The Afghan (2 page)

He should have had a team of expert roofers, and they should have clad the whole barn in scaffolding. It would have been faster and safer to do the job that way, but much more expensive. And that was the problem. The man with the claw hammer was an ex-soldier, retired after his twenty-five-year career, and he had used up most of his bounty to buy his dream: a place in the country to call home at last. Hence the barn with ten acres and a track to the nearest lane and then to the village.

But soldiers are not always shrewd with money and the conversion of the medieval barn into a country house and a snug home had produced estimates from professional companies that specialize in such projects that took his breath away. Hence the decision, whatever time it took, to do it himself.

The spot was idyllic enough. In his mind’s eye he could see the roof restored to its former leak-proof glory, with nine-tenths of the original and unbroken tiles retained and the other ten per cent bought from a yard selling the artefacts of old demolished buildings. The rafters of the hammerbeam roof were still as sound as the day they were hacked from the oak tree, but the cross-battens would have to come off to be replaced over good modern roofing felt.

He could imagine the sitting room, kitchen, study and hall he would make far below him where dust now smothered the last old hay bales. He knew he would need professionals for the electrics and the plumbing, but he had already signed on at Southampton Technical College for night courses in bricklaying, plastering, carpentry and glazing.

One day there would be a flagstoned patio and a kitchen garden; the track would be a gravelled drive and sheep would graze the old orchard. Each night, camping in the paddock as nature favoured him with a balmy late summer heat wave, he went over the figures and reckoned that with patience and a lot of hard work he could just survive on his modest budget.

He was forty-four, olive-skinned, black-haired and -eyed, lean and very hard of physique. And he had had enough. Enough of deserts and jungles, enough of malaria and leeches, enough of freezing cold and shivering nights, enough of garbage food and pain-racked limbs. He would get a job locally, find a Labrador or a couple of Jack Russells and maybe even a woman to share his life.

The man on the roof removed another dozen tiles, kept the ten whole ones, threw down the fragments of the broken ones, and in Islamabad the red light pulsed.

Many think that with a pre-paid SIM card in a cellphone all future billing is cancelled out. That is true for the purchaser and user but not for the service provider. Unless the phone is used only within the confines of the transmitting area where it was bought, there is still a settling-up to be accomplished, but between the cellphone companies, and their computers do it.

As Abdelahi’s call was taken by his brother in Quetta, he began to use time on the radio mast situated just outside Peshawar. This belongs to Paktel. So the Paktel computer began to search for the original vendor of the cellphone in England; its intent was to say, electronically, ‘One of your customers is using my time and airspace, so you owe me.’ But the Pakistani CTC had for years required both Paktel and its rival Mobitel to patch through every call emitted or received by their networks to the CTC listening room. And, alerted by the British, the CTC had inserted British software into its eavesdropping computers with an intercept suite for certain numbers. One of these had suddenly gone active.

The young Pashto-speaking Pakistani army sergeant monitoring the console hit a button and his superior officer came on the line. He listened for several seconds, then asked: ‘What is he saying?’

The sergeant listened and replied: ‘Something about the speaker’s mother. He seems to be speaking to his brother.’

‘From where?’

Another check. ‘The Peshawar transmitter.’

There was no need to ask the sergeant any more. The entire call would automatically be recorded for later study. The immediate task was to locate the sender. The CTC major on duty that day had little doubt this would not be possible in one short phone call. Surely the fool would not spend long on the line?

From his desk high above the cellars the major pressed three buttons and by speed-dial a phone trilled in the office of the CTC Head of Station in Peshawar.

Years earlier, and certainly before the event now known as 9/11, the destruction of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Department, always known as the ISI, had been deeply infiltrated by fundamentalist Muslims of the Pakistani army. That was its problem and the reason for its complete unreliability in the struggle against the Taliban and their guests Al-Qaeda.

But Pakistan’s President General Musharraf had had little choice but to listen to the USA’s strongly worded ‘advice’ to clean his house. Part of that programme had been the steady transfer of extremist officers out of ISI and back to normal military duties; the other part had been the creation inside ISI of the elite Counter-Terrorism Centre, staffed by a new breed of young officers who had no truck with Islamist terrorism, no matter how devout they might be. Colonel Abdul Razak, formerly a tank commander, was one such. He commanded the CTC in Peshawar and he took the call at half past two.

