The Rozabal Line Part 12

Bakatin had drunk vodka throughout the journey. His friend, the Sheikh, had prayed to Allah throughout it.

The Was.h.i.+ngton Quarterly would report that: The most disturbing aspect of the international nuclear smuggling network headed by Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, widely viewed as the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons, is how poorly the nuclear non-proliferation regime fared in exposing and stopping the network's operation. Despite a wide range of hints and leads, the United States and its allies failed to thwart this network throughout the 1980s and 1990s as it sold the equipment and expertise needed to produce nuclear weapons to major US enemies, including Iran, Libya, and North Korea.98 US intelligence had, at least partially, penetrated the network's operations, leading to many revelations and ultimately, the dramatic seizure of uranium-enrichment gas-centrifuge components bound for Libya's secret nuclear weapons programme aboard the German-owned s.h.i.+p BBC China. Libya's subsequent renunciation of nuclear weapons led to further discoveries about the network's operations and the arrest of many of its key players, including Khan himself. Suspicions remain that members of the network may have helped Al-Qaeda obtain nuclear secrets.

The University of Leuven had sp.a.w.ned an interesting partners.h.i.+p between the Oedipus trust and the Isabel Madonna trust. Alberto Valerio and Dawood Omar.

Waziristan, PakistanAfghanistan border, 2012 The Sheikh's Master, the ultimate beneficiary of the Isabel Madonna trust, was performing Salah, his daily prayer, for the fifth time that day. He had already completed his Wudu, the ritual ablution, during which he had washed his hands, teeth, face, nose, arms, hair, ears and feet, three times in specific order. He had started his Salah with the Niyyah, or the intention to pray, by reciting the first Surah of the Qur'an. He had then bowed, recited something, stood upright again, then sat on his legs. He had placed his hands and face down on his prayer mat and had then sat up, repeating this action once more before standing up and running through the entire sequence, or Raka'ah. He was now nearing the end of his prayers by looking right and left, saying, 'Peace be unto you, and on you be peace.'

Prayers duly completed, he sat down on his rug, turned around and stared into the eyes of the Sheikh, who was present along with Bakatin. He asked, 'So what do the crusaders of the cross demand?'

'They want him . . . you know, our man. In return they have paid for and have arranged for the nuclear weapon. Besides, they have transferred ten million dollars from their Oedipus account to our Isabel Madonna account.'

'What if I do not give him to them? What if I decide to use him for some greater calling?'

'We promised them that we would give him up,' said the Sheikh, s.h.i.+fting his weight uneasily on his own prayer rug.

'Have Christians kept their promise to Muslims that we should now honour a promise made by a Muslim to a Christian?' asked the Sheikh's Master.

Bakatin was surprisingly sober; he could not drink in the presence of the Sheikh's Master. In his newfound sobriety he said, 'Muslims have always been kind and gracious. I know that you are no less than the great Saladin!'

Flattery always worked. Bakatin's sobriety helped.

Jerusalem, 1192 Saladin, or Salah al-Din Yusuf, had recaptured Jerusalem for the Muslims in 1187. When his army entered Jerusalem, his soldiers were strictly prohibited from killing civilians, looting or plundering. Saladin's victory came as a shock to Pope Gregory VIII, who had commissioned Richard the Lionheart to mount the Third Crusade to recapture the holy city.

Richard had marched on Jerusalem in 1192. Unfortunately, his fever got in the way. His men were dying of hunger and thirst, so he appealed to the great Saladin to provide him with food and water. Saladin had duly obliged. Being a devout Muslim, it was his duty to help the needy. He sent frozen snow and fresh fruit to Richard in abundance.

Richard had eventually been unable to recapture Jerusalem and finally sued for truce with Saladin. Saladin agreed to let Christian pilgrims continue to visit the holy city without being troubled in any way by his Muslim brothers. Neither Richard nor Saladin had been too happy with the uneasy agreement, but both had realised that it was in their respective interests to work together.

An alliance between Christianity and Islam.

