CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED EIGHTEEN
“Explain this to me Shallal!” She attempted to remain calm, but her voiced had risen considerably.
“Emily, Mason volunteered to work as a physician in an area where his skills are most needed. He went via an organization that is a known front for terrorist recruitment. We have someone placed within the hierarchy who let us know and before he left I met with him and suggested that there were two ways we could work this. He goes and reports back to us anything and everything that he hears or he is charged under anti-terrorism laws and he’ll never practice medicine here or anywhere else again. So now he is an asset, a good asset with the potential to help both his countries.”
“He is my son, you bastard, and you knew all this when you recruited me to help you! You dirty rotten bastard! You have no conscience! You have put him at risk!”
“Emily, he volunteered to help Afghani civilians. I didn’t force him to do that.”
“How did he know about this organization if you had nothing to do with it?”
“Mina, He’s an Arab wannabe. He hangs around with militant Arabs in the health field. It had nothing to do with me. Can’t you understand that?”
“You’re telling me my son is in Afghanistan and didn’t realize that he’s being used by allied intelligence?” she hissed.
Shallal nodded, “He’s not a child Mina. He’s almost thirty-three. When he’s ready, he’ll come home.”
“No, wait. Does he have official cover?” she asked him point blank.
“No, he does not. He’s there as himself, a doctor. He’ll report on request. Nothing more. No cloak and daggers stuff.”
“You did this, right? Another Shallal referendum. A non-official cover?”
“Amina, calm down. He wanted to help. He speaks several languages. He’s a physician and known in Herat, as is his father. We need that advantage Amina.”
“Shallal, you needed a fucking patsy! And you know as well as I do that he’ll never get out of there. Our troops are on their way as we speak and he’s in their target range. He’s an ethnic Afghani and he’ll be killed!”
“Emily, our troops are going to liberate Afghanistan. He’s not in danger. He’s a physician.”
“Shallal, where is he now?”
“Back at the hospital.”
“So how is he communicating with you?”
“Emily I can’t tell you that, but it is secure. Even bin Laden has a cell phone, Emily. I mean, we really do know what he is doing. We have him covered. He’s ok. I can’t tell you anything else. Furthermore Emily, your knowing this now means you cannot leave the compound. It’s a security risk.”
“Bullshit Shallal. I’m going home right now. I need to see my husband. I’ll be back in a few days.”
“We’ll take you and pick you up.”
“As you wish.”
“By the way Shallal. If my son doesn’t get out of there, I will wreak havoc on your government. Not even a terrorist will destabilize it the way I still can. Just remember, I have a very long memory and a score to settle with your chain of command. The American and British people don’t like their children coming home in body bags. Don’t count too much on their support.”
“As an Arab female you should be used to the concept of death by now, Amina Desai.”
He turned and left the room, leaving her alone with her fears and within a few hours Emily too left the compound for the security of her home on the Magothy River.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED NINETEEN
The task force did not meet in Emily’s absence nor did the other members have any idea that their chairperson had any intention of leaving the country in an attempt to visit the place that held the number one position in their inquiry. They were told only that she was out on special assignment for a couple of days and they were to review their reports until her return. By the time five of the members of the ISIS Project had settled down to bed for the night, the sixth, Sinead O’Malley was in Emily’s private office, far from public scrutiny in the basement of her home.
O’Malley was a short, solidly built vivacious redhead, the mother of three sons and a daughter, whose studio was a tiny beach cottage two houses up from Emily’s in Cape St. Andrew. While there was a difference of ten years in their ages, the two had been as close as sisters for over a decade. O’Malley was a sculptor and quite well known in the city. She also specialized in facial reconstruction and frequently worked for the local police departments as a consultant. It was for this very reason that she had been on leave from the task force headquarters for three days to attend a conference. Her work on the task force involved creating computer models to identify deceased terrorists or to ‘age progress’ old pictures of known suspects. As a consultant, O’Malley’s specialty was in reconstructing the features from skeletal remains where the victims were unidentified. She would, once the allied troops began attacking al-Qaeda and Taliban targets, certainly be able to help determine whether important members had been killed and the raids successful. As the need for her skills would come a little later in the game, she had much more leeway than the other members at present. Very few people knew that Sinead O’Malley, who lived near St. John’s College in the City of Annapolis, had a beach cottage studio. She had not been asked if she had more than one domicile nor had she volunteered the information.
