in pursuit of the two Asian crewmen, the engineer had managed to give them the slip at the bottom and scramble up the ladder. Abed was standing on a midway landing, alone and the only obstacle to the open deck. He would have let the man get past if he could but the stairway was narrow and the engineer was fighting for his very life having seen his two comrades cut to pieces below. He was much bigger and stronger than Abed and came at him with great ferocity, eyes wild and determined. At the last second Abed held his scimitar above his head and as the man lunged across the small platform, he brought it down with such force on to the side of the man’s neck, it cut halfway through it. Had he not done so, the engineer would surely have thrown him over the rails.
Looking down on the dying man as the blood poured from a severed artery he saw a pen and notepad poking from his breast pocket and an idea immediately came to him as to how he might be able to contact the West. He tore a page from the pad, scribbled his name on it, wet his thumb in the man’s blood and pressed it on to the paper. As his men came back up the stairs, Abed stuffed the note into engineer’s wallet, pushed him under the lower rail and watched him fall to the bottom of the ship.
Abed was surprised how quickly the British had found him and was impressed by the subtlety of the contact. His handler was Lebanese, or so he said, and treated him like a son, giving him friendly advice and always begging him to take care of himself. Abed did not expect them to use him for any kind of assignment as soon as this, and so it came as a surprise when, the day before, he was told to come to Ramallah to meet with a British agent. It was not an inconvenience since he was already on his way to Palestine on personal matters with special permission from his sheiks. Not an inconvenience yet, but then he did not know what the British wanted him to do. He knew he was going to have to pay a price for his freedom and that would not come cheaply, or even soon. Perhaps never, he was realistic about that. But it was something he would look forward to anyway. At least he had a guarantee they would not exact retribution on him for the tanker, if the British were to be trusted, that is. They had not yet asked him to identify the others on that mission but they soon would. But saving his skin by sacrificing his associates did not sit well with him and he was not sure how he would handle that yet. He knew that at least one of them was already dead. Ibrahim. A few days after the tanker he left to join the fight in Iraq and was killed by the Peshmerga, the Kurdistan border guards, while crossing over from Iran to join the battle in Fallujah. Abed expected that he would be ordered into Iraq eventually. It was the nexus of the fight against the West. The world was the battlefield, but Iraq was the central battleground. If it fell to democracy, a wedge would have been driven right through the heart of the Middle East and Islam.Abed did not know what he would do when that order came. He was playing it day by day. Perhaps that was the place he could earn his freedom working for the British. But that could be weeks or months away and too far in the future for an Ansar Islam, a supporter of the Jihad.Tomorrow was far enough into the future for him to look.
Abed did not know how much control the British had over the Israelis. He told the British he would not work on behalf of Israel, but if the Israelis discovered who he was, what would happen to him then? The British might barter for his life as long as they had a use for him. It was a difficult and complex game and one that Abed knew he was not equipped to play, but he would do his best to learn quickly and find a value for himself that the British would appreciate. Hoping to be free one day was possibly naïve but if he could just