by Giles Foden
She turned the body over and cried out in horror. The face was half eaten away by maggots, and the upturned eyes gleamed with a dull, grey sheen. One ear was missing.
26
‘His name is Leggatt. He was washed up on the beach.’
‘So what are you telling me?’ Mort Altenburg replied, leaning across the desk in his office at the Kili. ‘That she’s found the body of some old English guy with his ear cut off and this has something to do with the case? I can’t see what. It’s probably just a routine murder, a robbery gone wrong. What about the boyfriend?’
‘Nothing yet,’ Queller said, relating what Miranda had told him in an anguished phone call from Zanzibar. ‘She’s still looking. But this is all part of it, I’m sure. I know we’ve had our differences, Mort, but I’m certain she’s on to something. They saw some Arabs heading out there a few weeks ago. I think one of them’s this guy.’
He passed Altenburg a photograph across the desk.
‘Yousef Mourad. It’s from our files. He’s the same one who was on the security video. In the truck. She thinks she saw him on a motor boat heading for the island earlier.’
‘I grant you he looks a bit like the one on the tape,’ Altenburg conceded. ‘And yes, given what we’ve got from the guy picked up in Karachi, I’m beginning to come round to the idea this might be a bin Laden operation.’
He took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. ‘But the Zanzibar side of it’s just speculation. It’s not certain he was the man on the boat.’
Queller set his face. ‘Well, I’m going to check it out.’
‘Wonderful. You do that. I can’t wait to put in my report how Jack Queller, the great terrorist hunter, wasted his time after the bombings kicking around the beaches of Zanzibar. Meanwhile American citizens are arriving back home in body bags. To be met with honours by the First Lady and the President and their grieving relatives. It’s on CNN, Jack.’
Queller didn’t need telling. The rolling-news station had been showing the same pictures all day: the Presidential couple and the families of the bomb victims waiting expectantly on the tarmac at Andrews Air Force base, outside Washington. Queller had watched it twice already in his room. The camera zooming in. The President silent, tears running down his cheek as the honour guards unload the flag-draped caskets. As a military band plays ‘Nearer My God to Thee’, the names of the dead are announced in sombre tones. To Queller’s mind, the repetition diminished the pathos. Broadcast so many times, the event became almost unreal.
‘– not to mention,’ Altenburg was saying, ‘the 220-plus non-Americans who’ve died. What are you going to say to them, Jack, when you get back from the beach? That you’re the guy who trained bin Laden? I’m sure they’d really like to hear that.’
‘If you hadn’t pulled my operation we might have stopped this. I gave you fair warning.’
‘The threat scenarios you prepared were flawed. As for the other thing, you’re lucky you weren’t put on a charge.’
Queller gathered up the photograph from the polished wood, scrabbling at it with his hand. Without saying anything further, he turned and left the room. Breathing heavily, he walked down the stairs to the Kili bar. He needed a drink. His stump hurt.
As he crossed the lobby, which was busy with guests arriving and departing, something odd happened. A young, pale-faced woman in orange robes approached him, carrying a bunch of carnations. Without saying anything, she held one out to him. Frowning, he shook his head. She smiled beatifically and approached another man, the father of a family of tourists – just arrived from England, by the sound of the children’s babbling voices. This man, too, waved her away, whereupon the hotel’s manager emerged from behind the desk and escorted her outside. Shaking his head, Queller went through to order his drink.
He sat in the bar with a whisky, looking out of the window and trying not to think about what Altenburg had said. The sight of the relatives on TV – one young girl sobbing loudly as the pallbearers passed by – had sent a thick black jet of guilt coursing through his veins.
He stared out over the Kili car park. It was dusk. There was a strange vehicle there, kind of a long jeep, painted coffee-brown, with a raised dais. Two men dressed in khaki fatigues were clambering into the back. Whites. One was carrying a rifle case. It was a modern version of a shooting trap, Queller realised, a converted long-wheelbase Land Rover with the top cut off. The men looked sleek. Perfect male specimens. He himself had been like that once. He watched as a Tanzanian driver ran across the car park and, after an obsequious performance in front of the two white men, who were cussing him for being late, jumped into the cab.
