Zanzibar

by Giles Foden

  ‘The word,’ vouchsafed the CNN reporter, ‘is that he is now at an opium farm south of Jalalabad. It is not at all certain that any of the members of his organisation have been killed. Back to you, Peter.’

  ‘Thanks, Wendy. Now over to William Cohen at the Pentagon,’ cued the anchorman.

  ‘We have taken these actions to reduce the ability of these terrorist organisations to train and equip their misguided followers,’ the US Defense Secretary said in his briefing. ‘Those who attack our people will find no safe place, no refuge from the long arm of justice.’

  As he spoke, Miranda realised that Queller’s views had rapidly become official US policy. They must have picked up further al-Qaida people while she had been away. Pointing the finger at bin Laden himself, Cohen added, in regard to the al-Shifa plant, that the terrorist leader had ‘contributed to this particular facility’.

  She went outside into the garden to call Queller on her mobile again, itched once more by the feeling that the need to be close to Nick, and to experience the reprisals as they unfolded on the screen, was a dereliction of duty. The wire-mesh door swung behind her. She walked about in the hot sun, hoping that a signal might come if she changed her position.

  It was no good. She looked upwards, as if the weather had something to do with it, and gazed at the immense blue-and-white spread of the sky; the cloud mass was breaking up into tiny points as if – it was her father’s phrase, throw sugar at you, that drifted into her mind.

  She noticed a bushbaby in a mango tree. Putting the phone in her pocket, she walked over and stood under the tree, watching the squirrel-like animal take a piece of fruit between its tiny claws and nibble at it exquisitely.

  Its face and the movement of its paws were terrifyingly human. The evolutionary message was clear; there seemed only the filmiest of screens between her and the creature in the tree. Miranda felt, in that deeply interfused moment – interfused with the yellow fruit and sugared skies as well as the animal itself – a kind of astonishment at being alive at all.

  Yet as she probed the strange experience, the link between it and the bushbaby broke like a twig; the feeling was gone. She took one last look at the little creature – with its face of an immature human embryo, rounded by an eskimo’s furry hood – and walked back across the courtyard.

  Inside, the whole madhouse, shrieking thing was still playing out. CNN had switched to a feed from ABC, which had a scoop. ‘I have never met him,’ the captioned owner of the al-Shifa factory, Salal Idris, was saying of bin Laden. A reporter from the network tracked the businessman down in Saudi Arabia. ‘I have never dealt with him. I have never knowingly dealt with any one of his agents.’

  ‘Still can’t get through,’ she said, hooking her shoulders under Nick’s outstretched arm on the sofa. ‘Have I missed anything?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I can’t get a handle on it. What’s the point of bombing if it doesn’t kill the guy? It doesn’t make sense.’

  *

  He was right. Getting at the truth behind the spectacle, as the TV ineluctably shaped it, was like looking through a steamed-up window only to find another behind it, and another, more and more to infinity. They could have polished the window till it was thin as tissue paper and they still wouldn’t have seen through. Perhaps there was little understanding in it anyway, this endless etcetera of events which led from dead Russians in Afghanistan, via this, that and the other, through dead Africans and Americans in Nairobi and Dar, to the bombardment of a country with some of the highest levels of malnutrition ever recorded.

  The deaths to come, in the parched fields of Sudan, would never appear on CNN, or in the New York Times – but a lot of work went into them. Over the previous week, progress reports from the investigation into the embassy bombings had flooded into the White House situation room from all over the national security apparatus. Everything, from interviews with suspects to trawls through telephone intercepts and satellite-surveillance tapes, seemed to point to bin Laden. Queller had been vindicated. Even Mort Altenburg agreed with him now – to the extent of saying, to others at least, that he had thought so all along. President Clinton met in secret with six advisers to discuss a counter-attack. The group included, in all probability, Security Director Berger and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, as well as General Tom Kirby from the Pentagon. They decided that al-Shifa and Khost were the targets to go for.

