Elephants can't hide forever (13 page)

It was rumoured that when the building had been constructed, a tunnel under the Thames linking Lego Land with Whitehall was incorporated to allow the comings and goings of senior politicians in
times of state emergencies.

It was on this late February morning that the Prime Minister Tony Blair had availed himself of the rumoured tunnel, and walked under the river and into the cellars of Century House, where he was
met by two ex marines who courteously escorted him to the 9
^th
floor.

The current Chief of Operations, Sir Richard Dearlove, was sitting at the head of a large rosewood table, with four colleagues, two either side.

“Good Morning, Prime Minister” he said measurably.

“Morning, Richard” replied the PM with his normal and public chirpiness, “I must say, since I got the news, little else has been on my mind.”

I bet there hasn’t
, thought Sir Richard, if
you can take the credit for the end of the greatest terrorist threat to the West in the history of mankind you’ll probably get a
statue in Admiralty Gate,
but these thoughts he kept to himself, instead he offered introductions of the four people around the table: “To my right is Dr David Davies. David heads up the
team at the Home Office Pathology and Forensic laboratories at Porton Down, it’s David who has been assessing the artefacts that came out of the house in Gandamak.” The two men shook
hands, the PM still beaming, hoping to put the assembled party at ease. Sir Richard continued: “Next to David is Major Sebastian Morley, who heads up the team down in Hereford. I believe you
already know each other.” The PM gave Major Morley a conspiratorial wink, which was a little unsettling for the Major considering the subject matter.

“Next” Sir Richard continued, “is John Smith, Head of Counter Intelligence, and based down at the establishment in Hampshire. John and his team have been chatting with the two
troopers that made it out of Pakistan, and brought home the bacon that David has been cooking.” For the first time that morning the PM shook the hand of John Smith, but without his normal
familiarity, he knew what John Smith did, he certainly didn’t approve, but he was also pragmatic enough to understand that when it came to the defence of the realm there were occasions that
warranted the use of such people and their methods. In bygone times John Smith would have been known as the Witchfinder General, extracting confessions from poor souls before burning them at the
stake. He would have been interrogating the troopers mercilessly since they arrived back to the safety of Blighty.

“And last. But by no means least,” continued Sir Richard, “Sally Dixon. Sally has been seconded from GCHQ to help with translations that may be needed, Sally is one of our
Bright Young Stars, and coincidentally, Prime Minister, she was actually the one who was first to pick up the original transmission from Afghanistan.” The PM had his beaming face back on, he
was comfortable with Bright Young Things, especially women.

“I’m delighted to meet you Sally” he said congenially.

The Prime Minister took a chair at the far end of the table, everyone else followed suit and Sir Richard started procedures. “Right Prime Minister, we will start at the beginning, everyone
in this room knows their own piece in this matter, so it will be advantageous that we all have a clear picture of events as they unfolded.”

“Agreed” said the PM

Agreed
thought Sally, but just sat waiting her turn, expressionless.

“Right then” said Sir Richard, “Major Morley, if you would be so kind.”

“You are all aware of the circumstances that bring us together today,” the Major began. “As you know, we inserted a specialised team into Afghanistan, following the information
our friends at GCHQ collated.” He smiled at Sally and continued, “It had to be a black operation on a strictly need to know basis, the potential rewards were the likely collapse of
Al-Qaeda as a potential threat to the West for many years to come. I used four of my top tactical mountain cadre, and the mission was led by the most experienced man we have at Hereford, no one in
the history of the service has extracted more hostages and prisoners from behind enemy lines than Mike Tobin.” No one spoke; they were all waiting for the Major’s take on what went
wrong,

He continued: “The mission was so secret there were no means of tracking the troop, once they were inserted into Afghanistan they were on their own, and if they had been captured we would
have denied their existence, at worst we would have claimed they had gone rogue and turned Bounty Hunters for the twenty five million dollar reward on Bin Laden’s head. There was a
prearranged signal that was to be fired off if the mission was successful, this duly occurred five weeks after the insertion, it meant they had the quarry and were inside Pakistan within two hours
of a RV point.”

