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Mostly it was of heavy leaden-grey cloud, from which the snow drifted down. But earlier, in that period when the Christians decorated trees and sang songs, the skies had been freezing cold but blue.
Then he had seen eagles and ravens wheeling overhead. Smaller birds had fluttered to the top of the wall and looked down at him, perhaps wondering why he could not come and join them in freedom. But what he liked most to watch were the aeroplanes.
Some he knew were warplanes, though he had never heard of either the Cascades Range where he was, nor McChord Air Force Base fifty miles to the west. But he had seen American combat aircraft turning into their bombing runs over northern Afghanistan, and he knew these were the same.
And there were the airliners. They were in different liveries, with varying designs on their tailfins, but he knew enough to know these were not national but company insignia. Except for the maple leaf. Some always had that leaf on the fin, they were always climbing and they always came from the north.
North was easy to work out; to the west he could see the sun set, and he prayed the opposite way, towards Mecca far to the east. He suspected he was in the USA because the voices of his guards were clearly American. So why did airliners with a different national emblem come from the north? It could only be because there was another land up there somewhere, a land where people prayed to a red leaf on a white ground. So he paced up and down, up and down, and wondered about the land of the red leaf. In fact he was watching the Air Canada flights out of Vancouver.
In a sleazy dockside bar in Port of Spain, Trinidad, two merchant seamen were attacked by a local gang and left dead. Both had been skilfully knifed.
By the time the Trinidadian police arrived the witnesses had acquired amnesia and could recall only that there had been five attackers who had provoked the bar fight and that they were islanders. The police would never get further than that, and no arrests were ever made.
In fact the killers were local low-life and they had nothing to do with Islamist terrorism. But the man who had paid them was a senior terrorist in the Jamaat-al-Muslimeen, the principal Trinidadian group on the side of Al-Qaeda.
Though still low profile across the western media, JaM has been growing steadily for years, as have other groups right across the Caribbean basin. In an area known for its down-home Christian worship, Islam has been quietly growing with wholesale immigration from the Middle East, Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent.
The money paid out by JaM for the killings came from a line of credit set up by the late Mr Tewfik al-Qur, and the specific orders had come from an emissary of Dr Al-Khattab who was still on the island.
No attempt had been made to steal the wallets of the dead men, so the Port of Spain police could quickly identify them as Venezuelan citizens and deck crew from a Venezuelan ship then in port.
Her master, Captain Pablo Montalban, was shocked and saddened to be informed of the loss of his crewmen, but he could not wait for too long in harbour.
The details of shipping the bodies back to Caracas fell to the Venezuelan Embassy and Consulate while Captain Montalban contacted his local agent for replacement sailors. The man asked around and struck lucky. He came up with two polite and eager young Indians from Kerala who had worked their passage across the world and who, even if they lacked naturalization papers, had perfectly good seamen’s tickets.
They were taken on, joined the other four seamen who made up the crew and the Doña Maria sailed only a day late.
Captain Montalban knew vaguely that most of India is Hindu but he had no idea that there are also a hundred and fifty million Muslims. He was not aware that the radicalization of Indian Muslims has been just as vigorous as in Pakistan, or that Kerala, once the hotbed of Communism, has been particularly receptive territory for Islamist extremism.
His two new crewmen had indeed worked their way from India as deck hands, but on orders and to gain experience. And finally the Catholic Venezuelan had no idea that, though neither had suicide in mind, they were working with and for Jamaat-al-Muslimeen. The two unfortunates in the bar had been killed precisely to put the two Indian matelots on his ship.
Marek Gumienny chose to fly the Atlantic when he heard the report from the Far East. But he brought with him a specialist in a different discipline.
‘Arab experts have served their purpose, Steve,’ he told Hill before he flew. ‘Now we need people who know the world’s merchant marine.’
The man he brought was from America’s Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, merchant-marine division. Steve Hill came north from London accompanied by another of his colleagues, who ca
me from the SIS’s anti-terrorism desk, maritime section.
At Edzell the two younger men met: Chuck Hemingway from New York and Sam Seymour from London. Both had heard of the other from the reading of papers and briefings within the West’s anti-terror community. They were told they had twelve hours to go into a huddle and come up with an evaluation of the threat and game plan for coping with it. When they addressed Gumienny, Hill, Phillips and McDonald, Chuck Hemingway went first.
‘This is not just a hunt, this is a search for a needle in a haystack. A hunt has a known target; all we have is something that floats. Maybe. Let me lay this on the line.
‘There are forty-six thousand merchant ships plying their trade on the world’s oceans as of now. Half of them are flying flags of convenience, which can be switched almost at the whim of the captain.
‘Six-sevenths of the world’s surface is covered by ocean, giving an area so vast that literally thousands of ships are out of sight of land or any other vessel all the time.
‘Eighty per cent of the world’s trade is still carried out by sea, and that means just under six billion tonnes. And there are four thousand viable merchant ports around the world.
‘Finally, you want to find a vessel; but you do not know her type, size, tonnage, contours, age, ownership, stern-flag, captain or name. To have a hope of tracing this vessel – we call them ghost ships – we will need more than that; or a large dose of luck. Can you offer us either?’
There was a depressed silence.
‘That’s damn downbeat,’ said Marek Gumienny. ‘Sam, can you suggest a ray of hope?’
‘Chuck and I agree there might be a way if we identify the kind of target the terrorists could be aiming at, then check out any ship heading towards that target and demand a gunpoint inspection of ship and cargo,’ said Seymour.
‘We’re all listening,’ said Hill. ‘What kind of target could they be most likely heading for?’