Vatican City, 2012 'Wearing traditional papal robes, the 265th Pontiff appeared Tuesday on a Vatican balcony as tens of thousands gathered in St Peter's Square to listen to him deliver his Easter address,' said CNN.

Sitting along with the other cardinals was His Eminence Alberto Cardinal Valerio. That morning he had been reading an article that was culled from the Arab News. The author was someone called Amir Taheri, who had written: At the start of the last century there were just six more or less independent Muslim states. By the year 2000 that number had grown to fifty-three. When John Paul II became Pope, Islam was no longer the religion of a neighbouring civilisation of Europe but a significant and growing presence within the continent.

It was the next paragraph that had held Valerio's rapt attention: The history of the past three to four decades is one of intense compet.i.tion between Islam and Christianity, especially the Catholic version, for converts. In 1980, John Paul II ordered a review of relations with Islam. This was based on the idea of a grand alliance between the Catholic Church and Islam. In western Europe, the heartland of Catholicism, the Pope saw Islam as an ally on such issues as h.o.m.os.e.xual 'marriages', abortion, euthanasia, human cloning, and the status of women. John Paul II pursued his quest for an alliance with Islam in 1986, by becoming the first Pope to visit a Muslim country. During that visit to Morocco he had this to say: 'We believe in the same G.o.d, the one and the only G.o.d, who created the world and brought its creatures to perfection.'

Valerio smiled a smile of quiet satisfaction and made up his mind that on critical issues, it was advisable to work alongside the enemy. They had done it for hundreds of years in the Crux Decussata Permuta.

Chapter Sixteen.

Pipavav, Gujarat, India, 2011 Port Pipavav, located in the Saurashtra region of the state of Gujarat in western India, was one of the smaller ports, certainly much smaller than Mumbai, which handled the bulk of India's cargo flows. Phase I of Pipavav Port had resulted in three dry cargo berths and one liquid cargo berth. The three dry cargo berths had been constructed as a single-length jetty of 725 metres, employing equipment capable of handling containers as well as bulk cargo.

The cargo s.h.i.+p that was docked at Pipavav was a standard 65,000-dwt Panamax vessel, one that represented the largest acceptable size to transit the Panama Ca.n.a.l-a length of 275 metres and a width of 32. It bore the name M/V Namgung, a North Korean registration.

It was unloading a rather nondescript container. The container held an important piece of cargo that needed to be cleared through customs with minimum fuss. This was precisely the reason the cargo had been sent to the port of Pipavav, and not to Mumbai.

The certificate of origin indicated that the 'construction jig' inside the container was from China and was headed to Himachal Pradesh in northern India. This was not entirely true. It had actually travelled from Pakistan to China, onwards to North Korea and then to Pipavav. At each stage, some critical components had been added.

From here, it would be loaded onto a ma.s.sive truck that would eventually transport it by road to its final destination. The recipient was shown on the bill of lading as a company with its registered office in Himachal Pradesh.

The 'construction jig' was very similar to the 13-kiloton uranium gun-type device that had been used in Hiros.h.i.+ma. It consisted of four simple elements. First, there was a uranium target. Second, there was a rail on which this uranium target sat mounted at one end. Third was the gun that would shoot a 'uranium bullet' and was mounted on the other end of the rail. And fourth was the uranium bullet itself.

Neither the target nor the bullet individually contained adequate uranium-235 to start a chain reaction. However, critical ma.s.s and a nuclear reaction could be started if these two elements were slammed together with sufficient force. After all, uranium-235 was radioactive. This meant that it was emitting neutrons spontaneously. If sufficient uranium-235 could be held together, each of the released neutrons could strike a uranium atom, releasing another pair of neutrons, thus setting off the chain reaction that could cause the ma.s.sive detonation needed. The sort that Nostradamus had written about in 1547.

