Blood and Sand

by Frank Gardner

  Darkness fell quickly, and at nearly eight thousand feet above sea level the temperature dropped like a stone. Beneath a clear, starlit sky, the American troops began to light fires inside the courtyard of their fort, the flickering light of the flames playing across their tired, drawn faces. Someone got out a guitar and began singing ‘I don’t belong here’, but in fact morale seemed to be good. Most of the soldiers were just out of school and I was taken aback at their philosophical approach to life. A nineteen-year-old told me how two of his good friends had been killed out on patrol here, but he shrugged his shoulders. ‘I’m just proud to be doing what I’m doing, but if it’s my time it’s my time.’

  By nine p.m. our little BBC team was tucked up in our sleeping bags, secure in a reinforced bunker room built into the walls of the fort. But this was not to be a quiet night. Fast asleep, I dreamed that someone was shouting ‘Incoming!’ as if I was in the middle of some Vietnam war film. It seemed remarkably realistic, though, and the shouts grew louder and more insistent. Suddenly I was wide awake; the base was under attack. In fact it was pretty ineffectual: just a salvo of four Chinese-made rockets that fell two hundred metres short of the base, exploding harmlessly in a dirt ravine. But the base was now a hive of activity. The Americans used their technology to pinpoint the exact location the rockets had been fired from and already they were returning fire, pumping out artillery shells into the mountains along the Pakistani border. They were sanguine about the results. ‘Most times the Taliban set the rockets on a timer fuse,’ said one of the sentries, ‘so by the time they go off the people who set them are long gone, back over the border into Pakistan where we can’t pursue them.’

  At first light the next morning we joined the tail end of a patrol of jeeps heading up to the border to investigate the previous night’s activities. We drove through a narrow gully, which seemed to me a frighteningly obvious ambush point, came up to a ridge and dismounted. The US infantrymen were, frankly, not as fit as they should have been and they found it tough going scrambling up these low hills. They fanned out, picking their way over the rocks amidst small juniper trees ripe with berries, some of the soldiers sweating and gasping to keep up. Birds I could not recognize swooped ahead of us, calling out as if to alert people to our presence. As our BBC team hung back, happy to film from a safe distance, the lead elements of the patrol blew the door open on the suspect compound up ahead. They found nothing inside, but now the nearby Pakistani border guards were in a flap. As I watched their observation post through binoculars I counted ten Pakistani soldiers with Kalashnikovs spilling out of their hilltop fort and scrambling down the mountainside to confront the Americans. They seemed very upset; obviously they viewed this as an incursion.

  ‘Do not open fire!’ radioed the patrol captain to his men up front. ‘Those men are Pakistani border guards. I say again, do not engage them!’ Mercifully no shots were fired, but the Americans had some complaints of their own. Why, they wanted to know, had those rockets been fired from right beneath the Pakistani border fort without the guards doing anything to stop the insurgents? Rather unconvincingly, the border guards said they knew of no such rockets, but we all suspected they had probably hunkered down in their bunker and hoped the problem would just go away. At this point a shout went up from one of the US scouts. Two rockets had been found intact, complete with timers and fuses that had failed to go off. They were Chinese-made, and attached to an alarm clock that was taken away for analysis. The US infantrymen took detailed photos of the scene to present to the Pakistanis the next day at their joint border conference to back up their demands that the Pakistanis do more to stop cross-border infiltration. It was a small incident, but indicative of the bigger problem along this wild, tribal border region. The Americans and their Afghan militia allies were not allowed to pursue anyone into Pakistan’s Waziristan and northwest frontier provinces. But there, where local sympathies lay with the Taliban and to a lesser extent Al-Qaeda, it was easy for insurgents to lay up, replenish and re-arm, ready for the next raid back over the border into Afghanistan.

  The Americans had little contact with the local population. Walled up in their fortress compounds, eating grilled steak and strumming guitars at night, theirs was a parallel world. Yet in the short time we were there, I never saw any morale problems; their black humour was summed up by a piece of graffiti scrawled on the wall of a urinal at Kandahar airbase:

  Osama Bin Laden: your time is short

  We’d rather you die than come to court.

  I have a question about your theory and laws.

  How come you never die for the cause?

