The Afghan

by Frederick Forsyth

  In several cases it was the information provided by the Det that enabled the SAS to set an ambush for a terrorist attack unit and wipe them out. Unlike the hard units, the Det used women extensively. As trackers they were more likely to pass as harmless and not to be feared. The information they were able to bring back was indeed very much to be feared.

  In 2005 the British government decided to expand and upgrade the Det. It became the Special Reconnaissance Regiment. It had an inaugural parade in which everyone, including the presiding general, was only photographed from the waist down. Its headquarters remain secret and if the SAS and SBS are discreet, the SRR is invisible. But Dame Eliza asked for them and got them.

  When Dr Al-Khattab boarded the airliner from Heathrow to Dubai there were six from the SRR on board, scattered invisibly among three hundred passengers. One was the young accountant in the row behind the Kuwaiti.

  Because this was just a shadowing operation, no reason could be seen not to ask the Special Forces of the UAE for cooperation. Ever since World Trade Center bomber Marwan al-Shehhi was discovered to have come from the UAE, and even more since the leak that the White House was tempted to bomb the Al-Jazeera TV station at Qatar, the UAE had been extremely sensitive about Islamist extremism, and nowhere more than in Dubai, headquarters of the Special Forces.

  Thus two hired cars and two rented scooters were available for the SRR team when it landed, just in case Dr Al-Khattab was being picked up. It was noted he had carry-on baggage only. They need not have bothered; he rented a small Japanese compact which gave them time to move into position.

  He was tailed first from the airport to the Creek in Dubai where once again the Rasha was moored after her return from Gwador. This time he did not approach the vessel but stood by his car a hundred yards away until Bin Selim spotted him.

  Minutes later a young man known to no one emerged from below decks on the Rasha, moved through the crowd and whispered in the ear of the Kuwaiti. It was the answer coming back from the man in the mountains of Waziristan. Al-Khattab’s face registered amazement.

  He then drove along the traffic-teeming road up the coast, through Ajman and Umm-al-Qaiwain and into Ras-al-Khaimah. There he went to the Hilton to check in and change. It was considerate of him, because the three young women in the SRR team could use the female washroom to change into the all-covering jilbab and get back to their vehicles.

  Dr Al-Khattab emerged in his white dishdash and drove away through the town. He adopted several manoeuvres designed to shake off a ‘tail’ but he had no luck. In the Arabian Gulf the motor scooter is everywhere, ridden by both sexes and, the clothes being the same, one rider is much like another. Since being assigned to the job, the team had been studying road maps of all seven emirates until they had memorized every highway. That was how he was tailed to the villa.

  If ever there had been any residual doubt that he was up to no good, his tail-shaking antics dispelled it. Innocent men do not behave like that. He never spent the night at the villa and the SRR women followed him back to the Hilton. The three men found a position on a hilltop that commanded a view of the target villa and kept vigil through the night. No one came or left.

  The second day was different. There were visitors. The watchers could not know it but they brought the new passport and the new clothes. Their car numbers were noted and one would be traced and arrested later. The third was the barber, also later traced.

  At the end of the second day Al-Khattab emerged for the last time. That was when Katy Sexton, tinkering with her scooter up the road, alerted her colleagues that the target was on the move.

  At the Hilton the Kuwaiti academic revealed his plans when, speaking from his room, which had been bugged in his absence, he booked passage on the morning flight out of Dubai for London. He was escorted all the way home to Birmingham and never saw a thing.

  MI5 had done a cracking job and knew it. The coup was circulated on a ‘your eyes only’ basis to just four men in the British intelligence community. One of them was Steve Hill. He nearly went into orbit.

  The Predator was reassigned to survey the villa in the far desert-side suburbs of Ras-al-Khaimah. But it was mid-morning in London, afternoon in the Gulf. All the bird saw were the cleaners going in. And the raid.

  It was too late to stop the Special Forces of the UAE sending in their close-down squad commanded by a former British officer, Dave de Forest. The SIS Head of Station in Dubai, a personal friend anyway, was on to him like a shot. Word was immediately put out on the jungle telegraph that the ‘hit’ had stemmed from an anonymous tip from a neighbour with a grudge.

