The Afghan

by Frederick Forsyth

  ‘They asked me about myself. I told them that.’

  ‘But you never denounced others? You mentioned no names? That is what the others say of you.’

  ‘They wiped out my family. Most of me died then. How do you punish a man who is dead?’

  ‘A good answer, my friend. So, let us talk about Guantanamo. Tell me about Gitmo.’

  Martin had been briefed hour after hour about what had happened to him on the Cuban peninsula. The arrival on 14 January 2002, hungry, thirsty, soiled with urine, blindfolded, shackled so tightly the hands were numb for weeks. Beards and heads shaved, clothed in orange coveralls, stumbling and tripping in the darkness of the hoods . . .

  Dr Al-Khattab took copious notes, writing on yellow legal notepaper with an old-fashioned fountain pen. When a passage was reached where he knew all the answers, he ceased and contemplated his prisoner with a gentle smile.

  In the late afternoon he offered a photograph.

  ‘Do you know this man?’ he asked. ‘Did you ever see him?’

  Martin shook his head. The face looking up from the photo was General Geoffrey D. Miller, successor as camp commandant to General Rick Baccus. The latter had sat in on interrogations but General Miller left it to the CIA teams.

  ‘Quite right,’ said Al-Khattab. ‘He saw you, according to one of our released friends, but you were always hooded as a punishment for non-cooperation. And when did the conditions start to improve?’

  They talked until sundown, then the Arab rose.

  ‘I have much to check on,’ he said. ‘If you are telling the truth, we will continue in a few days. If not, I’m afraid I shall have to issue Suleiman with the appropriate instructions.’

  Martin went back to his cell. Dr Al-Khattab issued rapid orders to the guard team and left. He drove a modest rented car and he returned to the Hilton Hotel in Ras-al-Khaimah town, elegantly dominating the Al-Saqr deep-water harbour. He spent the night and left the next day. By then he was wearing a well-cut cream tropical suit. When he checked in with British Airways at Dubai International Airport his English was impeccable.

  In fact Ali Aziz al-Khattab had been born a Kuwaiti, the son of a senior bank official. By Gulf standards that meant that his upbringing had been effortless and privileged. In 1989 his father had been posted to London as Deputy Manager of the Bank of Kuwait. The family had gone with him and avoided the invasion of their homeland by Saddam Hussein in 1990.

  Ali Aziz, already a good English speaker, was enrolled in a British school at age fifteen and emerged three years later with accentless English and excellent grades. When his family returned home, he elected to stay on and go for a degree at Loughborough Technical College. Four years later he emerged with a degree in chemical engineering and proceeded to a doctorate.

  It was not in the Arabian Gulf but in London that he began to attend the mosque run by a firebrand preacher of anti-western hatred and became what the media like to call ‘radicalized’. In truth, by twenty-one he was fully brainwashed and a fanatical supporter of Al-Qaeda.

  A ‘talent spotter’ suggested he might like to visit Pakistan; he accepted and then went on, through the Khyber Pass, to spend six months at an Al-Qaeda terrorist training camp. He had already been marked out as a ‘sleeper’ who should lie low in England and never come to the attention of the authorities.

  Back in London he did what they all do; he reported to his embassy that he had lost his passport and was issued a new one which did not carry the tell-tale Pakistan entry stamp. As far as anyone who asked was concerned, he had been visiting family and friends in the Gulf and had never been near Pakistan, let alone Afghanistan. He secured a post as lecturer at Aston University, Birmingham, in 1999. Two years later Anglo-American forces invaded Afghanistan.

  There were several weeks of panic in case any trace of him in the terror camps had been left lying around, but in his case AQ’s head of personnel, Abu Zubaydah, had done his job. No traces were found of any Al-Khattab ever having been there. So he remained undiscovered and rose to be AQ’s commanding agent in the UK.

  As Dr Al-Khattab’s London-bound airliner was taking off the Java Star eased away from her berth in the Sultanate of Brunei on the coast of Indonesian North Borneo and headed for the open sea.

