‘That’s not a bad thing for us, Amon. If we’re not competing too hard, then no one will be taking much notice. Do we have enough stingers for the first attack?’
‘I purchased them in Darra Adam Khel and,’ he said, looking at his watch, ‘they should have been transferred to one of the Pakistan Intelligence Agency’s own trucks. The ISI will deliver them to Karachi. The stingers for the other warning attacks have already been delivered by tugboat. You were right, Khalid. The infidel’s security concentrates on container ships. Tugboats don’t attract much attention; and if the first attack is to succeed the tugboats and the stingers will be vital,’ al-Falid acknowledged, pointing to a critical weak point in the Islamists’ plan. ‘The infidel’s soldiers are among the best in the world, Khalid, and they’ve been training for an event such as this.’
‘The infidel’s soldiers are formidable, Amon, but they’re only lightly armed. You’re confident of getting the stingers out of Pakistan?’ he asked. al-Falid nodded. ‘If Allah, the Most Kind, the Most Merciful is willing, both the tugboats and the stingers will make it to their destination. We have many friends in the Pakistani Intelligence, Khalid, and all of them are dedicated to Islam resuming its rightful place in the world. I’m hoping that the wharves of Karachi will not be a problem.’
It was one of the CIA’s and the US Administration’s great frustrations. The ISI, the powerful Pakistani Inter Service Intelligence agency had its own hard-line Islamic agenda and it was not about to change for even the Pakistani President, let alone a country like the United States which provided India with so much support against the Muslims in Kashmir.
‘The tugs are ready?’ Khalid asked, pouring some green tea from the ornate Russian samovar standing on a brass tray. al-Falid nodded. ‘My son, Malik is in charge of them,’ Amon said proudly, then his face darkened at the thought of his son. Malik had lost his wife and two young daughters at the hands of the notorious Egyptian secret police that were part of the US Administration’s ‘Extraordinary Rendition Program’; a program that used secret prisons in third countries around the world to get around the Geneva convention on torture. Amon’s daughter-in-law was caught up in a demonstration near the Sa’d Zaghlul shrine in Cairo. The opposition party Kifaya, or ‘enough’ in Arabic, had been protesting against twenty-five years of the dictatorship in Egypt when the riot police had waded into the crowd. The two little girls had been trampled and when Malik’s wife had tried to shield them, she had been beaten to death by plainclothes security men. It had not escaped either al-Falid or his son Malik’s notice that the Egyptian regime received more than US$2 billion a year from the United States, the second highest funding support in the world after Israel. Now al-Falid and his son Malik would get their revenge.
In the port of Monrovia, three battered-looking ocean-going tugboats, the Winston Churchill, the Montgomery and the Wavell, were preparing to put to sea. The Winston Churchill was completing a final delivery of radioactive teletherapy heads in case a subsequent warning attack became necessary. The Montgomery and the Wavell ’s first destination was Karachi, where they would pick up the consignment of stinger missiles. From there, after some stinger missile training en-route, they would head towards one of the world’s finest harbours and set in devastating motion the plans for the first warning attack.
CHAPTER 41
T he 1800-ton ocean-going tug, the Montgomery, and her sister tugs, the Wavell and the Winston Churchill rode uneasily on the restless harbour swell that alternately pushed and pulled at the United Towage Company berths in the capital of Liberia. The thick mooring ropes strained and creaked against the rusted bollards on the broken concrete of the dimly lit, dilapidated main wharf in the Freeport of Monrovia. Low asbestos warehouses, holes in the roofs, garish green paint peeling from their sides, stretched the length of the 600-metre pier. Halfway down the pier the wreck of a small 5000-ton container ship lay on its side. It had been there for over three years and rusted containers were still half submerged on the decks and in the holds, the result of a disastrous miscalculation on ballast. Like the piles of rotting rubbish in the main streets of the city, the Port of Monrovia was a symbol of more than a decade of civil war. For al-Qaeda, the location was perfect.
