The Afghan (23 page)

When he was satisfied, the van turned and went back down the hills. Its real destination was a villa standing in a walled compound in the outer suburbs of the town. With the gates relocked, the van reversed up to an open door and Martin was marched back out and down another tiled passage.

The plastic ties came off his wrists and a cool metal shackle went on to the left one. There would be a chain, he knew, and a bolt in the wall which could not be ripped free. When his hood came off, it was the kidnappers who had their heads covered. They withdrew backwards and the door slammed. He heard bolts go into sockets.

The cell was not a cell in the true meaning. It was a ground-floor room that had been fortified. The window had been bricked up and, though Martin could not see it, a painting of a window adorned the outside to fool even those with binoculars peering over the compound wall.

Considering what he had undergone years before in the SAS programme of interrogation resistance it was even comfortable. There was a single bulb in the ceiling protected against thrown objects by a wire frame. The light was subdued but adequate.

There was a camp bed and just enough slack in his chain to allow him to lie on it to sleep. The room also had an upright chair and a chemical toilet. All were in reach but in different directions.

His left wrist, however, was in a stainless-steel shackle that linked to a chain and the chain went to a wall bracket. He could not begin to reach the door through which his interrogators would enter, if at all, with food and water, and a spyhole in the door meant they could check on him any time and he would neither hear nor see them.

At Castle Forbes there had been lengthy and passionate discussions over one problem: should he carry any tracking device on him?

There are now tracker transmitters so tiny they can be injected under the skin without cutting the epidermis at all. They are pinhead-sized. Warmed by the blood, they need no power source. But their range is limited. Worse, there are ultra-sensitive detectors that can spot them.

‘These people are absolutely not stupid,’ Phillips had stressed. His colleague from CIA Counter-Terrorism agreed.

‘Among the best educated of them,’ said McDonald, ‘their mastery of very high technology, and especially the computer sciences, is awesome.’

No one at Forbes doubted that if Martin was subjected to a hyper-tech body search and something was discovered he would be dead within minutes.

Eventually the decision was: no planted bleeper. No signal-sender. The kidnappers came for him an hour later. They were hooded again.

The body search was lengthy and thorough. The clothes went first until he was naked, and they were taken away for searching in another room.

They did not even employ invasive throat and anal search. The scanner did it all. Inch by inch it was run over his body in case it gave the bleep that would mean it had discovered a non-body-tissue substance. Only at the mouth did it do that. They forced his mouth open and examined every filling. Otherwise – nothing.

They returned his clothing and prepared to leave.

‘I left my Koran at the guest house,’ said the prisoner. ‘I have no watch or mat, but it must be the hour of prayer.’

The leader stared at him through the eyeholes. He said nothing, but two minutes later he returned with mat and Koran. Martin thanked him gravely.

Food and water was brought regularly. Each time he was waved back with the handgun as the tray was deposited where he could reach it when they had done. The chemical lavatory was replaced in the same way.

It was three days before his interrogation began, and for this he was masked, lest he look out of the windows, and led down two corridors. When his mask was removed he was astonished. The man in front of him, sitting calmly behind a carved refectory table, for all the world like a potential employer interviewing an applicant, was youthful, elegant, civilized, urbane and uncovered. He spoke in perfect Gulf Arabic.

‘I see no point in masks,’ he said, ‘nor silly names. Mine, by the way, is Dr Al-Khattab. There is no mystery here. If I am satisfied you are who you say you are, you will be welcome to join us. In which case, you will not betray us. If not, then I am afraid you will be killed at once. So let us not pretend, Mr Izmat Khan. Are you really the one they call the Afghan?’

‘They will be concerned about two things,’ Gordon Phillips warned him during one of their interminable briefings at Forbes Castle. ‘Are you truly Izmat Khan and are you the same Izmat Khan who fought at Qala-i-Jangi? Or have five years in Guantanamo turned you into something else?’

Martin stared back at the smiling Arab. He recalled the warnings of Tamian Godfrey. Never mind the wild-bearded screamers; watch out for the one who will be smooth-shaven, who will smoke, drink, consort with girls, pass for one of us. Wholly westernized. A human chameleon, hiding the hatred. Totally deadly. There was a word . . .
takfir
.