  The two cleaners knew nothing; they came from an agency, they had been pre-paid and the keys had been delivered to them. However, they had not finished and swept up in a pile was a quantity of black hair, some evidently from a scalp and some from a beard – the texture is different. Other than that there were no traces of the men who had lived there.

  Neighbours reported a closed van, but no one could recall the number. It was eventually discovered abandoned, and revealed to have been stolen, but much too late to be of help.

  The tailor and the barber were a better harvest. They did not hesitate to talk, but they could only describe the five men in the house. Al-Khattab was already known. Suleiman was described and then identified from mug-shots because he was on a suspect list locally. The two underlings were described but rang no bells of recognition.

  It was the fifth man that De Forest, with his perfect Arabic, concentrated on. The SIS Station Chief sat in. The two Gulf Arabs who had done the tailoring and the barbering came from Ajman and were simply workers at their trade.

  No one in that room knew about any Afghan; they simply took a complete description and passed it to London. No one knew about any passport because Suleiman had done it all himself. No one knew why London was becoming hysterical about a big man with shaggy black hair and a full beard. All they could report was that he was now neatly barbered and possibly in a dark mohair two-piece suit.

  But it was the final snippet that came from the barber and the tailor that delighted Steve Hill, Marek Gumienny and the team at Edzell.

  The Gulf Arabs had been treating their man like an honoured guest. He was clearly being prepared for departure. He was not a dead body on a tiled floor in the Arabian Gulf.

  At Edzell Michael McDonald and Gordon Phillips shared the same joy, but a puzzle. They knew their agent had passed all the tests and been accepted as a True Jihadi. After weeks of worry they had had their second sign of life. But had their agent discovered a single thing about Stingray, the object of the whole exercise? Where had he gone? Was there any way he could contact them?

  Even if they could have spoken to their agent, he could not have helped. He did not know either.

  And no one knew that the Countess of Richmond was unloading her Jaguars at Singapore.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Even though the travelling party could not know there were pursuers a few hours behind them, their escape was, for them, a lucky chance.

  Had they turned towards the coast housing the six emirates they would probably have been caught. In fact they headed east, over the mountainous isthmus towards the seventh emirate, Fujairah, on the Gulf of Oman.

  They soon left the last metalled road and took to rutted tracks which lost themselves among the baking brown hills of Jebel Yibir. From the col at the height of the range they descended towards the small port of Dibbah.

  Well to the south on the same coast the police at Fujairah city received a request and a full description from Dubai, and mounted a roadblock at the entrance to their town on the mountain road. Many vans were stopped, but none contained the four terrorists.

  There is not much to Dibbah: just a cluster of white houses, a green-domed mosque, a small port for fishing vessels and the occasional charter boat for western scuba divers. Two creeks away an aluminium boat waited, drawn up on the shingle, its huge outboards out of the water. Its cargo space amidships was occ
upied by chained-down tanks of extra fuel. Its two-man crew was sheltering in the shade of a single camelthorn among the rocks.

  For the two local youths this was the end of their road. They would take the stolen van high into the hills and abandon it. Then they would simply disappear into the same streets that had produced Marwan al-Shehhi. Suleiman and the Afghan, their western clothes still in bags to shield them from the flying salt water, helped push the cigarette boat backwards into waist-deep water.

  With both passengers and the crew aboard, the smuggler craft idled its way up the coast almost to the tip of the Musandam Peninsula. The smugglers would only make the high-speed dash across the Strait in darkness.

  Within twenty minutes of the sun setting the helmsman bade his passengers hold on, and opened up the power. The smuggler erupted out of the rocky waters of the last tip of Arabia and hurled itself towards Iran. With 500-hp behind it, the nose rose and the craft began to skim. Martin judged they were covering the water at almost fifty knots. The slightest ripple on the sea was like hitting a log, and the spray flayed them. All four had wrapped their keffiyehs round their faces as a shield from the sun; now they kept them there as protection from the spray.

