The Afghan

by Frederick Forsyth

  ‘There are worse?’ asked Martin.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Tamian Godfrey, resuming her walk but directing the party firmly back towards the castle whose tower could just be seen two short valleys away.

  ‘The ultras, the real ultras, I would designate with one word. Takfir. Whatever it meant in Wahhab’s day, it has changed. The true Salafi will not smoke, gamble, dance, accept music in his presence, drink alcohol or consort with western women. With his dress, appearance and religious devotion, he is immediately identifiable for what he is. From an internal security point of view, identifiability is half the battle.

  ‘But some will adopt every single custom of the West, however much they may loathe them, in order to pass as fully westernized and therefore harmless. All nineteen of the Nine/ Eleven bombers slipped through because they looked and acted the part. The same with the four London bombers: apparently normal young men, going to the gym, playing cricket, polite, helpful, one of them a special needs teacher, smiling constantly and planning mass murder. These are the ones to watch.

  ‘Many are educated, barbered, clean-shaven, groomed, dressed in suits, with a good degree. These are the ultimate; prepared to become chameleons against their faith to achieve mass murder for their faith. Thank heavens, here we are, my old legs are giving out. Time for the midday prayers. Mike, you will utter the call, and then lead us in prayer. You may be asked to later. It is a great privilege.’

  Just after the New Year an e-mail was sent from the office of Siebart and Abercrombie to Jakarta. The Countess of Richmond, with a full cargo of crated Jaguar saloon cars for Singapore, would sail from Liverpool on 1 March. After unloading at Singapore she would proceed in ballast to North Borneo to take aboard the hold cargo of timber before turning for Surabaya for the deck cargo of crated silks.

  The construction crew working inside the Pasayten Wilderness was finally and deeply grateful when the job was done by the end of January. To keep up the work rate the men had chosen to overnight right on the site and until the central heating came on stream they had been extremely cold. But the bonus was large and tempting. They took the discomfort and completed on schedule.

  To the naked eye the Cabin looked much the same but larger. In fact it had been transformed. To cope with a staff of two officers the bedrooms would suffice; for the extra eight guards to accomplish a twenty-four-hours-a-day surveillance regime, an extra bunkhouse had been added, and a refectory beside it.

  The spacious sitting room was retained as such, but a recreation room with pool table, library, plasma TV and ample DVD selection had created yet another extension. All the rooms were built of interior-insulated pine logs.

  The third extension appeared to be of the usual rustic logs but its exterior walls were in fact only clad with split tree trunks; inside the walls were stressed concrete. The whole penitentiary wing was impregnable from without and escape-proof from within.

  It was reached from the guards’ quarters through a single steel door with food-service hatch and spyhole. Beyond this door was a single but spacious room. It contained a steel bed frame deeply embedded in the concrete floor. It could never be removed by bare hands. Nor could the wall shelving, which was integral to the concrete.

  There were however carpets on the floor and heat came from skirting-level grills that could never be opened. The room also contained a door opposite the spyhole and this the detainee could open or close at will. It led only to the exercise yard.

  This was bare save for a concrete bench in the centre out of reach of the walls. These were ten feet tall and smooth as a pool table. No man could get anywhere near the top, nor was there anything that could be detached, propped against the wall or stood on.

  For sanitation there was a recess off the sitting room/bedroom containing a single hole in the floor for bodily functions and a shower whose controls were in the hands of the guards outside.

  Because all the new materials had come in by helicopter, the only visible exterior addition was a landing pad under the snow. Otherwise the isolated Cabin stood in its five-hundred-acre tract, surrounded on all sides by the pines, larch and spruce even though the trees had been cut back to a hundred yards in every direction.

  When they came, the ten guardians of probably the country’s most expensive and exclusive prison were two middle-grade CIA men from Langley and eight junior staffers who had completed all the mental and physical tests at the ‘Farm’ training school and were hoping for an exciting first assignment. Instead they got a forest in the snow. But they were all fit and eager to impress.

