He went back into the sitting room. The four shahids looked at him expectantly. ‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘You have done well.’
The shahids were the front-line warriors of the jihad, the martyrs who would give their lives for Islam. The Koran promised the shahids unlimited sex with seventy-two black-eyed virgins. It said that martyrs went straight to heaven and that places would be saved for seventy of their relatives. There would be eighty thousand servants to take care of them. And they would see the face of Allah Himself. The Saudi didn’t believe that, of course, and neither did the four shahids in the room. But they were still prepared to die. ‘ Allahu akbar,’ they said in unison.
Nine kilometres below the white-flecked waves of the Andaman Sea, the pressure had been building for hundreds of years. Tectonic stresses, pressure that dwarfed anything that could be produced by man. The huge stone plate on which India and Australia rested had been inching northwards for millennia, pushing against the equally massive Eurasian landmass near Indonesia. Millions upon millions of tonnes of rocks forced against each other as the continents drifted over the surface of the earth. Three days earlier there had been an earthquake in the Macquarie Islands, but it had done nothing to alleviate the pressure close to Sumatra.
No single event triggered the rupture. At one moment the plates were jammed against each other as they had been for centuries, and at the next they slipped. It happened at precisely fifty-eight minutes past midnight, Greenwich Mean Time. The southern plate ripped under the northern plate, like a bulldozer blade cleaving through wet soil. Rocks ripped like cardboard. Pressure that had accumulated over centuries was released in an instant. The forces at work were almost unimaginable, equivalent to a million times the power of the atom bomb that had destroyed Hiroshima.
A massive earthquake shook the island of Sumatra for more than three minutes and registered 9.0 on the Richter scale. By the time the shaking had subsided, hundreds were dead. There had been only three bigger earthquakes in recorded history. But the fatalities caused by the earthquake were only a taste of what was to follow. The rupture in the ocean floor was twelve hundred kilometres long and a hundred wide. It averaged twenty metres deep and displaced millions of tonnes of water in a few seconds. On the surface, there was little change in the white-flecked waves. But deep underwater a tidal wave was racing outwards in all directions, north, south, east and west, travelling at the speed of a cruising airliner. Even at that velocity, the nearest landfall was two hours away.
The floor trembled, a slight vibration that was little more than a tickling sensation underfoot. Alen looked across at Anna. ‘Can you feel that?’
She nodded. ‘Like it’s shaking.’
Suddenly one of the framed pictures on the wall shifted. It was a beach scene. White sand, palm trees blowing in the wind, a fisherman tending his nets.
Norbert and Emir came out of the bedroom. ‘What is it?’ asked Norbert.
The shaking stopped as suddenly as it had begun. ‘An earthquake?’ said Anna, frowning.
‘They don’t have earthquakes in Thailand,’ said Alen.
Emir knelt and placed his hands on the tiled floor, as if preparing to pray. ‘It’s stopped now,’ he said.
‘It was nothing,’ said Alen.
Norbert pushed open the blinds and peered outside. Tourists in swimsuits were walking along the beach. The first vendors were appearing. Stray dogs were scavenging around litter-bins. ‘I’m going outside,’ he said.
‘It’s the final day,’ said Alen. ‘We should stay indoors. We should pray and meditate on what we have to do tonight.’
‘I know what we have to do tonight,’ said Norbert. ‘I need some air.’
Alen looked as if he was about to argue. Then he waved dismissively. ‘Do as you want,’ he said. ‘Are the circuits ready?’
‘They’re fine. I’ve disconnected the switches but everything else is in place.’ He unlocked the door, slipped outside and closed it behind him.
Alen went to the picture and adjusted it, then placed a hand flat against the wall. There was no vibration.
‘It could have been a large truck passing,’ said Emir.
Alen shrugged. ‘Maybe,’ he said. The vibration had felt too intense for that, but Thailand wasn’t in an earthquake zone. Japan, maybe, but Japan was a thousand miles away.
Alen went into the bedroom. The completed circuits lay on the twin beds, one on each. He examined them but didn’t touch them. Norbert knew what he was doing. Alen had met him in Bosnia, fighting the Serbs who were killing Muslim families and burying them in mass graves while the world watched and did nothing. In recognition of their services, both men had been given Bosnian citizenship, and passports in whatever name they chose. After the peacekeepers had moved into the former Yugoslavia, Alen and Norbert had stayed on, but while the killing had stopped, the Muslims had continued to be persecuted.
Alen had been approached first, by a representative of a Saudi-funded charity who asked if he would be prepared to continue his fight against the infidel. There was no pressure; it was a simple interview to see where his loyalties lay. Alen had left the man in no doubt that he served Islam. Norbert, too, was keen to continue the struggle. They had been taken into the al-Qaeda fold, then overland to Waziristan, a mountain ous area along the Afghan border with Pakistan, where their training intensified. That was where they had met Anna and Emir. In Waziristan their training had moved to an even higher leveclass="underline" they were groomed to join the ranks of the shahid. Alen had no doubts about what he was going to do. He had almost died many times in Bosnia, and he would have died happily then, fighting the Serbs. He would die just as happily in Thailand, killing the infidels as they drank whiskey and partied with prostitutes.
All that was left to do was to transfer the explosive-filled cans into the two Jeeps and insert the detonators. That would have to wait until dark. Now all they could do was wait. Prepare themselves. And pray.
He showered first, then changed into clean clothes. He took a mat out of the wardrobe and spread it on the wooden floor, making sure that the top faced the direction of Mecca. Alen prayed five times each day, and washed himself before each prayer.
He faced Mecca, and raised his hands to his ears. He prayed in Arabic, the language of Allah. That was something he had been taught in Pakistan. It was not enough to recite a translation of the Koran: any translation was a poor imitation of the real thing. Arabic was the mother-tongue of the Prophet and his wives, and the wives of the Prophet were the mothers of the faithful so Arabic had to be the mother-tongue of every Muslim. Alen proclaimed his intention to worship, then lowered his hands to his knees and bent forward, head bowed. ‘Subhaana rab-biyal azeem,’ he said, three times. ‘Glory to God, the Most Grand.’
Then he straightened up. ‘Sami’al laahu liman hamidah, rab-banaa lakal hamd,’ he said. ‘Our Lord, praise be to Thee.’
Then he fell to his knees and placed his forehead, nose and palms on the mat. ‘Subhaana rab-biyal a’laa,’ he said, three times. ‘Glory to my Lord, the Most High.’
He had just finished the third recitation when there was a sudden banging on the bungalow door. Alen scrabbled over to the bed nearest him and pulled a large automatic from under the mattress. He hurried into the sitting room. Anna had grabbed a handgun from her bag and was heading for the front door. Alen gestured for her to move to the left. Emir started to go to the main bedroom, but Alen clicked his fingers and motioned for him to stay where he was. If it was the police, they’d already have surrounded the bungalow and running wouldn’t be an option.