Salon, France, 1547 Michel de Nostredame was working on over a thousand different prophecies. Some years earlier, he had met some Franciscan monks while travelling through Italy. Nostradamus had thrown himself down on his knees and had reverentially clutched at the habit of one of the monks, Felice Peretti. When the monks had asked him why he was showing such reverence for an ordinary monk, Nostradamus had replied, 'I must yield myself and bow before His Holiness.' The ordinary monk of lowly birth, Felice Peretti, would become Pope Sixtus V, nineteen years after the death of Nostradamus.

Nostradamus' quatrains spoke of three powerful and tyrannical leaders called 'anti-Christs', who would each lead their nations and people into terrible bloodshed.

Nostradamus wrote about the first, Napoleon: 'An emperor shall be born near Italy, who shall cost the empire dear . . . from a simple soldier he will rise to the empire . . . a great troop shall come through Russia . . . the exhausted ones will die in the white territory . . . the captive prince, conquered, is sent to Elba.'

Nostradamus then wrote about the second anti-Christ, Hitler: 'Out of the deepest part of the west of Europe, from poor people a young child shall be born, who with his tongue shall seduce many people . . . he shall raise up a hatred that had long been dormant . . . the child of Germany observes no law . . . the greater part of the battlefield will be against Hister.'

Nostradamus went on to write about a third, one who would follow Hitler: 'Out of the country of Greater Arabia shall be born a strong master of Mohammed . . . he will be the terror of mankind . . . never more horror . . . by fire he will destroy their city, a cold and cruel heart, blood will pour, mercy to none.'

Nostradamus could not have imagined how devastatingly accurate his predictions would be.

Paris, France, 2011 Ataullah al-Liby read the note in his pathetic little flat in the Banlieue, the poorest section of suburban Paris, home to the highest concentration of Muslim immigrants. In 2006, Paris had burned as disenchanted Muslim youths had gone on a rampage. The French Intifada,as it would come to be known, had been masterminded by the young Ataullah.

Born in the wretched squalor of the Banlieue, the Muslim-dominated suburb of Paris, Ataullah had learned to fight for survival at a very young age when he had beaten up two other children who had tried to rob him of his only pair of shoes. Ataullah had not only kept his shoes, he had given the two would-be thieves a black eye, several broken teeth and two broken ribs between them.

For the average American, the word 'suburb' evoked images of an idyllic, leafy home to a community best depicted in Desperate Housewives. The French Banlieue, however, had developed rather differently, to say the least. If one took a train ride from Charles de Gaulle Airport to the centre of Paris, one saw the miles of depressing, stark, dehumanising and ominous concrete buildings that const.i.tuted the Banlieue. If one added, to this terrible landscape, a high rate of unemployment and a seething resentment against the perception that even French-born Muslims would never really be accepted as French, one had an explosive formula, ideally suited for the indoctrination of young and angry Muslims by

Al-Qaeda.

The well-indoctrinated Ataullah now looked closely at the note he had received from Ghalib.

21 January 2012.

La Triple Frontera, TBA, South America, 2011 The almost inaccessible jungle and hilly terrain nestled between Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay was known as the TBA, the Tri-Border Area, or La Triple Frontera.

Terror groups such as the Hezbollah, al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, Islamic Jihad, Al-Qaeda, Hamas, and the Lebanese drug mafia had been sending their recruits to this region for many years precisely because it was inaccessible and out of reach for most government authorities.

The kingpin of the TBA was Boutros Ahmad. Positioned here by Ghalib, he had masterminded the attack on the Israeli emba.s.sy in Buenos Aires as well as the attack on the Jewish Community Centre.

Boutros Ahmad commanded money power. The Black Market Peso Exchange, the largest and most sophisticated system of laundering money in the western hemisphere, along with hawala, an Islamic form of money transfer, was entirely controlled by Boutros in the La Triple Frontera region. Boutros had also been accused of cocaine-trafficking through a cartel of drug smugglers in the sizeable Muslim immigrant communities of the region. None of the charges had ever been proved and Boutros didn't really care. Boutros was a member of the al-Murabitun, the most popular missionary movement of Latin America, an international Sufi order founded in the seventies by Sheikh Abdel Qader as-Sufi al-Murabit, a controversial Scottish Muslim convert. Religious zeal, drug money and terrorism made for a lethal combination.

