by Jon Stock
The riders, bulked out in their padded leathers, had crowded around one bike. It was set apart from the others, next to a support Land Rover Defender. A man was lying on the ground beside the back wheel. The bike seemed to have a mechanical problem of some sort, and the group was deep in discussion, talking animatedly with two local guides. The other bikes were unattended. If the keys were in the ignition, it would be easy for the man to set off on one of them. But he drove past the bikes, past the petrol pumps, and parked his moped on the far side of the forecourt shop. He then walked around the back of the building, out of sight.
What was he doing? Marchant kept watching as he slipped the lid back onto the plastic bottle of water. Moments later, the man reappeared, helmeted and riding a powerful touring bike. As if making a token check for traffic, he looked back down the dusty road in Marchant’s direction – was he taunting him? – and was gone, roaring off towards Asni and the mountains.
Marchant felt sick. He was about to lose his man. He also knew that he was right, that Salim Dhar was up there somewhere in the High Atlas. And that made his stomach tighten so much that he wanted to throw up. The only good thing was that none of the bikers had clocked the man as he had driven off. In Marchant’s experience, bikers usually checked out each other’s hardware, but they were too preoccupied with their own broken machine.
Marchant remounted his Mobylette and rode up to the garage. He switched the engine off before he turned into the forecourt, and freewheeled silently for the last twenty yards. He passed the first two bikes, checking the ignitions. Neither had a key. But the third, a BMW GS Adventure, did. Marchant parked up beyond it and glanced once in the direction of the group. It was then that he realised that the man on the ground was not trying to mend the bike. He was the focus of the group’s attention, and he was lying very still. The bikers were too far away for Marchant to hear what they were saying, but he thought he heard someone mention a doctor.
Ignoring an instinctive urge to go over and help, Marchant switched quickly from his moped to the tourer, turned the ignition and felt the 1150cc engine rumble into life beneath him. Without looking up, he moved off the forecourt, joined the main road, and accelerated slowly away from the garage, heading for Mount Toubkal, the highest peak on the horizon.
7
James Spiro had not enjoyed his job with the CIA since he had been moved to Head of Clandestine, Europe. It was a promotion, and should have been rewarding, a few comfortable years in London before he returned to Virginia for greater things. But he hadn’t counted on Salim Dhar proving so elusive. Ever since he had slipped through the net in India, Dhar had been Spiro’s biggest headache. He would wake at night, sheets drenched in sweat, seeing his President take the bullet that had somehow missed him in Delhi. His in-tray was full of daily requests from the Pentagon, the White House, the media, all wanting to know where Dhar was and why he hadn’t been eliminated. And in his darkest moments, he couldn’t stop thinking of Leila, the woman who had died instead of the President, the woman he had slept with only hours before.
Spiro knew his career hung in the balance, which was why he was now back on home soil, coordinating the Agency’s biggest manhunt since the search for Osama bin Laden after 9/11. There had been dozens of credible sightings of Dhar around the world, each one proving false, each one ratcheting up the pressure on Spiro to find him. The collateral damage from drone strikes hadn’t helped his cause. The last one, in Pakistan, based on an ISI tip-off, had killed thirty civilians, mostly women and children.
And what were America’s greatest allies doing to help? Diddly shit. London’s relationship with Dhar was ‘delicate’, according to Marcus Fielding. Dubious, more like. Daniel Marchant, the one person who might be able to find Dhar, was on vacation in North Africa, if such a thing was possible, eating too much couscous in Marrakech. If it had been up to Spiro, Marchant would have been strapped back onto the waterboard, telling them all he knew about Dhar, rather than being allowed to wander around Morocco’s souks as if nothing had happened.
Now, though, the end seemed finally in sight. It was always going to be only a matter of time until Dhar made a mistake.
