The Saudi walked along the beach, enjoying the cool, early morning sea breeze. A well-muscled Thai man in a tight-fitting T-shirt jogged barefoot towards him, feet slapping on the wet sand. He smiled at the Saudi – the smile of a hooker searching for a client.
The Saudi looked away, more angry than em-barrassed. He was wearing a cheap cotton shirt, baggy cotton pants, cheap plastic sandals, Ray-Ban sunglasses, and carried a knitted shoulder-bag embroidered with elephants. There were no vendors about – it was too early for them. Once the tourists started heading down to the beach, they would come, their skin burned black from years of touting their wares under the unforgiving sun – cheap towels, sarongs, cooked ears of corn, plastic toys from China, laminated maps of Thailand. A sunbathing tourist would be lucky to get a couple of minutes’ peace before the next one blocked the rays.
The Saudi walked away from the sea towards the beach road. A few rusting red tuk-tuks were parked in front of a low-rise hotel, the drivers looking at him expectantly, but he avoided eye-contact. It seemed that every Thai he met in Phuket wanted to part him from his money. Indian tailors in long-sleeved shirts called to him whenever he went past their shops, bar-girls smiled suggestively, stallholders begged him to ‘Take a look, please.’ He had been in Phuket only eighteen hours but he had been propositioned at least fifty times. It was wearisome to be constantly shaking his head.
He had driven down from Bangkok in a rented Toyota Corolla because after the bombs had exploded the police would check all flights into and out of the island. He had checked into the Hilton on Patong Beach, a hotel favoured by tourists from the Middle East. He had dined alone in its outdoor restaurant surrounded by Arab families, the women swathed in traditional black tent-like burkhas, the children running around unsupervised, the men huddled in groups over glasses of sweet tea.
Later in the evening he had gone past the resort where Alen and his three colleagues were staying. He had sat at a beer bar overlooking it, sipped 7-Up and played a dice game with a bar-girl while he satisfied himself that no one else had the resort under observation. He had seen Alen and Anna get into the Jeep and drive off to Bangla Road. No one had followed them. The Saudi had waited half an hour or so, then flagged down a tuk-tuk and sat in the back as it rattled down the beach road. He had rung the bell and climbed out at the intersection with Bangla Road.
He spent the evening keeping Alen and Anna under surveillance, sipping soft drinks and ignoring the advances of the young girls who assured him that he was a handsome man and they wanted to go back to his hotel with him. The Saudi had no interest in paying for sex – at least, not in Thailand: the Thai girls, with their brown skin and snub noses, held no attraction for him. He paid happily for female companionship in London or New York, and preferred leggy blondes, ideally in pairs. He had waited until Alen and Anna had left Bangla Road, then returned to the Hilton. He had slept dreamlessly, confident that everything was going to plan.
As the Saudi walked through the bungalows, he smiled to himself. The operation had been six months in the planning, and now it was all coming to fruition. The key to its success had been the three men and the woman who were holed up in the pretty bungalow with its steeply slanted roof and teak deck overlooking the sea.
Since the attack on the World Trade Center in New York, Arabs around the world had been regarded with suspicion, whether or not they were Muslims. The Saudi had seen the nervous way in which fellow passengers glanced at him whenever he boarded a plane. All Arabs were potential terrorists; anyone from the Middle East was capable of slashing a stewardess or grabbing the controls from the pilot or setting fire to his explosive-filled shoes. Arabs were scrutinised at check-in desks, at airport security, at hotels. They were all guilty until proven innocent, to be locked up in Guantanamo Bay or Belmarsh Prison and denied their basic human rights. It was hard for the Saudi to move round the world – and he had the luxury of a British passport and a public-school accent. For the foot- soldiers of al-Qaeda, post 9/11, it was almost impossible to operate in the West without attracting attention. The organisation needed terrorists who didn’t look like terrorists. It needed fair-haired, white-skinned Muslims, who would be prepared to embrace martyrdom and die for Islam with smiles on their faces. The Saudi had found such men and women, and arranged for them to be trained. Now they were ready to give their lives for the jihad.
The Saudi took a mobile from his bag and tapped out a number. It rang three times before Alen answered. ‘Our meeting for tomorrow is still on schedule?’ asked the Saudi.
‘The following day would be better,’ said Alen, in accented English. It was a prearranged phrase that meant everything was as it should be. If the operation had been compromised, Alen would simply have agreed with him.
‘Excellent,’ said the Saudi, and ended the call. He walked slowly round the resort until he was satisfied that there was no surveillance, then went over to the door of the beach bungalow and knocked on the door. Three quick knocks. Two slow knocks. Two taps with the flat of his hand.
The door opened and Alen embraced him as he stepped inside, kissing him on both cheeks. ‘ Allahu akbar,’ he said.
‘ Allahu akbar,’ said the Saudi, kicking off his sandals. ‘You are prepared?’
‘We are all prepared,’ said Alen.
They spoke in English, their common language: the common language of terrorists around the world.
Anna, Norbert and Emir stood at the entrance to the second bedroom, smiling nervously. None had met the Saudi before, but they knew of him.
The Saudi went over and embraced them one by one. ‘ Allahu akbar ,’ he said, as he held them. ‘God is great.’
‘We have tea,’ said Anna.
‘I cannot stay,’ said the Saudi, ‘but thank you.’
He sat down on the bamboo sofa and removed a plastic-wrapped package from his bag. He laid it on the coffee table and unwrapped it carefully to reveal six pencil-sized metal tubes with plastic-coated wires attached to them. He placed them one by one on the table. The detonators had been brought into the country by a pilot with Emirates Airlines who had helped the Saudi before. Pilots, especially senior pilots with more than twenty years’ experience, were searched thoroughly, but the detonators had been well hidden in a false compartment of the man’s flight case. The Saudi had met him in the Shangri-la Hotel, overlooking the Chao Pra river. They had had coffee with cake and made small-talk. Then the Saudi had left with the detonators and the pilot had sat with an envelope containing a hundred thousand dollars in crisp new notes.
‘Use three per vehicle,’ said the Saudi. ‘Where are the circuits?’
Alen nodded at the bedroom. ‘In there,’ he said.
The Saudi eased himself up off the sofa and padded through to the bedroom. He gave the explosive-filled fuel cans a cursory glance. The wiring circuits were laid out on the two beds. He studied them carefully. Two batteries in each circuit. Two on-off switches, either of which would complete the circuit. Redundancy was essential. They could not afford a mistake at any level. There were flashlight bulbs, which could be used to test the circuit. The Saudi checked all four on-off switches. They worked perfectly.
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
