Cold Kill Read Free Page B

been well hidden in a false compartment of the man’s flight case. The Saudi had met him in the Shangri-la Hotel, overlooking the Chao Pra river. They had had coffee with cake and made small-talk. Then the Saudi had left with the detonators and the pilot had sat with an envelope containing a hundred thousand dollars in crisp new notes.
    ‘Use three per vehicle,’ said the Saudi. ‘Where are the circuits?’
    Alen nodded at the bedroom. ‘In there,’ he said.
    The Saudi eased himself up off the sofa and padded through to the bedroom. He gave the explosive-filled fuel cans a cursory glance. The wiring circuits were laid out on the two beds. He studied them carefully. Two batteries in each circuit. Two on-off switches, either of which would complete the circuit. Redundancy was essential. They could not afford a mistake at any level. There were flashlight bulbs, which could be used to test the circuit. The Saudi checked all four on-off switches. They worked perfectly.
    He went back into the sitting room. The four shahids looked at him expectantly. ‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘You have done well.’
    The shahids were the front-line warriors of the jihad , the martyrs who would give their lives for Islam. The Koran promised the shahids unlimited sex with seventy-two black-eyed virgins. It said that martyrs went straight to heaven and that places would be saved for seventy of their relatives. There would be eighty thousand servants to take care of them. And they would see the face of Allah Himself. The Saudi didn’t believe that, of course, and neither did the four shahids in the room. But they were still prepared to die. ‘ Allahu akbar ,’ they said in unison.
    Nine kilometres below the white-flecked waves of the Andaman Sea, the pressure had been building for hundreds of years. Tectonic stresses, pressure that dwarfed anything that could be produced by man. The huge stone plate on which India and Australia rested had been inching northwards for millennia, pushing against the equally massive Eurasian landmass near Indonesia. Millions upon millions of tonnes of rocks forced against each other as the continents drifted over the surface of the earth. Three days earlier there had been an earthquake in the Macquarie Islands, but it had done nothing to alleviate the pressure close to Sumatra.
    No single event triggered the rupture. At one moment the plates were jammed against each other as they had been for centuries, and at the next they slipped. It happened at precisely fifty-eight minutes past midnight, Greenwich Mean Time. The southern plate ripped under the northern plate, like a bulldozer blade cleaving through wet soil. Rocks ripped like cardboard. Pressure that had accumulated over centuries was released in an instant. The forces at work were almost unimaginable, equivalent to a million times the power of the atom bomb that had destroyed Hiroshima.
    A massive earthquake shook the island of Sumatra for more than three minutes and registered 9.0 on the Richter scale. By the time the shaking had subsided, hundreds were dead. There had been only three bigger earthquakes in recorded history. But the fatalities caused by the earthquake were only a taste of what was to follow. The rupture in the ocean floor was twelve hundred kilometres long and a hundred wide. It averaged twenty metres deep and displaced millions of tonnes of water in a few seconds. On the surface, there was little change in the white-flecked waves. But deep underwater a tidal wave was racing outwards in all directions, north, south, east and west, travelling at the speed of a cruising airliner. Even at that velocity, the nearest landfall was two hours away.
    The floor trembled, a slight vibration that was little more than a tickling sensation underfoot. Alen looked across at Anna. ‘Can you feel that?’
    She nodded. ‘Like it’s shaking.’
    Suddenly one of the framed pictures on the wall shifted. It was a beach scene. White sand, palm trees blowing in