They must be white hunters, Queller reflected, as the trap drove off. He’d read in a magazine someplace that there were still hunting concessions in northern Tanzania. Arusha way. Places where rich men – it was nearly always men, and nearly always his own countrymen, too – came to shoot lion, elephant and zebra. There was, if he recalled the article correctly, a sliding scale of costs for the trophies.
He thought about the cost of his own involvement with bin Laden, realising as he did so that the same CNN footage was playing on the TV in the bar.
‘They are a portrait of America today and of America tomorrow,’ President Clinton was saying, of those who had died.
Queller remembered America’s yesterdays, a time when he himself had nearly died in the service of his country. It felt such a long time ago, a whole world away. But it was only the eighties. Escorted by Green Berets and sometimes members of the British SAS, he had made a number of trips across the Pakistan border to link up with units of the Afghan mujahidin.
‘Each of them had an adventurous spirit, a generous soul. Each relished the chance to see the world and make it better.’
Since the invasion at the beginning of the decade, the Afghans, together with groups of Arab wahhabi, of which bin Laden’s was the best known, had been holding out against the might of the Soviet army. As an intelligence officer, it had been Queller’s role to assess the training and supply needs that the West could offer them.
‘No matter what it takes, we must find those responsible for these evil acts and see that justice is done,’ Clinton continued. ‘There may be more hard road ahead, for terrorists target America because we act and stand for peace and democracy.’
Queller had met with bin Laden a number of times. The Saudi had become a kind of all-round logistical resource for the Afghan fighters, providing food and weapons. These were paid for mainly by an inheritance of around $300 million (his father’s civil-engineering firm had made a fortune building accommodation for pilgrims to the Holy Places in Saudi Arabia), but also by a system of donations from Muslim governments, communities and individuals around the world. Bin Laden had brought in bulldozers and explosives from the family firm to blast new roads and build redoubts, landing strips and weapons depots for the Afghans. His operations included a vast network of tunnels in the Zazi mountains, in Bakhtiar Province, that became a large hospital for guerrillas injured in the fighting.
Later, he had begun fighting with the mujahidin himself, becoming something of a legend for his bravery at the head of a contingent of Arab and Afghan troops. He fought and ate alongside the ordinary soldiers in the mountain trenches in those days, distinguishing himself in hand-to-hand combat. On one occasion, the story was told, he had driven a bulldozer at a Soviet position while being strafed by helicopter gunships. Queller himself remembered the horror of those things – the way the cartridge cases fell out of the chutes at thousands of rounds per minute, the orange flame that spurted, hellishly, from the muzzles.
He swished the whisky round his mouth and looked down the bar. The man behind it was filling a bowl of peanuts, holding an expression of fierce concentration as he poured them from their plastic bag into a steel container. Above him, the television boomed and flickered.
‘Terror is the tool of cowards,’ intoned his old friend Secretary Albright on the television, adding her message to C
linton’s at the ceremony. ‘It is not a form of political expression. It is certainly not a manifestation of religious faith. It is murder, plain and simple.’
Bin Laden’s support – arms and money – didn’t just come from Arab organisations, like the Saudi Red Cross and the Istakhbarat (Saudi Intelligence). Through Queller himself, the CIA had supplied him with Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to bring down Russian gunships. Queller had also been instrumental in providing US funding for a cave complex bin Laden had built – to a CIA design – at Tora Bora, deep in the Afghan mountains. British MI6 had supplied advisers for other schemes.
