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  Norbert took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. ‘Allahu akbar,’ he said.

  ‘Allahu akbar,’ echoed his three companions.

  Alen straightened up. ‘Any questions?’

  Three shaking heads. They knew what had to be done, and why they were doing it. They were prepared to give their lives to the jihad.

  Alen went through to the first bedroom. It was larger than the second but had identical twin beds, which had been pushed to the side to give them room to work. A hundred and fifty kilos of Semtex had been packed inside metal petrol cans, with the handfuls of nails, screws and washers they had bought in Bangkok. More ironmongery had been taped around the cans. The Semtex had been manufactured in Czechoslovakia and shipped to Libya during the late 1980s. The Libyans had sold a batch to the Provisional Irish Republican Army a few years later and it had arrived in Dublin on a Spanish freighter. The consignment was split into four lots. The first batch was taken to London and formed the heart of a massive bomb that ripped through London’s financial district in April 1993, killing one man and causing more than a billion pounds’ worth of damage.

  The remainder of the Semtex had stayed hidden for three years, until another batch was taken to London and used to detonate a half-tonne fertiliser-based bomb, left near the South Quay station on the Docklands Light Railway. It had killed one man, injured thirty-nine others and marked the end of a seventeen-month IRA ceasefire.

  Four months later, another batch of the Semtex was used to destroy a busy shopping centre in Manch ester, injuring more than two hundred. It was only because the IRA had issued a warning in advance of the explosion that no one was killed. There would be no warning when the two bombs exploded in Bangla Road. Alen and his three colleagues were aiming to kill as many people as possible. It was only when the images of death and destruction were flashed round the world that policies would be changed, and the West would learn that it was time to treat the Muslim world with respect, not contempt.

  The rest of the Semtex lay buried in a graveyard in Galway throughout the 1990s, under a tombstone that marked the resting-place of an eighty-three-year-old Catholic priest. In the wake of the Good Friday Agreement, the IRA High Command had decided to rid itself of the stockpile and sold it to a Bosnian gangster, who put it into a false compartment in the floor of a container and shipped it to Sarajevo. It remained hidden in a warehouse on the outskirts of the city until Alen had bought it, with a suitcase of euros still in their bank wrappers. The explosive went overland, past the country where it had been manufactured almost thirty years earlier and on to Thailand. Bribes were paid where necessary, and the truck carrying the deadly cargo arrived in Phuket without once having been examined by a Customs officer.

  Norbert and Emir appeared in the doorway as Alen knelt to examine the petrol cans. He nodded his approval. ‘Good work,’ he said.

  Norbert and Emir smiled, pleased at the compliment. ‘What about the detonators?’ asked Norbert.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ said Alen. ‘They arrive tomorrow. Inshaallah.’

  Insha allah. God willing.

  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 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 level: 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 transfe
r 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.