  The planners worked round the clock. Once the targets had been pinpointed by several of the US government’s twenty-four global positioning satellites (GPS), the weapons units of six US navy warships and a submarine locked on to the coordinates. Two of the ships were in the Red Sea, the others, including the submarine, were in the Arabian Gulf. They were, assortedly, part of the USS Abraham Lincoln Battle Group, the USS Dwight Eisenhower Battle Group, and the USS Essex Amphibious Readiness Group. The sub was the USS Columbia.

  The next stage involved logging the coordinates of the targets into the ‘mission-tailored’ tracking systems of eighty Tomahawk cruise missiles. These systems comprised, in addition to GPS, Terrain Contour Matching (TERCOM) and Digital Scene Matching Area Correlation (DSMAC). Like Tomahawk® itself, all these had been registered as trademarks by the US Navy, which had lately made its first sale of the package to a foreign country – the United Kingdom had bought sixty of the missiles.

  With the systems primed, it was just a matter of waiting for General Kirby to relay President Clinton’s final executive implementation order, which was delivered over an encrypted line from Martha’s Vineyard. Once the holiday order had been given, initiating the vertical launch systems of the various vessels was a matter of diverse hands turning diverse keys and punching diverse buttons. It was all as safe as could be, and as controlled: the organisation of violence. Every step in the process was as cross-checked and balanced as the government under whose auspices the operation was taking place. And the hands were strong hands, at the ends of strong arms, rolled with khaki, and attached to well-muscled bodies topped with shaven, right-thinking, patriotic heads. Some wore caps, some were white, some were black. One nation under God, indivisible, liberty and justice for all.

  In this way, in defence of such precepts, navy weapons officers detonated the solid-booster explosive charges that lifted the Tomahawks from their silos. The missiles rose straight up at first. Then, the optimum altitude having been reached, their casings fell away. Tail fins and wings were deployed, pushed out of slots in the sides of the missiles by automated servo motors. Tiny rockets on the missiles changed the angle of thrust. Then the turbofan propulsion kicked in. After that, the missiles ceased to be projectiles and became something more like small robotic planes, just over six metres in length and half a metre in diameter.

  Four score strong, they descended to a lower altitude, to avoid radar detection. Silver specks, cigarette-sized in the sky, they left vapour trails like children’s crayons on nursery walls. But the vapour did not last, it disappeared as swiftly as childhood too. As a Navy press release put it: ‘Because of its long range, lethality, and extreme accuracy Tomahawk® has become the weapon of choice for the US Department of Defense.’

  Security Director Berger observed that the point of using Tomahawks was to avoid ‘giving the show away’. On TV screens worldwide – in a hotel lounge in Zanzibar, in a suburban house in Florida, at a secret location in Afghanistan – he explained after the fact that ‘the primary motivator here was maintaining operational secrecy’.

  The missiles continually realigned themselves by comparing time and location signals transmitted by atomic clocks in the satellites to their own on-board clocks and computers. From these calculations they extrapolated the ever-decreasing distance to the targets and made adjustments accordingly, also taking into account the shape of the underlying terrain and the prevailing weather patterns.

  Detonation was simultaneous with impact, either from side on, or (in which case the missiles were programmed to make a parabola in the last minutes of their journey)
directly above. At the factory, observers reported three large explosions. Walls were blown out, and steel and concrete thrown over the compound. At the camps, command and communication facilities, weapon and ammunition dumps and training areas, such as shooting ranges, were destroyed. Twenty-seven people were killed.

  It was a terrorist university, and what it taught was death. From the outside it looked like an ordinary factory, but deep in its underground bunkers they were making deadly nerve gas. Keep tuned to CNN for updates on the US missile strikes on Afghanistan and Sudan!

  Miranda and Nick sat together in silence as the reporting gathered pace. As the day progressed, coverage switched from the delivery of the Tomahawks to their effects. In the countries where the missiles had fallen, important officials gave their views. The strikes were ‘a gross violation of human rights’, declared the Taliban Foreign Ministry in Kabul.

