Bodyguard (28 page)

Nobody blinked. John narrated the story with real gravitas and warmth. It stood as a chilling reminder of the dangers on the very roads we were passing. The way he told the story clearly indicated it could have been him. Robin and Ran understood the depth of that. For once, their questions and analysis dried up. They were taking it all in, even as men who had seen it before. Their eyes told you
everything
, scanning the scouts who were surveying them, each a possible bystander to atrocities on this road before, perhaps just the fortnight before. Their faces radiated one message. They would have to come back this way on the return leg. The safety of Kabul, as ironic as that sounds, was a long way away now.

‘My military days told me that you never go back the way you came,’ Ran finally broke the silence.

The further we left Surobi behind, the more the conversation piped up again. You could feel the Dogs relaxing once more, although they were still very much on their guard. John had built up the dangers at the place where the French and Spanish were massacred, and you could sense a few kilometres down the road that it was OK to talk freely again – their silence a dignified memorial to the victims here, 
and an acknowledgment that the jolly had real journalistic merit, too. It was time to push on to the Khyber Pass.

Mountains, small towns, and the odd hamlet all the way to Jalalabad. Then it merges into an open plain, with greenery all around. The very first time I saw this I had thought it was beautiful, but I had met John here many times before. The second time I came this way, it was just a mountain range. I didn’t have time to be a tourist.

With heavy fighting between NATO and the Taliban at the border, we persuaded another army unit to escort us the final forty kilometres through the Black Mountains. John pointed out the route to Tora Bora – gateway to bin Laden all those years ago. With that sense of expedition in the blood of all three, who wouldn’t want to wander that way? He confessed it was one of the remaining things on his To Do list, even though al Qaeda were still lurking and the area was mined. Way beyond the lifetime of the Three Dogs, perhaps John’s little son might retrace his steps in safer times and enter bin Laden’s vast network of caves for the BBC. For now, Tora Bora remained pretty much inaccessible. Finally, we reached the Khyber Pass.

‘Ah, I love it here.’ John chatted naturally, oblivious to the camera. ‘So many of my times in Afghanistan have begun or ended here,’ he raved to the Dogs. ‘So full of activity, criminal, commercial, military, anything …’

Ranulph couldn’t believe he was here, as though this moment could have passed him by in life. It was one of the great crossing points in the world from a bygone era we rarely talked about nowadays but to their generation it was a time of daring adventure. Between 1839 and 1919, Britain engaged in three wars with Afghanistan. Many of the fiercest battles were fought here.

‘For a Brit, the Khyber Pass has a resonance of our past,’ Robin made the point for his generation.

‘It makes your heart beat faster,’ John was exhilarated.

At the same time, all three were wary. John pointed out a truck carrying goodness knows what. So much went through unchecked. 
‘This truck coming through here … could have something very unpleasant hidden under the top three or four layers … and nobody’s going to search it … he’s only got to press the button and the whole thing goes up.’

He was spot on. Every excitement was also a potential threat. The noise, the smell and the bustle were exhilarating but you couldn’t take your eye off the ball for one moment. Several factions of the transient community would often play on that nervous energy in the air. But John was moved to be here, too, and to share it with the Dogs, patting Robin on the back in an uncharacteristically non-British way. Each of them thanked the other.

‘I used to be a typical kind of broomstick up the arse Brit and probably still am, mostly, but the one thing I learned from being in countries like this is that physical contact means a lot,’ John
apologised
but didn’t need to.

I knew that this story had gone from being Dee’s idea, to an irritation with the Marriott bomb, to now reaching a thoroughly worthwhile emotional conclusion. To be at the Pass, however many times you had come this way, still stirred something in grown men, and to be with Ran and Robin made it prefect. So many times, John had been here with just a crew and myself. I sensed for the first time that showing the other two this border so steeped in history finally gave him somebody to share it with.

And the Ten wanted a piece of him, too. Oggy said that Craig Oliver had been on. They wanted John to be the lead that night. Neither John nor Oggy were convinced that they should go top on the bulletin. He had minutes to get the story out.