On this dark fall night it had been relatively easy for O’Malley, walking her dog along the beach to drop by unnoticed at Emily’s house. Sinead O’Malley was short in stature and had no problem ducking under the four or five piers that separated the property until she reached Emily’s deck and back door. Emily, angry and panicked had called her on Haley’s cell phone. Predictably, no one had monitored the back of her house which faced the beach and the community pier, and was still laden with boats even in the fall. It never ceased to amaze Emily how intelligence people were so poor at the most rudimentary surveillance and, thanking the blessed mother for their ineptitude, she welcomed her friend into her darkened house.
Emily explained her plan and quickly ascertained that O’Malley had a passport and could leave for Dublin within twenty-four hours. There was even a Three Dimensional Design Conference that she could make a pretense of attending. As she was divorced and her children were grown and away from home at college, she could come and go as she pleased. O’Malley quickly contacted the U.S. conference organizers in New York and made the necessary arrangements. She would attend the portion of the conference that interested her, cancel the rest of her booking and fly to Frankfurt within three days. She would leave a message on her answering service where she could be reached in Dublin, adding that after the conference she would be sight-seeing for at least a week, after which she would return to the States.
Haley was already on her way to Frankfurt and would take the train to Mannheim, then to Heidelberg Haptbahnhof and then a cab to the home of Aunty Margot Blatz, who still lived in Zeigelhausen. They would use her home as unofficial headquarters. As Haley was a government lawyer specializing in investigations and frequently on travel, her absence would also go unnoticed.
Within a few days Harrison Cowan and Dana Johnson would be on their way to an International Symposium on Immigration and Cybercrime in London which, in Dana’s case the task force had been forced to acknowledge and concur with her mandatory attendance as she was to be a featured speaker. Directly after the conference was over they would meet, travel to Islamabad where they would set up their headquarters at the home of Dr. Atiya Shah, now the widow of the former Afghan Consulate in Karachi. Atiya’s late husband had maintained his beautiful Pakistani residence after the Taliban Militia had taken over his consular residence. Devastated by the rise of the Taliban, Shah had lapsed into severe depression which led to a stroke from which he died in 2000. His wife had continued her own private revolution against the Taliban by setting up a clinic which doubled as an underground railroad for any escapees from the militia but was specifically designed to help women and children. Atiya Shah,
of course, was most sympathetic to the call she had received from Harrison Cowan. She was, after all, Mason’s first nanny and was still very much interested in his life.
Of course she would help, she said when Haley had called her a second time. She would help in any way she could. Her home in Karachi was empty outside of her housekeeper and gardener, she explained. They were welcome to use it and she would advise her staff of their visit. She, however, would continue with her practice in the clinic which was in Herat Province deep inside Afghanistan. Her work, she explained, was now even more necessary as her homeland was fighting for survival.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY
Afghanistan, October, 2001
Atiya Shah had been involved in the struggle of Afghani refugees in the areas surrounding Herat since the early 1980s. As the Afghan resistance against the Russians had strengthened, so had the plight of Afghanistan’s women as their struggle to maintain equality faltered and died. Thousands of people fled the northern sector for the border villages inside Iran. They crossed the desolate mountain ranges and paths in constant fear of death at the hands of feuding tribal factions, to a precarious freedom of sorts in the eastern Iranian cities and villages. Atiya was from Herat. She had, without struggle or compromise convinced her husband to use every contact he had to fund a small clinic to provide the most rudimentary services to the refugees at first leaving the area for Iran, than as the years went by to those returning to Afghanistan.
