by Simon Conway
Farouz greeted a gang leader who was standing beside a conical mound of drying gravel high above the pits. “How’da body?” he called. Their handshake ended with a flourish, a snap of the fingers.
Jonah crouched at the edge of the pit. Beneath them a man in the water stopped and lifted his shake-shake and immediately the guards were on him, a foreman reaching in and plucking out the stone. He washed it in the water to remove the last of the clay and held it up between his thumb and forefinger.
“Boss,” he called.
Beside them the gang leader nodded and the stone was passed from hand to hand up the earthen ledges. It was placed in the palm of Farouz’s hand. He held it up to the sun and squinted at it.
“Two carat,” he said.
Then he passed it to Jonah, who mimicked him—holding it up to his remaining eye for scrutiny. It looked like an impossibly large grain of salt. Jonah had read that once upon a time diamonds were said to reveal the guilt or innocence of accused criminals and adulterers by the colors they reflected. By rights, in Sierra Leone, Jonah thought, the diamonds should be blood red.
There was the sound of a throat being cleared close behind him and the cold O-ring of a muzzle was placed against the back of Jonah’s neck. The sound of insects thickened around him.
“Put your hands up,” said a voice that was calm but authoritative, and suddenly familiar from a long-ago children’s game. Silwood Park in the endless summer of 1976: a skinny boy pointing a stick at him. Jonah glanced at Farouz, who shrugged and mopped his brow. So much for a deal cut on behalf of his delinquent nephew.
The muzzle was removed. The man with the voice that had sent him spinning back through time stepped back, safely out of reach. “Turn around.”
It couldn’t be.
Jonah took a deep breath and obeyed.
There were three of them and he recognized them immediately. One of them he knew from grainy mugshots in “most wanted” posters, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani. Ghailani had bought the truck that carried the bomb that destroyed the US embassy in Dar es Salaam in 1998. The second was Aziz Nassour, the Lebanese diamond broker on the UN watch list, and the third, the one who was pointing a pistol at him—a black molded-polymer sub-compact—was the custodian of a deep, dark secret. Jonah would say that Nor ed-Din had been his best student and his oldest and dearest friend, but the last time he had seen him he was lying face down in a pool of icy water in the Khyber Pass, and for many years Jonah had been under the impression that he had killed him there.
Nor held out his hand for the diamond and Jonah dropped it into his upturned palm. He wanted to say, “Hey, Nor, welcome back from the dead.” But Nor was a professional secret-keeper—trained by the best—and it seemed from the expression on his face that they had never met.
“What are you doing here?” asked Nor in Arabic. “Buying diamonds,” Jonah replied, also in Arabic.
“The diamonds here are no longer available for sale.”
“Then I guess I’d better go back the way I came,” Jonah told him, but he could see from the expression on their faces that this was not an option. “I don’t want any trouble.”
“Nevertheless, trouble has come,” said Nor, and gestured to the guards with a flick of his narrow, tapered fingers. “Take him.”
They dragged Jonah down a jungle trail to a clearing with a single cinder-block hut and threw him inside. For several hours, he listened to the steady footfall of the guards circling the hut and occasionally the sound of Nigerian Alpha jet fighters buzzing the jungle to the west.
Afternoon sun poured through the gaps in the thatch roof and created pools of light on the dirt floor. Jonah squatted on his haunches and watched as a fly writhed on its back in its death throes. Soon afterwards an ant emerged from a crack in the cinder-block wall. It darted this way and that with its antennae writhing. It found the fly carcass, circled it, and then went back to a second scout. They met antenna to antenna as if talking and then the second scout returned to the crack. Almost immediately a column of ants marched out and smothered the fly. They dismembered it and carried the pieces back to the nest.
The next time he saw it happen, he waited for the second scout to return to the crack and then reached down and removed the fly. Sure enough, a column emerged but when they found no fly they turned on the scout and tore it limb from limb. It occurred to him that the impulse to kill the bearer of bad news is hardwired into all creatures.
