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‘Never mind the boat, stay with the moving figure,’ said Gordon Phillips, leaning over the console operator’s shoulder. The instructions went to Thumrait and the Predator was instructed to follow the thermal image of a man walking along the coast road back towards Ras-al-K.
It was a five-mile hike but Martin reached the Old Town section around midnight. He asked twice and was directed to the address of the guest house. It was five hundred yards from the family home of the Al-Shehhi, whence had come Marwan al-Shehhi who flew the airliner into the South Tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11. He was still a local hero.
The proprietor was surly and suspicious until Martin mentioned Faisal bin Selim. That and the sight of a wad of dirhams cleared the air. He was bidden to enter and shown to a simple room. There were seemingly just two other paying guests and they had retired.
Unbending his attitude the room-keeper invited Martin to join him for a cup of tea before turning in. Over tea Martin had to explain that he was from Jeddah, but of Pashtun extraction.
With his dark looks, full black beard and the repeated references to Allah of the truly devout, Martin convinced his host that he also was a True Believer. They parted with mutual wishes for a good night’s sleep.
The dhow master sailed on through the night. His destination was on the harbour known as the C
reek in the heart of Dubai. Once simply that, a muddy creek smelling of dead fish, in which men mended their nets in the heat of the day, it has become the last ‘picturesque’ sight in the bustling capital, opposite the gold soukh, beneath the windows of the towering western hotels. Here the trading dhows are berthed side by side and the tourists come to stare at the last portion of ‘old Arabia’.
Bin Selim hailed a taxi and instructed it to take him three miles up the coast to the Sultanate of Ajman, smallest and second-poorest of the seven. There he dismissed the taxi, ducked into a covered soukh of twisting alleys and clamouring stalls and lost himself to any following ‘tail’ – should there have been one.
There was not. The Predator was concentrating on a guest house in the heart of Ras-al-Khaimah. The dhow master slipped from the soukh into a small mosque and made a request of the imam. A boy was sent scurrying through the town and came back with a young man who genuinely was a student in the local technical college. He was also a graduate of the Darunta training camp owned and run by Al-Qaeda outside Jalalabad until 2001.
The old man whispered in the ear of the younger, who nodded and thanked him. Then the dhow captain went back through the covered market, emerged, hailed a taxi and returned to his freighter in the Creek. He had done all he could. It was up to the younger men now. Inshallah.
That same morning, but later due to the time difference, the Countess of Richmond eased out of the estuary of the Mersey and into the Irish Sea. Captain McKendrick had the conn and took his freighter south. In time she would, keeping Wales to her port side, clear the Irish Sea and Land,s End to meet the Channel and the eastern Atlantic. Then her course lay south past Portugal, through the Mediterranean to the Suez Canal and thence to the Indian Ocean.
Below his decks, as the cold March seas flew up over the bow of the Countess, was a cargo of carefully protected and crated Jaguar saloons, destined for the showrooms of Singapore.
Four days passed before the Afghan sheltering in Ras-al-Khaimah received his visitors. Following his instructions he had not gone out, or at least not as far as the street. But he had taken the air in the closed courtyard at the rear of the house, screened from the streets by double gates eight feet high. Here various delivery vans came and went.
While in the courtyard he was seen by the Predator and his controllers in Scotland noted his change of dress.
His visitors, when they came, did not arrive to deliver food, drink or laundry, but to make a collection. They backed the van close to the rear door of the building. The driver stayed at the wheel; the other three entered the house.
The lodgers were both away at work, the room-keeper by agreement out at the shops. The team of three had their directions. They went swiftly to the appropriate door and entered without knocking. The seated figure, reading his Koran, rose to find himself facing a handgun in the grip of a man trained in Afghanistan. All three were hooded.
They were quiet and efficient. Martin knew enough of fighting men to recognize his visitors knew their business. The hood went over his head and fell to his shoulders. His hands came behind his back and the plastic cuffs went on. Then he was marching, or being marched, out of his door, down the tiled corridor and into the back of a van. He lay on his side, heard the door slam, felt the van lurch out of the gate and into the street.
The Predator saw it, but the controllers thought it was another laundry delivery. In minutes the van was out of sight. There are many miracles that modern spy technology can accomplish, but controllers and machines can still be fooled. The snatch squad had no idea there was a Predator above them but shrewdly choosing mid-morning for the snatch rather than midnight fooled the watchers at Edzell.
It took three more days before they realized that their man no longer appeared daily in the courtyard to give the sign of life. In short, he had disappeared. They were watching an empty house. And they had no idea which of the several vans had taken him.
In fact the van had not gone far. The hinterland behind the port and city of Ras-al-K is wild and rocky desert rising to the mountains of Rus-al-Jibal. Nothing can live here but goats and salamanders.
Just in case the man they had snatched was under surveillance, with or without his knowledge, the kidnappers were taking no chances. There were tracks leading up into the hills and they took one. In the rear, Martin felt the vehicle leave the tarred road and start to jolt over pitted track.
Had there been a tailing vehicle, it could not have avoided detection. Even staying out of sight, its plume of rising desert dust would have given it away. A surveillance helicopter would have been even more obvious.
The van stopped five miles up the track into the hills. The leader, the one with the handgun, took powerful binoculars and surveyed the valley and the coast, right back to the Old Town whence they had come. Nothing came towards them.
When he was satisfied, the van turned and went back down the hills. Its real destination was a villa standing in a walled compound in the outer suburbs of the town. With the gates relocked, the van reversed up to an open door and Martin was marched back out and down another tiled passage.
The plastic ties came off his wrists and a cool metal shackle went on to the left one. There would be a chain, he knew, and a bolt in the wall which could not be ripped free. When his hood came off, it was the kidnappers who had their heads covered. They withdrew backwards and the door slammed. He heard bolts go into sockets.
The cell was not a cell in the true meaning. It was a ground-floor room that had been fortified. The window had been bricked up and, though Martin could not see it, a painting of a window adorned the outside to fool even those with binoculars peering over the compound wall.
Considering what he had undergone years before in the SAS programme of interrogation resistance it was even comfortable. There was a single bulb in the ceiling protected against thrown objects by a wire frame. The light was subdued but adequate.
There was a camp bed and just enough slack in his chain to allow him to lie on it to sleep. The room also had an upright chair and a chemical toilet. All were in reach but in different directions.
His left wrist, however, was in a stainless-steel shackle that linked to a chain and the chain went to a wall bracket. He could not begin to reach the door through which his interrogators would enter, if at all, with food and water, and a spyhole in the door meant they could check on him any time and he would neither hear nor see them.
At Castle Forbes there had been lengthy and passionate discussions over one problem: should he carry any tracking device on him?