  As is usual, you failed in your mission.

  If you expected pure chaos,

  You can keep on wishing!

  Afghanistan has always been of enormous importance to Osama Bin Laden, his mentor Ayman Al-Zawahiri and the rest of Al-Qaeda’s core, original leadership. This was where Afghan mujahideen and Muslim volunteers from the Arab world joined forces in the 1980s to humiliate and eventually drive out the mighty Soviet Red Army. Of course things might have taken a very different course had it not been for the enormous financial, logistic and military assistance given to the mujahideen by the USA, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, but Al-Qaeda’s theorists still view the Soviet defeat as a purely Muslim victory over a godless superpower.

  Bin Laden has always felt at home in Afghanistan’s stark desert and mountain landscapes, which must have reminded him of his ancestral homeland in the Hadhramaut area of southern Yemen. The more remote his Afghan bases were from Western civilization, the more freedom he felt. For over five years, from 1996 to 2001, Bin Laden and his lieutenants had pretty much a free rein in Afghanistan, so close was their alliance with Mullah Omar and the ruling Taliban. The training camps that Al-Qaeda set up and ran during this time processed an estimated fifteen thousand Muslim volunteers from all over the world, including several hundred from Britain. A few of the international trainees were singled out as being exceptionally talented and went on to become Al-Qaeda operatives who were assigned missions such as the bombing of US embassies in East Africa or the attack on the USS Cole. But for most who attended the camps it was primarily an opportunity to network, to share common beliefs and hatreds with others from as far afield as Indonesia, Algeria, Saudi Arabia and the British Midlands.

  When the USA was attacked on 11 September 2001 Osama Bin Laden knew full well to expect an onslaught of US reprisals. The East African embassy bombings in 1998 had been followed by a cruise-missile strike on one of his bases, but this time there was likely to be an invasion of Western forces. So Bin Laden had already secured his escape route back over the mountains to Pakistan, bribing a passage to safety for him and his entourage well in advance of 9/11. The training camps were destroyed by carpet bombing from US B-52s but their occupants had long since dispersed, with Bin Laden reportedly telling them to filter back to their own countries, lie low and wait for the order to strike.

  Since then, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban have proved surprisingly resilient. Thousands of heavily armed US troops, backed by satellite intelligence and close support aircraft, have failed to eliminate their remnants in southeast Afghanistan. Parts of that country have been made too dangerous for international NGOs to operate in and there are parts of Afghanistan where local people are far more afraid of the Taliban than they are of the US-led military Coalition.

  The use of Pakistan as a logistical rear base has been crucial for the Taliban. Although the central government in Islamabad has been cooperating closely with the FBI and the CIA to stamp out Al-Qaeda, and several of its key operatives have been captured in Pakistani cities, the prevailing sentiment along the wild, tribal borderlands has remained in favour of the Taliban and against the USA and the Northern Alliance in power in Kabul. Both Al-Qaeda and the Taliban are convinced that time is on their side, that sooner or later US forces and their Coalition partners will leave Afghanistan, that the democratically elected government will be too weak to hold the country together
and that gradually they will be able to reestablish themselves in much of the country. In several speeches intended for a Western audience Bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri have repeatedly demanded that Western forces withdraw from Islamic lands, notably Iraq and Afghanistan. But for the West there is a fundamental dilemma here. Keeping troops in such a remote, difficult and dangerous country is expensive and exhausting; it also fuels Al-Qaeda’s claims of Western occupation and colonization. But to withdraw and allow Afghanistan to revert to an anarchic shambles in which Al-Qaeda could re-establish itself would be almost unthinkable. The challenge will be to build up a strong Afghan government with broad popular support that can eventually run the country without a Western military presence, while resisting the advances of those who would turn back the clock. It will not be easy.

  9

  From Riyadh to Rehab

  THE INSURGENCIES IN both Afghanistan and Iraq were already well under way when Simon Cumbers and I made our fateful visit to Riyadh in 2004. Having stayed alive for the first vital minutes after I was gunned down, my destiny now passed into the hands of others.

