Like everyone else in Peshawar, they had but one subject to discuss, and almost as little to go on as the chatty merchants of the Old City, who were confidently informing their clients about the premature bomb blast seven thousand miles away in Connecticut, as if they had helped to fit the detonators.
Shakir Khan himself had heard an outline of the catastrophe via a cell-phone call from a village high in the Hindu Kush. The caller’s informant
was in Riyadh and had seen coverage on the al-Jazeera television channel. His details were sketchy, but it seemed there had been an enormous explosion on a school bus packed with dynamite. No one except the driver and passengers had been hurt, and none of the victims were known to the school authorities. The school was Canaan Academy.
Shakir Khan was appalled. Not so much at the death of some of al-Qaeda’s most daring warriors, but at the obvious leak there must have been, to allow an outsider to ruin the operation.
They entered the courtyard of the house and walked to the fountain where they each filled a stone cup with water and tried to cool off. The water was cold and tasted delicious, fresh from the racing mountain streams that provide for the city. But they were both overwhelmed by disappointment at the wreckage of their well-laid plans, so long in formation, so careful in execution, so expensive to organize, and now in ruins.
Khan paced the courtyard. He knew the Americans were clever, damned clever. And he knew they had sent three professional assassins up here to Peshawar presumably to eliminate the four freed prisoners. However he was unable to suggest even one place where a leak on this scale might have originated.
He accepted the British police might be tapping the telephone of Sheikh Abdullah Bazir in Bradford. And he’d heard of the three al-Qaeda hit-men who vanished out on Ilkley Moor. There could have been a leak in Spain. Or in the Muslim center in Mexico City. But Faisal al-Assad was rock-solid in New York. And if someone had traced and tracked him into Connecticut, that someone must have had some deep prior knowledge.
Unless Faisal himself had become a traitor. And that, he decided, was impossible.
At that point Kaiser Rashid’s cell phone vibrated and the political assistant retreated to a shaded corner of the courtyard and spoke quietly. He returned two minutes later to relay the message to his boss. “Sir, I have some news, some very good, some very horrible.”
Shakir Khan did not reply. He simply turned his head a fraction sideways, and raised his right eyebrow, a gesture that had saved him a lot of talking in his lifetime.
“Ibrahim Sharif and Yousaf Mohammed are both alive,” said Kaiser. “That much is definite. They were not on the bus.”
“And? . . .” replied Khan, bracing himself for the “very horrible.”
“Sir, they are both wanted by the Americans for murder. There is a manhunt for them, going on in two countries, the USA and Canada.”
“Who did they murder?”
“The manager of a bank in Bangor, in Maine, up near the Canadian border.”
“Were Ibrahim and Yousaf robbing his bank?”
“No one said that, sir.”
“Well, where are they?” asked Khan, fairly stupidly.
“If the Americans knew that, I suspect they would have arrested them,” said Kaiser. “The man’s body was found in a place called Bar Harbor, which is a ferry port on the Gulf of Maine.”
“Does that mean they escaped on the ferry?”
“I think they might have, sir. That’s what the Americans think, and there is a big police search going on for them in Nova Scotia. That’s where the ferry goes.”
“But our people have heard nothing from them?”
“Not so far. But the Canadian police believe they are hiding out somewhere in Nova Scotia.”
“This is very terrible,” said Khan. “Very terrible indeed. But if they do make contact, my orders are that everything in our power must be done to rescue them and bring them home.”
AT EIGHT O’CLOCK
that same morning, the
Odessa
was shouldering her way through big seas and a stiffening nor’easter up the coast of Nova Scotia. Like all Murmansk fishing boats, she was built for rough weather and, if necessary, pack-ice. Her bow was heavily reinforced with steel, and her powerful Russian diesels drove her twin screws with warship efficiency.
Charts for that three-hundred-mile long eastern coast of Nova Scotia read like those for the UK. Once she’d made her hard left turn past Cape Sable the previous afternoon,
Odessa
had steamed past local seaports like Liverpool, Bridgewater, Halifax, and Dartmouth.
Ibrahim and Yousaf did not see much of these, however. Captain Destinov had run ten miles offshore all through the night, all the way up to Cape Breton Island. The two passengers did not see much of anything in this weather since neither of them had dared to go outside.