‘There are many Afghans,’ he said. ‘Who calls me the Afghan?’

‘Ah, you have been incommunicado for five years. After Qala-i-Jangi word spread about you. You do not know about me, but I know much about you. Some of our people have been released from Camp Delta. They spoke highly of you. They claim you never broke. True?’

‘They asked me about myself. I told them that.’

‘But you never denounced others? You mentioned no names? That is what the others say of you.’

‘They wiped out my family. Most of me died then. How do you punish a man who is dead?’

‘A good answer, my friend. So, let us talk about Guantanamo. Tell me about Gitmo.’

Martin had been briefed hour after hour about what had happened to him on the Cuban peninsula. The arrival on 14 January 2002, hungry, thirsty, soiled with urine, blindfolded, shackled so tightly the hands were numb for weeks. Beards and heads shaved, clothed in orange coveralls, stumbling and tripping in the darkness of the hoods . . .

Dr Al-Khattab took copious notes, writing on yellow legal notepaper with an old-fashioned fountain pen. When a passage was reached where he knew all the answers, he ceased and contemplated his prisoner with a gentle smile.

In the late afternoon he offered a photograph.

‘Do you know this man?’ he asked. ‘Did you ever see him?’

Martin shook his head. The face looking up from the photo was General Geoffrey D. Miller, successor as camp commandant to General Rick Baccus. The latter had sat in on interrogations but General Miller left it to the CIA teams.

‘Quite right,’ said Al-Khattab. ‘He saw you, according to one of our released friends, but you were always hooded as a punishment for non-cooperation. And when did the conditions start to improve?’

They talked until sundown, then the Arab rose.

‘I have much to check on,’ he said. ‘If you are telling the truth, we will continue in a few days. If not, I’m afraid I shall have to issue Suleiman with the appropriate instructions.’

Martin went back to his cell. Dr Al-Khattab issued rapid orders to the guard team and left. He drove a modest rented car and he returned to the Hilton Hotel in Ras-al-Khaimah town, elegantly dominating the Al-Saqr deep-water harbour. He spent the night and left the next day. By then he was wearing a well-cut cream tropical suit. When he checked in with British Airways at Dubai International Airport his English was impeccable.

In fact Ali Aziz al-Khattab had been born a Kuwaiti, the son of a senior bank official. By Gulf standards that meant that his upbringing had been effortless and privileged. In 1989 his father had been posted to London as Deputy Manager of the Bank of Kuwait. The family had gone with him and avoided the invasion of their homeland by Saddam Hussein in 1990.

Ali Aziz, already a good English speaker, was enrolled in a British school at age fifteen and emerged three years later with accentless English and excellent grades. When his family returned home, he elected to stay on and go for a degree at Loughborough Technical College. Four years later he emerged with a degree in chemical engineering and proceeded to a doctorate.

It was not in the Arabian Gulf but in London that he began to attend the mosque run by a firebrand preacher of anti-western hatred and became what the media like to call ‘radicalized’. In truth, by twenty-one he was fully brainwashed and a fanatical supporter of Al-Qaeda.

A ‘talent spotter’ suggested he might like to visit Pakistan; he accepted and then went on, through the Khyber Pass, to spend six months at an Al-Qaeda terrorist training camp. He had already been marked out as a ‘sleeper’ who should lie low in England and never come to the attention of the authorities.

Back in London he did what they all do; he reported to his embassy that he had lost his passport and was issued a new one which did not carry the tell-tale Pakistan entry stamp. As far as anyone who asked was concerned, he had been visiting family and friends in the Gulf and had never been near Pakistan, let alone Afghanistan. He secured a post as lecturer at Aston University, Birmingham, in 1999. Two years later Anglo-American forces invaded Afghanistan.

There were several weeks of panic in case any trace of him in the terror camps had been left lying around, but in his case AQ’s head of personnel, Abu Zubaydah, had done his job. No traces were found of any Al-Khattab ever having been there. So he remained undiscovered and rose to be AQ’s commanding agent in the UK.

