Allahu Akbar! The men were delighted. If they’d been riding in an open-top vehicle, they’d have started firing their weapons in the air out of sheer exuberance. The guys in the crew cab repeated the glorious message for those in the back, who might not have heard.

In fact this was nothing entirely new, since waterborne attacks were a familiar and well-tried terrorist tactic. In 2003 Iraqi agents in Jordan had been arrested for trying to poison water supplying US troops near the Iraq border. Yet nothing remotely on this kind of scale had ever been attempted, or even dreamed of, before. It was as ambitious as 9/11 and could even eclipse it. If they could pull it off, they’d be heroes for the rest of time.

Only Abbud wanted to know the specifics of Nazim’s scheme. ‘How are we going to do this?’

‘It’s very simple. I expect that we will meet a significant security presence as we push our way inside. We kill as many as we can find, as quickly as we can, until there’s no more resistance. Then we find the right pipe, or reservoir, or whatever, and dump in all fourteen barrels.’

‘You’re talking about thousands and thousands of cubic metres of water pumping out every day,’ Abbud said, putting his engineer’s hat back on. ‘What we have will be as dilute as a drop in the ocean.’

‘But still concentrated enough to make a great many infidels very, very sick,’ Nazim replied with supreme confidence. ‘It takes only a small amount of the poison to be effective. The young and the elderly will be most vulnerable to the toxic effect. They will die in large numbers. Inshallah, we can kill hundreds of thousands of healthy adults too. Not to mention the terror it will strike into the entire country as people become afraid to drink, or splash even a single drop on their skin. Fear will be as effective a weapon as the weapon itself. The authorities will overreact by cutting off the water supply. Without water, even a strong nation is brought to its knees. Businesses and factories will shut down. Agriculture and food production will be crippled. Their whole economic infrastructure will collapse, and there will be rioting and crime as the survivors of the attack begin to starve and fight among themselves. The shockwaves will continue for months afterwards.’

‘Much will depend on finding the right part of the system to dump the contents of the barrels into,’ Abbud said.

‘You’re the engineer.’

‘I am. But these facilities are complex. One mistake, we could end up pouring the whole lot into a sludge tank, or any number of useless places, and it would never even make it to the public water supply.’

‘Then we find someone there who can tell us where to put it. A senior manager, a chief technical officer, someone like that.’

‘What if they refuse to play ball?’