In 2005, the British government decided to expand and upgrade the Det. It became “the Special Reconnaissance Regiment.” It had an inaugural parade in which everyone, including the presiding general, was photographed only from the waist down. Its headquarters remain secret, and if the SAS and SBS are discreet the SRR is invisible. But Dame Eliza asked for them and got them. When Dr. al-Khattab boarded the airliner from Heathrow to Dubai, there were six from the SRR on board, scattered invisibly among three hundred passengers. One was the young accountant in the row behind the Kuwaiti. Because this was just a shadowing operation, no reason could be seen not to ask the Special Forces of the UAE for cooperation. Ever since World Trade Center terrorist Marwan al-Shehhi was discovered to have come from the UAE, and even more since the leak that the White House was tempted to bomb the Al Jazeera TV station at Qatar, the UAE had been extremely sensitive about Islamist extremism-and nowhere more than in Dubai, headquarters of the Special Forces. Thus, two hired cars and two rented scooters were available for the SRR team when it landed, just in case Dr. al-Khattab was being picked up. It was noted he had carry-on baggage only. They need not have bothered; he rented a small Japanese compact, which gave them time to move into position. He was tailed first from the airport to the Creek in Dubai, where once again the Rasha was moored after her return from Gwadar. This time, he did not approach the vessel, but stood by his car a hundred yards away until bin Selim spotted him.
Minutes later, a young man known to no one emerged from be-lowdecks on the Rasha, moved through the crowd and whispered in the ear of the Kuwaiti. It was the answer from the man in the mountains of Waziristan coming back. Al-Khattab’s face registered amazement.
He then drove along the traffic-teeming road up the coast, through Ajman and Umm al-Qaiwain and into Ras al-Khaimah. There, he went to the Hilton to check in and change. It was considerate of him, because the three young women in the SRR team could use the female washroom to change into the all-coveringjY/fcafc and get back to their vehicles.
Dr. al-Khattab emerged in his white dishdasha and drove away through the town. He adopted several maneuvers designed to shake off a “tail,” but he had no chance. In the Arabian Gulf, the motor scooter is everywhere, ridden by both sexes, and, the clothes being the same, one rider is much like another. Since being assigned to the job, the team had been studying road maps of all seven emirates until they had memorized every highway. That was how he was tailed to the villa.
If ever there had been any residual doubt that he was up to no good, his tail-shaking antics dispelled it. Innocent men do not behave like that. He never spent the night at the villa, and the SRR woman followed him back to the Hilton. The three men found a position on a hilltop that commanded a view of the target villa and kept vigil through the night. No one came or went. The second day was different. There were visitors. The watchers could not know it, but they brought the new passport and the new clothes. Their car numbers were noted, and one would be traced and arrests made later. The third was the barber, also later traced.
At the end of the second day, al-Khattab emerged for the last item. That was when Katy Sexton, tinkering with her scooter up the road, alerted her colleagues that the target was on the move.
At the Hilton, the Kuwaiti academic revealed his plans, when, speaking from his room, which had been bugged in his absence, he booked passage on the morning flight out of Dubai for London. He was escorted all the way home to Birmingham and never saw a thing.
MI5 had done a cracking job and knew it. The coup was circulated on a “for your eyes only” basis to just four men in the British intelligence community. One of them was Steve Hill. He nearly went into orbit. The Predator was reassigned to survey the villa in the far desert-side suburbs of Ras al-Khaimah. But it was midmorning in London, afternoon in the Gulf. All the bird saw were the cleaners going in. And the raid. It was too late to stop the Special Forces of the UAE from sending in their closedown squad, commanded by a former British officer, Dave De Forest. The SIS head of station in Dubai -a personal friend, anyway-was onto him like a shot. Word was immediately put out on the jungle telegraph that the “hit” had stemmed from an anonymous tip from a neighbor with a grudge. The two cleaners knew nothing; they came from an agency, they had been prepaid and the keys had been delivered to them. However, they had not finished, and swept up in a pile was a quantity of black hair, evidently from a scalp, and from a beard-the texture is different. Other than that, there were no traces of the men who had lived there.