There had been another side to it. Not only had American tax dollars (to the tune of $500 million a year) and British pounds paid for military equipment and training, they had also facilitated the rise of a drugs empire that went hand in hand with the military operation. Queller had been only tangentially involved in this, but he had seen with his own eyes the shipments of raw opium go out in C-130 cargo planes under the auspices of ex-SAS and South African mercenaries. Ostensibly there to train mujahidin, the mercenaries had been in the opium trade up to their necks. They were loosely linked to an organisation called Keenie-Meenie Services, so named from the Swahili for the movement a snake makes through grass. KMS had friends deep in the heart of the British military establishment, but government complicity was totally deniable. In this way it was useful for both the UK and the US: members of the same outfit had been hired to mine Managua harbour during the Contra business. In Afghanistan – sometimes with Green Berets, sometimes without – Keenie-Meenie taught mujahidin the use of explosives and timers, and how to deploy anti-aircraft weapons. And in the background always were two men: Osama bin Laden, ‘Mr Sam’ as a South African employee of KMS christened him, and Jack Queller.
Over the years, Queller himself had watched bin Laden’s astonishing metamorphosis. When he’d first known him, he was a soft youth laughed at by other mujahids. He and other Arab scions of wealthy Gulf families were known as ‘Gucci muj’ by the Afghans because of their fine clothes and shoes. But by the time of the siege of Jalalabad, the key battle of the war, the young civil engineer had become a very different figure, a tough commander in traditional shalwar kameez and carrying a Kalashnikov, like the other Afghan leaders. As many as ten thousand fighters from all over the Muslim world – Algerians, Saudis, Egyptians, Filipinos, even Chinese Uighurs – passed through his camps.
It was these, or loosely affiliated cells of the same, that now formed the basis of al-Qaida. Moving his base of operations to Sudan, bin Laden (now known as ‘the Sheikh’ or ‘the Director’) bought land for training camps, set up factories and farms to produce income streams and – as was now all too clear – set up bases and safe houses in Kenya, Tanzania and elsewhere. On Queller’s advice, the CIA knew that there was more to bin Laden’s operations than met the eye. The Ladin [sic] International Company wasn’t just an import–export concern. Taba Investment didn’t just trade in currency. The Themar al-Mubaraka Farm didn’t just grow sesame, peanuts and corn. Hijra Construction didn’t just build bridges and roads.
When bin Laden resurfaced in Afghanistan in 1996, after being forced to leave Sudan by the Khartoum government, many of these businesses reverted to their ostensible functions. Queller sipped his drink. That was one of the frightening and unusual things about al-Qaida – the way it could slip to and fro, over relatively long periods of time, between the routines of everyday life and business and the extraordinary world of a terror organisation, whose very purpose was to subvert the everyday.
But was the everyday quite so explicable and dependable, anyway? The grievances of the sort of people who joined al-Qaida were as twisted into what we think of as ordinariness as the weave in a carpet: the ordinary, sometimes murderous activities of his state and their own – it was from these things that the terrorists drew their strength and self-justification.
Yet it wasn’t just politics, there was a perversion of religion there too, that lure of the sinister, that combination of other-worldliness, brutality and fantasy which bin Laden himself embodied. The fantasy part was important, and in a surprising manner: Queller had established that bin Laden named al-Qaida after Isaac Asimov’s Foundation books, which had been translated into Arabic under that title. Set over a vast timescale, the saga comprised a series of tales in which a group of savants took it upon themselves to save the galaxy from chaos and corruption. Their leader, a so-called ‘psycho-historian’, could see patterns in time and so predict the future.
Now the fantasy was factual, all too factual. In the years after his association with the renegade Saudi, it infuriated Queller that the intelligence community had ignored him when he’d warned them about the global scale and ambitions of bin Laden’s enterprise – how his front companies were procuring weapons and stockpiling chemicals for explosives. Training impressionable youngsters in hijacking, kidnapping, assassination … But in the eyes of Mort Altenburg and others, he was already a dinosaur, a one-armed creature from the Cold War lagoon.
A mass delusion or dissimulation had taken place, Queller believed. Once the Soviet threat had diminished, it seemed a period of unparalleled prosperity had begun. The West feasted like Belshazzar on what was called the ‘peace dividend’ – but the writing was on the wall the whole time. Now all of them, himself included, were paying the price.