‘Run me those coordinates again,’ he said to the operator next to him. He was standing in the ‘cockpit’, a hot and crowded trailer, also known as a mobile Ground Control Station, in a quiet corner of Creech US Air Force Base, Nevada. In front of him, two operatives were seated in high-backed chairs, each monitoring a bank of screens. One was a pilot with 42 Attack Squadron, a seasoned officer in his forties who used to fly F-16 fighter jets but was now directing MQ-9 Reapers, the most advanced hunter/killer drones in the world. The other was his sensor operator, a woman no older than twenty-five who controlled the Reaper’s multi-spectral targeting suite.
Spiro had spent a lot of his time at Creech in recent weeks, too much for his liking. And he had eaten too many Taco Bells in Las Vegas, thirty-five miles south-east. Creech used to be a bare-bones facility, a rocky outpost in the desert, but now it resembled a building site. New hangars were going up all the time around the main airstrip, which had once been used for landing practice by pilots from the nearby Nellis Air Force Base. Spiro found it hard to believe that such a bleak, uninhabited place represented the future of aerial combat. But he guessed that was the point: the USAF’s first squadron of Reapers was unmanned.
The pilot in front of him read out the coordinates. Dhar’s voice had been traced to a remote location in North Waziristan, on the borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Fort Meade had done a good job for once. Someone had been listening in real time, and not just to Pakistani generals having sex. This was the big one, and there was a palpable sense of excitement in the cockpit, even from the base commander. He had stepped into the trailer when news spread across the base that Salim Dhar might be about to be taken down. It would be a big moment for the commander. His unit, 432 Air Expeditionary Wing, had stood up at Creech in 2007 to spearhead the global war on terror, and he needed a result. Spiro knew the commander blamed the CIA for the recent spate of bad publicity. The last strike in Pakistan had brought relations between the Agency and the USAF to a new low.
‘I think we have our man,’ Spiro said, turning to the commander.
‘We need to do this by the book,’ he replied. ‘You know that.’
‘Of course. And the book says we take Dhar out. We have an 80-per-cent confidence threshold.’
‘Are there any legals?’ the commander asked, turning to an officer next to him.
‘Negative, sir. Potential for civilian collateral is zero. The building is remote, nearest population cluster five miles south. And this is a Level Five.’
‘Colonel, we’re locked onto the target,’ the pilot said, turning to the sensor operator. ‘Can you put thermal up on screen one?’
Spiro watched as blotches of bright colour appeared on the screen between the two seated operators. The surrounding screens were relaying live video streams from electro-optical and image-intensified night cameras mounted under the nose of the Reaper, and stills from a synthetic aperture radar. Spiro still hadn’t quite got his head round the fact that these images were streaming live, give or take a one-to-two-second delay, from 30,000 feet above Afghanistan, 7,500 miles away.
‘Fuse thermal with intensified,’ the pilot said. The image on the main screen sharpened a little, but it was still no more than a series of yellow, red and purple shapes.
It was at this point that the young female analyst first began to worry about their target. She wasn’t meant to be on duty now. The 24/7 rota they worked to had lost its shape in the previous few hours, and she should have been back in her room, getting some sleep and reading the bible before her next shift. (A lot of the analysts headed off to Vegas after work, but she found the contrast too great: one moment looking at magnified images of a destroyed Taleban target, the next shooting craps.) But the next analyst on duty had phoned in sick, and she had agreed to work on until cover showed up. That was two hours ago. She d
idn’t like bending the rules. She tried to leave a quiet, disciplined life. All she could hope for was that the base commander didn’t glance at the rota sheet on the wall behind them.
‘Sir, we have multiple personnel in the target zone,’ she said, looking closely at the screen. ‘And what looks like a pack of wild dogs forty yards to the east.’
Night-time image analysis was a skill that not everyone on the base appreciated. The pilots did, but she resented the disdain with which the CIA officers appeared to view her profession. Spiro was the worst, but that was also because he kept trying to look down her blouse. He hadn’t the first idea about the subtleties of either women or her job.
