Terror alert level fire red E-Book

Sarah Samuel

• Herausgeber: novum publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 914

Beschreibung

A devastating attack on a luxury hotel in Bali triggers a red alert in South East Asia. American special agent Robin is sent to Singapore to lead the fight against Islamist terrorists in the region. The hardened and experienced agent relies on stealth and deception to infiltrate the terrorist cells, but will not shy away from merciless liquidations if necessary. In the fascinating exotic ambience of Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, a bitter struggle with many dramatic twists and turns ensues, with the agent also experiencing many a nasty surprise. The fact that Robin knows her way around in all situations is not only demonstrated by her acquaintance with the young Frenchman Julien ...

Leseprobe

Terror Alert Level Red Hot

A thriller by

Chapter 1

The pool bar provoked the jihadists to the utmost. Scantily clad women sipping alcoholic drinks: Nowhere else in the Ritz-Carlton did people violate the Islamic rules of faith so shamelessly. In the eyes of the Islamists, this place of mortal sin alone justified the relentless punitive action against the luxury hotel on Jimbaran Beach.

Ten terrorists rushed up in two mud-colored Land Rovers. With screeching brakes and tires, the off-road vehicles came to a halt in front of the hotel entrance. The men in combat fatigues, their faces covered with black scarves except for narrow slits, jumped out of the vehicles and immediately began firing from their Kalashnikovs. Before the two hotel security officers could react in the slightest, the first hail of bullets mowed them down.

This meant that nobody was now blocking the way into the spacious atrium that towered several floors high and offered a view of the well-tended gardens full of lush tropical flora through huge glass fronts. This lobby gave the impression of being on the outside of a palm house with coconut and fan palms, banana trees, ixora and hibiscus bushes, orchids, angel trumpets, and other splendid displays of Southeast Asian nature, rather than in the entrance hall of a hotel. Three hooded men, unimpressed by this grandiose backdrop, rushed through the lobby and hurled hand grenades into the reception to paralyze the Ritz-Carlton's control center from the start. The professional welcoming smiles froze on the faces of the attractive young Balinese women standing behind the highly polished teak counter in their floral-patterned batik sarongs. They became another item of collateral damage; even feminine charm and gracefulness could not win mercy from the Islamists.

Then the three gunmen came across a group of twelve French tourists who were waiting in the lobby for a transfer to Denpasar airport. The terrorists pointed their guns at the horrified travelers and herded the surprised group into the management office on the ground floor of the eastern wing. There the twelve hotel guests were taken hostage together with the general manager of the Ritz-Carlton and his secretary.

Meanwhile, the other attackers stormed onto the terrace shouting "Allahu akbar!" and surrounded the pool bar. As they had expected, it was very busy at the happy hour in the late afternoon. They found the scene unbearable for them, with prosecco, champagne, and cocktails all over the tables and half-naked women as the pinnacle of scandalous indecency. The Islamist assassins took particular pleasure in exploding bottle after bottle of alcoholic beverages behind the elongated bar with hand grenades and turning them into a sea of flames. For the devout Muslims, this symbolized the hellfire that would scorch the infidels for all eternity as punishment for their sins. This momentary distraction allowed some alert guests, who had just been looking forward to a spectacular sunset in the sea, to flee along the sandy beach. The bar patrons, on the other hand, who had already become lethargic due to their alcoholic excesses, froze in shock at their tables.

Suddenly, revolver shots rang out and one of the assassins - obviously hit - cried out in pain. The assault rifles responded furiously to this attack by two men who had crouched protectively in front of a third one who was seeking cover under a table. However, these three hotel guests had no chance against the barrage of fire from the Kalashnikovs and were cut down in a bloodlust fueled by a frenzied craving for retribution. The terrorists suspected that the protected victim must be a prominent personality and therefore riddled his body with a marked display of sadism. In fact, this person was the Australian consul in Bali who was vacationing at the newly opened Ritz-Carlton to make a demonstrative statement that this tropical island paradise was now safe for Australian tourists. In 2002, the devastating bomb attacks on nightclubs on Bali's Kuta Beach killed over 200 people, most of them Australians.

During this exchange of fire, some other guests managed to get out of the danger zone. The masked men mercilessly massacred the 20 or so remaining bar patrons, hunting down women in bikinis with marked malice. Then the attackers surrounded the swimming pool and whipped bullets into the water until it turned crimson and no swimmer emerged alive.

After this orgy of bloodshed, the terrorists combed the ground floor of the huge hotel for further Western victims who could presumably be found in the various restaurants, the lounge, the wellness area, and the fitness center. Particularly productive in this foray turned out to be the refrigerated storage room for food supplies into which panicked guests, cooks, and waitresses had fled. Unleashed Rambos now transformed it into a chaotic jumble, a chamber of horrors full of corpses, fruit and vegetable shreds, burst cans, leaking bottles, and smeared shards of glass. On the floor, fruit juices, milk, sauces, jam, blood, and body excretions melted into a disgusting, viscous slurry. Around two dozen people lost their lives in this storage room alone. Even the most hardened police officers who later investigated the attack were horrified by the gruesome state of these corpses.

In the fitness center, the masked men took pleasure in staging a mass execution. The eight men and women they found there first had to strip off their few clothes and then stand against a wall with their arms raised. They were then bound by their feet and systematically riddled with bullets, starting from their knees and ending at their heads. The victims' hysterical, but of course completely useless pleas for mercy further amused the executioners. When the police later found the massacred amateur athletes, rivulets of sweat, panic piss and diarrhea as well as coagulated blood on their skin formed a macabre styling as if for a Halloween party.

In the meantime, a hotel employee had finally managed, with his cell phone, to contact the emergency call center in Jimbaran which forwarded the alarm to a task force in Denpasar. The cry for help reached the officer on duty there, Police Major Siloso, also known as Peng Peng by friends and colleagues since he always carried a large-caliber revolver and two rapid-fire pistols on his belt. Like most Balinese, he was of diminutive build and therefore wanted to establish his authority through the arsenal of weapons on his uniform belt.

