The Afghan (20 page)

Pul-i-Charki is a fearsome, brooding block of a place to the east of Kabul, near the gorge at the eastern end of the Kabul plain. Under the Soviet occupation it was controlled by the Khad secret police and constantly rang with the screams of the tortured.

During the civil war several tens of thousands of prisoners failed to leave alive. Conditions had improved since the creation of the new, elected Republic of Afghanistan, but its stone battlements, corridors and dungeons still seemed to echo with the shrieks of its ghosts. Fortunately the prison van never made it.

Ten miles after losing the military escort a pick-up truck came out of a side road and took up station behind the van. When it flashed its lights, the van driver pulled over at the pre-reconnoitred flat area off the road and behind a clump of stunted trees. There the ‘escape’ took place.

The prisoner had been uncuffed as soon as the van left the last security check at Bagram’s perimeter. Even as the van rolled, he had changed into the warm grey woollen shalwar kameez and boots provided. Just before the pullover he had wound round his head the feared black turban of the Talib.

Brigadier Yusuf, who had descended from the cabin of the truck to be taken on board by the pick-up, now took charge. There were four bodies in the open back of the utility.

All had come fresh from the city mortuary. Two were bearded, and they had been dressed in Talib clothing. They were actually construction workers who had been atop some very insecure scaffolding when it collapsed and killed them both.

The other two derived from separate car accidents. Afghan roads are so potholed that the smoothest place to drive is the crown at the centre. As it is considered rather effeminate to pull over just because someone is coming the other way, the harvest in fatalities is impressive. The two smooth-shaven bodies were in prison service uniform.

The prison officers would be found with handguns drawn, but dead; the bullets were fired into the bodies there and then. The ambushing Taliban were scattered at the roadside, also shot with slugs from the pistols of the guards. The van door was savaged with a pickaxe and left swinging open. That was how the van would be found sometime the next day.

When the theatre had been accomplished Brigadier Yusuf took the front seat of the pick-up beside the driver. The former prisoner climbed in the back with the two Special Forces men he had brought with him. All three wrapped the trailing end of their turbans round their faces to shelter from the cold.

The pick-up skirted Kabul City and cut across country until it intercepted the highway south to Ghazni and Kandahar. There waited, as each night, the long column of what all Asia knows as the ‘jingly’ trucks.

They all seem to have been built about a century ago. They snort and snarl along every road of the Middle and Far East, emitting their columns of choking black smoke. Often they are seen broken down by the roadside, the driver being prepared to trudge many miles to find and buy the needed part.

They seem to find their way over impossible mountain passes and along the sides of bare hillsides on crumbling tracks. Sometimes the gutted skeleton of one can be seen in the defile below the road. But they are the commercial lifeblood of a continent, carrying an amazing variety of supplies to the tiniest and most isolated settlements and the people who live in them.

The British named them jingly trucks many years ago because of their decorations. They are carefully painted on every available surface with scenes from religion and history. There are representations from Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism and Buddhism, often gloriously mixed up. They are decorated and caparisoned with ribbons, tinsel and even bells. Hence, they jingle.

The line on the highway south of Kabul contained several hundred, their drivers sleeping in their cabs, waiting for the dawn. The pick-up slewed to a halt beside the line. Mike Martin jumped from the back and walked to the cab. The shrouded figure behind the wheel had his face hidden by a shemagh of checked cloth.

On the other side Brigadier Yusuf nodded but said nothing. End of the road. Start of the journey. As he turned away he heard the driver speak.

‘Good luck, boss.’

That term again. Only the SAS called their officers ‘boss’. What the American provost major at Bagram had not known as he made the handover was not only who his prisoner was, but that since the installation of President Hamid Karzai the Afghan Special Forces had been created and trained at his request by the SAS.

Martin turned away and started to walk down the line of trucks. Behind him the tail lights of the pick-up faded as it headed back to Kabul. In the cab the SAS sergeant made a cellphone call to a number in Kabul. It was taken by the Head of Station. The sergeant uttered two words and terminated.

