Elephants can't hide forever (3 page)

The President listened, a knot forming in his stomach. “Mr President, I cannot emphasise how grave the situation is” said John Robertson. “We locked onto the two aircraft as
soon as we heard the news; both had changed direction and were heading for New York City.”

“My God,”
thought the president, not fully taking in what he was hearing.

The head of National Security took a deep breath.

“Sir, to bring you up to date, at 845 this morning, the United Airlines flight 11 crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Centre, at 905 the second plane crashed into the south
tower. There are two other flights over America that we believe may also have been hijacked, destination unknown. Four F16s have been scrambled from Dulles and will, under instruction, shoot any
aircraft out of the skies should we feel they are under hostile control.” The time was now 9:30 am. “Mr President, America is under attack, we will keep you up to speed as events
unfold, but firstly you must issue the Presidential order that we immediately go to DEFCON 1.”

He paused a second to allow the ramification of these words to sink in. The USA, like most countries, has a prioritised list of alert statuses for its armed forces and other agencies, DEFCON 5
being no threat perceived and peace, escalating to DEFCON 1 which is imminent attack, requiring full mobilisation of all armed forces and major evacuation of cities under threat. The American
authorities had not been in a DEFCON 1 situation since the Cuban missile crisis of 1963.

John continued, “Further, Mr President, you are to be escorted immediately to Air Force One, with other key staff including FLOTUS (the acronym for the president’s wife: First Lady
of the United States). Once Air Force One is airborne we will assess a safe destination, but at this moment in time that may have to be a friendly country.”

As the conversation continued, the doors to the Oval Office burst open, and two fully armed Marines approached the President. War had been declared on the USA and the President had to be made
safe; and so as respectfully as possible, the Marines escorted him with the utmost urgency to the waiting helicopter, which would whisk him to the safety of the Presidential 727 Jumbo. The United
States was under attack, violators currently unknown.

President Bush sat motionless, engulfed in the horror of watching US citizens leaping from the burning buildings of the World Trade Centre. Since Air Force One had lifted off, the situation had
become more extreme; the pictures on the screen of the burning towers of the World Trade Centre were the stuff of nightmares, but they had now been replaced by a CNN crew who were filming live
pictures from Washington. American Airlines flight 77 had crashed into the Pentagon, the President watched in abject horror as a huge plume of smoke rose from the burning building. By now the world
was watching the macabre events unfolding in the greatest country in the world, the United States of America. Both the Pentagon and the White House were being evacuated with extreme haste; the
terrorists had the great Satan running scared.

10:05 am saw the south tower of the World Trade Centre collapse; like a deck of cards the massive symbol of American Capitalism slithered to the ground causing a huge cloud of rubble and dust to
spread across the nearby streets.

The National Security and US agents that surrounded POTUS, The President of The United States, were frantically gathering information from the rows of electronic wizardry that filled every nook
and cranny of Air Force One. Every satellite and listening device on the earth could be fed through the aircraft; each and every member of the team knew that when the atrocities of the day released
their hold on POTUS, he would want answers and expect them.

Approximately ninety minutes into the flight of Air Force One, at 10.28am eastern seaboard time, the second tower of the World Trade Centre, which once stood tall and proud as a symbol of
American prestige, came juddering ground ward. The President had watched enough. He had witnessed the unimaginable; America reduced to rubble by forces unknown. How, with all the resources America
spent on its security, could this have happened, without so much as a whisper? He had just witnessed the mass murder of what must be thousands of Americans. POTUS rose from his chair and looked
towards the hubbub of the personnel busy seeking and analysing the constant chatter of the surrounding machines spewing out the incoming intelligence from the world’s security services. The
President stood and gazed around the room and for two minutes he said nothing, and every man and woman stopped their work and an unnatural quiet descended.

Eventually the President spoke.

“Who did this John?” he asked in a barely audible voice. The head of national security looked the President in the eye and said:

“Sir our initial Intel has established that the organisation responsible for this is: Al-Qaeda.”

“Go on” said POTUS.