He listened attentively to his colleague in the national capital, then asked: ‘How long?’

‘About three minutes, so far.’

Colonel Razak had the good fortune to have an office just eight hundred yards from the Paktel mast, within the radius – a thousand yards or less – normally needed for his direction-finder to work efficiently. With two technicians he raced to the flat roof of the office block to start the D/F sweeps of the city that would seek to pin the source of the signal to a smaller and ever smaller area.

In Islamabad the listening sergeant told his superior: ‘The conversation has finished.’

‘Damn,’ said the major. ‘Three minutes and forty-four seconds. Still, one could hardly have expected more.’

‘But he doesn’t appear to have switched off,’ said the sergeant.

In a top-floor apartment in the Old Town of Peshawar Abdelahi had made his second mistake. Hearing the Egyptian emerging from his private room, he had hastily ended his call to his brother and shoved the cellphone under a nearby cushion. But he forgot to turn it off. Half a mile away Colonel Razak’s sweepers came closer and closer.

Both Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have big operations in Pakistan, for obvious reasons. It is one of the principal war zones in the current struggle against terrorism. Part of the strength of the western alliance, right back to 1945, has been the ability of the two agencies to work together.

There have been spats, especially over the rash of British traitors starting with Philby, Burgess and Maclean in 1951. Then the Americans became aware they too had a whole rogues’ gallery of traitors working for Moscow and the inter-agency sniping stopped. The end of the Cold War in 1991 led to the asinine presumption among politicians on both sides of the Atlantic that peace had come at last and come to stay. That was precisely the moment that the new Cold War, silent and hidden in the depths of Islam, was having its birth pangs.

After 9/11 there was no more rivalry and even the traditional horse-trading ended. The rule became: if we have it, you guys had better share it. And vice versa. Contributions to the common struggle come from a patchwork quilt of other foreign agencies but nothing matches the closeness of the Anglosphere information-gatherers.

Colonel Razak knew both the Heads of Station in his own city. On personal terms he was closer to the SIS man, Brian O’Dowd, and the rogue cellphone was originally a British discovery. So it was O’Dowd he rang with the news when he came down from the roof.

At that moment Mr Al-Qur went to the bathroom and Abdelahi reached under the cushion for the cellphone to put it back on top of the attaché case where he had found it. With a start of guilt, he realized it was still ‘on’ so he switched it off at once. He was thinking of battery wastage, not interception. Anyway, he was too late by eight seconds. The direction-finder had done its job.

‘What do you mean, you’ve found it?’ asked O’Dowd. His day had suddenly become Christmas and several birthdays rolled into one.

‘No question, Brian. The call came from a top-floor apartment of a five-storey building in the Old Quarter. Two of my undercover people are slipping down there to have a look and work out the approaches.’

‘When are you going in?’

‘Just after dark. I’d like to make it three a.m., but the risk is too big. They might fly the coop . . .’

Colonel Razak had been to Camberley Staff College in England on a one-year Commonwealth-sponsored course and was proud of his command of idiom.

‘Can I come?’

‘Would you like to?’

‘Is the Pope Catholic?’ said the Irishman.

Razak laughed out loud. He enjoyed the banter.

‘As a believer in the one true God I would not know,’ he said. ‘All right. My office at six. But it is mufti. And I mean our mufti.’

He meant there would not only be no uniforms but no western suits either. In the Old Town, and especially in the Qissa Khawani Bazaar, only the shalwar kameez assembly of loose trousers and long shirt would pass unnoticed. Or the robes and turbans of the mountain clans. And that also applied to O’Dowd.

The British agent was there just before six, with his black and black-windowed Toyota Land Cruiser. A British Land-Rover might have been more patriotic, but the Toyota was the preferred vehicle of local fundamentalists and would pass unnoticed. He also brought a bottle of the whisky known as Chivas Regal. It was Abdul Razak’s favourite tipple. He had once chided his Pakistani friend on his taste for the alcoholic tincture from Scotland.

