The Afghan (21 page)

The first of the two Predators had taken off from Thumrait twenty-four hours earlier. Flying in rotation, the UAVs would keep up a constant day-and-night patrol over their assigned surveillance area.

A product of General Atomics, the UAV-RQ 1 L Predator is not much to look at. It resembles something that might have come from the aero-modeller’s doodling pad.

It is only twenty-seven feet long and pencil-slim. Its tapered seagull wings have a span of forty-eight feet. Right at the rear a single 113-hp Rotax engine drives the propellers that push it along, and the Rotax just sips petrol from its hundred-gallon fuel tank.

Yet from this puny impulsion it can speed up to 117 knots or loiter along at seventy-three. Its maximum endurance aloft is forty hours, but its more normal mission would be to fly up to a 400-nautical-mile radius from home base, spend twenty-four hours on the job and fly home again.

Being a rear-engined ‘pusher’ device, its directional controls are up front. They can be operated by its controller manually or switched to remote control from a computerized programme to do what is wanted and keep doing it until given fresh instructions.

The Predator’s true genius lies in its bulbous nose: the detachable Skyball avionics pod.

All the communications kit faces upwards to talk to and listen to the satellites up in space. These receive all its photo-images and overheard conversations and pass them back to base.

What faces downwards is the Lynx synthetic-aperture radar and the L-3 Wescam photographic unit. More modern versions, such as the two used over Oman, can overcome night, cloud, rain, hail and snow with the multi-spectral targeting system.

After the invasion of Afghanistan, when the juiciest of targets were spotted but could not be attacked in time, the Predator went back to the makers and a new version emerged. It carried the Hellfire missile, giving the eye-in-the-sky a weaponized variant.

Two years later the head of Al-Qaeda from the Yemen left his compound far in the invisible interior with four chums in a Land Cruiser. He did not know it but several pairs of American eyes were watching him on a screen in Tampa.

On the word of command the Hellfire left the belly of the Predator and seconds later the Land Cruiser and its occupants were simply vaporized. It was all witnessed in full colour on a plasma screen in Florida.

The two Predators out of Thumrait were not weaponized. Their sole task was to patrol at twenty-thousand feet, out of sight, inaudible, radar-immune, and watch the ground and sea below.

There were four mosques in Gwador but discreet British enquiries of the Pakistani ISI extracted the information that the fourth and smallest was flagged as a hotbed of fundamentalist agitation. Like most of the smaller mosques in Islam, it was a one-imam place of worship, surviving on donations from the faithful. This one had been created and was run by Imam Abdullah Halabi.

He knew his congregation well and from his raised chair as he led the prayers he could spot a visiting newcomer at a glance. Even at the back, the black Talib turban caught his eye.

Later, before the black-bearded stranger could replace his sandals and lose himself in the crowds of the street, the imam tugged at his sleeve.

‘Greeting of our all-merciful Lord be upon you,’ he murmured. He used the Arabic phrase, not Urdu.

‘And upon you, imam,’ said the stranger. He too spoke Arabic, but the imam noticed the Pashto accent. Suspicion confirmed; the man was from the tribal territories.

‘My friends and I are adjourning to the
madafa
,’ he said. ‘Would you join us and take tea?’

The Pashtun considered for a second, then gravely inclined his head. Most mosques have a
madafa
attached, a more relaxed and private social club for prayers, gossip and religious schooling. In the West the indoctrination of teenagers into ultra-extremism is often accomplished there.

‘I am Imam Halabi. Does our new worshipper have a name?’ he asked.

Without hesitation Martin produced the first name of the Afghan President and the second of the Special Forces brigadier.

‘I am Hamid Yusuf,’ he said.

‘Then welcome, Hamid Yusuf,’ said the imam. ‘I notice you dare to wear the turban of the Taliban. Were you one of them?’

‘Since I joined Mullah Omar at Kandahar in nineteen ninety-five.’

There were a dozen in the
madafa
, a shabby shack behind the mosque. Tea was served. Martin noticed one of the men staring at him. The same man then excitedly drew the imam aside and whispered frantically. He would not, he explained, ever dream of watching television and its filthy images, but he had passed a TV shop and there was a set in the window.