Major Siloso was put in a tight spot by the emergency call - the officer in Jimbaran spoke of terrified and breathless panic in the voice of the hotel employee - because he only had a few men from his special unit at his disposal. As there had been no further spectacular terrorist attacks on Bali for years after the attacks at Kuta Beach, the Indonesian police's special squads were gradually withdrawn from the island. They suppressed the demonstrations on other islands in the archipelago, which were constantly breaking out due to the growing corruption in the oil-rich country. Major Peng Peng was therefore forced to increase his small remaining force, which had received specialist and professional training in Australia, to full strength with regular police officers with no experience in counter-terrorism. Siloso and his ragtag task force made their way to the Ritz-Carlton hotspot without much confidence.

On the way, the major called the hotel management office. One of the hostage-takers picked up the phone without answering. The police officer shouted into his cell phone:

"This is Major Siloso from the Denpasar task force. We are on our way to you. What's the situation at the hotel?"

"Excellent for Muslims and hellish for infidels," the terrorist replied cynically. "In fact, we've pretty much cleaned up the cesspit of sin here."

"Who are you and what do you want?" growled Major Siloso brusquely, immediately recognizing the situation of a terrorist attack.

"I am Jihadi 5 and we are 30 holy warriors here. We want to perform a task pleasing to Allah: to liberate our country from the whorish and drunken infidels! If you attack us here, you will degrade yourself to a miserable accomplice of this Satanic brood. Think carefully about what you are doing, because we have taken a large number of hostages. One wrong move on your part and all these people will be executed!"

With that, the hostage-taker slammed down the receiver. He then sent one of his comrades-in-arms to gather all the jihadists into a compact defensive position in the management office.

When the terrorists heard the police sirens, the masked men took up battle-ready positions. Major Peng Peng wanted to give his squad precise instructions at the hotel entrance, but a few inexperienced men stormed into the lobby and indiscriminately fired most of their ammunition, even though there was not a soul to be seen. The police major now feared that the arsenal of violence on his side might be inferior to that of the assassins, especially if Jihadi 5 had told the truth and there were 30 certainly well-armed opponents entrenched in the hotel. But of course the terrorist could also have been bluffing. In any case, tactical prudence dictated that contact be made with the enemy again. This time Jihadi 1 answered.

"Where are you hiding, you cowardly sons of bitches?" provoked Major Peng Peng.

"We're waiting for you in the director's office," Jihadi 1 blurted out impulsively, but immediately regretted what he had said.

"Good, then we know where we can smoke you out," said Major Siloso threateningly.

"You won't do that because we're holding twelve foreigners as prisoners here. They are our bargaining chips against you."

The police major inquired as a matter of form:

"Where is the hotel manager? After all, he also has something to say in this matter."

"He and his secretary are under our control as well."

The arrogant sneer in Jihadi 1's voice was unmistakable. Major Peng Peng went all out:

"What are you going to do now? Are you going to kill the hostages one by one or are you going to negotiate?"

"We can talk about the two Indonesians. Wait a moment and stay on the phone."

The leader of the terrorists asked the manager and the secretary to recite a few verses from the Koran. The two hotel employees managed to do so, albeit almost faltering with fear. Like the vast majority of Balinese, they were Hindus, but in predominantly Muslim Indonesia a few pithy quotes from the Koran are part of general knowledge, just as certain Bible verses have become commonplace in Christian countries.

Jihadi 1 accepted the short and pathetic declamations as sufficient proof of belonging to Islam and said into the phone:

"I'll show you my willingness to negotiate and send the director and the secretary out. No idiotic reactions, otherwise foreign hostages will be killed. Over!"

Four jihadists, their Kalashnikovs at the ready, led the two hotel employees to the door, opened it a crack, and pushed them out. Again, some police officers lacked discipline and thought they could shoot into the narrow breach that had been created. However, with their pistols they had no chance against the terrorists' assault rifles. The policemen collapsed dead with countless hits. The two hostages who had just been freed had the presence of mind to throw themselves to the ground, and so they survived with minor injuries.

Major Peng Peng planted himself dramatically in front of the blood-covered bodies of the police officers and gave his men an angry dressing down. Then he phoned again:

"You'll have to pay for that, you miserable bastard! If it comes to a firefight, I'll target you and slice you into tiny pieces with my 45 Governor."

He immediately realized that this was actually an empty threat, as he didn't even know what his conversation partner looked like. The latter laughed crudely and cynically and replied:

"We are no longer talking to you. You have completely squandered what little trust there may have been, and in any case you have no authority to negotiate the fate of foreigners. We will hold any further talks exclusively with the French consul in Bali, because all our hostages are French. If this demand for negotiations is not met by 8 p.m., we will shoot two young women here. That's it!"

It took almost an hour, through a painstaking series of phone calls, to track down the French consul at a cocktail party organized by the Bali Tourism Association. He had deactivated his smartphone so as to enjoy the party undisturbed. A group of self-proclaimed Balinese temple dancers showed off as the highlight and centerpiece of the event. They tingled through the hotels of the international chains and interpreted the traditional ceremonial pantomime more like an erotic vaudeville, which went down enormously well with the tourists. At the party, the girls put their graceful porcelain figures in the limelight with smooth and swaying movements and were in demand from all the male guests. In terms of conversation, the dancers didn't yield much, as they were constantly giggling behind their hands, half embarrassed, half coquettish. Even their alcohol consumption could not stop this behavior - on the contrary, it even seemed to encourage it. That didn't bother the consul. He liked being surrounded by a swarm of desirable exotic girls and in his mind choosing two or three for the later part of the evening. After all, this type of girl is always on the lookout for patrons and protectors from the West. The dancers would certainly not turn down an invitation to visit a night club.

When contact was finally made with the consul, it was initially not at all obvious that he could be released from this important social and foreign policy obligation, as he put it. Even when the urgency and the enormous scope of the matter had been made clear to him, he actually wanted to delegate only an attaché from the consulate to the Ritz-Carlton. It took lengthy debates before the consul finally condescended to be driven to Jimbaran Beach in a police patrol car.

