The Afghan

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 sat phone, 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 broadcast on the news 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 gri

But he could not know when and where, or what horror lay inside the sea containers. He considered a possible idea to be first back on the Countess, cast the inflatable adrift, kill Ibrahim and take over the freighter. But there was no such chance. The speedboat was much faster, and 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 northwest to skirt the coast of Senegal. Recovered from his nausea, Yusef Ibrahim spent more time on the bridge or in the wardroom, where the crew ate together. The atmosphere was already hypertense, 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 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 Count ess of Richmond from just in front of the bridge almost to the forepeak. And only Ibrahim appeared to know the eventual designation and pla

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 Aghan 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 saraband under his robe, and had sworn to die, he could not suppress his awe of the man from the Tora Bora. So he brooded, stared, waited and kept his own counsel.

For a second time, the West’s search for the ghost ship-if it even 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 down upon him from the British premier and the U.S. president. 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 anything 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 of smoke and 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 that he was now 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 counseled caution, and a continued 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 List, 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 coming to a polite sidelining to the archives of the Central Registry, even though he had been saddled with a job that was looking every day more impossible to fulfill.

“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 radiation is long term, causing carcinoma and malformations. With the LPG explosion, forget three of them-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.

“LPS is heavier than air. When transported, it is not, like LNG, kept at an amazingly low temperature; it is kept under pressure. Hence, the double-hulled skins of LPG tankers. If a tanker is ruptured, the LPG will gush out, quite invisible, and mix with the air. It is heavier than air, so it will swirl round 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. It creates its own wind. It will roll outward from the source, a roaring tide of flame, consuming everything in its path until it has completely consumed itself. Then it gutters like a fading candle and dies.”

“How far will the fireball roll?” asked Hill.

“Well, according to my newfound boffin friends, a small tanker of, say, eight thousand tons, fully vented and ignited, would consume everything, and extinguish all human life, within a five-kilometer radius. One last thing, I said it creates its own wind. It sucks in the air from periphery to center, to feed itself, so even humans in a protective shell five klicks away from the epicenter will die of asphyxia.”

Steve Hill had a mental image of a city cluttered round its harbor after such a horror exploded there. Not even the outer suburbs would survive. “Are these tankers being checked out?”