The Afghan

by Frederick Forsyth

  It was not badly equipped as crates go. From the outside it was just a large timber box such as are used for general freight purposes. Even the markings were totally authentic.

  Inside it was insulated against any sound being able to emerge. In the roof there was a small removable panel to replenish fresh air, but that would not be taken down until the crate was safely airborne. There were two comfortable armchairs welded to the floor and a low-wattage amber light.

  The recumbent Izmat Khan was placed in the chair that already had restrainer straps fitted. Without cutting off circulation to the limbs, the prisoner was secured so that he could relax but not leave the chair. He was still asleep.

  Finally satisfied, the fifth CIA man, the one who would travel in the crate, nodded to his colleagues and the end of it was closed off. A forklift hoisted the crate a foot off the ground and ran it out to the airfield where the Hercules was waiting. It was an AC-130 Talon from Special Forces fitted with extra-range tanks and could make its destination easily.

  Unexplained flights into and out of Gitmo are regular as clockwork; the tower gave a quick ‘clear take-off’ in response to the staccato request and the Hercules was airborne for McChord Base, Washington State.

  An hour later a closed car drove up to the Camp Echo block and another small group got out. Inside the empty cell a man was garbed in orange jumpsuit and soft slippers. The unconscious Afghan had been photographed before being covered and removed. With the use of the Polaroid print a few minor snips were made to the beard and hair of the replacement. Every fallen tuft was collected and removed.

  When it was over there were a few gruff farewells and the party left, locking the cell door behind them. Twenty minutes later the soldiers were back, mystified but incurious. The poet Tennyson had got it right: ‘theirs not to reason why’.

  They checked the familiar figure of their prize prisoner and waited for the dawn.

  The morning sun was tipping the pinnacles of the Cascades when the AC-130 drifted down to its home base at McChord. The base commander had been told this was a CIA shipment, a last consignment for their new research facility up in the forests of the Wilderness. Even with his rank, he needed to know no more, so he asked no more. The paperwork was in order and the Chinook stood by.

  In flight the Afghan had come round. The roof panel was open and the air inside the hull of the Hercules fully pressurized and fresh. The escort smiled encouragingly and offered food and drink. The prisoner settled for a soda through a straw.

  To the escort’s surprise the prisoner had a few phrases in English, clearly gleaned over five years listening in Guantanamo. He asked the time only twice in the journey, and once bowed his face as far as it would go and murmured his prayers. Otherwise he said nothing.

  Just before touchdown the roof panel was replaced and the waiting forklift driver had not the slightest suspicion he was not lifting an ordinary load of freight from the rear ramp of the Hercules across to the Chinook.

  Again the ramp doors closed. The small battery-powered pilot light inside the crate remained on, but invisible from outside, as all sounds were inaudible. But the prisoner was, as his escort would later report to Marek Gumienny, like a pussy-cat. No trouble at all, sir.

  Given that it was mid-February, they were lucky with the weather. The skies were clear but freezing cold. At the helipad outside the Cabin the great twin-rotored Chinook landed and opened its rear doors. But the crate stayed inside. It was easier to disembark the two passengers straight from the crate to the snow.

  Both men shivered as the rear wall of the crate came off. The snatch team from Guantanamo had flown with the Hercules and up front in the Chinook. They were waiting for the last formality.

  The prisoner’s hands and feet were shackled before the restraining straps were removed. Then he was bidden to rise and shuffled down the ramp into the snow. The resident staff, all ten of them, stood around in a semi-circle, guns pointing.

  With an escort so heavy they could hardly get through the doors, the Taliban commander was walked across the helipad, through the cabin and into his own quarters. As the door closed, shutting out the bitter air, he stopped shivering.

  Six guards stood round him in his large cell as the manacles were finally removed. Shuffling backwards, they left the cell and the steel door slammed shut. He looked around. It was a better cell, but it was still a cell. He recalled the courtroom. The colonel had told him he would return to Afghanistan. They had lied again.