This delay proved to be extremely unpleasant for the hostages, as the shackles were fastened so tightly around their bodies that their limbs felt completely stiff and drained of blood after just half an hour. In addition, the detainees had to endure even longer the constant abuse by the terrorists, who saw this brutality as a pastime while they waited.

After an anxious period of idle waiting on the part of the policemen, the consul finally emerged at the Ritz-Carlton from the muggy tropical night. Major Siloso was glad to be relieved of responsibility. He had nothing to gain from this affair: If he allowed the assassins to leave with the hostages, it would be an encouragement of terrorism and a moral defeat, and if, on the other hand, he caused a bloodbath, he would have the deaths of the hostages on his conscience and risk his dismissal.

The consul - stolid, complacent, and always in a jolly mood - did not look as if he were up to tough negotiations with violent terrorists. After all, he had only applied for the post in Bali so that he could work in the relaxed and stress-free atmosphere of a vacation island and not in cities like Shanghai, Osaka, or Mumbai, where only boring commercial matters are dealt with. Countries such as Afghanistan or Iraq, where deadly dangers lurk everywhere, were certainly out of the question for him.

Major Siloso advised him to contact the leader of the jihadists by telephone immediately so as not to prolong the hostages' ordeal any further. The consul hesitated, however, because he wanted to think about what innocuous diplomatic phrases the Quai d'Orsay might suggest for negotiations with hostage-takers. However, he couldn't think of anything suitable, so he first presented himself as the French consul in Bali without giving his name. He believed that this anonymity would offer him better protection from the terrorists.

Jihadi 1 shouted at him:

"Where were you hiding for so long? Did you have to fly here from Paris first? The hostages are already mad with fear. Their stares are getting crazier and crazier and the amount of the ransom is getting higher and higher. Our demand is clear and simple: two million dollars in cash, not a cent less. By the way, your twelve panicky compatriots are too much of a burden for us in the long run. We'll take you as collateral instead."

The consul was taken aback:

"How am I supposed to find the money if you're holding me hostage?"

"You're an idiot. Of course you'll get the cash first, and this tonight! Only then will we exchange your compatriots for you and the ransom money. We'll be allowed to leave unhindered, and you'll be released during the journey with us as soon as we feel safe. We won't do it any other way."

The weak-willed diplomat, who was also completely inexperienced in these matters, was taken by surprise by Jihadi 1's uncompromising terms and agreed across the board. He had just enough presence of mind to demand a conversation with a hostage. A certain Monsieur Duhamel came forward.

All the consul could think of at the moment was:

"Ça va?" ("Well, how are you?")

"Çane marche pas du tout" ("It's not going well at all"), he heard a desperate voice in his cell phone, a voice that slurred more than it spoke because of the long gagging.

The consul had it confirmed that all the hostages were still alive and then hung up completely baffled. The situation completely overwhelmed him - none of his elite schools in France had prepared him for this.

He informed Major Peng Peng about the agreement, and the latter reproached him because the diplomat would hand himself over to the hostage-takers without any safeguard.

"You should have that much faith in humanity," the consul said outwardly with confidence, but cursing himself in his mind for his clumsiness.

Of course, it was absolutely gullible to put himself and the ransom money in the hands of the terrorists. But now he had already agreed to the demands and action had to be taken quickly in the interests of the hostages. The consul was transported to Denpasar in a patrol car with flashing blue lights and reached the city in 20 minutes.

Naturally, all the banks in Bali's capital were closed at this late hour. But the consul was socializing with the branch manager of BNP Paribas where the French diplomatic mission had its bank account. The diplomat therefore took the liberty of visiting the banker during his evening entertainment, but learned that the branch did not have the required sum in dollar notes in its vault. The consul made the urgency of the request clear and entreated the branch manager to take out short-term loans in cash from other foreign banks such as HSBC, Commonwealth Bank, and Maybank.

In the meantime, the consul obtained official backing for his actions from the Foreign Ministry in Paris. In itself a mere formality, as it was well known throughout the diplomatic corps that the French government pays all the ransoms demanded. The only thing was not to let the media know about it, otherwise a scandal would blow up in your face.

After quite a while, the two million dollars were neatly bundled in a large travel bag and handed over to the consul under police protection. Now it was time to head back to the Ritz-Carlton in the patrol car. At the thought of soon being at the mercy of brutal terrorists, the diplomat suddenly panicked and refused to get into the car. Two policemen grabbed him like a prisoner and stowed him and his travel bag in the back seat of the car. He began to wail, but the other passengers ignored him. By the time he arrived at Jimbaran Beach, the consul had resigned himself to his fate.

Major Siloso was astonished to find the consul so pale and intimidated, hence he gave him a few words of encouragement. Then the head of the police operation took over the handling of the hostage exchange ex officio. Everything had to be meticulously coordinated with Jihadi 1 to ensure that there was no cheating. The reluctant diplomat and his travel bag were pushed through the crack in the office door by the police major himself, and the two men saw a revolver and two Kalashnikovs of the terrorists pointed at them, ready to fire. Duhamel and two other hostages insulted the consul as a sucker and moron when they squeezed past him during the exchange. They felt it had obviously taken too long to free them.

Now that the jihadists had the ransom money and a high-ranking hostage, they were no longer in such a hurry. After a few minutes, Jihadi 1 informed Major Peng Peng brusquely:

"Everything's okay here, except that this consul is a downright coward. He whines like a sick dog. We have to gag him so he doesn't trample on our nerves. We'll perform the Isha right now, and after the prayer I'll tell you how we plan to get out. Two of my men will always be on the alert and shoot the hostage as soon as you try to play any funny games in the meantime. Over!"

After half an hour, the leader of the terrorists called again in his gruff manner:

"We're leaving now, and no fooling around on your side. My revolver will be on the consul's neck all the time. One false move by your men and I'll pull the trigger. We will release the hostage as soon as I get the impression that our cars are not followed. Over!"