‘This has become a no-man’s land where all sorts of violence can thrive,’ he began. ‘The Pakistanis clearly can’t do anything to stop it. If the Americans don’t come up with something pretty dramatic, then this war will be lost. By changing the command structure, they’re hoping they can stop the rot, but it’s by no means certain. John Simpson, BBC News at the Khyber Pass.’ 

And the clue was in the out. John didn’t have a story, but this time location won the day. They wanted those words at the end on the Ten against that mountainous backdrop, knowing that viewers would be in awe that even today, you could file from the middle of nowhere, yet in one of the tensest places in the world. John would never shirk at being the lead, of course, but it left him hungry to find a real top story. It was time to push on. And crucially, he had left the Marriott behind.

We had to make for the Tora Bora caves. No other reporters had been there since 2001. This was the journalistic merit I’ve been talking about. Thirteen vehicles now accompanied us towards Tora Bora – mostly through dried up river beds. Out of character, we were almost embedded. Tora Bora was no-man’s land on Afghanistan’s side of the border. The commander escorting us insisted we had to have such a huge heavily armed entourage – it was that dangerous. This meant hours of travelling though bandit country and then camping in the mountains overnight.

‘I don’t like this,’ John said. ‘I don’t like all these soldiers. I’ve almost never done this in my life. My idea was always to get in a vehicle like this and just go out unnoticed. I think you are ten times safer on your own. The Taliban must know that we’re in town.’

I knew John’s tone. He didn’t want to be part of a circus. Soon we ran into rough terrain. The vehicles were dangerously exposed. We came a cropper in the dry river beds – stones under the vehicles meaning we couldn’t get any momentum to push on. Next, we hit a puncture. John wanted to walk. If the Taliban were on their game, there was no easier target than us. We’d taken our chances outside Surobi where the French were killed but we’d known we weren’t going to linger. Now, we didn’t know how long we would have to wait because of circumstance. You can see why I bollocked Hanif about the vehicles on day one.

This made Ran and Robin even more uncomfortable at staying overnight. ‘From a military view, I wouldn’t come in here unless I was dressed like one of them,’ Ran said, concerned as he gestured 
towards our guards. Every moment we lingered gave the Taliban a chance to organise an ambush up ahead – and those guys never needed asking twice.

‘It’s almost like we are deliberately giving the Taliban an
opportunity
,’ Robin replied. And if they didn’t get us now, it would certainly never be so easy for them again. We were sitting on a plate for them. This was not a case of two great explorers’ arses going. They were just talking common sense. ‘It’s almost as though we are going to create news by getting a mine blown up under us.’

Robin was right. We abandoned the crew vehicles to make for the checkpoint. From here, we became military – army jeeps would have to do. There was still no lack of danger. Parallel to the road, whose edges couldn’t be defined, mine after mine lined the route. There was only one relatively safe way to proceed – follow the tracks of the vehicle in front. Just like in Zim, always trust the local knowledge – but this was completely different. There we would have suffered a beating and imprisonment at worst. Here, we could all end up like Stuart Hughes through the slightest misjudgement by someone else. The commander had told us it was his life as well as ours, which was as close as you got up here to a guarantee.

Despite the tension in the air, nothing was going to stop Ranulph and I standing in the back of the jeep with the AK-47s ready to go. As much war as I had seen, there was something playful in both of us. Who wouldn’t want to be a big kid for a few moments and pretend they were in the A-Team? This was genuinely scary territory, and if something happened you wouldn’t even know about it, but I can’t say I didn’t love it.

Finally, we made it to the top. We were there.

John has harboured this ambition for many years – to reach Tora Bora. The commander of the checkpoint explained exactly what lay beneath in bin Laden country. Through a break in the mountains, a green area came in to view – that was where America’s greatest menace of recent times lived when the Taliban were in power. Occasionally, 
he added, the Taliban came to the peak of the mountain. Just two days before our visit, they had fired rockets on his men but retreated when the attack was returned. They were still there and very much alive and kicking. Just the place to stay the night then.