  Her destination was the Western Australian port of Fremantle, as usual, and her Norwegian skipper Knut Herrmann had no inkling his journey would be other than usual; which meant routine and eventless.

  He knew that the seas in those parts remain the most dangerous waters in the world; but not from shoals, riptides, rocks, tempests, reefs or tsunamis. The danger here is pirate attacks.

  Every year, between the Malacca Strait in the west and the Celebes Sea to the east, there are over five hundred pirate attacks on merchant shipping and up to a hundred hijackings. Occasionally the crew are ransomed back to the ship owners; sometimes they are all killed and never heard of again; in those cases the cargo is stolen and sold on the black market.

  If Captain Herrmann sailed with an easy mind on the ‘milk run’ to Fremantle, it was because he was convinced his cargo was useless to the dacoits of the sea. But on this trip he was wrong.

  The first leg of his course lay north, away from his eventual destination. It took him six hours to pass the ramshackle town of Kudat and come round the northernmost tip of Sabah and the island of Borneo. Only then could he run south-east for the Sulu Archipelago.

  He intended to move through the coral and jungle islands by taking the deep-water strait between Tawitawi and Jolo Islands. South of the islands it was a clear run down the Celebes Sea to the south and eventually Australia.

  His departure from Brunei had been watched, and a cellphone call made. Even if it had been intercepted, the call referred only to the recovery of a sick uncle who would be out of hospital in twelve days. That meant: twelve hours to intercept.

  The call was taken in a creek on Jolo Island and the man who took it would have been recognized by Mr Alex Siebart of Crutched Friars, City of London. It was Mr Lampong, who no longer affected to be a businessman from Sumatra.

  The twelve men he commanded in the velvety tropical night were cut-throats but they were well paid and would stay obedient. Criminality apart, they were also Muslim extremists. The Abu Sayyaf movement of the southern Philippines, whose last peninsula is only a few miles from Indonesia on the Sulu Sea, has the reputation of including not only religious extremists but also killers for hire. The offer Mr Lampong had put to them enabled them to fulfil both functions.

  The two speedboats they occupied put to sea at dawn, took up position between the two islands and waited. An hour later the Java Star bore down on them to pass from the Sulu Sea into the Celebes. Taking her over was a simple task and the gangsters were well practised.

  Captain Herrmann had taken the helm through the night and as dawn came up over the Pacific away to his left he handed over to his Indonesian first officer and went below. His crew of ten Lascars were also in their bunks.

  The first thing the Indonesian officer saw was a pair of speedboats racing up astern, one each side. Dark, barefoot, agile men leaped effortlessly from speedboat to deck and ran aft towards the superstructure and bridge where he stood. He just had time to press the emergency buzzer to his captain’s cabin before the men burst through the door from the fly-bridge. Then there was a knife at his throat and a voice screaming ‘Capitan, capitan . . .’

  There was no need. A tired Knut Herrmann was coming topsides to see what was going on. He and Mr Lampong arrived on the bridge together. Lampong held a mini-Uzi. The Norwegian knew better than to begin to resist. The ransom would have to be sorted out between the pirates and his employer company HQ in Fremantle.

  ‘Captain Herrmann . . .’

  The bastard knew his name. This had been prepared.

  ‘Please ask your first officer did he in any circumstances make a radio transmission in the past five minutes?’

  There was no need to ask. Lampong was speaking in English. For the Nor
wegian and his Indonesian officer it was the common language. The first officer screamed that he had not touched the radio’s transmit button.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Lampong and issued a stream of orders in the local dialect. This the first officer understood and opened his mouth to scream again. The Norwegian understood not a word, but he understood everything when the dacoit holding his Number Two jerked the seaman’s head back and sliced his throat open with a single cut. The first officer kicked, jerked, slumped and died. Captain Herrmann had not been sick in forty years at sea, but he leaned against the wheel and emptied his stomach.

  ‘Two pools of mess to be cleaned up,’ said Lampong. ‘Now, Captain, for every minute you refuse to obey my orders, that will happen to one of your men. Am I clear?’