  It was mid-morning and the sun was blazing down on the Cuban landscape when another Hercules rolled in to land. This also was equipped for long-distance flying, but unlike the Talon it was not armed to the teeth and did not belong to Special Forces. It came from MATS, the Air Force transport division. It was to carry one single passenger across the globe.

  The cell door swung open.

  ‘Prisoner Khan, stand up. Face the wall. Adopt the position.’

  The belt went round the midriff; chains fell from it to the ankle cuffs and another set to the wrists, held together and in front of the waist. The position permitted a shuffling walk, no more.

  There was a short walk to the end of the block with six armed guards. The high-security truck had steps at the back, a mesh screen between the prisoners and the driver, and black windows.

  When he was ordered out at the airfield, the prisoner blinked in the harsh sunlight.

  He shook his shaggy head and looked bewildered. As his eyes grew accustomed to the glare, he gazed around and saw the waiting Hercules and a group of American officers staring at him. One of them advanced and beckoned.

  Meekly he followed him across the scorching tarmac. Shackled though he was, six armed grunts surrounded him all the way. He turned to have one last look at the place that had held him for five miserable years. Then he shuffled up into the hull of the aircraft.

  In a room one flight below the operations deck of the control tower two men stood and watched him.

  ‘There goes your man,’ said Marek Gumienny.

  ‘If they ever find out who he really is,’ replied Steve Hill, ‘may Allah have mercy on him.’

  PART FOUR

  Journey

  CHAPTER TEN

  It was a long and wearisome flight. there were no in-flight refuelling facilities, which are expensive. This Hercules was just a prison ship, doing a favour for the Afghan government who ought to have picked up their man in Cuba but had no aircraft for the job.

  They flew via American bases in the Azores and Ramstein, Germany, and it was late afternoon of the following day that the C-130 dropped towards the great air base of Bagram at the southern edge of the bleak Shomali Plain.

  The flight crew had changed twice, but the escort squad had stayed the course, reading, playing cards, catnapping as the four sets of whirling blades outside the portholes drove them east and ever east. The prisoner remained shackled. He too slept as best he could.

  As the Hercules taxied on to the apron beside the huge hangars that dominate the American zone within Bagram base, the reception group was waiting. The US Provost Major heading the escort party was gratified to see the Afghans were taking no chances. Apart from the prison van there were twenty Afghan Special Forces soldiers headed by the unit commander Brigadier Yusuf.

  The major trotted down the ramp to clear the paperwork before handing over his charge. This took a few seconds. Then he nodded to his colleagues. They unchained the Afghan from the fuselage rib and led him shuffling out into a freezing Afghan winter.

  The troops enveloped him, dragged him to the prison van and threw him inside. The door slammed shut. The US major decided he absolutely would not want to change places. He threw up a salute to the brigadier, who responded.

  ‘You take good care of him, sir,’ said the American, ‘that is one very hard man.’

  ‘Do not worry, major,’ said the Afghan officer. ‘He is going to Pul-i-Charki jail for the rest of his days.’

  Minutes later the prison van drove off, followed
by the truck with the Afghan SF soldiers. It took the road south to Kabul. It was not until the darkness was complete that the van and the truck became separated in what would later be officially described as an unfortunate accident. The van proceeded alone.

  Pul-i-Charki is a fearsome, brooding block of a place to the east of Kabul, near the gorge at the eastern end of the Kabul plain. Under the Soviet occupation it was controlled by the Khad secret police and constantly rang with the screams of the tortured.

  During the civil war several tens of thousands of prisoners failed to leave alive. Conditions had improved since the creation of the new, elected Republic of Afghanistan, but its stone battlements, corridors and dungeons still seemed to echo with the shrieks of its ghosts. Fortunately the prison van never made it.

  Ten miles after losing the military escort a pick-up truck came out of a side road and took up station behind the van. When it flashed its lights, the van driver pulled over at the pre-reconnoitred flat area off the road and behind a clump of stunted trees. There the ‘escape’ took place.