The SIS chief for all Afghanistan also made a call on a secure line. It was three-thirty in the morning in Kabul, eleven at night in Scotland. A one-line message came up on one of the screens. Phillips and McDonald were already in the room, hoping to see what they then saw. ‘Crowbar is running.’

On a freezing, pitted highway Mike Martin permitted himself one last glance behind him. The red lights of the pick-up were gone. He turned and walked on. Within a hundred yards he had become the Afghan.

He knew what he was looking for but he was a hundred trucks down the line until he found it. A licence plate from Karachi, Pakistan. The driver of such a truck would be unlikely to be Pashtun and so would not notice the imperfect command of Pashto. He would be likely to be a Baluchi heading home to Pakistan’s Baluchistan province.

It was too early for the drivers to be rising, and unwise to rouse the driver of the chosen truck; tired men woken suddenly are not in the best of tempers and Martin needed him in a generous mood. For two hours he curled up beneath the truck and shivered.

Around six there was a stirring and a hint of pink in the east. By the roadside someone started a fire and set a billy on it to boil. In central Asia much of life is lived in and around the tea-house, the
chai-khana
, which can be created even with a fire, a brew of tea and a group of men. Martin rose, walked over to the fire and warmed his hands.

The tea-brewer was Pashtun but taciturn, which suited Martin fine. He had taken off his turban, unwound it and stowed it in the tote-bag hanging from his shoulder. It would be unwise to advertise being Talib until one knew the company was sympathetic. With a fistful of his Afghanis he bought a steaming cup and sipped gratefully. Minutes later the Baluchi clambered sleepily out of his cab and came over for tea.

Dawn rose. Some of the trucks began to kick into life with plumes of black smoke. The Baluchi walked back to his cab. Martin followed.

‘Greetings, my brother.’

The Baluchi responded, but with some suspicion.

‘Do you by any chance head south to the border and Spin Boldak?’

If the man was heading back to Pakistan, the small border town south of Kandahar would be where he would cross. By then Martin knew there would be a price on his head. He would have to skirt the border controls on foot.

‘If it please Allah,’ said the Baluchi.

‘Then in the name of the all-merciful would you let a poor man trying to get home to his family ride with you?’

The Baluchi thought. His cousin normally came with him on these long hauls to Kabul, but he was sick in Karachi. This trip he had driven alone, and it was exhausting.

‘Can you drive one of these?’ he asked.

‘In truth, I am a driver of many years.’

They drove south in companionable silence, listening to the eastern pop music on the old plastic radio propped above the dash. It screeched and whistled but Martin was not sure whether this was just the static or the tune.

The day wore on and they chugged through Ghazni and on towards Kandahar. On the road they paused for tea and food, the usual goat and rice, and filled the tank. Martin helped with the cost from his bundle of Afghanis and the Baluchi became much more friendly.

Though Martin spoke neither Urdu nor the Baluchi dialect and the man from Karachi only a smattering of Pashto, with sign language and some Arabic from the Koran they got along well.

There was a further overnight stop north of Kandahar, for the Baluchi would not drive in the darkness. This was Zabol province, wild country and peopled by wild men. It was safer to drive in the light with hundreds of other lorries in front, behind and yet more heading north. Bandits would prefer the night.

At the northern outskirts of Kandahar Martin claimed he needed a nap and curled up along the bench behind the seats which the Baluchi used as his bed. Kandahar had been the headquarters and stronghold of the Taliban and Martin wanted no reformed Talib to think he saw an old friend in a passing truck.

South of Kandahar he again spelled the Baluchi at the wheel. It was still mid-afternoon when they came to Spin Boldak; Martin claimed he lived in the northern outskirts, bade his host a grateful farewell and dropped off miles before the border checkpoint.

Because the Baluchi spoke no Pashto he had kept his radio tuned to a pop station and never heard the news. At the border the queues were longer even than usual and when he finally rolled to the barrier he was shown a picture. A black-bearded Talib face stared at him.