The product of that lethal combination now read the message from Ghalib. Finally, some serious action.

21 February 2012.

Xinjiang, China, 2011 The East Turkestan Islamic Movement had been seeking independence for the Chinese province of Xinjiang since the 1990s. The group was radically Islamist but extremely popular among the Uighur population of Xinjiang.

Even countries that had originally held the view that the East Turkestan Islamic Movement was a genuine independence movement had been left speechless when it had come to light that 1,000 Uighur men had undergone training by Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

The group had raked up an impressive score: 200 attacks with 162 dead and more than 440 injured. Faris Kadeer enjoyed his work.

Faris Kadeer had been born an Uighur Sunni Muslim. As a child growing up in Xinjiang, the mahalla had been the centre of his life. Daily life had been based on these local residential cooperatives, the mahallas, and the centre of each mahalla had inevitably been the local mosque where daily prayers were conducted. It was at one of these prayers that Faris Kadeer had been recruited and sent to the Khalden Camp. Faris was now one of the most dedicated members of Ghalib's team.

He looked at the note from Ghalib-wonderful! Bek esil boldi!

21 March 2012.

London, UK, 2011 Fouad al-Noor was reading the note in his cramped studio in Wembley. Next to him sat a cup of steaming hot tea and a plate of mutton kebabs.

He had just finished his prayers when the note arrived. It had been delivered by the old gatekeeper of the Wembley mosque on Ealing Road.

At times Fouad found it difficult to remember his old self. Where had the east Londoner's spiky haircut, the Gucci shoes and the Armani clothes gone? Fouad, a British-born Pakistani, had lived most of his life as a Londonstani, the popular term given to Asian youth of England, staying out late with his friends, and missing prayers quite often. All that had changed after he went for Haj to Saudi Arabia.

He had found himself in Mecca, wandering among 23,000 Muslim pilgrims from Britain. His head had been shaven, and he had grown a beard. His only clothing was the simple white robe signifying that all Muslims were equal before G.o.d-quite a radical departure from Gucci and Armani.

As he jostled with the hundreds of thousands filtering out of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, he joined them in raising his hands to the heavens and chanting 'Labbaik Allah humma labbaik! Here I am, O Lord!' That was when he knew that he was a Muslim first, last, and to the end. The subsequent meeting with Ghalib had convinced him of his mission in life. The training at Khalden had been a cakewalk.

Fouad had been waiting impatiently since. Good. The date was final.

21 April 2012.

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 2011 Tau'am Zin Ha.s.san read the note. The strategist behind Darul Islam had spent many months waiting to see his dream fulfilled, setting up the Daulah Islamiah Nusantara, or the Islamic Caliphate of Indonesia, Malaysia and Southern Philippines.

He remembered the call to prayer at the Al Mukmin Islamic boarding school in Ngruki, Central Java. On that fateful day, he had left his wife and headed towards the mosque and the Taklim councils in the surrounding villages. He had not returned for five years. From Ngruki, he had run from one town to another-Semarang, Bandung, Jakarta, Lampung and Medan-before finally settling down in Malaysia. Tau'am Zin Ha.s.san had fled Ngruki because of his refusal to accept Pancasila as the sole state-sponsored ideology in Indonesia. Little had he imagined that he would one day become the most dreaded Islamic hardliner in all of Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. Ghalib was a bonus.

The note was one more step in the direction of the Islamic Caliphate.