Ibrahim and Yousaf had never seen the ocean, except out of an aircraft window. They were both mountain men, and their main overseas ops areas had been in Baghdad and Kabul, both miles inland. Neither Ibrahim nor Yousaf had ever been on a ship, and now they were suffering an ocean-going baptism, on this rolling Russian dragger, where everyone felt every pitch and yaw.
By Igor’s rough water standards, this had not been at all bad. There had been no green water over the bow, yet. And because the Nova Scotia coastguard was always so touchy about foreign nationals fishing their waters, he had no nets out. So
Odessa
had run hard, packed with fish, and low in the water, making 12 knots, which would put her in the famously choppy seas on the Atlantic side of Cape Breton Island around four o’clock this afternoon.
Ibrahim and Yousaf, meanwhile, felt seasick to the point of suicide, which can happen to those who have spent a lifetime on land. The day was profoundly unhappy for both, but the evening was truly awful. It was almost 5 p.m. when they ran past the wide estuary bay of the Strait of Canso, the narrow throughway that cuts Nova Scotia in two. They then set off on their 180-mile journey around the east and north coastlines of Cape Breton Island.
They left the land to port, but still ran several miles offshore. For much of the way the rough waves were right on
Odessa
’s starboard beam, but then they turned into a surging, quartering sea, which was constantly trying to slew her stern around and drive her out into ever more dangerous waters.
Ibrahim and Yousaf were too ill to sleep, too sick to eat, and too frightened to move from their cabin. Ibrahim reasoned that Captain Igor plainly knew what he was doing, and he obviously intended to bring this ship home safely. Yousaf, on the other hand, believed Igor Denistinov was a suicidal maniac who was taking them all to the brink of hell. He retreated to his bunk and covered his head, unable to comprehend how this tin-can wreck of a ship, which smelled like a half-ton of dead fish, could possibly get anywhere, without sinking to the bottom of the ocean. In silence, except for releasing the occasional anguished burp, Yousaf waited for his God to relieve him of his misery, and deposit him, dead, on the floor of the Atlantic.
They ran all night, up past Point Michaud and Cape Gabarus, finally turning northeast in the small hours, and steaming past Glace Bay and Sydney Mines. It was dawn the following morning when they turned into the wide, calmer waters of the Cabot Strait, which runs between Nova Scotia and Newfoundland.
By now Captain Igor had headed out even further offshore, and he had the helm himself when they adjusted their course six degrees to three-six-zero. This took them through the middle of the Strait and into the world’s largest estuary, the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, which drains the mighty river of the same name, and, of course the Great Lakes.
The last point of land in Nova Scotia, Cape North, stands seventy-five miles from the southern tip of Newfoundland, Cape Ray. Out some eighteen miles from Cape North stands St. Paul’s Island, known among Canadian mariners as the “Graveyard of the St. Lawrence,” owing to centuries of ships, both steam and sail, that had been wrecked there due to big seas, powerful tides, gale force winds, and gigantic rock ledges. Captain Igor gave St. Paul’s a very wide berth, running due north and leaving the island five miles off his port beam.
Ibrahim had begun to feel very much better, and in the middle of the morning, he took his cell phone out on deck and tried to make contact with his masters. There was still no connection to Faisal al-Assad in New York, and he tried Sheikh Abdullah in England. Somewhat to his amazement the Yokshire-based imam answered his phone.
He was genuinely thrilled to hear from Ibrahim, because he knew things had gone wrong in Connecticut, and he didn’t know until now that they were safe.
Both men understood the danger of lingering too long on the telephone, and the business part of the conversation was conducted with slick efficiency. Sheikh Abdullah had Ibrahim’s cell number for any emergency, and he understood the two terrorists were on a Russian trawler, out of Murmansk, and currently crossing the Gulf of Saint Lawrence.
Ibrahim explained they would land in three or four days time, in Nuuk, the capital city of Greenland and the biggest fishing port in the country. Their captain had business to conduct there.