  While the Riyadh police were rushing me at breakneck speed, bleeding and screaming, to the Al-Iman Hospital on the evening of Sunday 6 June 2004, a few miles away on the other side of the city, in a heavily secured area known as the Diplomatic Quarter, a meeting was under way at the British Embassy. The ambassador, Sherard Cowper-Coles, was chairing a routine Heads of Mission meeting, pulling in staff from the Riyadh Embassy and its consular outposts in Jeddah and Dhahran. The meeting was interrupted by another diplomat rushing in with the news that two ‘British journalists’ had been shot in Al-Suwaidi district. Sherard thought for a moment: there were only two journos he knew of who were working for the British media in the country at that time: me and Simon Cumbers. The ambassador immediately broke up the meeting, got straight into his chauffeured, reinforced car and headed south for Al-Suwaidi, accompanied by his bodyguards, the Close Protection Team and Detective Inspector Wanless, who was on secondment to Riyadh from Scotland Yard’s Anti-Terrorist Branch. The Close Protection Team were uncomfortable with Sherard going down to Al-Suwaidi, but he insisted on finding out what had happened and what could be done to help.

  His first stop was the mortuary, where he was presented with the heart-wrenching sight of Simon Cumbers’s body. Only two days earlier Simon had filmed an interview I did with the ambassador in Al-Khobar and we had all shared my Walkers shortbread fingers in his hotel room afterwards. Simon had been killed by our attackers. One of the nicest, most kind-hearted men I have ever met, Simon had never even had a chance to use his famous Irish charm to talk his way out of this situation.

  By now it was almost dusk and the British ambassador was working the phone, speaking directly to the governor of Riyadh, Prince Salman Bin Abdulaziz, one of the inner circle of Saudi princes who rule the country. I had interviewed him once, three years earlier, at the official twentieth-anniversary celebrations of King Fahd’s rule, but I doubt he remembered this. Prince Salman was appalled by what had happened and immediately ordered a team of top surgeons from one of the best-equipped hospitals in the world, the King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Riyadh, to come to my rescue. Later that night he told Paul Wood, one of my fellow BBC correspondents who flew in from Cairo immediately to see if he could help: ‘We will get the people who did this, I can promise you that.’ Prince Salman’s intervention was fortunate, but I was about to have an amazing stroke of luck.

  It transpired that a South African gunshot-wound specialist surgeon was working in Riyadh. It is a sad fact of life in South Africa that, working in Cape Town, Peter Bautz had seen more than his fair share of gunshot-wound victims from the area known as Cape Flats. It was my good fortune that this young, energetic trauma surgeon now led the emergency rescue team that raced over from the King Faisal Hospital. When they pulled up at the Al-Iman Hospital in the Al-Suwaidi district of Riyadh, the surgeons there had already been working on me for about an hour. It was not going well. In fact, to use a cliché, they were losing me. Dr Bautz told me later that had his team not arrived when they did, with their hi-tech equipment and expertise, I would have died that night. His team’s hospital notes paint a picture of a man about to move on somewhere else:

  Upon arrival of Dr Bautz the patient was seen in the operating room with open abdomen, bleeding extensively. His body temperature was 30 degrees C (86°F) and he had disseminated intravascular coagulation. He was in hypovolemic shock and was oozing from all cut surfaces.

  In other words I had lost so much blood that I was dangerously cold and my heart was only pumping blood to the vital organs. Months later, when I showed my Riyadh medical file to an Army doctor friend he went pale. ‘Strewth! You had DIC! That’s where you are so severely injured that the blood starts clotting all over the body. Your whole body effectively becomes one big wound. It’s the endgame, one of the last things before death.’

  I subsequently asked Bautz how they had brought me back from the brink. ‘The DIC had everything thrown at it,’ he told me in a text message, ‘including two doses of Activated Factor 7, a miracle drug. It’s verrry expensive!’

  After working on me for several hours at the Al-Iman, Bautz and his team then loaded me into their mobile Intensive Care Unit for the transfer to the King Faisal Specialist Hospital. DI Wanless, the Scotland Yard anti-terrorist detective in Riyadh, was watching as they put me in the ambulance. ‘I’ve seen a few dead bodies in my time,’ he told me months later, ‘and I thought you were a goner. Your face was ashen grey and you had tubes coming out of you everywhere. It’s incredible to see you alive now.’ He also said that Dr Bautz had shaken his head at this point and remarked, ‘That boy’s not well.’