  The prisoner had been uncuffed as soon as the van left the last security check at Bagram’s perimeter. Even as the van rolled, he had changed into the warm grey woollen shalwar kameez and boots provided. Just before the pullover he had wound round his head the feared black turban of the Talib.

  Brigadier Yusuf, who had descended from the cabin of the truck to be taken on board by the pick-up, now took charge. There were four bodies in the open back of the utility.

  All had come fresh from the city mortuary. Two were bearded, and they had been dressed in Talib clothing. They were actually construction workers who had been atop some very insecure scaffolding when it collapsed and killed them both.

  The other two derived from separate car accidents. Afghan roads are so potholed that the smoothest place to drive is the crown at the centre. As it is considered rather effeminate to pull over just because someone is coming the other way, the harvest in fatalities is impressive. The two smooth-shaven bodies were in prison service uniform.

  The prison officers would be found with handguns drawn, but dead; the bullets were fired into the bodies there and then. The ambushing Taliban were scattered at the roadside, also shot with slugs from the pistols of the guards. The van door was savaged with a pickaxe and left swinging open. That was how the van would be found sometime the next day.

  When the theatre had been accomplished Brigadier Yusuf took the front seat of the pick-up beside the driver. The former prisoner climbed in the back with the two Special Forces men he had brought with him. All three wrapped the trailing end of their turbans round their faces to shelter from the cold.

  The pick-up skirted Kabul City and cut across country until it intercepted the highway south to Ghazni and Kandahar. There waited, as each night, the long column of what all Asia knows as the ‘jingly’ trucks.

  They all seem to have been built about a century ago. They snort and snarl along every road of the Middle and Far East, emitting their columns of choking black smoke. Often they are seen broken down by the roadside, the driver being prepared to trudge many miles to find and buy the needed part.

  They seem to find their way over impossible mountain passes and along the sides of bare hillsides on crumbling tracks. Sometimes the gutted skeleton of one can be seen in the defile below the road. But they are the commercial lifeblood of a continent, carrying an amazing variety of supplies to the tiniest and most isolated settlements and the people who live in them.

  The British named them jingly trucks many years ago because of their decorations. They are carefully painted on every available surface with scenes from religion and history. There are representations from Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism and Buddhism, often gloriously mixed up. They are decorated and caparisoned with ribbons, tinsel and even bells. Hence, they jingle.

  The line on the highway south of Kabul contained several hundred, their drivers sleeping in their cabs, waiting for the dawn. The pick-up slewed to a halt beside the line. Mike Martin jumped from the back and walked to the cab. The shrouded figure behind the wheel had his face hidden by a shemagh of checked cloth.

  On the other side Brigadier Yusuf nodded but said nothing. End of the road. Start of the journey. As he turned away he heard the driver speak.

  ‘Good luck, boss.’

  That term again. Only the SAS called their officers ‘boss’. What the American provost major at Bagram had not known as he made the handover was not only who his prisoner was, but that since the installation of President Hamid Karzai the Afghan Special Forces had been created and trained at his request by the SAS.

  Martin turned away and started to walk down the line of trucks. Behind him the tail lights of the pick-up faded as it headed back to Kabul. In the cab the SAS sergeant made a cellphone call to a number in Kabul. It was taken by the Head of Station. The sergeant uttered two words and terminated.

  The SIS chief for all Afghanistan also made a call on a secure line. It was three-thirty in the morning in Kabul, eleven at night in Scotland. A one-line message came up on one of the screens. Phillips and McDonald were already in the room, hoping to see what they then saw. ‘Crowbar is running.’

  On a freezing, pitted highway Mike Martin permitted himself one last glance behind him. The red lights of the pick-up were gone. He turned and walked on. Within a hundred yards he had become the Afghan.

  He knew what he was looking for but he was a hundred trucks down the line until he found it. A licence plate from Karachi, Pakistan. The driver of such a truck would be unlikely to be Pashtun and so would not notice the imperfect command of Pashto. He would be likely to be a Baluchi heading home to Pakistan’s Baluchistan province.