He couldn’t help wondering whether he had been dealt a similar fate.
PIPE DREAMS
September–October 1996
It was September 28. On an elevated traffic island outside Kabul’s presidential palace the corpse of former president Mohammed Najibullah was strung up by his neck. His clothes were drenched in blood and the pockets of his coat and his mouth were stuffed with afghanis, the country’s almost worthless currency. Kabul had fallen to the Taliban and the motley collection of British soldiers and spooks known as the Afghan Guides were now officially surplus to requirements.
Jonah was called to a meeting with Fisher-King to be given the news in his carpeted rooms at 85 Vauxhall Cross, the headquarters of MI6. He left the Department and walked down Whitehall and along the Embankment, past Parliament and MI5, and crossed Vauxhall Bridge. Approaching the building with the sun rising behind it, you could see why it was known as the “Inca jukebox.” It was surprisingly brash for a building that housed a secret arm of the government.
Fisher-King met him by the elevator in shirtsleeves and socks and guided him by the elbow past Immaculate Margo, his formidable secretary, and on into his inner sanctum with its privileged view of the Thames.
“Looking back on it, who’d have thought a band of bloodthirsty tribesmen would bring the Soviet Union to its knees,” he drawled in his effortlessly patrician voice. “Darjeeling?”
“No thanks.”
“Have a seat.” He waved in the direction of a chesterfield. Jonah sat carefully. The first time he had been called to Fisher-King’s office a chair had collapsed beneath him, and although he had suspected that the incident had been manufactured, it had nonetheless had the desired effect; ever since he had felt ill at ease in Fisher-King’s presence.
Fisher-King crossed to his broad, uncluttered desk and paused for a moment with his hand resting on his high-backed chair. “Afghanistan has been through a whirlwind of intrigue and deception in the years since the Soviets left, and during that time your friend Nor has offered us an unparalleled insight into Pakistani meddling.”
“And I think he still could,” Jonah said.
Fisher-King sat and leaned back in his chair with his fingers clasped behind his head. “We hung on in longer than most, Jonah. Long after the Americans had lost interest. You can’t say fairer than that, can you?”
“No,” Jonah conceded.
“Now it’s time to move on, to invest in new areas. The Pakistanis have put the Taliban in power in Kabul and on reflection we think that’s a good thing. In fact, it’s good news across the region. We gave Saddam a bloody nose in ’91 and now he’s contained. In Tehran, President Rafsanjani has taken the mullahs in hand. He’s a moderate, a thoroughly good chap. And Arafat’s returned to the West Bank. You couldn’t have predicted that. I think we’ll look back in a few years’ time and say 1996 was the turning point for Middle East peace. You played a part in that and, of course, we’re bloody grateful. We know what you’ve been through. Both of you.”
Fisher-King smiled broadly.
“That’s it?” Jonah demanded.
“We can’t be expected to shoulder your costs indefinitely,” Fisher-King protested. “After all, you’re not really one of us, Jonah.” Fisher-King had always treated the collection of misfits at the Department at best as poor relations, at worst as rank amateurs. He was of the opinion that military intelligence was a contradiction in terms and Jonah was forced to admit that for the most part he agreed.
“How is Monteith?” Fisher-King asked. “Is he still growing roses?
”
Monteith was Jonah’s boss, a fiery terrier of a man who ran the Department out of the gloomy basements beneath the Old War Office in Whitehall.
“I have serious doubts about the Taliban,” Jonah told him.
Fisher-King sighed. “Of course you do, Jonah, and so do we, but it’s a trade-off. It’s always a trade-off, in this case between peace and security on the one hand and human rights on the other. Right now, Afghanistan needs peace more than anything. The Taliban could play a central role in restoring centralized government in Afghanistan. The Americans agree. They are going to run a thousand miles of pipeline straight through the middle of it and pump a million barrels of oil a day. The oil companies are opening offices in Kandahar.”