In the early days, as Taliban control worsened and the rights of all women were in jeopardy, Atiya’s clinic became the center point of communication in the Afghan women’s resistance movement. This was a region where there was no pre or postnatal medical care, where women were discouraged from seeing physicians and where poor sanitation led to disease. The infant morality rate was scandalously high; more women died in delivery than survived and no one outside of this desolate land seemed to care. Women were expendable items, of lower significance than livestock and valued only for breeding. Those who were brave enough, or who still had the hope of gaining the education that was afforded to them under communism, met in secret and pledged to fight for survival.
The clinic was located in the Herat province of Enjil. It was warm, clean and offered the rudiments of western medicine. It survived on the donations of women’s groups worldwide. Some of the clinic’s patrons had escaped the Taliban regime’s hostility by feigning illness, reporting to the clinic to be treated by an all-woman staff under the sympathetic supervision of a male doctor, hardly if ever seen, who was in fact gay and terrified of being discovered. Good insurance for all sides! Once inside the building, the women were given new identification, which was rarely examined and only shown if completely necessary as the illiteracy rate was so high among Taliban border patrols. Such a manner of escape was virtually foolproof. They were then shuttled off to safety in the outskirts of the city, to the border country where refugee camps flourished.
Each woman and her family would be accompanied by a sympathetic and exceptionally well-paid Afghani, who posed as her husband and who would leave her safely within the hands of another resistance member where she would be taught a trade with enough earning potential to support herself and her children, generally as a tailor, seamstress or weaver.
Earning as much as thirty or forty dollars a month, their lifestyle, although worse than what they were used to in many cases, was at least enough for them to minimally survive. This underground railroad of help became stronger over the decade of Taliban Militia power and Dr. Atiya Shah was one of its first organizers. She had kept in continual contact with Emily who in turn had donated a portion of her annual income to the movement and encouraged everyone she knew to try and do the same. “It is women helping women,” Emily had implored her friends. Atiya kept her contacts well supplied with money and in turn they kept her and ultimately Emily supplied with first hand information not only about the Taliban but any opposing factions that could be used in the future. There was nothing that did not filter down the grapevine into Herat, including news of bin Laden and Mullah Omar, and once Emily made contact and requested information on the health of bin Laden’s sons and all those who visited them in their temporary quarters, she knew it would not take long to track down her son’s whereabouts and determine if he was safe. Her object was to establish a chain of safe houses and routes to assist him to escape if he needed to. It was unfortunate that all paths led through Pakistan or Iran, neither of which, in Emily or Harrison’s opinion was safe ground for a European, regardless of ancestry.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-ONE
Jalalabad, Afghanistan, October 2001
Mason had arrived in Kabul earlier that month and then traveled the seventy-five miles by Jeep to Jalalabad. The Darunta Camp Complex was some eight miles outside of that city. It had been just four days since his mother’s dinner party. He said his good-byes to Safiya and left her with what he felt was an “understanding” between them. He would return and she would wait until then before once more considering his proposal and the conditions of marriage. His driver, Amahl Razaq was a battle-hardened boy perhaps no more than fifteen. The camp, he told Mason, was called “Abu Khabab” in honor of the Egyptian national who ran it. It was part of a complex of training camps named after the hydro-electric dam which creates the nearby Darunta Lake. The complex had been financed by the boy’s hero, Osama bin Laden. Amahl bragged about the camp’s brick bunkers which housed dozens of rockets. “They are sheltered by trees which also provide shade from the furious sunlight and desolate mountains. The three camps are set on three hilltops,” the boy went on, “just south of the dam.” They detoured from the Kabul-Kyber Pass highway and followed a dirt road in front of the dam, passing heavily guarded Taliban observation points, then roadblocks and checkpoints marking the tunnel entrances. Mason also noticed what looked like a helipad.