  When the ambulance pulled up at the King Faisal shortly after midnight I was still in a very bad way. The hospital report records:

  Upon arrival the patient had a temperature of approximately 30 degrees and he was found to have almost impalpable systolic blood pressure. On examination, the patient had eleven bullet holes and three bullets in situ. On careful examination, the patient had been shot about six times with three through-and-through and three bullets in situ. The patient had entrance wounds mainly posteriorly indicating that he had been shot from the back. These are all classic entrance wounds with a perforating and surrounding area of contusion and abrasion. On examination of the bullets through the X-rays they measured approximately 8.5mm which is probably 9mm bullet size [it was]. These bullets look classically like that of a handgun probably semi-automatic or machine pistol type but certainly not that of revolvers. Because of the potential bleeding risk and the condition of the patient only one bullet was removed and this was from the abdominal wall. This was a copper-jacketed lead-filled bullet, it was carefully handled, wrapped, placed into sealed container which was witnessed by several people and given to the police after the surgery.

  Bullets used for forensic evidence, I learned later, are always touched by hand, as holding them with metal instruments destroys the marks impressed on them by the gun barrel which can lead to the identity of the gunman, as indeed it did in my case. But on reading this on my hospital bed in London weeks later, I texted Bautz for clarification as to where exactly I had been shot. Back came the answer. One bullet in the left thigh/buttock area had gone in almost parallel to the skin and had then come out again within a three-centimetre tract. ‘You had a severe case of acute lead poisoning.’ Lead poisoning? Hang on, I thought, I’ve still got two bullets inside me. Another text to Bautz, another reply: ‘Don’t worry, each bullet now has a scar capsule around it.’ Good. It’s so reassuring to know these sorts of things. In fact ‘lead poisoning’ turned out to be hospital humour for being shot. Lead levels in the blood are apparently undetectable following the failed removal of retained bullets.

  While Bautz and his team were battling to save me in Riyadh, three thousand miles away in England my parents were casually watching the ten o’clock news on BBC1. At the mention of two British jo
urnalists shot in Riyadh my father turned grimly to my mother. ‘It’s Frank,’ he said. He spent the next few hours desperately trying to get information out of the BBC and the Foreign Office. All they knew initially was that one of us was dead and one severely wounded.

  As soon as the BBC had got confirmation of our identities, two of its managers, Mark Damazer and Sarah Ward-Lilley, raced round to our house to break the news to Amanda before she heard it second-hand. She was just putting the children to bed. ‘We have some bad news,’ they said. ‘Frank has been shot in Riyadh and he’s in a critical condition. He’s been taken to hospital there but there’s a chance he won’t make it. We’ll fly you out as soon as you’re ready.’

  It was too much for Amanda to take in. ‘Could you hang on,’ she said politely, ‘while I just read the children a goodnight story?’ A few minutes later she came back downstairs to where Mark and Sarah were waiting. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘tell me what has happened.’

  Amanda hardly slept at all that night. While the surgeons were fighting to save my life, she was trying to make sense of what she had been told. Two of our closest friends at the time, Aidan and Naomi Hobbs, were camped in our living room, also trying to take in the idea that I might already be dead. Amanda told them that if the phone went she did not think she could answer it, so Aidan volunteered to stay on phone watch, giving himself the terrible task of having to break the news to Amanda if the call came through that said, ‘We are sorry, Frank passed away a few minutes ago.’ On the other side of the world, Amanda’s parents were boarding a plane from New Zealand, coming to offer whatever support they could, while her brother Mike dropped everything at the hotel he ran in Bangkok to escort his sister to Riyadh.

  Meanwhile Amanda had the pressing problem of what to tell Melissa and Sasha the next morning, the start of the school week. The news was already on the radio, so she knew that the children’s classmates and their parents would hear it as they drove in on the school run. She decided there was no point beating around the bush. ‘Something bad has happened,’ she told them, as she adjusted their uniforms at the breakfast table. ‘Daddy has been shot in the hand and he’s in hospital. I may have to go and be with him.’ Sasha, who was five at the time, seemed to take this in her stride, but Melissa, who was a year older, was visibly shaken.