As Dr Al-Khattab’s London-bound airliner was taking off the
Java Star
eased away from her berth in the Sultanate of Brunei on the coast of Indonesian North Borneo and headed for the open sea.

Her destination was the Western Australian port of Fremantle, as usual, and her Norwegian skipper Knut Herrmann had no inkling his journey would be other than usual; which meant routine and eventless.

He knew that the seas in those parts remain the most dangerous waters in the world; but not from shoals, riptides, rocks, tempests, reefs or tsunamis. The danger here is pirate attacks.

Every year, between the Malacca Strait in the west and the Celebes Sea to the east, there are over five hundred pirate attacks on merchant shipping and up to a hundred hijackings. Occasionally the crew are ransomed back to the ship owners; sometimes they are all killed and never heard of again; in those cases the cargo is stolen and sold on the black market.

If Captain Herrmann sailed with an easy mind on the ‘milk run’ to Fremantle, it was because he was convinced his cargo was useless to the dacoits of the sea. But on this trip he was wrong.

The first leg of his course lay north, away from his eventual destination. It took him six hours to pass the ramshackle town of Kudat and come round the northernmost tip of Sabah and the island of Borneo. Only then could he run south-east for the Sulu Archipelago.

He intended to move through the coral and jungle islands by taking the deep-water strait between Tawitawi and Jolo Islands. South of the islands it was a clear run down the Celebes Sea to the south and eventually Australia.

His departure from Brunei had been watched, and a cellphone call made. Even if it had been intercepted, the call referred only to the recovery of a sick uncle who would be out of hospital in twelve days. That meant: twelve hours to intercept.

The call was taken in a creek on Jolo Island and the man who took it would have been recognized by Mr Alex Siebart of Crutched Friars, City of London. It was Mr Lampong, who no longer affected to be a businessman from Sumatra.

The twelve men he commanded in the velvety tropical night were cut-throats but they were well paid and would stay obedient. Criminality apart, they were also Muslim extremists. The Abu Sayyaf movement of the southern Philippines, whose last peninsula is only a few miles from Indonesia on the Sulu Sea, has the reputation of including not only religious extremists but also killers for hire. The offer Mr Lampong had put to them enabled them to fulfil both functions.

The two speedboats they occupied put to sea at dawn, took up position between the two islands and waited. An hour later the
Java Star
bore down on them to pass from the Sulu Sea into the Celebes. Taking her over was a simple task and the gangsters were well practised.

Captain Herrmann had taken the helm through the night and as dawn came up over the Pacific away to his left he handed over to his Indonesian first officer and went below. His crew of ten Lascars were also in their bunks.

The first thing the Indonesian officer saw was a pair of speedboats racing up astern, one each side. Dark, barefoot, agile men leaped effortlessly from speedboat to deck and ran aft towards the superstructure and bridge where he stood. He just had time to press the emergency buzzer to his captain’s cabin before the men burst through the door from the fly-bridge. Then there was a knife at his throat and a voice screaming ‘Capitan, capitan . . .’

There was no need. A tired Knut Herrmann was coming topsides to see what was going on. He and Mr Lampong arrived on the bridge together. Lampong held a mini-Uzi. The Norwegian knew better than to begin to resist. The ransom would have to be sorted out between the pirates and his employer company HQ in Fremantle.

‘Captain Herrmann . . .’

The bastard knew his name. This had been prepared.

‘Please ask your first officer did he in any circumstances make a radio transmission in the past five minutes?’

There was no need to ask. Lampong was speaking in English. For the Norwegian and his Indonesian officer it was the common language. The first officer screamed that he had not touched the radio’s transmit button.

‘Excellent,’ said Lampong and issued a stream of orders in the local dialect. This the first officer understood and opened his mouth to scream again. The Norwegian understood not a word, but he understood everything when the dacoit holding his Number Two jerked the seaman’s head back and sliced his throat open with a single cut. The first officer kicked, jerked, slumped and died. Captain Herrmann had not been sick in forty years at sea, but he leaned against the wheel and emptied his stomach.