Everything happened as requested. Major Siloso clearly could not risk the French consul coming to any harm during this operation by his task force. The ten terrorists, including one wounded man, and the hostage held at bay by the revolver split up unmolested between the two Land Rovers, and then the off-road vehicles immediately sped away. The police force dared only after a minute to call for ambulances and leave the hotel compound. The police major left the criminal investigation into the terrorist attack at the Ritz-Carlton to the relevant authorities.

The holy warriors soon felt safe from pursuit on their wild ride back to their hideout in a remote mountain region of the Buleleng district in the north of the island. But what to do with the hostage? Although the consul had been promised to be released, a promise to infidels is null and void from the outset and merely a tactical ruse. For the Islamists, the diplomat was a symbol of Western decadence: flabby, spineless, cowardly, and bloated from excessive alcohol consumption. Jihadi 1 therefore felt increasingly irritated, even provoked, by this pathetic huddled figure. He sat, revolver at the ready, right behind the hostage. As they passed a lonely stretch of road just past the sleepy village of Kukup in central Bali, he gave his henchmen in the car a thumbs down. They all nodded, and the leader carried out the death sentence with a single well-aimed shot into the neck.

The corpse was disposed of at a suitable opportunity behind a densely flowering ixora bush by the roadside. Jihadi 1 called a television station in Denpasar on the executed man's smartphone and disclosed where the dead French consul could be found. Then the leader of the jihadists threw the now ownerless device onto the lifeless body with a contemptuous gesture.

Chapter 2

Two days later, a young black-bearded Muslim man came to the hospital in Singaraja near the north coast of Bali with a nasty leg injury. He explained that the wound, which was no longer fresh, stemmed from a motorcycle accident. The attending Australian doctor immediately became suspicious, as it appeared that someone had already operated on the serious injury in an amateurish manner in order to remove a bullet or several splinters. The serious and composed patient claimed that a friend had tried to wash dirt out of the wound. Unfortunately, the wound had then become infected due to a lack of disinfectant. The doctor lightheartedly suggested that gin or vodka would also have been useful for sterilization, forgetting that he was speaking to a Muslim. However, the young man didn't bat an eyelid and allowed the festering wound to be treated without expressing any pain.

Of course the doctor knew about the terrorist attack at Jimbaran Beach - the horror story had caused an uproar all over the world. He followed his obligation to report any serious injury to the police. The security authorities reacted immediately. Without a word and without any resistance on his part, the young Muslim was taken directly from the treatment room in the hospital to a patrol car and then handed over to Major Peng Peng in Denpasar.

First of all, of course, the arrested person had to be identified. However, his fingerprints did not appear in the database of known or suspected terrorists. He only gave the name Hasan, and so the police major made an effort to beat the full name out of him. But the bearded man stubbornly stuck to Hasan. Major Siloso then remembered that on some Indonesian islands it is quite common to have only one name instead of a first name and a surname, and so he finally was content with Hasan. That was all he could get out of the taciturn man anyway, although the major systematically beat him with slaps and punches and threatened him with his various firearms. As the police station in Denpasar had no appropriate equipment, the suspect was transferred to the IIS, the Indonesian Internal Security, on Java for the necessary special interrogations.

The interrogation center of the IIS, as it was called in the bureaucratic language of the Republic of Indonesia, had been set up with the help of the AIC, the US Agency for International Cooperation. It was located in spartan former barracks built by the frugal, primarily mercantile Dutch colonial power, which at the time were located in a large clearing in the Javanese rainforest, far from any human settlement.

The interrogation center was now surrounded by a kampong, a chaotic collection of huts made from bamboo poles, palm leaves, sisal ropes, and corrugated iron. These shelters were connected by rust-brown mud paths and mainly inhabited by children, chickens, cockroaches, and mosquitoes. Although the access road to the former barracks was the only paved road for miles around, even this road was flooded knee-deep during the almost daily downpours and thunderstorms - just like the entire surrounding area - as there was no sewage system. In the monsoon season the water could be up to three feet high in places, and therefore many huts in the area were built on stilts. The only solid buildings in the kampong, the police station, the mosque, and the prayer houses, however, stood directly on the muddy ground and thus constantly suffered from damp and moldy walls.

As a matter of principle, only political prisoners were brought to the IIS interrogation center: The courageous journalist who had uncovered a corruption scandal in the telecommunications industry with political ramifications; the conscientious teacher who had told his students about the atrocities committed during the American-backed suppression of the communist uprising in 1965; the correct election observer who had spoken of irregularities in the last regional elections on Java; the idealistic environmental activist who had exposed the illegal slash-and-burn of an oil palm plantation operated by major foreign investors and the subsequent air pollution caused by toxic fumes; or the cheeky young blogger who had used social networks to denounce the mismanagement and nepotism of the country's political caste. No matter whether a dictatorship or a pseudo-democratic regime held the reins in the changing political systems, the IIS interrogation center served all Indonesian rulers well and was almost always fully utilized.

Hasan was picked up at the military airport near Jakarta by an unmarked transport vehicle with barred windows in the prisoners' section. On potholed and cracked roads, the prison van passed countless kampongs and tiny subsistence farms scattered in between until it reached the interrogation center. For the detainee, this journey through the hut villages was like a time-lapse movie of his childhood and youth that Hasan had spent in a similarly bleak and hopeless environment on Sumatra, without any real education or career opportunities. It was only through the imam of his mosque that he was given a purpose and a destiny in life by turning to a militant Islam. The fundamentalist prayer leader also arranged Hasan's three-month training in a Taliban camp in Helmand province in Afghanistan.

Hasan's stay at the interrogation center began with the usual data collection: fingerprints, iris scan, DNA swab. The jihadist was surprised by the unusual appearance of the officials. They all wore light grey suits with high-necked, buttoned jackets, anthracite-colored stand-up collars and no insignia of rank. If it weren't for the gun belts around their waists, the guards, torturers, and prison bureaucrats might as well have been hotel doorkeepers. The jobs here were obviously monopolized by inhabitants of Java: the same dull-brown, smooth, grinning faces everywhere, the same coal-black straight hair, the same small statures. Hasan soon realized that this was a large-scale camouflage operation to make it difficult to recognize and identify the officers acting in these sensitive roles in civilian life out there.