“Go on,” said the PM, frowning.

“So our first communication with the troop comes after nothing for over a month, we launch a plane to collect them from a small plateau inside Pakistan but deep in the Mountains, even the
Pilot is not given the co-ordinates until he’s airborne, then what happens is nothing, absolutely nothing. We’ve got a Hercules ticking over on the tarmac at Islamabad, air traffic
control ready to land the rescue plane right up to the Hercules, a virtual shutdown of the entire airport until we get them in and out, but nothing shows.”

Major Morley took a long drink of water, then continued: “Of course we can’t ask the Cousins (a colloquial name for American military and secret service) if they’ve picked any
thing up, they’re still happily systematically rearranging the landscape of the Tora Bora Mountains, blissfully unaware what we’re up to. So after the deadline has passed, we have to
assume the plane has either crash landed in the pick up zone or flown into the side of a mountain, either before or after the pick up. At this point our friends at Cheltenham are able to divert a
satellite over the area, plus we get an AWAC airborne, but that’s as much as we can do without alerting the Cousins we’ve got some sort of operation going down in the area. Anyhow the
AWAC has picked up the wreckage of the plane, and I mean wreckage, it didn’t take long to realise that the recovery plane had suffered a direct hit from a SAM, we then had the AWAC produce a
satellite photograph of the entire area within a five kilometre radius, and we picked up the burnt out shell of a car, plus several bodies, no doubt about what happened the boys were ambushed, and
I don’t mean they were unlucky and stumbled on a local posse of bad guys, I mean these people were waiting for them.”

“What happened next? asked the PM.

“As far as we are concerned, that’s the end of it,” said Major Morley. “We’ve posted our people Missing in Action and informed the relatives they were lost on a
training exercise in Norway. Then after three weeks, right out of the blue, we get a call from British Consulate in Islamabad who informs us two very emaciated vagrants were seeking asylum but
refusing to answer any questions until they had spoken to me directly, any where else in the world they would have been chucked out on their ears, but this being Pakistan the consulate thought he
had better check with me, and from there it didn’t take long to establish it was indeed Mike Tobin and Jock Wallace. They had walked through the Mountains and into Islamabad, it took them
over three weeks and, quite honestly, it was one of the most incredible feats of endurance I’ve come across in all my years in the SAS.”

“So much so,” said Sir Richard, “that we were not comfortable with their story, to walk out of that hostile environment is in itself damn near impossible, but presumably they
were also being hunted by the insurgents that ambushed them and needed to take extra precautions. Furthermore, how did they even walk away from an ambush in an alien environment, one which the
attackers lived and breathed in? Surely if the bandits were able to take out a plane, they could have eliminated the squad with considerable ease, it just didn’t fit whichever way we looked
at it. They did carry out several documents and maps from the house in Gandamak which David will talk about shortly, but apart from that we were deeply suspicious that somewhere down the piece they
had sold out.”

“So what did you do?” enquired the PM.

“We kept them out of sight, separated them, got them on the next flight to Brize Norton, and then sent them down to our Training establishment in Hampshire where John, here de-briefed
them.”

The Prime Minister was not looking forward to what John Smith had to say, and hoped he would be spared the details of the “de-brief.”

As a highly trained counter espionage officer, John Smith was trained to read people’s minds by their body language and general demeanour, and it was right to show some deference towards
the Prime Minister of Great Britain.