Ibrahim said that he trusted Captain Destinov, and already had accepted there would be a twenty-four-hour stopover before they proceeded on a fourteen-hundred-mile voyage to Iceland. This would take them across the ten-thousand-foot deep Irminger Basin, that freezing northern corner of the Atlantic where the pack-ice comes rumbling and groaning out from the Greenland Coast, sealing off the entire eastern part of the country for the winter.
Sheikh Abdullah did not much like the sound of all that, but he took careful notes, and agreed to have money wired to the main office of the Bank of Iceland, which would be awaiting them upon their arrival in Reykjavik.
They would leave the ship in the big southern Iceland fishing port of Vestmannaey, and from there take a short local flight up to the international airport. There were many foreign flights in and out of Iceland these days, and Ibrahim said he would leave it to his commanders to book him
and Yousaf to somewhere in Europe, probably Amsterdam, and then on to Peshawar or Riyadh, wherever was most convenient.
He and Sheikh Abdullah agreed to speak again when the
Odessa
docked in Vestmannaey.
MACK BEDFORD
was pacing so much, he was wearing out the carpet in the living room as the first snows of winter blew against the house. He’d just gotten off the phone with Captain Ramshawe, who had briefed him on the latest police Intelligence regarding the ex-Guantanamo fugitives.
Both the Canadians and the Maine State Troopers believed Ibrahim and Yousaf were still hiding somewhere in Nova Scotia. There was a reasonably efficient photographic security system in the ferry port in Yarmouth. They had spent hours comparing the disembarking passengers with the prison pictures and those taken by Johnny Strauss, and they had plainly identified the two Middle Eastern terrorists who had landed on Canadian soil.
The Mounties issued a full statement about the dragnet they had placed around the ferry terminal, and the diligence with which they had searched for the men. A detective inspector expressed his sincere appreciation of the work that had gone “beyond the call of duty.” He was also confident the fugitives could not be far away, and that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police would get their men in the end, they always did.
Mack had an atlas fully opened on the sofa, and he was referring to it every few minutes. He had now arrived at an irrevocable conclusion, which he expressed to himself in rich Navy SEAL parlance:
There is no way those two Towelheads are still friggin’ around in Nova fucking Scotia.
He had it all reasoned out, and he stood in the center of the room and
He had it all reasoned out, and he stood in the center of the room and issued an impassioned soliloquy to anyone who cared to listen, which was no one. Anne and Tommy were not due home for another hour.
IBRAHIM SHARIF
and Yousaf Mohammed,
he stated.
Both highly educated, Harvard and London. These are two guys who are able to deal with imperatives. They knew to clear the datum immediately when their bus blew. They knew to get out of Connecticut. Somehow, when Johnny’s pictures were circulated and the hunt for their number plate was on, all along the East Coast, they knew before anyone else they’d been rumbled.
They knew to abandon the Dodge truck, and that they could forget about public transport. They knew they needed an anonymous new car, and it took ’em about five minutes to get one. They knew not to just
take
one and risk getting caught when the driver reported the theft. They waited for him, and they knew that to shoot him stone dead would buy them time. Already fucking nearly two days.
They knew not to drive back across Maine, running the gauntlet of the state troopers. They knew to head for a lonely country road, and they picked the one that led to the only ferry port in that part of the country.
And where’s that ferry going? It’s going to Dead End City. Nova Scotia, where there’s only one highway out, over the Fucking Nowhere Bridge, or whatever it’s called, back to mainland New Brunswick.
Except you could seal all of their little airports, plus the highway, with about four guys. Not the best place for a terrorist leader to run. “I think I’ll charge into a fucking rat-trap and wait till they find me!”
But no. That’s not what they did. Because Nova Scotia has boats and ships. Freighters and fishermen. And about a zillion miles of coastline, jetties, seaports, and harbors.
And those al-Qaeda guys have plenty of money. Any goddamned halfwit could hitch a ride on a big freighter or a trawler if he had several thousand U.S. dollars. And these two characters are not halfwits.
They went to Nova Scotia alright, but not to hide out. They went to get out. By sea. You want to find them? Start checking out all ships that left Nova Scotia ports in the thirty-six hours after Mr. Ridley was murdered. Because Mr. Sharif and Mr. Mohammed are in one of them right now.