  The Norwegian was escorted to the tiny radio shack behind the bridge where he selected Channel 16, the international distress frequency. Lampong produced a written sheet.

  ‘You will not just read this in a calm voice, Captain. When I press “transmit” and nod, you will shout this message with panic in your voice. Or your men die, one by one. Are you ready?’

  Captain Herrmann nodded. He would not even have to act in order to affect extreme distress.

  ‘Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. Java Star, Java Star . . . Catastrophic fire in engine room . . . I cannot save her . . . My position . . .’

  He knew the position was wrong even as he read it out. It was a hundred miles south into the Celebes Sea. But he was not about to argue. Lampong cut the transmission. He brought the Norwegian at gunpoint back to the bridge.

  Two of his own seamen had been put to work frenziedly scrubbing up the blood and the vomit on the floor of the bridge. The other eight he could see marshalled in a terrified group out on the hatch covers with six dacoits to watch them.

  Two more of the hijackers stayed on the bridge. The other four were tossing liferafts, lifebelts and a pair of inflatable jackets down into one of the speedboats. It was the one with the extra fuel tanks stored amidships.

  When they were ready the speedboat left the side of the Java Star and went south. On a calm tropical sea at an easy fifteen knots they would be a hundred miles south in seven hours and back in their pirate creeks ten hours after that.

  ‘A new course, Captain,’ said Lampong civilly. His tone was gentle but the implacable hatred in his eyes gave the lie to any humanity towards the Norwegian.

  The new course was back towards the north-east, out of the cluster of islands that make up the Sulu Archipelago and across the national line into Filipino water.

  The southern province of Mindanao Island is Zamboanga and parts of it are simply no-go areas for Filipino government forces. This is the terrain of Abu Sayyaf. Here they are safe to recruit, train and bring their booty. The Java Star was certainly booty, albeit unmarketable. Lampong conferred in the local lingo with the senior among the pirates. The man pointed ahead to the entrance to a narrow creek flanked by impenetrable jungle.

  What he asked was: ‘Can your men manage her from here?’ The pirate nodded. Lampong called his orders to the group round the Lascar seamen at the bow. Without even replying they herded the sailors to the rail and opened fire. The men screamed and toppled into the warm sea. Somewhere below, shark turned to the blood smell.

  Captain Herrmann was so taken by surprise he would have needed two or three seconds to react. He never got them. Lampong’s bullet took him full in the chest and he too tumbled back from the fly-bridge into the sea. Half an hour later, towed by two small tugs, which had been stolen weeks earlier, and with much shrieking and shouting, the Java Star was at her new berth beside a stout teak jetty.

  The jungle concealed her from all sides and from above. Also hidden were the two long, low, tin-roofed workshops that housed the steel plates, cutters, welders, power generator and paint.

  The last despairing cry from the Java Star on Channel 16 had been heard by a dozen vessels but the nearest to the spot given as her position was a refrigerator ship loaded with fresh and highly perishable fruit for the American market across the Pacific. She was commanded by a Finnish skipper who diverted at once to the spot. There he found the bobbing liferafts, small tents on the ocean swell which had opened and inflated automatically as designed. He circled once and spotted the lifebelts and two inflated jackets. All were marked with the name: MV Java Star. According to the law of the sea, which he respected, Captain Raikkonen cut power and lowered a pinnace to look inside the rafts. They were empty so he ordered them sunk. He had lost several hours and could stay no longer. There was no point.

  With a heavy heart he reported by radio that the Java Star was lost with all hands. Far away in London the news was noted by insurers Lloyd’s International and at Ipswich, UK, Lloyd’s Register of Shipping logged the loss. For the world the Java Star had simply ceased to exist.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  In fact the interrogator was gone for a week. Martin remained in his cell with only the Koran for company. He would, he felt, soon be among that revered company who had memorized every one of the 6,666 verses in it. But years in special forces had finally given him a rare gift among humans: the ability to remain motionless for exceptionally long periods and defy boredom and the urge to fidget.

  So he schooled himself again to adapt to the inner contemplative life that alone can stop a man in solitary confinement from going mad.