21 May 2012.

Katra, Jammu & Kashmir, India, 2011 Nearly five-and-a-half million devotees paid homage to the divine G.o.ddess in 2003. An average of 14,794 visits each day of the year. A pilgrimage to the holy shrine of Vaishno Devi was considered to be one of the holiest pilgrimages by one billion Hindus in the world. So why was Bin Fadan, one of the key operatives of the Jaish-e-Mohammed, present in this Hindu pilgrimage town? He read the note from Ghalib: Longitude: 7457'00'. Lat.i.tude: 3259'00'. Phase of Moon: 0.274. Planet, Longitude, Lat.i.tude, Right Asc., Declination. Sun, 29 Sgr 31'38', -000'03', 17:57:56, -2326'09'. Moon, 08 Ari 00'14', 324'56', 00:23:59, 618'43'. Moon's Node, 25 Sco 35'58', 000'00', 15:33:04, -1909'27'. Apogee, 29 Tau 47'12', -022'58', 03:50:44, 1943'42'. Mercury, 14 Sgr 00'41', 027'53', 16:50:52, -2201'02'. Venus, 06 Sgr 00'19', 107'28', 16:17:19, -2011'56'. Mars, 26 Cap 03'52', -109'54', 19:53:11, -2204'38'. Jupiter, 08 Gem 57'20'R, - 044'40', 04:29:29, 2103'14'. Saturn, 08 Sco 37'09', 218'24', 14:27:59, -1211'14'.Ura.n.u.s, 04 Ari 38'16', - 042'47', 00:18:09, 111'18'. Neptune, 00 Psc 48'11', - 036'39', 22:12:18, -1145'30'. Pluto, 08 Cap 55'59', 320'47', 18:37:56, -1947'46'. Chiron, 05 Psc 36'53', 516'39', 22:21:54, - 432'17'. Quaoar, 23 Sgr 58'46', 732'28', 17:35:11, -1545'55'. Sedna, 22 Tau 52'08'R, -1202'07', 03:34:04, 649'24'. Sgr A*/GalCtr, 27 Sgr 01'52', -536'34', 17:46:29, -2900'38'

An astrologer was immediately summoned; someone who could interpret the planetary positions. 'Can you tell me what this means?' asked Bin Fadan.

Pandit Ramgopal Prasad Sharma was just another ordinary visitor to Katra on a pilgrimage to the divine Mother, but he always carried his Panchaang, the Indian ephemeris, wherever he went. After all, planetary positions were the tools of his trade.

He looked in his ephemeris and said, 'These are planetary positions on a given date at a particular location. Judging from my ephemeris, I would say that these positions would be attained in Katra on 21 June 2012.'

Bin Fadan smiled at Pandit Ramgopal Prasad Sharma as he remembered growing up in Pakistan.

During his eleven-year reign over Pakistan, General Zia ul-Haq had enforced his policy of Islamisation, and eventually the madrasa infrastructure had been inst.i.tutionalised. Zia had empowered the mullah who eventually became the sword of Islamisation. Bin Fadan was the product of one such madrasa. He was, in effect, a product of the Pakistani military, which had developed the top-down strategy of the expansion of the madrasa system for political gain. The main objective of the madrasa infrastructure was to use Islamist militancy as an economical tool for Pakistan's geopolitical interests in Afghanistan and India.

Bin Fadan's education had been a hybrid mix of the ultra-conservative Deobandhi version of Islam in the Indian subcontinent, the Saudi desert version of Wahabism, and the Middle-Eastern revolutionary version of Islamic Brotherhood. A few years later, he had been selected to secretly infiltrate the Pakistan-India border and a.s.similate himself among the millions of Indian Muslims.

Now his preparation would come in use.

21 June 2012.

Baghdad, Iraq, 2011 Kader al-Zarqawi had been born in Zarqa, Jordan. In fact his name, 'al-Zarqawi', literally meant 'the man from Zarqa'. The man from Zarqa was now the man from Baghdad. He was the most dreaded and feared Islamic terrorist in Iraq and the American government was offering a reward of US$ 50 million for his capture.

Kader al-Zarqawi had spent his youth as a petty criminal in Jordan. Quick-tempered, and barely literate, al-Zarqawi had been quick to volunteer as an Afghan Arab, to lead fighters against the Soviets in Afganistan in the eighties. The defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan had resulted in Kader returning to Jordan with a radical Islamist agenda. He would spend the next six years in prison there, accused of conspiring to overthrow the monarchy. He had managed a daring escape and, at Ghalib's behest, moved to Iraq and established links with Ansar al-Islam-a group of Kurdish Islamists from the north of the country.