‘I regard myself as a good Muslim but not an obsessive one,’ said Razak. ‘I do not touch pork, but see no harm in dancing or a good cigar. To ban these is Taliban fanaticism which I do not share. As for the grape, or even the grain, wine was widely drunk during the first four Caliphates and if, one day in Paradise, I am chided by a higher authority than you, then I shall beg the all-merciful Allah for forgiveness. In the meantime, give me a top-up.’

It was perhaps strange that a tank corps officer should have made such an excellent policeman, but such was Abdul Razak. He was thirty-six, married with two children and educated. He also embodied a capacity for lateral thought, for quiet subtlety and the tactics of the mongoose facing the cobra rather than the charging elephant. He wanted to take the apartment at the top of the block of flats without a raging fire-fight, if he could. Hence his approach was quiet and stealthy.

Peshawar is a most ancient city and no part is older than the Qissa Khawani Bazaar. Here caravans travelling the Great Trunk Road through the towering and intimidating Khyber Pass into Afghanistan have paused to refresh men and camels for many centuries. And like any good bazaar the Qissa Khawani has always provided for man’s basic needs: blankets, shawls, carpets, brass artefacts, copper bowls, food and drink. It still does.

It is multi-ethnic and multilingual. The accustomed eye can spot the turbans of Afridis, Waziris, Ghilzai and Pakistanis from nearby, contrasting with the chitral caps from further north and the fur-trimmed winter hats of Tajiks and Uzbeks.

In this maze of narrow streets and lanes where a man can lose any pursuer are the shops and food stalls of the clock bazaar, basket bazaar, money-changers, bird market and the bazaar of the storytellers. In imperial days the British called Peshawar the Piccadilly of Central Asia.

The apartment identified by the D/F sweeper as the source of the phone call was in one of those tall, narrow buildings with intricately carved balconies and shutters; it was four floors above a carpet warehouse in a lane wide enough for only one car. Because of the heat in summer, all these buildings have flat roofs where tenants may catch a breath of cool night air, and open stairwells leading up from the street below. Colonel Razak led his team quietly and on foot.

He sent four men, all in tribal clothes, up to the roof of a building four houses down the street from the target. They emerged on to the roof and calmly walked from roof to roof until they reached the final building. Here they waited for their signal. The colonel led six men up the stairs from the street. All had machine pistols under their robes save the point man, a heavily muscled Punjabi who bore the rammer.

When they were all lined up in the stairwell the colonel nodded to the point man who drew back the rammer and shattered the lock. The door sprang inwards and the team went inside at the run. Three of the men on the roof came straight down the access stairs; the fourth remained aloft in case anyone tried to escape upwards.

When Brian O’Dowd tried to recall it later, it all appeared extremely fast and blurred. That was the impression the occupants received as well.

The attack squad had no idea how many men would be inside or what they would find. It could have been a small army; it could have been a family sipping tiffin. They did not even know the layout of the apartment; architects’ plans may be filed in London or New York, but not in the Qissa Khawani Bazaar. All they knew was that a call had been made from a red-flagged cellphone.

In fact they found four young men watching TV. For two seconds the attack group feared they might have raided a perfectly innocent household. Then they registered that all the young men were heavily bearded, all were mountain men and one, the fastest to react, was reaching beneath his robes for a gun. His name was Abdelahi and he died with four bullets from a Heckler & Koch MP5 through the chest. The other three were smothered and held down before they could fight. Colonel Razak had been very clear; he wanted them alive if possible.

The presence of the fifth man was announced by a crash from the bedroom. The Punjabi had dropped his rammer but his shoulder was enough. The door came down and two CTC hard men went in, followed by Colonel Razak. In the middle of the room they found a middle-aged Arab, his eyes wide and round with fear or hatred. He stooped to try to gather up the laptop computer he had hurled to the terracotta tiles in an effort to destroy it; then he realized there was no time, turned and ran for the window which was wide open. Colonel Razak screamed: ‘Grab him,’ but the Pakistani missed his grip. The Egyptian had been caught naked to the waist because of the heat, and his skin was slick with sweat. He did not even pause for the balustrade but went straight over and crashed to the cobbles forty feet below. Bystanders gathered round the body within seconds but the AQ financier gurgled twice and died.