‘I am sure it is the man,’ he hissed. ‘He escaped from Kabul but three days ago.’

Martin did not understand Urdu, least of all in the Baluchi accent, but he knew he was being talked about. The imam may have deplored all things western and modern, but like most he found the cellphone damnably convenient, even if it was made by Nokia of Christian Finland. He asked three friends to engage the stranger in talk and not to let him leave. Then he retired to his own humble quarters and made several calls. He returned much impressed.

To have been a Talib from the start; to have lost his entire family and clan to the Americans; to have commanded half the northern front in the Yankee invasion; to have broken open the armoury at Qala-i-Jangi, to have survived five years in the American hellhole, to have escaped the clutches of the Washington-loving Kabul regime – this man was not a refugee, he was a hero.

Imam Halabi may have been a Pakistani, but he had a passionate loathing of the government of Islamabad for its collaboration with America. His sympathies were wholly with Al-Qaeda. To be fair to him, the five million Afghani reward, which would make him rich for life, did not tempt him in the slightest.

He returned to the hall and beckoned the stranger to him.

‘I know who you are,’ he hissed. ‘You are the one they call the Afghan. You are safe with me but not in Gwador. Agents of the ISI are everywhere and you have a price on your head. Where are your lodgings?’

‘I have none. I have only just arrived from the north,’ said Martin.

‘I know where you have come from; it is all over the news. You must stay here, but not for long. Somehow you must leave Gwador. You will need papers, a new identity, safe passage away from here. Perhaps I know a man.’

He sent a small boy from his
madrassah
running to the harbour. The boat he sought was not in port. It arrived twenty-four hours later. The boy was still patiently waiting at the berth where it always docked.

Faisal bin Selim was a Qatari by birth. He had been born to poor fisherfolk in a shack on the edge of a muddy creek near a village that eventually became the bustling capital of Doha. But that was after the discovery of oil, the creation of the United Arab Emirates out of the Trucial States, the departure of the British, the arrival of the Americans and long before the money poured in like a roaring tide.

In his boyhood he had known poverty and automatic deference to the lordly white-skinned foreigners. But from his first days Bin Selim had determined he would rise in the world. The path he chose was what he knew: the sea. He became a deck hand on a coastal freighter, and as his ship plied the coast from Masirah Island and Salalah in the Dhofari province of Oman round to the ports of Kuwait and Bahrain at the head of the Persian Gulf, he learned many things with his agile mind.

He learned that there was always someone with something to sell and prepared to sell it cheap. And there was someone else, somewhere, prepared to buy that something and pay more. Between the two stood the institution called the Customs. Faisal bin Selim made himself prosperous by smuggling.

In his travels he saw many things that he came to admire: fine cloths and tapestries, Islamic art, true culture, ancient Korans, precious manuscripts and the beauty of the great mosques. And he saw other things he came to despise: rich westerners, porcine faces lobster-pink in the sun, disgusting women in tiny bikinis, drunken slobs, all that undeserved money.

The fact that the rulers of the Gulf States also benefited from money that simply poured in black streams from the desert sands did not escape him. As they also flaunted their western habits, drank the imported alcohol, slept with the golden whores, he came to despise them too.

By his mid-forties, twenty years before a small Baluchi boy waited for him at the dock in Gwador, two things had happened to Faisal bin Selim.

He had earned and saved enough money to commission, buy and own outright a superb timber trading dhow, constructed by the finest craftsmen at Sur in Oman and called
Rasha
, the
Pearl
. And he had become a fervent Wahhabi.

When the new prophets arose to follow the teachings of Maududi and Sayyid Qutb, they declared jihad against the forces of heresy and degeneracy, and he was with them. When young men went to fight the godless Soviets in Afghanistan his prayers went with them; when others flew airliners into the towers of the western god of money he knelt and prayed that they would indeed enter the gardens of Allah.