  The screen showed thousands of Afghan protesters stoning the deserted US embassy in the city. Then switched to Khartoum, where a similar scene took place, crowds climbing the fence of the embassy building (which had also been evacuated several years ago) and setting light to American flags.

  ‘Down, down USA!’ howled the protesters.

  ‘This is a terrorist action,’ said the President of Sudan, Omar el-Bashir, more soberly. ‘This aggression targets Muslim and Arab people. They have no right to strike Sudan without any vindication or evidence. Clinton and America will have to pay.’

  As to the question of whether or not the al-Shifa plant was being used to make nerve gas or other chemical weapons, he remarked: ‘Putting out lies is not new for the United States and its President. A person of such immorality will not hesitate to tell any lie.’ He went on to call the beleaguered President ‘a war criminal of the first degree’.

  Elsewhere in the Arab world, the reaction to the missile strikes was no less outraged. ‘Lewinsky’s dress is no longer the preoccupation of the world after Clinton has discovered Osama bin Laden’s shalwar kameez,’ declared an editorial in Beirut’s Al-Kifah Al-Arabi newspaper.

  ‘It is a conspiracy against the Muslim world,’ said Qazi Hussain, leader of Pakistan’s Jamaat e-Islami party. ‘We will join the jihad!’ shouted demonstrators on the streets of Karachi. They, too, were burning American flags, along with effigies of President Clinton. For good measure – and the cameras zoomed in on this – they stamped the burning embers into the pavement.

  The US government responded bullishly to the criticisms. ‘In life, there is no perfect security,’ explained Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering. ‘There may be more such strikes. We will act unilaterally when we must, in order to protect our citizens – but we invite other nations of the world to stand with us in this battle.’ Some Western states did back the strikes. ‘I strongly support this American action against terrorism,’ said British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

  Officials from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons came forward to say that, as well as nerve gas, Empta could be used to make fungicides and anti-microbial agents. It was also linked to a process for softening plastics. Other Western scientists pointed out that VX gas shared some of the chemical constituents of cherry flavouring, as used in boiled sweets or cough syrup.

  * * *

  ‘I can’t talk now,’ said Queller when Miranda finally got through, the following morning.

  She kept him on the line to tell him about Nick.

  ‘What? You’ve found him? When?’

  She told him.

  ‘What the hell have you been doing since then?’

  Forbearing to answer that question exactly, she said she hadn’t been able to get through.

  ‘Stay there. I’ll be over as soon as I can. Where exactly are you again?’

  ‘The Macpherson Ruins. Outside of Stone Town.’

  During the next day, in that very place, the TV remained on whenever the generator permitted. There was to be no more love-making for a while, though there was more pizza and beer. And chicken curry and coconut rice. Over the tin roof above the sofa, bushbabies would thud across, making the aerial dish wobble and the TV picture too. Da Souza would come in from time to time, put down their food and drink on an old tin tray marked ‘Property of Union Castle Shipping Company: Southampton, Cape Town, Zanzibar.’

  Assuming a posture of horrified amazement at the events on the screen, he would stay and watch for a while.

  ‘Very bad,’ he’d say. ‘Very bad. They will do, and the others will do, and they will do, and the others will do again. Is there no way we can control this damned crew?’

  When he had left, the wooden-framed mesh door would creak on its hinges, and the warm jasmine-scented air stream more briskly through the mesh of the screen. Time passed no less briskly, and still the garrulous reporters and the anchormen, and the witnesses and the commentators and the experts chattered on.

  ‘Let’s go for a swim,’ said Nick, eventually. ‘Before it gets dark.’

  Beneath a reddening sun, they went to the room and put on their costumes, then walked slowly down to the beach, towels slung over their shoulders.

