extra stability at the moment of detonation. He had inserted the single slug-very long and slim-and he had burnished and buffed the nose tip to eradicate the tiniest vibration in flight. Along the top of the breech ran a Leatherwood X24 scope.
“I have him, Captain,” he whispered.
The binoculars had missed the fugitive, but the scope had found him. Set among the cabins across the valley, walled on three sides by timber, with a single, glass-paneled door, was a phone booth.
“Tall, long shaggy hair, bushy black beard?”
“Roger that.”
“What’s he doing?”
“He is in a phone booth, sir.”
Izmat Khan had had little concourse with his fellow inmates at Guantanamo, but one with whom he had spent many months in the same solitary confinement block had been a Jordanian who had fought in Bosnia in the midnineties before returning to become a trainer in the AQ camps. He was hardline. As security slackened around the Christmas period, they found they could whisper from one cell to another. If you ever get out of here, the Jordanian told him, I have a friend. We were in the camps together. He is safe, he will help a true believer. Mention my name.
There was a name. And a phone number, though Izmat Khan did not know where its owner lived. He was not quite sure of the complexities of subscriber trunk dialing, for which he actually had enough quarters; but, worse, he did not know the overseas code for dialing out of Canada. So he punched in a quarter and asked for the operator.
“What number are you trying, caller?” said the unseen Canadian telephone operator.
Slowly, in halting English, he read out the figures he had so painstakingly memorized.
“That is a UK number,” said the operator. “Are you using U.S. quarters?”
“Yes.”
“That’s acceptable. Put in eight of them, and I will connect you. When you hear the pips, put in more if you wish to continue the call.” “Have you acquired the target?” asked Linnett.
“Yes, sir.”
“Take the shot.”
“He’s in Canada, sir.”
“Take the shot, Sergeant.”
Peter Bearpaw took a slow, calm breath, held it inside and squeezed. The range was a still-air 2.IOO yards on his range finder, well over a mile. Izmat Khan was pushing quarters into the slot. He was not looking up. The glass front of the booth disintegrated into pinpricks, and the bullet took away the occiput from the rest of his head.
The operator was as patient as she could be. The man down in the logging camp had inserted only two quarters, then apparently left the booth and left the handset hanging. Finally, she had no choice but to hang up on him and cancel the call.
Because of the sensitivity of the cross-border shot, no official report was ever made.
Captain Linnett reported to his commanding officer, who told Marek Gumienny in Washington. Nothing more was heard.
The body was found in the thaw when the lumberjacks returned. The hanging phone was disconnected. The coroner could do little but record an open verdict. The man wore U.S. clothing, but in the border country that was not odd. He had no ID; no one recognized him locally.
Unofficially, most people around the coroner’s office presumed the man had been victim of a tragic stray shot from a deer hunter, another death from careless shooting or ricochet. He was buried in an unmarked grave. Because no one south of the border wanted to make waves, it was never thought to ask what number the fugitive had asked for. To even make the inquiry would give away the source of the shot. So it was not made. In fact, the number he wanted was that of a small apartment off-campus near Aston University in Birmingham. It was the home of Dr. Ali Aziz al-Khattab, and the phone was on intercept by Britain ’s MI5. All they waited for was enough evidence to justify a raid and an arrest. They would get it a month later. But that morning the Afghan was trying to call the only man west of Suez who knew the name of the ghost ship.
CHAPTER 16
After two weeks, enthusiasm for the hunt for a seemingly nonexistent ghost ship was starting to fade, and the mood came from Washington. How much time, trouble and treasure could be expended on a vague scrawl on a boarding card stuffed into a dive bag on an island no one had ever heard of? Marek Gumienny had flown to London to confer with Steve Hill when the SIS expert in maritime terrorism, Sam Seymour, called up from the Ipswich HQ a Lloyd’s shipping list and made matters worse. He had changed his mind. Hill ordered him to London to explain.
“With hindsight,” said Seymour, “the option of Al Qaeda seeking to use a huge blocking ship to close down a vital sea highway to wreck global trade was always the likeliest option. But it was never the only one.” “What makes you think it was the wrong way to go?” asked Marek Gumienny. “Because, sir, every single vessel in the world big enough to achieve that has been checked out. They are all safe. That leaves options two and three, which are almost interchangeable but with different targets. I think we should now look at option three: mass murder in a seashore city. Bin Laden’s public switch to economic targets could have been a hoax, or he has changed his mind.” “Okay, Sam, convince me. Steve and I both have political masters demanding results or our heads. What kind of ship if not a blocking vessel?” “For threat number three, we do not look at the ship so much as the cargo. It need not be large so long as it is absolutely deadly. Lloyd’s have a hazardous cargo division-obviously, it changes the premium.” “Ammunition ship?” asked Hill. “Another Halifax wipeout?” “According to the boffins, military ordnance simply does not explode like that anymore. The modern stuff needs huge provocation to go off inside the hull. Youd get worse from an exploding firework factory, but it would not begin to deserve the term ‘spectacular,’ as in 9/11. The Bhopal chemical leak was far worse, and that was dioxin, a deadly weed killer.”
“So, a tanker truck driving dioxin up Park Avenue, and completing the job with Semtex,” suggested Hill.
“But these chemicals are closely guarded inside their manufacturing and storage base,” objected Gumienny “How do they get the cargo with no one noticing?” “And we were specifically told a ship would be the carrier,” said Seymour. “Any hijacking of such a cargo would bring immediate retaliation.” “Except in some parts of the Third World that are virtually lawless,” said Gumienny.
“But these ultralethal toxins are not made in such places anymore, not even for labor-cost savings, sir.”
“So, we are back to a ship?” said Hill. “Another exploding oil tanker?” “Crude oil does not explode,” Seymour pointed out. “When the Torrey Canyon was ripped open off the French coast, it took phosphorus bombs to persuade the oil to ignite and burn off. A vented oil tanker will only cause ecodamage, not mass murder. But a quite small gas tanker could do it. Liquid gas, massively concentrated for transportation.”
“Natural gas, liquid form?” asked Gumienny. He was trying to think how many ports in the USA imported concentrates of gas for industrial power, and the number was becoming unsettling. But surely these docking facilities were miles from massed humanity.
“Liquid natural gas, known as LNG, is hard to ignite,” Seymour countered. “It is stored at minus 256 Fahrenheit in special double-hulled vessels. Even if you took one over, the stuff would have to leak into the atmosphere for hours before it became combustible. But according to the eggheads, there is one that frightens the hell out of them. LPG Liquid petroleum gas. “It is so awful that a quite small tanker, if torched within ten minutes of catastrophic rupture, would unleash the power of thirty Hiroshima bombs, the biggest nonnuclear explosion on this planet.”
There was total silence in the room above the Thames. Steve Hill rose, strolled to the window and looked down at the river flowing past in the April sunshine. “In laymen’s language, what have you come here to say, Sam?” “I think we have been looking for the wrong ship in the wrong ocean. Our only break is that this is a tiny and very specialist market. But the biggest importer of LPG is the USA. I know there is a mood in Washington that all this may be a wild-goose chase. I think we should go the last mile. The USA can check out every LPG tanker expected in her waters, and not just from the Far East. And stop them until boarded. From Lloyd’s, I can check out