After relieving himself, the young Muslim was brought in for his first interrogation. His counterpart was one of those now familiar anonymized Javanese. His grin was perhaps even more smug than that of his colleagues. Or was Hasan just imagining it in the light of the situation? The intimate conversation began with conventional methods, as Major Siloso had already used them in Denpasar, but now slightly enriched with cigarette butts on the nipples. As these hot touches had no effect on the prisoner, he had to undress completely, and the procedure of extinguishing glowing cigarette butts on sensitive parts of the body was then repeated on the penis. The maltreated man only responded by shouting "Allahu akbar!" several times in a harsh voice. The secret-service officer realized that more intensive questioning was necessary for this fanatic, but left such more robust interrogations to a specialist for the next day.

Hasan was taken to a mass cell for 15 prisoners who had no more than about 200 square feet at their disposal. Stained sheets spread out on the concrete floor had to make do as beds. A tap on the wall served as the only source of water. A hole in the floor was provided for emptying the bladders and bowels. It had to be flushed out with buckets of water after each use so that the cell inmates did not suffocate from the vile stench of piss and shit. And those were all the facilities in this lodging.

Looking at the men, Hasan realized that he was the only fundamentalist Muslim among them, and he immediately felt isolated. The other prisoners were either beardless or had the thin moustache on their upper lip that Malays and Indonesians like to sport. He was unlikely to find any supporters among these fellow prisoners for his life mission of exterminating as many infidels as possible. So he huddled down on the only free sheet, kept silent, and listened. The oppressive, muggy air dulled everyone, so that conversations were slow to develop.

A prisoner from Bandung complained about the miserable food at the IIS and began to talk about the juicy and spicy satay skewers with chicken and sweet-and-sour peanut sauce that his wife prepared. An inmate from the island of Madura preferred to replace chicken with prawns, which were particularly tasty in the coastal waters of his region, and preferred spicier chili dips and onions as side dishes. However, this culinary conversation was characterized more by wistful renunciation than by gourmandise. Some grumbled along, others raised their arms in lamentation, until a frustrated prisoner cried out:

"Stop the torture!"

Thus, he brutally silenced the satay lovers.

During the so-called evening meal, Hasan realized the reason for the complaints. A mockingly grinning guard in the usual hotel doorkeeper's suit opened the door and pushed a small, low metal tray into the cell. On it, the prison kitchen had prepared a flat bed of sticky, unseasoned, and almost cold rice. Hasan wanted to wait for the main course, but another inmate told him that this is all there is and will have to satisfy 15 mouths. The men squatted around the tray on the floor, hastily formed lumpy balls of rice with their fingers, and devoured them greedy with hunger. Some very weakened prisoners barely got a chance in this eating contest, and there was no charitable soul offering them rice balls. The solidarity of the opponents of the regime stopped when it came to food. Hasan with autosuggestion thought of plump, thick, rich, and palate-pleasing peanut sauce as he devoured the few dry morsels he had managed to grab.

At 3 o'clock in the morning, the cell door banged open and the beam of a flashlight searched for and found Hasan among the huddled figures on the sheets; it was impossible to stretch out while sleeping due to the lack of space. Two guards grabbed the young Islamist and dragged him through dark and gloomy corridors with countless cell doors, behind which horror and fear of death dwelled.

The guards finally took Hasan to a huge, brightly lit room which had apparently served as accommodation for an entire platoon of a company in the former barracks. The room was divided into bunks, from which a cacophony of shrill, agonizing screams emanated. Hasan was pushed into an empty compartment where an official was already waiting for him - with a grim, sleep-deprived expression - next to some kind of electric chair. The henchman lashed the prisoner to the chair with broad leather straps and put a wired metal headband on him. Then the torturer turned to a simple switching device and sent several electric shocks through the victim's body. If the chair hadn't been bolted to the floor, Hasan's wild rebellious resistance and grotesque convulsions would have sent it and his own body hurtling across the bunk. But as it was, the tormented man could only tug at the leather straps until he had bloodshot welts on his limbs.

"That was only the lowest level," commented the torturer, who had been awakened by the cruel spectacle of peril and helplessness before him. "We still have the rest of the night to run through the whole scale. But if you spit out who your gang mates are and where you're hiding, I'll stop right now."

The young fundamentalist remained taciturn, so his henchman moved the control lever for the current up a notch. The tugging at the leather straps became even more desperate. Otherwise, however, there was no reaction from the tortured man. The two partners in horror ran through the entire scale of the shock apparatus until the wee hours of the morning. But when even the highest intensity level produced no results, the torturer duly informed the head of the interrogation center. As an immediate measure, the latter tightened the conditions for the detainee by imposing solitary confinement. He also ordered the use of so-called robust American methods for the coming nights.

Hasan's private cell had probably once served as a storeroom at best, as it measured barely more than 20 square feet. The walls were moist from the tropical humidity and infested with a poisonous green mold that filled the prison hole with an obtrusive smell of mustiness and decay. Glass panes in the barred windows were apparently considered a superfluous luxury, allowing the muggy air from outside to flow freely into the cramped hermitage. Hasan even suspected that the open windows were a deliberate malice to make the indoor climate as oppressive as possible. The prisoner searched in vain for a water tap in the cell. This penury hit him with a vengeance in the afternoon, when his throat became as dry as paper due to the sweltering heat. Until then, he had spent the day reciting the Koran from the first sura onwards and beating to death the fat cockroaches, that ran around the cell in droves, with his sandals. Now the Islamist screamed loudly and desperately for water. After a while a pitiless voice answered through the door:

"Shut up, you stupid monkey. You only get water from the rain barrel, and it's still empty today."

The young Muslim begged his God for a rain shower soon. Nevertheless, it took until late afternoon for the floodgates of the sky to finally open. The intense pattering awoke a trace of hope in Hasan, and indeed, after the rain had stopped, a tin bowl full of water came through a crack in the door. However, the prisoner first had to pick leaves and small twigs out of the liquid of dubious value before he could drink from it in greedy gulps.