So were others. More stories were beginning to emerge from Nairobi. The pedestrian whose head was blown open. The woman who was standing in his shadow when it happened and escaped unharmed. The buried man who could feel the bodies of dead people all around him in the darkness, who tied his broken leg to his good leg and dragged himself, inch by suffocating inch, to where the rescuers could hear his cries.
Queller watched an advertisement for a chain of prestige hotels roll down the TV screen. In diverse locations worldwide, all the group’s establishments were vaunted aloud as being of ‘unparalleled excellence and luxury’. He shuddered. Normal living, never mind luxury, seemed an alien concept in the present situation. Bin Laden, he thought, must have had some expectation of how many Africans, as opposed to Americans, would be killed, yet they could in no way be seen as a worthwhile target. He shook his head and sipped more whisky. There was no point in looking for logic in that quarter. Yet it was natural to do so. Even when one was aware that poison filled his bloodstream, it was hard to accept that one’s adversary acted not just on moral convictions at variance with one’s own, but a different kind of intelligence too.
And a different theology. Queller had long maintained that Islam lent itself to distortion by terrorists because of the low value it placed on the material world. If you believed something, the human frame included, was merely an illusion, it was easier to destroy it. Although, by the same argument, what would be the point?
The two great religions tensed, like wrestlers entwined in a pose, over the question of what constituted man’s fall. It was a topic that fascinated Queller, and he planned to make it the centrepiece of a lecture he had been invited to give to the Islamic Studies department at Rutgers University. Though what audiences really wanted, he’d gathered from previous lectures, were stories of guns and bombs, and glimpses of grand conspiracies.
In Christianity, the expulsion from paradise involved humanity’s disobedient desire for knowledge. In Islam the loss of Eden also came from eating the forbidden fruit, but the fault was Satan’s. Adam and Hawwa’s fall was caused by their seeing the world as real in its own terms rather than acknowledging there was no reality but Allah. Acceptance of this (literally islam: surrender) was the fundamental pillar of the faith and the route to redemption, allowing humankind to pass across that bridge which separates the two worlds.
La ilaha Allah. There is no God if it is not Allah. The phrase itself was a kind of bridge.
To Queller’s mind, Islam had more mystic force than Christianity, because it struck at the core of one’s everyday perceptions. In a distorted form, this force could become a tool for p
sychic attack. So it was with al-Qaida, whose members were encouraged or coerced into believing they were renunciating a polluted world. Like the leader of a cult, bin Laden used Islam’s innate mysticism to bewitch his followers in this way – despite his professed brand of Islam, Wahhabism, strictly forbidding esoteric practices. Even music was banned.
Queller believed that as well as fostering them in others, bin Laden suffered from such psychic attacks himself. The twin Islamic doctrines of the illusory nature of creation, and the need for self-abnegation, had some resonance with the psychological conditions of delusion and repression. Disregarding all authority but one’s own definition of Allah could, in a diseased mind, lead to a massive expansion of belief in the power of the will, and the assumption of mythological proportions.
Then again, the ingredients for a hell-broth of hatred and trouble could be found in many religions. Feeling irresolute, Queller watched two waiters move a bamboo screen away from a raised platform at the edge of the room. There were large loudspeakers on the platform, and a drum kit and a microphone attached to a pole. There was, it was clear, going to be music in the Kili bar that night.
He had seen the germ of the hatred long ago. As it became clear the Soviets would withdraw, Queller had begun to notice a change in bin Laden’s attitude to him. In the early years, he had been warm and welcoming. Later, his manner cooled. He started to conflate the Soviets and the Americans even in Queller’s hearing, seeing them all as infidel superpowers – unbelievers who threatened the Muslim world. What irked bin Laden most was how the external policy of the Saudi regime had so swiftly attached itself to America as the US grew in power after the Second World War. Throwing off the yoke of the British, they should, in bin Laden’s view, have tried to develop an indigenous Islamist policy rather than associating themselves with the kufr.