Rachmaninov
Copyright© 2019 by Harry Carton
Chapter 9
Durban, Union of South Africa
South African Air flight 1317 landed at Victoria Airport from Pretoria, Bloemfontein and Cape Town – late as usual. The arrival time didn’t matter at all to Muhammad Bin Salaam. He’d been in the air almost continuously for thirty hours. Well in the air or in an airport transit lounge. Algiers to Madrid to Lagos to Cape Town to Bloemfontein to Pretoria to Victoria. All to arrive in Durban before the shipment of nuclear material from Bandar Abbas in two days.
The men from the Team of the Prophet would be arriving tomorrow.
Bin Salaam took a taxi to Durban, dressed like any other businessman – he even carried a briefcase, filled with the shipping papers. He checked in to the Albany Hotel, in the center of Durban’s busy downtown. He retrieved a suitcase that had been left for him yesterday by a delivery van registered to a shell company in Shalcross, a small town some twelve kilometers to the west.
In the suitcase were clothes that would turn Bin Salaam from a terrorist masquerading as a Middle-Eastern businessman into a South African worker fronting for a merchant. He scanned the internet directory for truck rentals and selected one that “sounded” Jewish: Abrams & Sons Transport. After all, if the detonation due to take place in a few days were to be linked to Israel, it should be with as many Jews as he could find. A phone call to Abrams reserved a lorry that would be big enough to haul the fissile material.
He changed clothes and slipped out a side entry to the Albany Hotel, took public transport to the Abrams & Sons site and soon drove away with the lorry. He drove down to the wharves, looking for a “space for let” sign in the warehouse district, near Maydon Wharf Street – the street that ran along the primary docking facility in Durban’s busy port.
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.