Sitting inside a decrepit old house located close to the Al-Noor Hospital in the Al-Sho'la neighbourhood in Baghdad, virtually under the very noses of the American forces, Kader al-Zarqawi calmly read the handwritten note in Arabic that had come directly from Ghalib. Good. He cursed, 'Ebn el metanaka!'

'Those American sons of b.i.t.c.hes will now realise what it really means to be blown up,' he exclaimed.

21 July 2012.

New York, USA, 2011 Shamoon Idris sat inside the Masjid Abu Bakr on Foster Avenue in Brooklyn. Around him were other members of the Islamic Jehad Council.

Looking at Shamoon, one could not tell that he was a terrorist. His faded jeans, his Hugo Boss sungla.s.ses and the clean-shaven smiling face were not things one a.s.sociated with a fundamentalist. A hapless Wall Street investment banker would realise that the hard way.

The investment banker had been clicking photos of his girlfriend in front of the Masjid At-Taqwa Mosque in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. She had been 'inappropriately dressed' and this had roused the ire of Shamoon. The banker had been huddled off to a bas.e.m.e.nt beneath the mosque, where he had been grilled by Shamoon who had remained surrounded by his ardent fan following. It was only when the banker claimed that he was an admirer of Islam and wanted to learn about this religion of peace and tolerance, that Shamoon's grimace turned into a smile.

Shamoon was patiently discussing the note he had received from Ghalib. It had a date mentioned.

21 August 2012.

Jakarta, Indonesia, 2011 Jemaah Islamiyah was a militant Islamic terrorist outfit with a one-point agenda: the establishment of a fundamentalist Islamic caliphate in Indonesia, Singapore, Brunei, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines. The Jemaah Islamiyah had carried out the Bali bombing in which suicide squads had murdered 202 people in a busy nightclub.

Yaqub Islamuddin, the intellectual director of the Jemaah Islamiyah, sat inside his jail cell, which he had occupied for the past few months, reading his Qur'an. Yaqub had been a techno-nerd running a computer business in Jakarta. It was the two weeks he had spent studying the Qur'an at a pro-Afghan training centre in Peshawar, that had led him to create a small core of young Muslims who wanted the introduction of Islamic law, or Sharia, as the basis of Indonesian law. He had always been more of an intellectual than a muscleman. Unfortunately, his words and thoughts were often more dangerous than the blows of a thug.

Among the correspondence that he had been allowed to receive was a single note from Ghalib. It contained a verse from the holy book. 'Their Lord gives them good news: mercy and approval from Him, and gardens where they rejoice in everlasting bliss.' Yaqub Islamuddin knew the verse.

Chapter 9, Verse 21.

9/21.

21 September 2012.

Sydney, Australia, 2011 Muslims in Australia had a long history. Adil Afrose's ancestors had come to Australia as Afghan camel drivers in the 1800s.They had played an important role in the exploration of Australia's endless dry terrains by carrying people and telegraph poles to points that could only be reached on camelback. But had they been appreciated? The white man didn't give a camel's a.s.s about them.

Adil had done quite well for himself in life. He had succeeded in setting up a trading firm that specialised in the export of halaal meat to very discerning customers in the Middle East. In 2005, a delegation of young Muslim leaders from Australia had travelled to Jakarta to explore Islam in Indonesia. The Australian amba.s.sador to Indonesia had said, 'It's important for young Australians to gain a better understanding of the role of religion in Indonesia and to share their views on how Islam contributes to diverse, democratic societies like Australia and Indonesia.' The Amba.s.sador had obviously not known what exactly it was that Adil had learnt during that trip!

Adil surveyed the beautiful Lakemba Mosque where he prayed each day. Today he was praying that Allah would give him strength to do His will as per the note from Ghalib.