  In less than thirty minutes the first scattered lights of the Persian coast were visible to port and the smuggler raced east towards Gwador and Pakistan. This was the route Martin had covered under the sedate sails of the Rasha a month before. Now he was returning at ten times her speed.

  Opposite the lights of Gwador the crew slowed and stopped. It was a welcome relief. With funnels and muscles they hoisted the drums to the stern and refilled each engine to the brim. Where they were going to fill up again for the return journey was their business.

  Faisal bin Selim had told Martin these smugglers could get from Omani waters to Gwador in a single night and be back with a fresh cargo by dawn. This time they were clearly going further and would have to travel in daylight as well.

  Dawn found them well inside Pakistani waters but close enough inshore to be taken for a fishing boat going about its business, save that no fish can swim that fast. However, there was no sign of officialdom and the bare brown coast sped past. By midday Martin realized their destination must be Karachi. As to why, he had no idea.

  They refuelled at sea one more time and as the sun dipped to the west behind them were deposited at a reeking fishing village outside the sprawl of Pakistan’s biggest port and harbour.

  Suleiman may not have been there before, but his briefing must have been by someone who had done a recce. Martin knew that Al-Qaeda did meticulous research, regardless of time and expense; it was one of the few things he could admire.

  The Gulf Arab sought out the only vehicle for hire in the village and negotiated a price. The fact that two strangers had come ashore from a smuggler craft with no suggestion of legality raised not an eyebrow. This was Baluchistan; the rules of Karachi were for idiots.

  The interior stank of fish and body odour, and the misfiring engine could manage no more than forty miles per hour. Neither could the roads. But they found the highway and reached the airport with time to spare.

  The Afghan was appropriately bewildered and clumsy. He had only twice travelled by air, each time in an American C-130 Hercules and each time as a prisoner in shackles. He knew nothing of check-in desks, flight tickets, passport controls. With a mocking smile, Suleiman showed him.

  Somewhere in the vast sprawling mass of pushing and shoving humanity that comprises the main concourse of Karachi International Airport, the Gulf Arab found the ticket desk of Malaysian Airlines and bought two single tickets in economy class to Kuala Lumpur. There were lengthy visa application forms to fill out, which Suleiman did, in English. He paid in cash, in American dollars, the world’s common currency.

  The flight was on a European Airbus A330 and took six hours, plus three for time-zone changes. It landed at nine-thirty, after the serving of a snack breakfast. For the second time, Martin offered his new Bahraini passport and wondered if it would pass muster. It did; it was perfect.

  From international arrivals Suleiman led the way to domestic departures and bought two single tickets. Only when Martin had to proffer his boarding pass did he see where they were heading: the island of Labuan.

  He had heard of Labuan, but only vaguely. Situated off the northern coast of Borneo, it belonged to Malaysia. Though its tourist publicity spoke of a bustling cosmopolitan island with stunning coral in the surrounding waters, western briefings on the criminal underworld mentioned another and darker reputation.

  It was once part of the Sultanate of Brunei, twenty miles across the water on the Borneo coast. The British took it in 1846 and kept it for 117 years barring three under Japanese occupation in World War II. Labuan was handed by the British to the state of Sabah in 1963 as part of decolonization, then ceded to Malaysia in 1984.

  It is one of those oddities that has no visible economy within its fifty-square-mile oval territory, so it has created one. With a status of international offshore financial centre, tax free port, flag of convenience and smuggling mecca, Labuan has attracted some extremely dubious clientele.

  Martin realized he was being flown into the heart of the world’s most ferocious ship-hijacking, cargo-stealing and crew-murdering industry. He needed to make contact with base to give a sign of life, and he needed to work out how. Fast.

  There was a brief stopover at Kuching, first port of call on the island of Borneo but non-alighting travellers did not leave the aeroplane.

  Forty minutes later it took off to the west, circled over the sea and turned north-east for Labuan. Far below the turning aircraft the Countess of Richmond, in ballast, was steaming for Kota Kinabalu to pick up her cargo of padauk and rosewood.

