had paid them was a senior terrorist in the Jamaat al-Muslimeen, the principal Trinidadian group on the side of Al Qaeda. Though still low profile across the Western media, JaM has been growing steadily for years, as have other groups right across the Caribbean basin. In an area known for its down-home Christian worship, Islam has been quietly growing with wholesale immigration from the Middle East, Central Asia and the Indian Subcontinent.

The money paid out by JaM for the killings came from a line of credit set up by the late Mr. Tewflk al-Qur, and the specific orders had come from an emissary of Dr. al-Khattab, who was still on the island.

No attempt had been made to steal the wallets of the dead men, so the Port of Spain police could quickly identify them as Venezuelan citizens and deck crew from a Venezuelan ship then in port.

Her master, Captain Pablo Montalban, was shocked and saddened to be informed of the loss of his crewmen, but he could not wait for too long in harbor. The details of shipping the bodies back to Caracas fell to the Venezuelan Embassy while Captain Montalban contacted his local agent for replacement sailors. The man asked around and got lucky. He came up with two polite and eager young Indians from Kerala who had worked their passage across the world, and who, even if they lacked naturalization papers, had perfectly good seamen’s tickets.

They were taken on, joining the other four seamen who made up the crew, and the Dona Maria sailed only a day late.

Captain Montalban knew vaguely that most of India is Hindu, but he had no idea that there are also a hundred and fifty million Muslims. He was not aware that the radicalization of Indian Muslims has been just as vigorous as in Pakistan, or that Kerala, once the hotbed of communism, has been particularly receptive territory for Islamist extremism.

His two new crewmen had indeed worked their way from India as deckhands, but on orders and to gain experience. And finally the Catholic Venezuelan had no idea that though neither had suicide in mind, they were working with, and for, Jamaat al-Muslimeen. The two unfortunates in the bar had been killed precisely to put the two Indian matelots on his ship.

Marek Gumie

“Now we need people who know the world’s merchant marine.” The man he brought was from America ’s Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, merchant marine division. Steve Hill came north from London accompanied by another of his colleagues; he came from the SIS’s antiterrorism desk, maritime section.

At Edzell, the two younger men met: Chuck Hemingway from New York and Sam Seymour from London. Both had heard of the other from the reading of papers and briefings within the West’s antiterror community. They were told they had twelve hours to go into a huddle and come up with an evaluation of the threat and a game plan for coping with it. When they addressed Gumie

“This is not just a hunt; this is a search for a needle in a haystack. A hunt has a known target. All we have is something that floats. Maybe. Let me lay it on the line.

“There are forty-six thousand merchant ships plying their trade on the world’s oceans as of now. Half of them are flying flags of convenience, which can be switched almost at the whim of the captain.

“Six-sevenths of the world’s surface is covered by ocean, an area so vast that literally thousands of ships are out of sight of land or any other vessel at any given time.

“Eighty percent of the world’s trade is still carried out by sea, and that means just under six billion tons. And there are four thousand viable merchant ports around the world.

“Finally, you want to find a vessel, but you don’t know her type, size, to

There was a depressed silence.

“That’s damn downbeat,” said Marek Gumie

“Chuck and I agree there might be a way if we identify the kind of target the terrorists could be aiming for, then check out any ship heading toward that target and demand a gunpoint inspection of ship and cargo,” said Seymour. “We’re all listening,” said Hill. “What kind of target could they be most likely heading toward?”

“People in our line of business have been worried for years, and filing reports for years. The oceans are a terrorists’ playground. The fact that Al Qaeda chose for its first huge spectacular an attack from the air was actually illogical. They only hoped to take out four floors of the World Trade Center towers, and even then they were incredibly lucky. All that time, the sea has been beckoning to them.”

“Security of ports and harbors has been massively tightened,” snapped Marek Gumie

“With respect, sir, not enough. We know ship hijacking in the waters around Indonesia -that is, in all directions-has been steadily increasing since the turn of the mille

“Such as?”

“There have been ten cases of sea dacoits stealing tugs. Some have never been recovered. They have no value as resales because they are pretty noticeable and hard to disguise. What are they for? We think they could be used to tow a captured supertanker right into a busy international port like Singapore.” “And blow her up?” asked Hill.