  It was too early for the drivers to be rising, and unwise to rouse the driver of the chosen truck; tired men woken suddenly are not in the best of tempers and Martin needed him in a generous mood. For two hours he curled up beneath the truck and shivered.

  Around six there was a stirring and a hint of pink in the east. By the roadside someone started a fire and set a billy on it to boil. In central Asia much of life is lived in and around the tea-house, the chai-khana, which can be created even with a fire, a brew of tea and a group of men. Martin rose, walked over to the fire and warmed his hands.

  The tea-brewer was Pashtun but taciturn, which suited Martin fine. He had taken off his turban, unwound it and stowed it in the tote-bag hanging from his shoulder. It would be unwise to advertise being Talib until one knew the company was sympathetic. With a fistful of his Afghanis he bought a steaming cup and sipped gratefully. Minutes later the Baluchi clambered sleepily out of his cab and came over for tea.

  Dawn rose. Some of the trucks began to kick into life with plumes of black smoke. The Baluchi walked back to his cab. Martin followed.

  ‘Greetings, my brother.’

  The Baluchi responded, but with some suspicion.

  ‘Do you by any chance head south to the border and Spin Boldak?’

  If the man was heading back to Pakistan, the small border town south of Kandahar would be where he would cross. By then Martin knew there would be a price on his head. He would have to skirt the border controls on foot.

  ‘If it please Allah,’ said the Baluchi.

  ‘Then in the name of the all-merciful would you let a poor man trying to get home to his family ride with you?’

  The Baluchi thought. His cousin normally came with him on these long hauls to Kabul, but he was sick in Karachi. This trip he had driven alone, and it was exhausting.

  ‘Can you drive one of these?’ he asked.

  ‘In truth, I am a driver of many years.’

  They drove south in companionable silence, listening to the eastern pop music on the old plastic radio propped above the dash. It screeched and whistled but Martin was not sure whether this was just the static or the tune.

  The day wore on and they chugged through Ghazni and on towards Kandahar. On the road they paused for tea and food, the usual goat and rice, a
nd filled the tank. Martin helped with the cost from his bundle of Afghanis and the Baluchi became much more friendly.

  Though Martin spoke neither Urdu nor the Baluchi dialect and the man from Karachi only a smattering of Pashto, with sign language and some Arabic from the Koran they got along well.

  There was a further overnight stop north of Kandahar, for the Baluchi would not drive in the darkness. This was Zabol province, wild country and peopled by wild men. It was safer to drive in the light with hundreds of other lorries in front, behind and yet more heading north. Bandits would prefer the night.

  At the northern outskirts of Kandahar Martin claimed he needed a nap and curled up along the bench behind the seats which the Baluchi used as his bed. Kandahar had been the headquarters and stronghold of the Taliban and Martin wanted no reformed Talib to think he saw an old friend in a passing truck.

  South of Kandahar he again spelled the Baluchi at the wheel. It was still mid-afternoon when they came to Spin Boldak; Martin claimed he lived in the northern outskirts, bade his host a grateful farewell and dropped off miles before the border checkpoint.

  Because the Baluchi spoke no Pashto he had kept his radio tuned to a pop station and never heard the news. At the border the queues were longer even than usual and when he finally rolled to the barrier he was shown a picture. A black-bearded Talib face stared at him.

  He was an honest and hard-working man. He wanted to get home to his wife and four children. Life was hard enough. Why spend days, even weeks, in an Afghan jail trying to explain that he had been totally ignorant?

  ‘By the Prophet, I have never seen him,’ he swore, and they let him go.

  Never again, he thought as he trundled south on the Quetta road. He might hail from the most corrupt city in Asia, but at least you knew where you were in your own home town. Afghans were not his people; why get involved? He wondered what the Talib had done.

  Martin had been warned the hijack of the prison van, the murder of its two warders and the escape of a returnee from Guantanamo Bay could not be covered up. To start with the American Embassy would make a fuss.