Amahl continued his chatter, telling Mason that recruits were coming in daily, going to the camps at Al-Anzar where landing strips were being built so that prominent Islamic religious leaders could meet together to make “jihad”. Other well known builders, though not as big as the Binladen Group, had contributed labor to blast into the Zazi Mountains to build Command, Control and Communication Centers and networks. The hospital at Abu Khabab was not modern, however it would be reconstructed in a few months. The primary goal of the camp was to provide development and training in the use of chemicals, poisons and other toxins. Mason was horrified, but said nothing, feeling both used and suddenly very afraid.
“My grandfather says he is the Prophet’s messenger.”
“Your grandfather may be right, but I don’t think so, even though this bin Laden lives in a cave and the prophecy says he will come out of such a place to fight the good fight for Islam,” Mason said with a smile, not wishing to crush the boy’s idea totally.
“No, doctor. He is the ‘Madhi’. The Prophet said, ‘Allah will bring out from concealment al-Mahdi from my family just before the day of judgment, even if only one day remains in the life of the world, he will spread justice and equity and will eradicate tyranny and oppression.’ He must be the ‘Mahdi’, Doctor. I have seen him. He is very tall. He wears white robes that are trimmed with gold. When the sun strikes him, he glows like he is from paradise. He reads poetry. He tells of his visions of being able to disappear. The infidels will never find him. He is invisible to them. My grandfather tells me so.”
Mason wondered how this child, so ignorant by western standards of education could quote passages from the Qu’ran. There was something both familiar and endearing about him. His smile, the shape of his head and his profile. But Mason was becoming so distracted with the never-ending tan brown mountains that he couldn’t place who the boy reminded him of. Amahl continued his obvious praise and worship, “He will have a broad forehead and a pointed nose and he will rule for seven years. My grandfather says it is so. He will pray in Mecca and ask the prophet Isa. You know, that is the name of the one the infidels call Jesus.
He is the son of Maryam and he will return to Earth, to join with him and the dead will come to life. He will spread devotion and brotherhood among us. It is him. I believe that.”
“Bin Laden is a millionaire, Amahl, not a poor man who is a messenger from God. His objective is to establish a network of people who think like he does throughout the Islamic world.”
“So? The Mahdi will do the same in modern times. He is the Mahdi!” the boy answered matter-of-factly.
This was like arguing with fundamentalists at home, Mason thought, giving up the discussion. But home now seemed so far away. He looked out at this land of bleak mountains and caves covered in the awful dust that he was ingesting and inhaling, making him cough painfully. Was there no water here at all, he wondered.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-TWO
In the two days after his arrival, Mason worked non-stop treating wounds, performing complicated emergency surgery on both combatants and civilians under primitive and unhygienic conditions. As a daily routine he made his morning rounds to the other two camps in the complex on horseback, with Amahl the boy as his only assistant. The youth accompanied him on foot, leading a donkey carrying sparse medical supplies. On his return, Mason worked with two more experienced male nursing helpers in the rough hewn elongated huts serving as the hospital in the eastern corner of the camp. Masud Desai had no time to think.
Each day would begin with Amahl’s words, “My grandfather says, ‘When you give thanks to the wonder of Allah, you can better see the light of day.’ Greet your God. It is morning, Mr. Doctor,” as he opened the woven drapes dividing the living quarters, letting the blinding sunlight shine through. The clinic consisted of five separate one room buildings set within a greater adobe walled compound. Two huts were used to house the wounded, one building was divided in two by carpets hanging from rods that could with some difficulty be opened or drawn for privacy. The smaller portion served as an examining room and the larger area as a surgery. The fourth small building was used as a supply house and a fifth, perhaps twenty by eight feet, somewhat large by camp standards, was assigned to Masud and his staff as living quarters. The room’s walls were made of mud with sod intermingled with thatch serving as a roof. The floors were covered with many thick hand-woven carpets. There was no indoor sanitation. Water, while plentiful, came from a decaying sulfuric stream behind the camps boundaries and was stored in tanks attached to each building.
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