  After take-off the stewardess distributed landing cards. Suleiman took them both and began to fill them in. Martin had to pretend he neither understood nor wrote English and could speak it only haltingly. He could hear it all around him. Besides, though he and Suleiman had changed into shirts and suits at Kuala Lumpur, he had no pen and no excuse for asking for the loan of one. Ostensibly they were a Bahraini engineer and an Omani accountant heading for Labuan on contract to the natural gas industry, and that was what Suleiman was filling in.

  Martin muttered that he needed to go to the lavatory. He rose and went aft where there were two. One was vacant, but he pretended both were in use, turned and went forward. There was a point. The Boeing 737 had a two-cabin service: economy and business. Dividing the two was a curtain and Martin needed to get beyond it.

  Standing outside the door of the business-class toilet, he beamed at the stewardess who had distributed the landing cards, uttered an apology and plucked from her top pocket a fresh landing card and her pen. The lavatory door clicked open and he went in. There was only time to scrawl a brief message on the reverse of the landing card, fold it into his breast pocket, emerge and return the pen. Then he went back to his seat.

  Suleiman may have been told the Afghan was trustworthy, but he stuck like a clam. Perhaps he wanted his charge to avoid making any mistakes through naivety or inexperience; perhaps it was the years of training in the ways of Al-Qaeda, but his watchfulness never faltered, even during prayers.

  Labuan airport was a contrast to Karachi: small and trim. Martin still had no idea exactly where they were headed, but suspected the airport might be the last chance to get rid of his message and hoped for a stroke of luck.

  It was only a fleeting moment and it came on the pavement outside the concourse. Suleiman’s memorized instructions must have been extraordinarily precise. He had brought them halfway across the world and was clearly a seasoned traveller. Martin could not know that the Gulf Arab had been with Al-Qaeda for ten years and had served the Movement in Iraq and the Far East, notably Indonesia. Nor could he know what Suleiman’s speciality was.

  Suleiman was scouring the access road to the concourse building which served both arrivals and departures on one level: he was looking for a taxi when
one appeared heading towards them. It was occupied but clearly about to deposit its cargo on the pavement.

  Two men alighted and Martin caught the English accents immediately. Both were big and muscular; both wore khaki shorts and flowered beach shirts. Both were damp in the blazing sun and moist, thirty-degree pre-monsoon heat. One produced Malaysian currency to pay the driver, the other emptied the boot of their luggage. There were two hard-framed suitcases and two scuba diver’s kitbags. Both had been diving the offshore reefs on behalf of the British magazine Sport Diver.

  The man by the boot could not handle all four bags, one each for clothes, one each for diving tackle. Before Suleiman could utter a word, Martin helped the diver by hefting one of the kitbags from the road to the pavement. As he did so the folded landing card went into one of the side pockets of which all divebags have an array.

  ‘Thanks, mate,’ said the diver, and the pair of them headed for departure check-in to find their flight to Kuala Lumpur with a connection to London.

  Suleiman’s instructions to the Malay driver were in English; a shipping agency in the heart of the docks. Here at last the travellers met someone waiting to receive them. Like the newcomers he excited no interest by the wearing of ostentatious clothing or facial hair. Like them he was takfir. He introduced himself as Mr Lampong and took them to a fifty-foot cabin cruiser, tricked out as a game-fisherman, by the harbour wall. Within minutes they were out of the harbour.

  The cruiser steadied her speed at ten knots and turned north-east for Kudat, the access to the Sulu Sea and the terrorist hideout in Zamboanga Province of the Philippines.

  It had been a gruelling journey, with only catnaps on the aeroplanes. The rocking of the sea was seductive, the breeze after the sauna-heat of Labuan refreshing. Both passengers fell asleep. The helmsman was from the Abu Sayyaf terror group; he knew his way; he was going home. The sun dropped and the tropical darkness was not long behind. The cruiser motored on through the night, past the lights of Kudat, through the Balabac Strait and over the invisible border into Filipino waters.