“The two soldiers in question,” he began, “Mike Tobin and Jock Wallace, are two highly skilled Special Forces operators; both of them have been on several black missions
previously and have always proved their loyalty and commitment beyond reproach. If they have been turned or just gone native it was always going to be exceptionally difficult to get either one to
confess, they have both been through all the interrogation techniques, and how to avoid talking, many times in their history with the Unit. However, as much as we train these soldiers to resist the
modern art of interrogation, we are aware that there are occasions when the toughest of men will turn renegade, and so we have certain methods, developed and refined over many years, which even our
most trusted personnel, be they soldiers or field operators from the security service, do not know how to resist. There is no need for me to explain what we do, only to inform you of the result.
The soldier in charge on the ground, Mike Tobin, is a highly skilled operative, he told us of easy passage through the border on the way out, he said it had been nagging him right through the long
walk out of Pakistan, he even told us he couldn’t understand how they had managed to evade capture, at the very least, at the ambush. At a certain point in the interview we informed him of
the death of his two colleagues, his reaction showed us he suspected they had not made it and that was right, so all in all, gentlemen and lady, we have concluded that Mike Tobin and Jock Wallace
have told us the entire truth as they see it, and I would like to say they are two lucky people to be alive today but I can’t.”

“What do you mean?” enquired the PM.

“Well, Sir,” continued John Smith “There is nothing conclusive to suggest otherwise but like Tobin, myself and members of my team spend our entire waking hours questioning
peoples motives, their actions and their logic. We are continuously looking for the slightest flaw in our subjects that may denote a potential lie or even a half truth, we are suspicious by nature,
and by training we have to read hidden meanings into everything we investigate, and if by distrusting everyone we save one life we have done our job. It is without foundation, but nevertheless my
belief, that somehow this whole Bin Laden situation has been a set up and we walked right in. In a nutshell I suspect we have a leak”

There was silence in the room, for several seconds; Sally Dixon went as pale as death, she nearly gagged and if she had been asked to talk next would not have been able to. She looked at John
Smith and the thought of having a little chat with him down on the Farm in Hampshire nearly caused her to pass out there and then.

“So,” Sir Richard said after several long silent moments “Let’s hear what David has to tell us.”

David Evans was a typical boffin- bespectacled, overweight and with a generally scruffy appearance, sweating profusely in the presence of the number one citizen of the country, but always
comfortable on his subject matter. He began:

“I have examined all the items the soldiers brought out of Afghanistan, and we have traced the paper certain articles were written on, we have traced the DNA that was abundant, and we have
taken finger prints. We have translated the writings through Sally, we have tracked the dust particles that were present and we have traced the source of the ink that was used in the writings of
the documents that were brought back. We have analysed the evidence more extensively than anything we have ever done before, and I can say without a shadow of a doubt the person in that room was
Osama Bin Laden”

Sir Richard and John Smith exchanged glances, and it was Sir Richard, head of the British Secret Service, who spoke.

David,” he said very slowly “The man in the house in Gandamak was surrounded by all the evidence you have confirmed as belonging to Bin Laden, and no doubt it does, but what evidence
do you have that the paperwork that was in the same room was in any way processed by this man, or putting it another way, what direct evidence have you obtained from the man we originally believed
to be Bin Laden?”

David Davies starred into the piecing blue eyes of Sir Richard Dearlove for a very long time, at some point he realised all eyes were on him and he needed to reply to the Boss.

“None, Sir” was his answer.

“Thank you David” said Sir Richard “Now have you anything to add Sally?” he enquired.

Sally Dixon’s day was disintegrating whilst she stood by watching British Intelligence begin to unravel the plot she had been complicit with. She had regained her composure from the
initial shock of hearing there was suspicion that it was a hoax. Before the meeting started she was clear in her mind that her job would be to confirm that all the manuscripts found were of course
the work of Bin Laden; as a student of Language she knew all written work carried its author’s signature just as significantly as all the finger prints and the DNA David Davies had found.
However she quickly needed to change tack.

“It is my opinion, Sir, that the translations that I was asked to do on the various pieces of work I was given bore a startling resemblance to that of previous works by Mr Bin Laden, and I
would say they were almost definitely written by him,” she stated, and very pleased with herself too, she felt a lot better. What she or any one else in the room failed to spot was the
lightning quick glance Sir Richard and John Smith exchanged as Sally finished speaking.