For TV purposes and no other, Ran and Robin under my
supervision
fired three shots each from the AK-47 into the valley.

‘That kind of thing ain’t for me,’ John relinquished the opportunity. ‘As a journalist, I don’t want anything to do with guns.’

It was an ironic choice of words, given his lifetime in war zones. I think what he meant was that he shouldn’t be protected because he was a journalist reporting the story. Robin said it was nice to do it practically but that was very different from having to do it for real. Ran fussed over his technique like the old pro, comparing it to other weapons he had fired. The decision was taken. We would camp for the night after all.

Oggy was on the phone to Television Centre. London loved it and wanted John live to millions of viewers, minutes later.

‘How lovely to see you there.’ The News anchor was momentarily caught up in the moment too.

This wasn’t the
Holiday
programme. It was incredible that the World Affairs editor was there, and live, but the report was all about the backdrop and the unspoken story. Today, there was no news in these parts, but the 9/11 generation knew what the silent words meant. John was breathing in bin Laden’s air and even though he was long gone, nobody had got this close in years. John savoured the moment.

An emotional satisfaction hit everyone when the feed was cut and only the view and sense of history remained. The Dogs all knew what they had achieved and that you don’t come back to these places twice. Three wise old men who had lived a million lives between them knew these were precious moments.

‘I couldn’t bear not to have seen it,’ John said with his guard down. When you’ve done your day job to the level that he had just done, even the most seasoned pros would be forgiven for forgetting the 
documentary camera was rolling too. It wasn’t that he was caught off guard, but he spoke as though the moment were special beyond journalistic purpose, though it had that, too. In his job and mine, you see so little of the world for pleasure. It’s all about airports and the story. This was heaven for John in that he had the story and so much more. The sense of wonder in his eyes, looking down into bin Laden’s lair, would never leave him, regardless of what was still to come in his long and distinguished career.

‘To wake up tomorrow and see what it is like in the early morning is going to be magical.’ John summed it up perfectly.

They toasted each other under the stars and under the influence, and reviewed the previous fortnight.

‘To the Dogs,’ Ran proposed.

‘The Dogs, the drunken Dogs,’ John laughed.

This time it was Robin who found the words. ‘We’ve still got that childish curiosity in us to see these places. We may have grown old in experiences, but we haven’t allowed that to quench our thirst.’ He puffed on his cigar, having hit the nail on the head.

I felt the same. It was a private moment caught in public. To sit around the campfire and hear the stories was just phenomenal. It was like Iraq in 2003, camping out under the stars with the American Special Forces. To be in the presence of three legends and such danger was the stuff of dreams. This was a different gig. Clearly, as safety advisor it didn’t get any bigger. Equally, I was soaking up this once in a lifetime experience, sleeping outside in the still of the night and waking up feeling a million dollars. To be paid to do this in such company – well, it didn’t get any better.

Only a dog sniffing around in the early hours presented any danger. I slept with my AK-47 by my side. Around me so did thirty-five of the finest from the Afghan National Guard. What an awesome experience. In the most dangerous place in the world, I had never felt safer. Normally, of course, when you’ve never felt safer, you’ve never been in so much danger. Nobody bothered us tonight. 

We had shot ninety-six hours footage for a one-hour show. I wouldn’t be accompanying the Dogs on their next two adventures. But I did have one last little surprise up my sleeve. There was no way we were going back the way we came, so I had chartered a rickety, old 1950s Russian propeller ten-seater to get us out of there. At take-off, I’m sure returning through Surobi looked a better option.

Little did I know that less a month later, I would be once again in Afghanistan with the reporter Jane Corbin, back in the same room where John had interviewed the ‘Spy Chief’ from Afghan Intelligence. This time, eyeballing me across the room and refusing to look Jane in the eye because of his religious attitude to women, I was within a breath of a suicide bomber from the same stable that wreaked havoc on London on 7/7. One vest could kill forty people.

I knew, of course, that there was a fine line between planned, needless violence and sporadic gang warfare, and nothing was more apparent to me as I jetted next into Mexico. Destination: Ciudad Juárez.