During the day, with clear visibility, it was easy enough to distinguish man from woman, cat from dog, even from 30,000 feet. The images were pin sharp. But at night you had to rely on the digitally enhanced imagery of the infra-red spectrum. Interpreting the ghostly monochrome of the mid-IR wavelengths required intuition and training to flesh out the shapes. You had to impose upon them known patterns of human behaviour. Two years earlier, she had averted a friendly-fire attack when she realised that the four targets on an Afghanistan hillside, thought to be insurgents, were doing press-ups. She had never seen the Taleban working out, and assumed, rightly, that they were US soldiers.
The shapes in front of her now, clustered together inside a hut on a mountainside in North Waziristan, were not normal, even allowing for the local atmospheric conditions, which were making the images less clear than she would have liked. She isolated the feed from the thermal infra-red camera, which detected heat emitted from objects, and then fused it again with the image-intensified images. She had seen Taleban leaders talking many times before, and they never stood so close. When they sat, they formed circles. These people had created something else: a glowing crucifix to warn off the Reaper.
8
Marchant pulled off the dusty track and parked the BMW behind a cluster of coarse bushes, out of sight. It was almost dark and he could see the headlights of a lorry coming down over the Tizi’n’Test pass in the far distance. He wished he had been able to steal a scrambler rather than a tourer, as the BMW had struggled with the rough terrain. They had left the main road, and followed an increasingly remote and bumpy track for the past half-hour, Marchant keeping at least a mile between them. The man he was pursuing had stopped here a few minutes earlier and parked his bike on the other side of the track, without bothering to hide it. He was in a hurry, and had already disappeared on foot, following a steep path that zigzagged up through windblown juniper-berry trees that clung to the hillside.
Marchant set off up the path, confident that he had left enough time between them not to be seen. He thought he was fit from his running and his abstemious life in Marrakech, but the mountains were soon sucking the thin air from his lungs. Occasionally, as he crested another false ridge, he saw his man in front of him, at least five hundred yards ahead, covering the ground with the ease of a mountain goat. Whenever he turned, Marchant pressed himself flat against the dry earth, feeling his chest rise and fall as he tried to keep his breathing quiet.
It was after forty minutes of climbing that he heard the first cries on the wind. The mountains around here were farmed by Berber goatherds, who called out to each other across the valleys as they followed their animals. Sometimes they sang bitter songs about arrogant Berbers who had travelled abroad and returned with enough money to build ugly modern houses on the hillside. But tonight they seemed to be singing of something else. Marchant struggled with the dialect, but he could pick up enough to detect the agitation and fear in their voices. Had his man come up here to give his coded message to the goatherds, who would pass it on from man to man across the mountains, until eventually it reached Dhar? It would be in keeping with the primitive means of communication used so far.
Marchant listened again to the Berbers’ agitated calls as a goat stumbled out of the gloaming next to him and moved off down the hillside. Something had disturbed the peace of the mountains. The man he had been following had stopped now. His hands were cupped around his mouth and he was calling out into the dying light. The wind was in the wrong direction for Marchant to hear, but the man’s body language said enough. He had sunk to his knees with exhaustion. Had he come with a warning? Was it that he was too late? Then he heard him cry out again. The swirling wind carried the sound down the hillside to Marchant. There was panic in his voice, and they weren’t Berber words this time.
‘Nye strelai!’ he shouted. ‘Nye strelai!’
Moments later, a short burst of automatic gunfire rang out, echoing through the mountains, and the man slumped over. Marchant pressed himself closer to the earth, breathing hard, searching around for better cover, calculating where the shots had come from. He slid across to a bush, keeping his eyes on the horizon. And then he saw it, hovering up over the crest of the hill. The Roc bird rose into the sky.
He knew at once that it was Russian-built, an Mi-8, its distinctive profile silhouetted in the dusk light. It was white, but there were no UN markings. The shots had come from the machine-gun mounted beneath the cockpit. Marchant was dead if the pilot had seen him, but the helicopter turned, nose down, and rose into the star-studded sky, heading towards the Algerian border.
9
The doubt that had been sown in the young sensor operator’s mind grew stronger with each passing second. She had tried to tell herself that she was just seeing things, that she was suffering from exhaustion, too many late nights reading God’s word, but there was no escaping the yellow shape that the heat of the bodies had formed. Although the hut only had a canvas roof of some kind, it was impossible to tell precisely how many people there were inside, as the bodies were bunched so closely together – too close for Taleban.