To the world he remained the courteous, frugally living, fastidious, devout master and owner of the
Rasha
. He plied his trade along the entire Gulf coast and round into the Arabian Sea. He did not seek trouble, but if a True Believer sought his help, whether in alms or a passage to safety, he would do what he could.

He had come to the attention of western security forces because a Saudi AQ activist, captured in the Hadramaut and confessing all in a cell in Riyadh, let slip that messages of the utmost secrecy destined for Bin Laden himself, so secret that they could only be confided verbally to a messenger who would memorize them verbatim and take his own life before capture, would occasionally leave the Saudi peninsula by boat. The emissary would be deposited on the Baluchi coast whence he would take his message north to the unknown caves of Waziristan where the Sheikh resided. The boat was the
Rasha
. With the agreement and assistance of the ISI it was not intercepted, just watched.

Faisal bin Selim arrived in Gwador with a cargo of white goods from the duty-free entrepôt of Dubai. Here the refrigerators, washing machines, microwave cookers and televisions were sold at a fraction of their retail price outside the free-port warehouses.

He was commissioned to take back with him to the Gulf a cargo of Pakistani carpets, knotted by the thin fingers of little boy slaves, destined for the feet of the rich westerners buying luxury villas on the sea islands being built off Dubai and Qatar.

He listened gravely to the small boy with the message, nodded, and two hours later, with his cargo safely inland without disturbing Pakistani Customs, left the
Rasha
in the charge of his Omani deck hand and walked sedately through Gwador to the mosque.

From years of trading with Pakistan, the courtly Arab spoke good Urdu and he and the imam conversed in that language. He sipped his tea, took sweet cakes and wiped his fingers on a small cambric handkerchief. The while, he nodded and glanced at the Afghan. When he heard of the break-out from the prison van he smiled in approval. Then he broke into Arabic.

‘And you wish to leave Pakistan, my brother?’

‘There is no place for me here,’ said Martin. ‘The imam is right. The secret police will find me and hand me back to the dogs of Kabul. I will end my life before that.’

‘Such a pity,’ murmured the Qatari, ‘so far . . . such a life. And if I take you to the Gulf States, what will you do?’

‘I will try to find other True Believers and offer what I can.’

‘And what would that be? What can you do?’

‘I can fight. And I am prepared to die in Allah’s holy war.’

The courtly captain thought for a while.

‘The loading of the carpets takes place at dawn,’ he said. ‘It will take several hours. They must be well below decks lest the sea-spray touch them. Then I shall depart, sails down. I shall cruise close past the end of the harbour mole. If a man were to leap from the concrete to the deck, no one would notice.’

After the ritual salutations he left. In the darkness Martin was led by the boy to the dock. Here he studied the
Rasha
so that he would recognize her in the morning. She came past the mole just before eleven. The gap was eight feet and Martin made it with inches to spare after a short run.

The Omani had the helm. Faisal bin Selim greeted Martin with a gentle smile. He offered his guest fresh water to wash his hands and delicious dates from the palms of Muscat.

At noon the elderly man spread two mats on the broad coaming about the cargo hold. Side by side the two men knelt for the midday prayers. For Martin it was the first occasion of prayer other than in a crowd where a single voice can be drowned by all the others. He was word perfect.

When an agent is way out there in the cold, on a ‘black’ and dangerous job, his controllers at home are avid for some sign that he is all right; still alive, still at liberty, still functioning. This indication may come from the agent himself, by a phone call, a message in the small ads column of a paper or a chalk mark on a wall, a pre-agreed drop. It may come from a watcher who makes no contact but observes and reports back. It is called ‘sign of life’. After days of silence, controllers become very twitchy waiting for some sign of life.

It was midday in Thumrait; breakfast time in Scotland; the wee small hours in Tampa. The first and the third could see what the Predator could see but did not know its significance. Need to know; they had not been told. But Edzell air base knew.

Clear as crystal, alternately lowering the forehead to the deck and raising the face to the sky, the Afghan was saying his prayers on the deck of the
Rasha
. There was a roar from the terminal operators in the ops room. Seconds later Steve Hill took a call at his breakfast table and gave his wife a passionate and unexpected kiss.