In the evening, Hasan was of course expecting food. When he hadn't received any, even after it had long since gone dark, he called for the guard. The official had a devastating message:

"The orders say that we're whacking you with a tough interrogation tonight. You won't get any food beforehand, otherwise it'll just come up as vomit and you'll make a filthy mess."

Hence Hasan had no choice but to ration the rest of the water throughout the evening and soothe his burning stomach with small sips. Then he curled up on his sheet and distracted the anxiety of his heart with further Koranic declamations. From the outside world, only the insistent buzzing of the cicadas penetrated the cell, accompanying his recitation with a monotonous rhythm.

That night, the imprisoned Islamist was picked up already at 2 a.m. by two guards. The American interrogation method is more time-consuming than the electric one, Hasan suspected in horror. The specialist, trained at a secretive outfit in Langley, Virginia, routinely began with an underwater treatment. Indeed, as essentially predicted by the prison warden, Hasan felt a piercing nausea after each breathless emergence from the tub, but this only wrung the last of his digestive juices from his stomach and, from the fifth time onwards, caused a cramped retching. The torture expert observed these reactions with great professional interest, as the next steps had to be flexibly adapted to Hasan's behavior. The questions about the members and the hiding place of the suspected terrorist gang were repeated as by a prayer wheel, but found no response.

After an hour, the specialist began to get bored by the fruitless underwater therapy and switched to another special American treatment. He placed Hasan on the floor with his hands and feet bound and put a plastic bag over his head. Then strangulation was simulated, first with a thin yet very strong nylon cord and then with a wire noose. However, the henchman was not yet so experienced in the second variant, because when Hasan's throat almost burst from strained, breathless gasping, the torturer pulled the metal loop, which was difficult to bend, even tighter, injuring his victim's throat and vocal cords. From this point on, Hasan could only slur his words instead of speaking. That night, however, he refused to make any meaningful sounds anyway, although the torturer alternated between feigned drowning and strangulation at hourly intervals.

The next night, the interrogation center had to play its last trump card against the as yet indomitable Hasan, the so-called trapeze. The expert with this device received the appreciative label "the trapeze artist" from his colleagues. He had set up his own corner in the huge hall of tortures, which he ruled all by himself. His most important piece of equipment was indeed a circus-style trapeze, a horizontal wooden bar suspended from two ropes. These slid over two pulleys attached to the ceiling, so that a clever mechanism allowed the height of the trapeze bar to be adjusted.

Two guards delivered Hasan again. His hands had already been tied behind his back in the cell as a precaution. The prisoner was astonished not to find an electric chair or a tub of water for the ordeal, but only a wooden slat suspended in the air. What additional torture could be inflicted on him with that simple gadget? He was totally starved and almost completely dehydrated anyway, as no rain had fallen the previous day and the rain barrel had therefore remained empty. In Hasan's mind, the potential for suffering seemed to have been exhausted long ago.

This trapeze in the torture hall, however, offered the imaginative mind many possibilities, as does the device of the same name under the circus dome. The trapeze artist began leisurely with the warm-up variant. He pulled a short but sturdy sisal rope through Hasan's handcuff and carefully tied one end to the handcuff and the other to the trapeze bar with several knots. With vigorous tugs, the henchman then hoisted the trapeze together with the human load to a height of about seven feet. He left his victim hanging like this for several minutes. Hasan desperately tried to stabilize his torso in as horizontal a position as possible so that the entire gravitational force of his body did not act on his shoulder joints.

Suddenly, the torturer gave the dangling legs an energetic push, causing the trapeze to swing. Further rough thrusts on the floating body set the trapeze into a wide pendulum motion that doomed Hasan's desperate efforts to keep his torso in balance. His arms were yanked over his head from behind, and with a dry crack that sounded like the breaking of brittle bones the heads of his upper arms popped out of the sockets of his shoulder blades. Hasan felt a pain he had never experienced before, a pain that struck his nervous system like a bolt of lightning and triggered mute screams of madness in his brain. His mouth, on the other hand, could only produce frenetic babbling.

The trapeze artist lowered the martyred body to the concrete floor so that he could perhaps understand the beastly sounds. But it was in vain. Consequently, the torturer turned the trapeze back into the gruesome pendulum and switched on a recording device. After he had collected about two minutes of audio material, he stopped the demonstration of Hasan's trapeze tricks. He untied the prisoner from the trapeze bar and, like a barbaric chiropractor, made a few brutal adjustments to Hasan's upper arm bones to force them back into the shoulder joints.

Back in his cell, Hasan begged Allah the Most Merciful for forgiveness for having betrayed God's warriors under the unspeakable pressure of torture. Then the Islamist slurred a passage from the Koran about the promises of paradise for truly pious Muslims: sweet fruits and beautiful girls with big, dark eyes, it says there. Finally, Hasan executed a strangulation - this time a real and not a simulated one - with his sheet, which he tied at one end to the window grille for this purpose. A slow but honor-saving death for a terrorist who had caved in during an interrogation by his enemies.

The interrogation center forwarded the data carrier with Hasan's two-minute babble to a special laboratory at Jakarta International College. There, American experts painstakingly carried out a voice and language analysis. Three recurring terms emerged from the scraps of words: Jamaal Islamiya, Jimbaran Beach, and Buleleng.

The naming of the Jamaal Islamiya, abbreviated to JI by the media, came as no surprise to Indonesian Internal Security officials. This Islamist terrorist group had been responsible for the murderous series of attacks on Kuta Beach in Bali which had gained international notoriety and spread fear and terror in Indonesia. However, the fact that the notorious JI has now ventured into large-scale terrorism again with the attack on the Ritz-Carlton Hotel - after well over ten years with only minor incidents - caused great concern and alarm.