‘Sir, there’s something abnormal about the target imagery,’ she said, turning to her pilot.
‘Would you care to elaborate?’ Spiro said, before the pilot had time to reply.
The analyst paused, struggling to conceal her dislike of Spiro. ‘They’re too close together.’
‘Perhaps they’re praying. What’s the local time anyhow? I’ll put money on it being the Mecca hour. If we have no other objections, I say we shoot.’
Spiro directed his last comment at the base commander, who was on the phone to the Pentagon. Spiro knew the commander needed the break just as much as he did.
‘We’re green-lit,’ the commander said, replacing the phone. Spiro could tell he was concealing his excitement. He just had to make sure the USAF didn’t get to take any credit.
‘Then let’s engage, people,’ Spiro said, putting a hand on the pilot’s shoulder. The pilot flinched, and Spiro withdrew it. He knew at once that it had been an inappropriate gesture. These pilots were under pressure, too. There was talk on the base of combat stress, despite their distance from the battlefield. Unlike a fighter pilot, who pulled away from the target after dropping his payload, the Reaper pilots stayed on site, watching the bloody aftermath in high magnification.
‘Sir, given the subject is static, I’d appreciate a second opinion,’ the pilot said, catching his colleague’s eye. ‘If she’s not happy, neither am I.’
‘Are you not happy?’ Spiro asked the analyst. No one in the room missed his sarcasm. ‘The Pentagon’s happy, I’m happy, your commander here is goddamn cock-a-hoop. Salim Dhar, the world’s most wanted terrorist, just spoke on a cell from the target zone, and you’re not happy. As far as we know, nobody has gone in or out of that lousy shack apart from a pack of crazy Afghani dogs. This is paytime, honey. And we’ll all get a share, don’t you worry your tight little ass. I’ll see to it personally.’
As Spiro’s words hung in the air, a phone began to ring. The commander picked it up and listened for a few moments, nodding at the pilot. ‘Could you stream it through now? I’d appreciate that. Channel nine.’
The pilot leaned forward and flicked a switch. Moments later, Salim Dhar’s voice filled the stuffy room. It was only a
few words, a short burst from someone who seemed to know the risk he was running by speaking on a cell phone, but no one was in any doubt. They had all heard his voice too many times in the last year, seen his face on too many posters.
‘Fort Meade picked it up a few seconds ago,’ the commander said. ‘Same coordinates, same cell, 100 per cent voiceprint match, confidence threshold now at 95 per cent. Gentlemen, ladies, I hope 432 Air Expeditionary Wing will be remembered for many things, but as of this moment, we’ll be known for ever as the people who took down Salim Dhar. Engage the target.’
Lieutenant Oaks spent the last minutes of his life in frustration as much as fear. He had managed to corral everyone into the middle of the hut, including Murray, and persuaded them of the merits of his plan. The cross was as good as he could make it in the circumstances: four men lying in a line, hands still tied behind their backs, heads below the next man’s shackled ankles, and then two lying perpendicular to them, one either side of Oaks, who was second in the upright. Even if it didn’t show up as a cross, Oaks figured it would look pretty damn weird on a thermal-imaging screen.
But then, as they lay there, each praying to his own God, Salim Dhar was suddenly amongst them for a second time. It was only a few words, spoken on his cell phone, but it was enough to make Oaks realise what was happening. When he heard him, he screamed, hoping that his voice would be picked up by someone at Fort Meade, but he was too late. Dhar had stopped talking by the time he was railing at the sky.
He started to sob now, lying in the mud on his imaginary cross, the smell of urine filling the air. There was nothing left to do. For a moment he stopped, trying to hear the sound of the drone above the murmurings of his colleagues. A Reaper’s turboprop engine at altitude purred like a buzzing insect – that’s what they said, wasn’t it? – but he heard nothing. Just the noise of the dogs, which whined and ran in all directions when the first Hellfire exploded deep in the Afghan mud beside him.