He was an honest and hard-working man. He wanted to get home to his wife and four children. Life was hard enough. Why spend days, even weeks, in an Afghan jail trying to explain that he had been totally ignorant?

‘By the Prophet, I have never seen him,’ he swore, and they let him go.

Never again, he thought as he trundled south on the Quetta road. He might hail from the most corrupt city in Asia, but at least you knew where you were in your own home town. Afghans were not his people; why get involved? He wondered what the Talib had done.

Martin had been warned the hijack of the prison van, the murder of its two warders and the escape of a returnee from Guantanamo Bay could not be covered up. To start with the American Embassy would make a fuss.

The ‘murder’ scene had been discovered by patrols sent up the Bagram road when the prison van failed to arrive at the jail. The separation of the van from its military escort was put down to incompetence. But the freeing of the prisoner was clearly by a criminal gang of Taliban leftovers. A hunt was put out for them.

Unfortunately the US Embassy offered the Karzai government a photograph, which could not be refused. The CIA and SIS Heads of Station tried to slow things down but there was only so much they could do. By the time all border posts received a faxed photograph, Martin was still north of Spin Boldak.

Though he knew nothing of this, Martin was determined there would be no chances taken at border crossings. In the hills above Spin Boldak he hunkered down and waited for night. From the position he had climbed to, he could see the lie of the land and the route he would take on the night march to come.

The small town was five miles ahead and half a mile below him. He could see the road snaking in and the trucks on it. He could see the massive old fort that had once been a stronghold of the British army.

He knew the capture of that fort in 1919 had been the last time the British army used medieval scaling ladders. They had approached secretly by night and apart from the bellowing of the mules, the clang of ladles on cauldrons and the swearing of the soldiers as they stubbed their toes, were silent as the grave so as not to wake the defenders.

The ladders were ten feet too short so they crashed into the dry moat with a hundred soldiers on them. Happily, the Pashtun defenders, crouching behind the walls, presumed the force attacking them must be enormous, so they quit through the back door and ran for the hills. The fort fell without a shot being fired.

Before midnight Martin stole quietly past its walls, through the town and into Pakistan. Sunrise found him ten miles down the Quetta road. Here he found a
chai-khana
and waited until a truck that accepted paying passengers came along and gave him passage to Quetta. At last the black Talib turban, instantly recognizable in those parts, became an asset and not a liability. So on it went.

If Peshawar is a fairly extreme Islamist city, Quetta is more so, only exceeded in its ferocity of sympathy for Al-Qaeda by Miram Shah. These are within the North-West Frontier Provinces where local tribal law prevails. Though technically across the border from Afghanistan the Pashtun people still prevail, as does the Pashto language and extreme devotion to ultra-traditional Islam. A Talib turban is the mark of a man to be reckoned with.

Though the main road south from Quetta heads for Karachi, Martin had been advised to take the smaller track of a highway south-west to the wretched port of Gwador.

This lies almost on the Iranian border at the extreme western end of Baluchistan. Once a sleepy and malodorous fishing village, it has developed into a major harbour and entrepôt, contentedly devoted to smuggling, especially opium. Islam may denounce the use of narcotics but that is for Muslims. If the infidels of the West wish to poison themselves and pay handsomely for the privilege, that has nothing to do with true servants and followers of the Prophet.

Thus the poppies are grown in Iran, Pakistan and most of all Afghanistan, refined to base morphine locally and hence smuggled further west to become heroin and death. In this holy trade Gwador plays its part.

In Quetta, seeking to avoid conversation with Pashto speakers who might unmask him, Martin had found another Baluchi truck driver heading for Gwador. It was only in Quetta that he learned there was a five-million Afghani price on his head – but only in Afghanistan.

It was on the third morning after he heard the words ‘good luck, boss’ that he dropped off the truck and settled gratefully for a cup of sweet green tea at a pavement café. He was expected, but not by locals.