The IIS had actually hoped to have destroyed the radical fundamentalist breeding ground for this criminal organization through raids and disruptive measures by the secret service. But apparently, religious fanaticism and the assortment of political and ideological zealots cannot simply be eradicated through persecution by state organs. What's more, Western powers repeatedly fanned the Islamist flames with their attacks in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Iraq, driving tens of thousands of angry young men into the arms of the recruiters of the terrorist gangs. If the current situation in Iraq or Libya, for example, symptomatically represents the blessings of so-called liberal democracy, then it is understandable that these men are passionately and determinedly looking for alternatives. Even within the IIS, just as in the Iraqi and Pakistani security apparatuses, there was sympathy for this view of the Islamists, but of course such sentiments could not be publicly flaunted.

Over the next few days, army helicopters from Singaraja systematically searched the Balinese district of Buleleng for signs of JI camps or training areas. In the lowlands, there exists only the unbroken, peaceful harmony of irrigated rice fields, palm and banana trees, hut villages, pagodas, and temples, hardly an environment for Islamist holy warriors. The somewhat elevated areas are dominated by lush green rice terraces (the stairways to heaven as they are also known in Bali) that fan out like fern leaves and glide over gentle slopes. In addition, spectacular cataracts burst out of the rainforest like giant gorges and again and again pagodas and temples adorn the picturesque landscape, some perched on sacred islands in deep blue mountain lakes. It was in the zone higher than one mile above sea level, around the extinct volcano Gunung Catur, where the helicopter crews really kept a very close eye out. Apart from a few coffee plantations, there are hardly any traces of human civilization there, so this remote area had the potential of being an Islamist hideout.

One of the helicopter pilots identified a cleared flat terrain in this mountain range that made a landing possible. And then, while reconnoitering a forest clearing, the remains of tent stakes were discovered in the brick-red earth as well as a charred but recently used fireplace. By decree, as it were, and out of displeasure at the lack of any other evidence, it was determined that the JI must have set up the camp they were looking for right here. But there was no sign of the terrorists themselves for miles around. They had obviously adopted the tactic of moving quickly after combat operations, which had been practiced so successfully by the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War. It could even be considered likely that the jihadists had left Bali altogether in order to find a more inconspicuous camouflage on one of the many islands in Indonesia with a predominantly Muslim population.

In any case, according to its own assessment, the IIS now had sufficient evidence to prove the resurgence of the Jamaal Islamiya with a good measure of plausibility and, in coordination with the cooperating security authorities in the region, declare a terror alert of the highest level red hot throughout Southeast Asia.

Chapter 3

The Airbus A380 made the smooth and clean landing at Changi International Airport that you would expect from a robotically programmed Singapore Airlines pilot. Robin was astonished by the announcement on board that reminded the passengers that drug offenses are punishable by death in Singapore. It seemed rather unusual to her that she was welcomed to a supposedly tourist-friendly country with such a massive threat of punishment. Perhaps this is typical of my new place of work, Robin assumed for the time being. She had obviously prepared herself for Singapore and the tasks here before her departure, and yet the experiences on the ground were often surprising and new. After all, that was exactly what made foreign missions so appealing. The peculiar welcoming culture was obviously one of the original facets here in this island state.

After the gate, a slight Chinese man in a chauffeur's uniform was waiting for Robin. He looked even more conformist and spick and span than the underlings from the People's Republic she was familiar with from her posting in Hong Kong. He held up a neat white sign with the black lettering OCEAN WORLD. The little chauffeur was probably expecting a man - he probably thought of Robin Hood or Robin Williams when he heard the first name Robin - because he didn't react to her at first. Only when she irrefutably pressed her ID card under his eyes did he manage to elicit a nod. I still chose my alias well, Robin thought with satisfaction, because it could be both male and female and thus cause embarrassing confusion among machos of all shades.

She was very relieved that after the long and tiring flight she could evade the annoying questioning and body searches that the other passengers had to endure because of the terror alert in Singapore. As a high-ranking employee of the Agency for International Cooperation, she enjoyed certain privileges. Smiling noncommittally all the time, the Ocean World delegate ushered her through doors and corridors that were normally reserved for airport staff. In the baggage claim area, the suitcases from Robin's flight were already circling around on a conveyor belt. In terms of efficiency, Changi International Airport was simply unbeatable!

In the car, Robin asked the Ocean World Chinese to take her immediately to her quarters at the state university NUS. During the drive, the AIC delegate struggled to keep her eyes open, so exhausted was she. Robin was only vaguely aware of an expressway lined with coconut and fan palms and hibiscus bushes, a bridge with a view of the spectacular Singapore skyline that almost jolted her out of half-sleep, and another expressway alongside a gigantic container dock. She remembered through a haze of memory that, according to her briefings, Singapore was the largest transshipment port in the world. So you had to expect huge port facilities after all.

The driver communicated with his passenger in an expressive silence - which didn't exactly help to perk her up. It was only when they took a left turn off the city expressway that Robin realized that they had been cruising on the left all along. Here, as in most of their ex-colonies, the eccentric British had left behind the strange habit of driving on the "wrong" side of the road. After a few swinging bends that made Robin's tired head roll back and forth like a bowling ball, they reached a compound consisting of several high residential buildings. The chauffeur deposited Robin and her luggage in front of Block A. Nearly dozing off already, she staggered into the elevator and then into the apartment on the twelfth floor that local AIC staff had reserved for her.

It was late afternoon. Contrary to the common recommendation to combat jet lag by taking up immediately the local biorhythm, Robin threw herself exhausted onto her bed after quickly removing her shoes, pants, and blouse. The overseas traveler fell into a restless sleep and dreamed of dark and menacing figures with names like Ahmed and Salah.

After a few hours, she woke up with a start. The air in the apartment was as thick and sticky as swollen yeast dough. In her haste to get to bed, Robin had forgotten to switch on the air conditioning. But the heavy pressure on Robin's lungs was not the real reason for her premature awakening. From the apartment above her came the increasingly shrill and insistent screams of a woman:

"Pän! Pään! Päään!"

This had obviously woken Robin from her sleep. She struggled to get up, as she had to turn up the air-con anyway, but also to take up a listening post on a professional impulse.