“Al-Qaeda, Sir” said John Robertson to the President. The President’s assembled people sat or stood in total silence. He continued: “Al-Qaeda is an Islamist group founded
sometime between 1988 and 1989. We have known of their existence since its inception when several senior leaders from the Islamic Jihad organisation joined forces with a wealthy Saudi extremist.
Since then they’ve gone off the radar. Although several suicide bombings have been attributed to these people nothing has ever been proven and, unusually, nothing claimed.”

The President pondered for a moment, you could hear a pin drop and John Robertson knew the President’s next question, which he duly delivered.

“Who, John, is the leader of this organisation?”

“Osama Bin Laden Sir, is the Saudi benefactor,” came the reply.

“And where might we find him?” demanded the President, at last re-capturing some of his fighting spirit.

“Afghanistan, Sir” came the reply.

The World entered a new phase.

Sixteen days later on the 7th October 2001, American forces invaded Afghanistan under the brief Operation Enduring Freedom. The aim was to bring Bin Laden and other high ranking members of
Al-Qaeda to trial, destroy the entire organization and remove the existing rulers of Afghanistan, the Taliban.

Thirty two days later Major Mike Tobin, known as Nine Fingers to his comrades in the British SAS, was readying himself to answer the President’s request.

Gandamak is a village in eastern Afghanistan situated between the country’s capital and the Pakistani town of Peshawa; a cold inhospitable settlement. Its only claim to
fame, if you could call it fame, was that a hundred and fifty nine years previously, the First Afghan war was concluded there. On the afternoon of January 13
^th
1842, the British troops,
who were retreating to India through the mountain passes having been overwhelmed in Kabul, made their last stand against the Afghan hordes in Gandamak. They were cut to ribbons; what with the cruel
Afghan winter and cowardly British Officers they never stood a chance, and that was about the sum total of Gandamak’s claim to fame.

Gandamak lies relatively close to the Tora Bora mountainous region of Afghanistan. The Tora Bora, or White Mountains, lie in the District of Nangarhar, only 50 kilometres west of the Khyber
Pass, which joins Afghanistan to Pakistan.

The English and American press in the furore of post September 11
^th
had all claimed that the mountains of Tora Bora contained a hotel -like bunker, where Osama Bin Laden and up to two
thousand followers were holed up. The idea that the perpetrators of the horrific attacks on America were hiding in caves in the middle of Asia embedded itself into the American public. They wanted
retribution, and George W Bush was not silly enough to deny them their bloodlust, indeed it was he who led the rallying cry for the heads of those responsible for the recent attacks. So it
transpired, whether through fact or fiction no one will ever know, that a report from the Secretary of Defence USA was leaked to the American press, stating that immediately post September
11
^th
(or 9/11 as it was now referred to), Bin Laden had been picked up by a British AWAC (Airborne Early Warning and Control) spy plane, leaving Kabul, on a donkey no less, and heading
for the impenetrable fortress of the Tora Bora mountains.

Like a recalcitrant child who can’t get his own way and lashes out at the nearest thing, POTUS decided, probably carried along by the American groundswell that Bin Laden must perish in his
mountain hideaway. He ordered a great force of bombers to systematically reduce the Tora Bora mountain range to dust, and those hiding underneath as well; even if Bin Laden wasn’t there the
World would see the full might of American anger when aroused and the good folks of the USA might start to feel good about themselves again.

Mike Tobin, British SAS Captain and his three comrades sat outside the café, in Sher Poor Square Gandamak.

They listened to the constant thunder of the B 52s dropping their deadly ordinance payload as they reshaped the landscape of the Tora Bora Mountains. Their mission was to destroy the members of
Al-Qaeda hiding beneath.

It struck the four SAS troopers with great irony that this entire division of America’s finest airborne was in fact wasting their time, as the quarry they so desperately sought to blast
into eternity was, in fact, holed up in a house fifty metres from where they sat.

For fifteen days they had been sitting outside the café and at first they had attracted some minor attention. Dressed as Afghan farmers, and fully covered up for protection against the
cold winter, they soon blended in with the indigenous population. Many Afghan farmers now resorted to spending the majority of their days doing likewise, ever since the great Satan, the USA, had
systematically destroyed their crops and income from the poppy fields.