  Unwatched, the TV babbled in the lounge, then faded to black as the generator went out with a groan. At that moment, more or less, CNN happened to be reporting big news. Osama bin Laden himself had apparently sent a message from Afghanistan to London’s Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper, saying that he had vowed to make further attacks on ‘Crusaders and Jews’.

  ‘The battle has not begun yet,’ the message continued. ‘The response will be with actions and not words.’

  * * *

  The man who sent that message, prepared long before, in expectation of duress, was far away from where the Tomahawks fell. He was riding a horse through a remote pass in eastern Afghanistan, along smugglers’ tracks. Below him – he spurred his mount on, impatiently – rode two of his lieutenants: Ayman Zawahiri, the Egyptian doctor, and Muhammad Atef, al-Qaida’s military commander. Behind them, also on horseback, were seven hand-picked members of his personal bodyguard.

  The guards were close by the Sheikh at all times, but he took care to keep some part of himself back. Mystery magnified majesty, power was strongest when half hidden. He also kept himself back from revelation to the enemy, sending messages only, or allowing them to see glimpses of himself in the videos made by Ahmed the German, some of which they inevitably laid hands on. It was better to keep in the shadows like this, before emerging with one’s full strength. The displayed hand of the thief, as he saw lately in Herat, derives its horrifying influence not from itself but from the want of a body.

  Or perhaps a better analogy was the voice that echoed through the pillared city of Iram, warning its disobedient people. Ignoring it they were turned into stone and drowned in sand, surrounded by all their useless wealth. Hast thou not seen how thy Lord dealt with Ad, at Iram adorned with pillars, whose like have not been reared in these lands!

  It was cold – there were drifts of snow caught in pockets of rock on either side of the pass – and he was glad of his woollen coat. Tonight they would sleep in a shepherd’s barn, perhaps killing a goat to eat with the rice they had brought with them. He was hungry already though. He reached into a pocket with his long, slim fingers and, taking out a date, put it into his mouth.

  Chewing the sweet flesh, he halted his horse – its hooves clattering on the rock – to look again at his companions below. He had a sudden vision, then, of putting on swift wings and flying down to them, scouring the side of the mountain. He closed his eyes against the glitter of the rocks, spat out the stone of the date, and encouraged the visualisation further, pulling on the silken threads of his consciousness like a spider in its web. As if by mental effort alone he might fly as high as the gates of the paradise or, swooping down, spy on inhabitants of the fire. Even, shaving the oceans with level wings, betake himself to the land of the Adversary – that would itself, in time, being of time, be in the fire.

  He put another date in his mouth.

  * * *<
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  ‘I take refuge in God from Satan, the stoned one.’ So whispered Khaled al-Khidr, kneeling in a mosque in Jambangona. On the island of Pemba, it was the town of his parents, who were no more. Outside the mosque, he could hear a goat bleating, waiting to be milked.

  His disavowals were over. The convalescence of memory had concluded. Truth, that highest thing a man may keep, had come clearly, like the ringing of a bell that penetrated his very heart. His own history, that night of destiny – marked like writing in the particular cuts on their throats – had all descended, unclouded, manifest, into the translucent casket of his soul.

  Why had he left it locked so long, escaping into other thoughts, when the key had lain so plainly in front of him all the time? Was it because he had wanted to collude in Zayn’s story? That he had desired not to know the truth?

  He pressed his forehead to the floor.

  For whatever reason – the adventure of jihad, freedom from his family and the narrow circumstances of Zanzibar – he had gone along with something that at the time appeared to ease the affliction of their death. Yet the salve was also the cause, and in allowing it to be applied he had brought greater affliction to himself and others.

  He clutched his head, doubting now whether he could have any destination but Gehenna, that fire whose fuel is men and stones. All the Sheikh’s talk of a pleasing Paradise, a walled and lofty garden, he’d said, its clusters nigh to gather – this was nothing but words, false resemblances designed to wind into one’s mind, covering havoc and ruin with cloying murmurings. And all this he had known before, even as he had entered on that savage path.