The sea currents had caught the enormous shoal and swirled it within the arms of the horseshoe, so that before the tide turned and the seawater began to drain from the reef, the lagoon glittered with the bloated white and silver bellies of tens of thousands of rotting fish. Several sharks would have been amongst them but, having no swim bladders, they sank to the bottom rather than floating to the surface when they died. Birds had joined the fish, and here and there desiccated feathers in various shades of black and white and grey bobbed amongst the silver, along with a dozen turtles and a small pod of dolphins.
The tropical sun beat down relentlessly on the reef, going to work on the fish and the other dead creatures, breaking down the VX, cleaning up the mess with only the wind as its witness.
Author’s note
I began sketching the outline for this book on 12 September 2002. That date was, of course, a year and a day after the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. It was hardly auspicious.
This book is about gunrunning, drug smuggling, money laundering and terrorism. I was about five thousand words into it when the awful event known as the Bali bombing happened exactly a month later on 12 October 2002.
When I write a book, I have the skeleton of the plot largely hammered out. The working title for Sword of Allah was originally, and eerily, Smoking Gun. I say ‘eerily’ because, if you remember, the term ‘smoking gun’ became the catch cry for the UN weapons inspectors as they hunted for WMD in Iraq prior to the war there.
In separate news stories through the year, a guy in New Zealand claimed that he could whip up an unmanned aerial vehicle using off-the-shelf technology and then set about building it (he has since been fined for doing so). Hamas and Hezbollah, a couple of groups in the Middle East not averse to violence, have joined forces on a number of ‘projects’, and Hamas has announced that it will soon be deploying its own drone. On 23 July 2003, Australian troops were deployed to the Solomon Islands, joining others from the Pacific region to help restore law and order there. When you read this book, this may sound a bit familiar.
And then, on the afternoon of 6 August 2003, as I packaged up the manuscript to send to the publisher, came the news that the Marriot hotel in Jakarta had been struck by an explosive device. A contingent from the Australian Federal Police, in Bali for the trial of Amrosi, one of the Bali bombers, was sent to Jakarta to help the local authorities track down the culprits. America gave assistance too.
What am I saying here? I’m not claiming that by writing this story I’m making bad things happen, but the coincidences have sure been eerie.