  The military trial at Guantanamo Bay began just before the end of January and was held in one of the larger rooms in the interrogation block, decked out now for its judicial purpose. Anyone hoping for a half-mad Colonel Jessup or any of the histrionics portrayed in A Few Good Men would have been sorely disappointed. The proceedings were low in tone and orderly.

  There were eight detainees being considered for release as of ‘no further danger’ and seven were vociferous in stating their harmlessness. Only one maintained a scornful silence. His case was heard last.

  ‘Prisoner Khan, into what language would you like these proceedings to be translated?’ asked the colonel presiding, flanked by a major and a female captain on the dais at the end of the room under the seal of the United States of America. All three were from the US Marines legal branch.

  The prisoner was facing them; he was hauled to his feet by the Marine guards flanking him. Desks set facing each other had been allocated to prosecuting and defending attorneys, the former military, the latter civilian. The prisoner shrugged gently and stared at the female Marine captain for several seconds; then he let his gaze come to rest on the wall above the judges.

  ‘This court is aware that the prisoner understands Arabic, so that is the language the court chooses. Any objection, counsellor?’

  The question was to the defending attorney, who shook his head. He had been warned about his client when he took the case. From all he had heard he was convinced he had no chance. It was a civil-rights-based appearance and he knew what the surrounding Marines thought of white knights from the civil-rights movement. A helpful client would have been nice. Still, he reasoned, the Afghan’s attitude at least got his counsel off the hook. He shook his head. No objection; Arabic would do.

  The Arabic terp advanced and positioned himself close to the Marine guards. It was a wise choice; there was only one Pashtun interpreter and he had had a rough time with the Americans because he had coaxed nothing out of his fellow Afghan. Now he had nothing to do and saw the end of a quite comfortable lifestyle approaching.

  There had only ever been seven Pashtun at ‘Gitmo’, the seven wrongly included among the foreign fighters at Kunduz five years earlier. Four had gone back, simple farm boys who had renounced all Muslim extremism with considerable enthusiasm; and the other two had had mental breakdowns so complete that they were still in psychiatric care. The Taliban commander was the last one.

  The prosecuting counsel began and the terp uttered a stream of sibilant Arabic. The gist was that the Yankees are going to send you back to the slammer and throw away the keys, you arrogant Taliban shit. Izmat Khan slowly lowered his gaze and fixed the terp. The eyes said it all. The Lebanon-born American reverted to literal translation. The man might be dressed in a ludicrous orange jumpsuit, shackled hand and foot, but you never knew with this bastard.

  The prosecutor did not take long. He stressed five years of virtual silence, a refusal to name collaborators in the war of terror against the USA and the fact the prisoner had been caught in a jail uprising in which an American had been brutally stomped to death. Then he sat down. He had no doubt of the outcome. The man would have to remain in custody for years to come.

  The civil-rights attorney took a little longer. He was pleased that as an Afghan the prisoner had had absolutely nothing to do with the atrocity of 9/11. He had been fighting in an all-Afghan civil war at the time and had nothing to do with the Arabs behind Al-Q
aeda. As for Mullah Omar and the Afghan government sheltering Bin Laden and his cronies, that was a dictatorship of which Mr Khan was a serving officer but not a part.

  ‘I really must urge this court to admit the reality,’ he wound up. ‘If this man is a problem, he is an Afghan problem. There is a new and democratically elected government there now. We should ship him back for them to deal with.’

  The three judges withdrew. They were away for thirty minutes. When they returned the captain was pink with anger. She still could not believe what she had heard. Only the colonel and the major had had the interview with the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and knew their orders.

  ‘Prisoner Khan, be upstanding. This court has been made aware that the government of President Karzai has agreed that if you are returned to your native land, you will be sentenced to life imprisonment over there. That being so, this court intends to burden the American taxpayer with you no longer. Arrangements will therefore be made to ship you back to Kabul. You will return as you arrived – in shackles. That is all. Court rises.’