Neighbors reported a closed van, but no one could recall the number. It was eventually discovered abandoned, and revealed to have been stolen, but much too late to be of help.
The tailor and the barber were a better harvest. They did not hesitate to talk, but they could describe only the five men in the house. Al-Khattab was already known. Suleiman was described and then identified from mug shots, because he was on a suspect list locally. The two underlings were described, but the descriptions rang no bells of recognition.
It was the fifth man that De Forest, with his perfect Arabic, concentrated on. The SIS station chief sat in. The two Gulf Arabs who had done the tailoring and the barbering came from Ajman, and were simply workers at their trade. No one in that room knew about any Afghan; they simply took a complete description and passed it to London. No one knew about any passport because Suleiman had done it all himself. No one knew why London was becoming hysterical about a big man with shaggy black hair and a full beard. All they could report was that he was now neatly barbered, and possibly in a dark two-piece mohair suit.
But it was the final snippet that came from the barber and the tailor that delighted Steve Hill, Marek Gumienny and the team at Edzell. The Gulf Arabs had been treating their man like an honored guest. He was clearly being prepared for departure. He was not a dead body on a tiled floor in the Arabian Gulf.
At Edzell, Michael McDonald and Gordon Phillips shared the same joy, but a puzzle. They knew their agent had passed all the tests and been accepted as a true Jihadi. After weeks of worry, they had had their second sign of life. But had their agent discovered a single thing about Stingray, the object of the whole exercise? Where had he gone? Was there any way he could contact them? Even if they could have spoken to their agent, he could not have helped. He did not know, either.
And no one knew that the Countess of Richmond was unloading her Jaguars at Singapore.
CHAPTER 13
Even though the traveling party could not know there were pursuers a few hours behind them, their escape was, for them, a lucky chance. Had they turned toward the coast housing the six emirates, they would probably have been caught. In fact, they headed east, over the mountainous isthmus, toward the seventh emirate, Fujairah, on the Gulf of Oman. They soon left the last paved road and took to rutted tracks, and lost themselves among the baking brown hills of Jabal Yibir. From the col at the height of the range, they descended toward the small port of Dibbah. Well to the south on the same coast, the police at Fujairah City received a request and a full description from Dubai and mounted a roadblock at the entrance to their town on the mountain road. Many vans were stopped, but none contained the four terrorists.
There is not much to Dibbah, just a cluster of white houses, a green-domed mosque, a small port for fishing vessels and the occasional charger boat for Western scuba divers. Two creeks away an aluminum boat waited, drawn up on the shingle, its huge outboards out of the water. Its cargo space amidships was occupied by chained-down tanks of extra fuel. Its two-man crew was sheltering in the shade of a single camel thorn among the rocks. For the two local youths, this was the end of their road. They would take the stolen van high into the hills and abandon it. Then they would simply disappear into the same streets that had produced Marwan al-Shehhi. Suleiman and the Afghan, their Western clothes still in bags to shield them from the flying salt water, helped push the cigarette boat backward into waist-deep water. With both passengers and the crew aboard, the smuggler craft idled its way up the coast almost to the tip of the Musandam Peninsula. The smugglers would only make the high-speed dash across the strait in darkness. Within twenty minutes of the sun’s setting, the helmsman bade his passengers hold on and opened up the power. The smuggler erupted out of the rocky waters of the last tip of Arabia and hurled itself toward Iran. With five hundred horsepower behind it, the nose rose, and the craft began to skim. Martin judged they were covering the water at almost fifty knots. The slightest ripple on the sea was like hitting a log, and the spray flayed them. All four, who had wrapped their keffiyehs round their faces as a shield from the sun, now kept them there to protect from the spray.