“And the missing Stingers …?” Jonah asked. “Shouldn’t we be trying to get them back?”
The CIA had given away more than two thousand of the easy-to-use, shoulder-fired missiles during the war against the Soviets. The Stinger automated heat-seeking guidance system was uncannily accurate, and they had brought down scores of helicopters and transport aircraft, sowing fear among Soviet pilots and troops alike. Jonah had seen recent intelligence that suggested that six hundred Stingers were still at large.
Fisher-King dismissed the idea with a wave of the hand. “The Americans are even as we speak negotiating with Mullah Omar to buy them back. They’re offering a hundred thousand dollars for each one. There’s nothing we can bring to that particular table. We don’t have the resources. You’ll tell Nor, won’t you? It’s best coming from you. He’s your joe …”
“Tell him what exactly?”
“What I’ve just told you: job well done. Thanks very much.”
“And what do you expect him to do?”
“Same as he does now.” Fisher-King smiled winningly and sprang to his feet. “I’m sure the Pakistanis will keep him busy.” He removed his double-breasted suit jacket from a rack and put it on, sweeping together the silk-lined flaps and buttoning it up.
“Got to go,” he said. “Top Floor is waiting. You know your way out.”
Jonah found Monteith sitting on a plastic chair in front of the Afghan ops board in one of the largest of his basement rooms. As was his daily custom, he was wearing a hand-stitched tweed suit and polished brogues. It was difficult to tell whether the suit was forty years old or simply looked it.
“They want me to pack it up in boxes and stick it in an archive,” Monteith muttered angrily, staring intently at the board. “Fisher-King says it should be in a museum. I was thinking of donating it to my old school.”
Monteith’s Afghan ops board was a legend across the intelligence services. It was known as the Khyber Collage. It was a mishmash of satellite photos, mugshots, maps, waybills, freight certificates, Post-it notes, bills of lading, company accounts and bank records, transcripts of phone intercepts, letters and newspaper cuttings. Things were crossed out and new bits superimposed and glued on. It was maddeningly complex, like an alchemistic experiment. When Jonah had joined the Department it covered a single wall, now it was two. Only Monteith professed to see all the links. Only Monteith could claim to have been following the growth of the broad and diverse movement that was radical Islamic militancy, going back decades, to its roots in the jihad against the Soviets, when the Americans and the Saudis, without any thought for the consequences, funneled money to a diverse range of Afghan fighters. Funds that went to tens of thousands of people, some operating as individuals, others as mujahedin groups—groups that had over time dissolved or gruesomely mutated.
At the center of the board, there was a photograph cut from a newspaper of a donnish-looking man with a high forehead and bifocals perched on his nose. It was Monteith’s arch-nemesis, Brigadier Javid Aslam Khan, known to the Department as “The Hidden Hand.” Khan was head of the Afghan Bureau of the ISI, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s shadowy and all-powerful intelligence agency. Monteith maintained that it was Khan who was responsible for channeling Saudi and American funds to the most unsavory and extremist elements of the mujahedin during the Soviet occupation. It was Khan who was directly responsible for the brutal civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal when the mujahedin groups turned on each other and fought over the rubble. And it was Khan who created and nurtured the Taliban for a purpose that was yet to be fully revealed, but which kept Monteith awake at night.
Khan was also Nor’s ISI handler. Nor was one of the roving sets of eyes and ears that Khan maintained in the shifting jihadi groups that he subsidized in Afghanistan. Nor fed information to Khan and Nor fed information to Monteith. He was the Department’s best Afghan source, and Jonah suspected that there was nothing that Monteith hated more than the sense that Khan had finally prevailed.
“We stride boldly away from the twentieth century with too much confidence and too little reflection. We wrap ourselves in self-serving half-truths and comic-book tag-lines: the triumph of the West, the end of history.” He snorted. “The unipolar American moment. It’s ridiculously naive.”
“What do you want me to tell Nor?” Jonah asked.