Below the decks of the Montgomery, Hani Bassnan, a wiry, wizened engineer of indeterminate age, was going through the start up procedures for the two huge, reconditioned Daihatsu diesel engines. The turquoise paint gleamed under the soft lights of the engine room. The massive diesels each put out 5000 horsepower to two enormous propellers that were encased in large nozzles beneath the hull. Rudders were now unnecessary. Protruding deep into the ocean, the propellers could swivel through 360 degrees in an instant. The engine room was spotless and packed with air and hydraulic hoses and a myriad of other pipes connected to heavy gearboxes, hydraulic pumps and steering. Towards the aft of the engine room, a small soundproof control room served as Hani’s office; a mass of warning and control lights quietly winking on the console. Further aft, a hydraulically controlled watertight steel door was open. Once they were underway the hydraulic door would be sealed. If the aft compartment housing the propeller units and the engine room were to flood the Montgomery would go straight to the bottom.
Hani checked the big sumps on the diesels. The oil was constantly circulated through a purifier and it looked clean. He opened the sea valves that provided the seawater cooling, then he checked the big steering pumps. Next he started one of two huge caterpillar generators, checked that the banks of compressed air cylinders were full, and disconnected the shore power. Satisfied, he moved back to his control room and pushed the ‘Start’ button for the starboard main engine. A burst of compressed air exploded into the number one cylinder and then into successive cylinders as each massive piston passed through top dead centre. The fuel-air mixture followed and the main engine burst into life, the big flywheel settling down to just under 100 revs per minute. Hani grinned to himself as he went through an identical procedure for the port engine, doubling the noise in the confines below decks. Hani had been around tugs for nearly fifty years and nothing gave him greater satisfaction, other than doing the will of Allah, than to be below decks among the diesel and the oil, the raw power pulsating beneath his feet.
On the bridge, nearly 18 metres above him, Captain Malik al-Falid was preparing to put to sea. In this cell, he knew how critical the tugs were to the success of the mission. He scanned the weather forecasts with an increasing sense of foreboding and glanced at the black gradations inside the brass casing of the barometer above his head – 980 hPa and falling. Beyond the breakwater lay two oceans, both of them renowned for angry mood swings.
Malik al-Falid had just turned 28 and was young for a tug captain. His dark face was pockmarked and his hair was black and curly. His alert brown eyes reflected a deep sadness that could never be eased, at least not in his lifetime. Malik glanced at the framed photograph that had a permanent place to the left of the depth sounder on the polished marine ply console. It was a photograph of his wife and two daughters aged four and five. It wouldn’t be long now and if Allah willed it he would be able to avenge their death at the hands of the hated secret police and their American allies. In just a few weeks he would join his wife and daughters in paradise.
As Malik al-Falid waited for the massive diesels below him to come up to operating temperature, he pulled open the chart drawer beneath the table on the starboard side of the wheelhouse and took out the chart for the approaches to the target city. It was highly unlikely that anyone in Monrovia would ever ask why he might have that particular chart, but just in case, the drawers held the charts of forty other major cities that an ocean-going tug might need at short notice. Malik had already committed this one to memory but somehow it gave him a sense of satisfaction to have the details of the infidel’s city out on the chart table, and he scanned it once again. The traffic in and out of the port was tightly regulated and the Jerusalem Bay would be restricted to an arrival through area Alpha to the north. Departures came out of the port through area Bravo. A new separation zone was marked on the chart between Alpha and Bravo, brought in because of a rivalry between incoming and outgoing vessels seeking to use the same set of navigation leads, and the port authorities had imposed a strict requirement for arriving ships to keep to the north of the leads at all times. Both he and the masters of the Wavell and the Jerusalem Bay would obey the regulations to the letter, and so would the Captain of the Ocean Venturer. He would have no choice. A pilot would board the big tanker at a point 4 miles due east from the lighthouse on the very edge of area Alpha. Malik traced the route they would take. The tanker would be allowed in first and once it reached the sea buoy inside the entrance, the pilot would turn the lumbering giant from area Alpha towards the Western channel, a channel that was 210 metres wide with a minimum depth of 13.7 metres at low water. The Jerusalem Bay would be next on the schedule. The authorities would log that the Montgomery and the Wavell were midway through an ocean voyage and that they were scheduled to visit for refueling. With a bit of luck, their arrival at the same time as the tanker and the Jerusalem Bay would be put down to coincidence. If Allah willed it, Malik mused, when the port authorities discovered that the Montgomery and the Wavell were no ordinary tugs, it would be too late.