  This talent did not prevent the operations room at Edzell air base becoming very tense. They had lost their man, and the enquiries from Marek Gumienny in Langley and Steve Hill in London became more pressing. The Predator was double-assigned: to look down on Ras-al-Khaimah in case Crowbar appeared again, and to monitor the dhow Rasha when it appeared in the Gulf and docked somewhere in the UAE.

  Dr Al-Khattab returned when he had confirmed every aspect of the story as it concerned Guantanamo Bay. It had not been easy. He had not the slightest intention of betraying himself to any of the four British inmates who had been sent home. They had all declared repeatedly that they were not extremists and had been swept up in the American net by accident. Whatever the Americans thought, Al-Qaeda could confirm they were telling the truth.

  To make it harder, Izmat Khan had spent so long in solitary for non-cooperation that no other detainee had got to know him well. He admitted he had picked up fragmentary English, but that was from the endless interrogations when he had listened to the CIA man and then the translation by the one Pashto-speaking terp.

  From what Al-Khattab could discover his prisoner had not slipped up once. What little could be gleaned from Afghanistan indicated that the break-out from the prison van between Bagram and Pul-i-Charki jail had indeed been genuine. What he could not know was that this episode had been accomplished by the very able Head of Station of the SIS office inside the British Embassy. Brigadier Yusuf had acted out his rage most convincingly and the agents of the by now resurgent Taliban were convinced. And they said so to Al-Qaeda enquiries.

  ‘Let us go back to your early days in the Tora Bora,’ Al-Khattab proposed when the interrogation resumed. ‘Tell me about your boyhood.’

  Al-Khattab was a clever man but what he could not know was that, even though the man in front of him was a ringer, Martin knew the mountains of Afghanistan better than he. The Kuwaiti’s six months in the terrorist training camps had been exclusively among fellow Arabs, not Pashtun mountain men. He noted copiously, even the names of the fruits in the orchards of Maloko-zai. His hand sped across the legal pad, covering page after page.

  On the third day of the second session the narrative had reached the day which proved a crucial hinge in the life of Izmat Khan: 20 August 1998, the day the Tomahawk cruise missile crashed in the mountains.

  ‘Ah, yes, truly tragic,’ he murmured. ‘And strange, for you must be the only Afghan for whom no family member remains alive to vouch for you. It is a remarkable coincidence, and as a scientist I hate coincidences. What was the effect on you?’

  In fact Izmat Khan in Guantanamo had refused to
talk about why he hated Americans with such a passion. It was information from the other fighters who had survived Qala-i-Jangi and reached Camp Delta that filled the gap. In the Taliban army Izmat Khan had become an iconic figure and his story was whispered round the camp fires as the man immune to fear. The other survivors had told the interrogators the story of the annihilated family.

  Al-Khattab paused and gazed at his prisoner. He still had grave reservations, but of one thing he had become certain. The man truly was Izmat Khan; his doubts were over the second question: had he been ‘turned’ by the Americans?

  ‘So you claim you declared a sort of private war? A very personal jihad? And you have never relented? But what did you actually do about it?’

  ‘I fought against the Northern Alliance, the allies of the Americans.’

  ‘But not until October and November two thousand and one,’ said Al-Khattab.

  ‘The Americans first came in the autumn of two thousand and one,’ said Martin.

  ‘True. So you fought for Afghanistan . . . and lost. Now you wish to fight for Allah.’

  Martin nodded.

  ‘As the Sheikh predicted,’ he said.

  For the first time Dr Al-Khattab’s urbanity completely forsook him. He stared at the black-bearded face across the table for a full thirty seconds, mouth agape, pen poised but unmoving. Finally he spoke in a whisper: ‘You . . . have actually met the Sheikh?’

  In all his weeks in the camp Al-Khattab had never actually met Osama bin Laden. Just once he had seen a black-windowed Land Cruiser passing by but it had not stopped. But he would, quite literally, have taken a meat cleaver and severed his left wrist for the chance of meeting, let alone conversing with, the man he venerated more than any other on earth. Martin met his gaze and nodded. Al-Khattab recovered his poise.