Monteith glared at him. “Tell him that he can expect no further assistance from us, either financial or legal. Tell him that if he shows his face here we will deny that we ever had anything to do with him.”
“How do you think he’s going to react to that?”
“I don’t expect him to react well. What do you think?”
“I think he’s going to throw a fit.”
“Thank you for your insight. You’d better head off if you’re going to catch your plane.”
On his way out, Jonah saw that some wag had written “only connect” on the back of the door.
A week later, in the final days of the “hundred-and-twenty-day wind,” when the Afghan plains were lashed with dust storms and the sky was the color of a bruise, Jonah slipped silently into Kandahar.
Tradecraft dictated that they meet in the privacy of the cemetery behind the Chawk Madad, among the tattered green martyrs’ flags and upright shards of stone. Nor strode back and forth, his thoughts and words running into each other, gesticulating with his hands as tears rolled down his cheeks. Nor had always been emotionally extravagant: he swerved from one extreme to the other, from unblinking stillness to this staccato jumble of speech.
“You must be fucking joking,” Nor said. “I’m not hearing this.”
Jonah had just told Nor that he must learn to live without him. “They pulled the funding,” he explained.
“So what am I supposed to do now?” demanded Nor. “Stand by and watch while this country rolls back into the Dark Ages? Because that’s what’s going to happen, Jonah, they’re going to wind the clock all the way back to zero. They’re going to break the fucking springs.”
“They’re delivering peace,” Jonah said, lamely.
Nor stopped and stared. His accusing silence, as always, was worse than his mania.
“Afghanistan has a chance that it hasn’t had in a generation,” Jonah told him. “The Americans are going to run a pipeline through it.”
Nor sat down and buried his head in his hands.
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” he said.
And Jonah couldn’t believe that he was saying it.
“What’s happened to you?” asked Nor suddenly.
Jonah wondered whether to tell him: I have bought a dilapidated farmhouse on an island on the west coast of Scotland, somewhere as far away from Afghanistan as it is possible to get, and I’m going to repair it and live in it; I am to become the father of a baby girl and I have a marriage that I want to make right again, and that is all I care about.
“The Department is downsizing,” Jonah told him instead. “The Afghan Guides have been consigned to history. I’m retiring.”
“What the fuck are you talking about? How can you retire? You’re not even thirty years old.”
“I’m done.”
“I’ll never forgive you for this.”
; THE MULLAH WANTS TO PARLEY
January 1999
It was in early 1999, just over two years after he was deemed to be surplus to requirements in the new Taliban era, that Nor got back in touch with the Department. The message that he conveyed was simple—the mullah wants to parley.
By that stage it was already clear to anyone who was a student of Afghan affairs that the Taliban, under the command of Mullah Omar, were not the pliable yokels that it had been assumed they were. In August 1998, the Clinton administration had launched a cruise missile attack on terrorist training camps near Khost in retaliation for the Nairobi and Dar es Salaam truck bombings, and the US oil giant Lodestone and its rival Unocal, the Taliban’s only corporate friends, had suspended work and closed their Kandahar offices. In November 1998 the Manhattan Federal Court had issued an indictment chronicling 238 separate charges against Osama Bin Laden, from participating in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and funding Islamist groups in New Jersey to conspiring with Sudan, Iran and Iraq to attack US installations. And the following month, the UN Security Council had passed a motion of censure on the Taliban for its failure to conclude a ceasefire with the Northern Alliance, the slaughter of thousands of ethnic Hazaras in Mazari Sharif, profiting from the lucrative heroin trade and harboring terrorists.
Jonah was living on the Hebridean island of Islay, with his wife Sarah and Esme, his baby daughter. He remembered the sense of relief when the call came and the sense of palpable excitement in the Department when he arrived. He also recognized, with the clarity of hindsight, the significance of Sarah’s parting question, delivered across the kitchen table: “Is that what you’re going to do? You’re going to keep leaving us?”
What could he say? He had come to his own conclusion. As miserable as it was, his job was what he was. It was his calling. He was nothing without it.