  The captain was not the only one in shock. The prosecuting attorney wondered how this would look on his résumé. The defending counsel was feeling slightly light-headed. The terp had for one panicking moment thought the mad colonel would order the cuffs taken off in which case he, the good son of Beirut, was going straight out of the window.

  The British Foreign & Commonwealth Office is situated in King Charles Street, just off Whitehall and within easy glancing distance of the window outside which King Charles I was decapitated. As the New Year holiday slipped into memory the small protocol team that had been set up the previous summer resumed its task.

  This was to coordinate with the Americans the ever more complex details of the forthcoming 2007 G8 conference. The 2005 meeting of the governments of the eight richest states in the world had been at Gleneagles Hotel, Scotland, and it had been a success up to a point. The point, however, had as always been the roaring crowds of protesters. Each year they presented problems that grew steadily worse. At Gleneagles the Perthshire landscape had had to be disfigured by miles and miles of chain-link fencing to create a complete cordon sanitaire round the entire estate. The access road had had to be fenced and guarded.

  Led by two ageing pop stars, the call had gone out for a million protesters against world poverty to march through nearby Edinburgh. That was just the anti-poverty brigade. Then the anti-globalization cohorts had thrown their flour bombs and waved their placards.

  ‘Don’t these yo-yos realize that global trade generates the wealth with which to fight poverty?’ asked one angry diplomat. The answer was: apparently not.

  Genoa was remembered with a shudder. That was why the idea out of the White House, who would be hosting 2007, was acclaimed as simple, elegant, brilliant. A location sumptuous but utterly isolated; immune, unreachable, secure in total control. It was the mass of detail that concerned the protocol team; that and the advancement to mid-April. So the British team accepted what had been agreed and announced, and got on with their administrative task.

  Far away to the south-east two huge USAF C-5 Galaxies began to drop towards the Sultanate of Oman. They came from the east coast of the USA with one mid-air refuelling by a tanker out of the Azores. The two aerial juggernauts came out of the sunset on the Dhofari hills, heading east and asking for landing instructions at the Anglo-American desert air base of Thumrait.

  In their cavernous hulls the two giants contained an entire military unit. One had the living accommodation: from flat-pack, skilled-assembly hutments, through generators, air conditioning, refrigeration plants and TV aerials, to the corkscrews for the fifteen-person technical team. The other carried what is called ‘the sharp end’: two pilotless reconnaissance drones called Predator, their guidance and imaging kit and the men and women who would operate them.

  A week later they were set up. On the far side of the air base, out of bounds to non-unit personnel, the bungalows were up, the air conditioners hummed, the latrines were dug, the kitchen cooked; and under their hooped shelters the two Predators waited until their mission should be given to them. The aerial surveillance unit was also patched through to Tampa, Florida and Edzell, Scotland. Some day they would be told what they had to watch – day and night, rain and cloud – photograph and transmit back. Until then men and machines waited in the heat.

  Mike Martin’s final briefing took a full three days and it was important enough that Marek Gumienny flew over in the agency Grumman. Steve Hill came up from London and the two spymasters joined their executive officers McDonald and Phillips.

  There were only five of them in the room, for Gordon Phillips operated what he called ‘the slide show’ himself. Rather more developed than the old slide projectors of yesterday, the demonstrator threw up picture after picture on a high-definition plasma screen in perfect colour and detail. At a touch on the remote, it could close in on any detail and magnify to fill the screen.

  The point of the briefing was to show Mike Martin every last piece of information in the possession of the entire gamut of western agencies concerning the faces he might meet.

  The sources were not just the Anglo-American agencies. Over forty nations’ agencies were pouring their discoveries into central databases. Apart from the rogue states, Iran, Syria, and the failed states like Somalia, governments across the planet were sharing information on terrorists of the ultra-aggressive Islamist creed.

  Rabat was invaluable in targeting its own Moroccans; Aden fed in names and faces from South Yemen; Riyadh had swallowed its embarrassment and provided columns of faces from its own Saudi list.