The woman's shouts, in an Asian accent that Robin could not yet determine, seemed to be directed at a person called Paine and became increasingly louder and more insistent. But this person did not react and remained eerily silent. It was only after a hysterical, drawn-out "Pääään!" that a phlegmatic mumbling could be heard from the far end of the apartment, as if the clamor there were only perceived in a very muffled form and hardly deserved any attention. The male voice sounded purely mechanical, as if it had often reacted to similar disturbances in an automatically controlled manner. Despite the modest echo, the woman did not let up. When she shouted at the man with her cutting voice in a particularly unpleasant and demanding tone, he seemed to take pity on her and spoke soothingly like a psychotherapist and in broad American:

"Do you need something? Would you like cookies? Or how about some chocolate sweets? You like them so much, don't you? And maybe you also want something to drink. Why don't you have a glass of water? Or would you prefer orange juice?"

As a result, the patronized woman completely lost control and shrieked in a growing crescendo:

"I don't want cookies! I don't want a drink! I want money! I do all the housework and you don't give a damn. I cook, wash, iron, clean. I do everything myself and you don't pay for it! Even a maid is treated better. You think if you lay me on the bed every few weeks and satisfy yourself on me, that's enough. As if I'd get anything out of your helpless fumbling around!"

Paine was perplexed and stammered:

"I'll buy you all the clothes you want ... We'll go to Orchard Road tomorrow ... and you choose ... something nice."

The woman took a deep breath and announced in a loud, pathetic voice:

"I won't be fobbed off with the cheap clothes you grant me after an eternity. I want cash, and I mean grands and not dimes. Then I'll buy myself the elegant clothes I deserve! And you can play your paltry sex games with yourself!"

That was the signal for Paine to close the door to the small kitchen balcony. There was no need for the whole of Block A of Kent Vale to learn his bedroom secrets. Robin only picked up a few more snippets from him, like:

"Calm down, honey."

"I'll sort it out, I promise."

"I'll give you 500 dollars right now, that's enough, isn't it?"

Then the whirring of the air-conditioning motor on the balcony drowned out the woman's heart-rending sobs. Before it became quiet altogether, only subdued arguing and the frantic opening and slamming of cupboard doors could be heard from the apartment. The two disputants had obviously retreated to a room for which it was no longer easy for Robin to eavesdrop.

The listening as a matter of professional duty had made her half-awake and her vegetative system was demanding its due. The catering on board, even in business class, is at best enough to satisfy minimal needs during the flight. Passengers shouldn't expect that they will be fed more than that for their paltry thousands of dollars!

Compassionate colleagues, or Kent Vale service staff, had stocked the kitchen with the bare essentials. Robin poured boiling water over a teabag, sat down in a club chair by the coffee table in the living room and wanted to reflect on what she had just heard. But the view from the room, which was offered through the glass front running along its entire length, temporarily distracted the AIC delegate.

What a glittering panorama and what a lavish play of lights were there to behold! In the foreground, a huge condominium complex of the posh category, magnificently illuminated and rising out of the dark terrain like a gigantic luxury cruise ship out of the blackness of a nocturnal sea. Behind it on the left, the glaring floodlights and the constantly moving overhead cranes with their colorful spotlights at the West Coast Terminal, where container ships were of course also loaded and unloaded with great intensity during the night. To the right and further back, the Jurong East shipyard with the same late-night hustle and bustle and a spectacular lights show similar to that at a mega rock concert. And in the background, beyond the Singapore Strait, the oil refineries on the Jurong polder island, with their chains of lights on flashing aluminum and steel - pipes, supports, struts, pumps, valves - flickering and sparkling like galaxies of stars. Every now and then, a refinery chimney hissed red glow and thick gray smoke into the night sky like a flamethrower with furious energy. Seemingly unimpressed by all these fireworks, the smooth, pitch-black surface of the sea lay there, reflecting the most brilliant lights muffled and dimmed, while all others were absorbed without reflection and swallowed up for ever by the yawning deep. The arm of the sea rested in eternal equanimity and seemed boundless because of the horizon being invisible at night. And yet it formed only a tiny offshoot of the immeasurable expanse of the Pacific Ocean which was at best geographically and geodetically, but in no way sensually comprehensible - unless you looked at it from outer space, the logically thinking Robin admitted.

It took her a few minutes to tear herself away from this fascinating spectacle and her almost epistemological reflections. What a contrast to the view from her apartment in a nondescript bedroom suburb of Washington, D.C.! Looking out of the window there, she had never been able to get into raptures or musings. On the contrary: She always succumbed to melancholy moods and quickly needed a strong drink.

Gradually her thoughts returned to Paine. This guy could only be the AIC employee Paine Townsend, who, according to the contact list stored in her memory, lived in Block A of Kent Vale. There is unlikely to be a second American with the unusual first name Paine in the same building. One particularly patriotic couple had obviously named their son after Thomas Paine, one of the great pioneers of the American independence movement. It could not have been foreseen that this offspring would grow up to be a rather pathetic figure. But other children were also named Washington or Lincoln full of pathos, and yet they never stood out in their lives, so we should cut Paine's parents some slack, Robin thought.

Either way, she couldn't believe that a man like Paine whose private life was so ridiculous was working for the AIC. What were his duties in Singapore and how did he fulfill them? She had to find out during her first meeting with the local AIC coordinator Clive. And what about Paine's partner? Had he possibly let her in on his activities against the rules or betrayed himself in a moment of amorous excitement? Was there a file on her? Was she watched? Perhaps she was even operating, under the clever guise of the oppressed and exploited woman, as an enemy agent for the Russians or the Chinese. Robin had already become acquainted with the Asian varieties of devious female spies during her assignment in Hong Kong.

She helped herself to a second cup of tea and began to unpack her two suitcases. Although Robin was expecting to stay in Singapore for at least six months, she hadn't taken much in the way of clothing with her. Her wardrobe was not at all suited to a tropical climate. Therefore Robin planned to buy appropriate garments here in Singapore, with Bermuda shorts, light cotton blouses, airy T-shirts, and perhaps even some chic, figure-enhancing batik dresses.