The four members of the SAS snatch squad had walked into Gandamak from the Pakistan town of Peshawar, crossing the border at nightfall; little attention was paid to them in this remote and
hostile environment. There was a constant stream of human flotsam crossing into and out of Pakistan. Whilst sitting outside the café, whiling away the time, they had kept a constant eye on
the alleyway running off at right angles to the road they sat by. Nothing unusual had been observed; in fact to these highly trained individuals the very fact that nothing moved up or down this
alleyway was in itself an indication that there was something unusual occurring, and that unusual occurrence was the fact that, providing GCHQ had not fucked up, Osama Bin Laden was sitting in the
back room of the fourth house down the alley, safe in the knowledge that the distant rumble of the American bombers indicated no one had a clue where he really was.

It was the most extraordinary piece of luck that brought these four men into the lawless region of Eastern Afghanistan, and now as they waited for darkness to envelop the small village, they
readied themselves for the snatch they had been planning which was to occur that evening.

GCHQ sits just outside the town of Cheltenham. Local residents are aware of its existence but pay little attention to the comings and goings. Its function is to listen and
monitor the constant chatter of the world at large. It can eavesdrop on every telephone conversation no matter what the contents or classification. GCHQ can filter the millions of phones calls
which are made each second of every day through their massive computers, and discard the normal, but recognise those that may be less ordinary and deal with them accordingly; so if certain known
numbers or words are used, this triggers an automatic segregation whereby these numbers are flashed to one of the waiting monitors manned by the team of trained listeners, who will then track the
call and wait for further developments. The task is both tiresome and tedious for the watchers, as ninety nine percent of suspect calls turn out to be fruitless. It has always irked the British
Security Service that GCHQ has been looked upon by the cousins across the pond at Langley as a somewhat provincial outfit which rarely contributes to world security, and they longed for an
opportunity to prove they were actually the world’s premier spymasters.

On this particular day in mid December 2001, all was about to change. Sally Dixon, recently recruited from Cambridge after obtaining a First in middle eastern languages, was sitting watching her
screen display various low level chit chat emanating from the area covering the Gulf and north Tajikistan, when her screen went dead, immediately followed by a flashing red warning message which
read ‘incoming encrypted message, maximum status, area North East Afghanistan, delivery via Predator’

Sally had heard of these messages in the canteen when the staff met and swopped stories, but the truth was the last red flash had occurred 10 years or so earlier when a satellite had spotted 300
tanks with Iraqi markings going hell for leather towards the Kuwait border. Sally’s training kicked in, she hit the panic button next to the monitor which would alert her departmental head
sitting one storey above, and then logged into her two immediate neighbours’ computers, both middle east experts, in case her screen crashed.

The vehicle that was about to deliver its life changing message to young Sally, was, to give it its full name, the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Predator MQ-1, better known as a drone. Used by the
British and American armed forces and security networks, it was a pilotless aircraft that could fly at altitudes of fifty thousand feet, watching and listening to what was occurring beneath it. It
could observe enemy movements and in real time convey information to the front line soldier; furthermore it was capable of picking up radio and satellite messages no matter how smart the enemy on
the ground thought he was being in evading their monitoring systems.

On this particular December morning, the Predator had been deployed in the region of Afghanistan known locally as the Safed Koh, or white mountains, otherwise known as the Tora Bora area; indeed
most of the western world’s military resources were focused on this region, for it was here that the American intelligence community were certain Osama Bin Laden had taken refuge following
his departure from Kabul a couple of weeks earlier. The Predator, flying at thirty thousand feet, had just covered its third sweep of the day and was preparing to circle back when an unusually
strong side wind blew it slightly off course. As it automatically readjusted its position, its flight took it over the village of Gandamak, and at that precise moment an encoded, encrypted message,
reduced to a nano second by the sender on the ground, hit the sensors of the Predator with a ping no louder than a submarine using sonar would locate another vessel. The Predator’s equipment
locked into the location of the sender within five feet, and together with the electronic message, forwarded it to GCHQ’s bank of satellite dishes and then on to the desk of Sally Dixon.