  Martin stared at them all as they flashed up. Some were face-on portraits taken in a police station; others were snatched with long lenses on streets or in hotels. The faces’ possible variants were shown: with or without beard; in Arab or western dress; long hair, short or shaven.

  There were mullahs and imams from various extremist mosques; youths believed to be simple message-carriers; faces of those known to help with support services like funds, transport, safe houses.

  And there were the big players, the ones who controlled the various global divisions and had access to the very top.

  Some were dead, like Muhammad Atef, first Director of Operations, killed by an American bomb in Afghanistan; his successor, serving life without parole; his successor, also dead; and the believed present one.

  Somewhere in there was the doctorly face of Tewfik al-Qur, who had dived over a balcony in Peshawar five months earlier. A few faces down the line was Saud Hamud al-Utaibi, new head of AQ in Saudi Arabia and believed very much alive.

  And there were the blanks, the outline of a head, black on white. These included the AQ chief from South-east Asia, successor to Hanbali and probably the man behind the latest bombings of tourist resorts in the Far East. And, surprisingly, the AQ chief for the United Kingdom.

  ‘We knew who he was until about six months ago,’ said Gordon Phillips. ‘Then he quit just in time. He is back in Pakistan, hunted day and night. The ISI will get him eventually . . .’

  ‘And ship him up to us in Bagram,’ grunted Marek Gumienny. They all knew that inside the US base north of Kabul was a very special facility where everyone ‘sang’ eventually.

  ‘You will certainly seek out this one,’ said Steve Hill as a grim-faced imam flashed on the screen. It was a snatched shot and came from Pakistan. ‘And this one.’

  It was an elderly man, looking mild and courtly; also a snatched shot, on a quayside somewhere with bright blue water in the background; it came from the Special Forces of the United Arab Emirates in Dubai.

  They broke, ate, resumed, slept and started again. Only when the housekeeper was in the room with trays of food did Phillips switch off the TV screen. Tamian Godfrey and Najib Qureshi stayed in their rooms or walked the hills together. Finally it was over.

  ‘Tomorrow we fly,’ said Marek Gumienny.

  Mrs Godfrey and the Afghan analyst came to the he
lipad to see him off. He was young enough to be the Koranic scholar’s son.

  ‘Take care of yourself, Mike,’ she said, then swore. ‘Damn, stupid me, I’m choking up. God go with you, lad.’

  ‘And if all else fails, may Allah keep you in his care,’ said Qureshi.

  The Jetranger could only take the two senior controllers and Martin. The two executive officers would drive down to Edzell and resume their mission.

  The Bell landed well away from prying eyes and the group of three ran across to the CIA Grumman V. A Scottish snow squall caused them all to shelter under waterproofs held over their heads, so no one saw that one of the men was not in western dress.

  The crew of the Grumman had tended to some strange-looking passengers and knew better than to raise even an eyebrow at the heavily-bearded Afghan whom the Deputy Director (Operations) was escorting across the Atlantic with a British guest.

  They did not fly to Washington but to a remote peninsula on the south-east coast of Cuba. Just after dawn on 14 February they touched down at Guantanamo and taxied straight into a hangar whose doors closed at once.

  ‘I’m afraid you have to remain in the plane, Mike,’ said Marek Gumienny. ‘We’ll get you out of here under cover of dark.’

  Night comes fast in the tropics and it was pitch black by seven p.m. That was when four CIA men from ‘special tasks’ entered the cell of Izmat Khan. He rose, sensing something wrong. The regular guards had quit the corridor outside his cell half an hour earlier. That had never happened before.

  The four men were not brutal but they were not taking no for an answer either. Two grabbed the Afghan, one round the torso pinioning his arms, the other round the thighs. The chloroform pad took only twenty seconds to work. The writhing stopped and the prisoner went limp.

  He was put on a stretcher and thence on to a wheeled trolley. A cotton sheet went over the body and the prisoner was wheeled outside. The crate was waiting. The entire cell block was devoid of guard staff. No one saw a thing. A few seconds after the abduction the Afghan was inside the crate.