Frederick Forsyth - The Kill List

And there was a television set in the corner, an object of fascination to the mountain men. It was not screening live TV but a DVD from a player linked to it. The speaker on the screen was using English, but the mullah had a pause button, enabling him to halt the flow, explain what the preacher had said and then reveal how, according to the Holy Koran, it was all rubbish.

One of the four squatting on the floor was Mahmud Gul, who had been a senior commander as far back as 9/11. He was not yet fifty, but thirteen years in the mountains had aged him; the face beneath the black turban was wrinkled like a walnut, the hands gnarled and aching from incipient arthritis.

He had been indoctrinated as a young man not against the British and Americans, who he knew had helped free his people from the Russians. He knew little of bin Laden and his Arabs, and what he did know he did not like. He had heard of what had happened in downtown Manhattan all those years ago and he did not approve of it. He had joined the Taliban to fight against the Tajiks and Uzbeks of the Northern Alliance.

But the Americans did not understand the law of pashtunwali , the sacred rule between host and guest that absolutely forbade Mullah Omar to hand his al-Qaeda guests over to their tender mercies. So they had invaded Mahmud Gul’s country. He had fought them for that, and he was still fighting them. Until now.

Mahmud Gul felt old and tired. He had seen many men die. He had put some out of their misery with his own gun when the wounds were so bad that they could live, in pain, for only a few more hours or days.

He had killed British and American boys but could not recall how many. His old bones ached and his hands were turning into claws. The shattered hip of many years ago never gave him peace through the long mountain winters. Half his family was dead, and he had not seen his grandchildren except during hurried night visits, before dawn drove him back to the caves.

He wanted out. Thirteen years was enough. Summer was coming. He wanted to sit in the warmth and play with the children. He wanted his daughters to bring him food, as it should be in old age. He had decided to take the government offer of amnesty, a house, sheep, an allowance, even if it meant listening to a fool of a mullah and a masked speaker on television.

As the TV was switched off and the mullah droned on, Mahmud Gul uttered something under his breath in Pashto. Chris Hawkins was sitting next to him and he, too, had a command of the language, but not the Ghazni rural dialect. He thought he had heard correctly but could not be sure. When the lecture was over and the mullah had scurried back to his car and his bodyguards, tea was taken. Strong, black, and the farangi officers had brought sugar, which was good.

Captain Hawkins slid down beside Mahmud Gul and they sipped in companionable silence. Then the Australian asked: “What did you say when the lecture finished?”

Mahmud Gul repeated the phrase. Spoken slowly and not under his breath, it meant only one thing. He had said: “I know that voice.”

Chris Hawkins had two more days to spend in Ghazni and one more reintegration meeting to attend elsewhere. Then back to Kabul. He had a friend at the British embassy who he was pretty certain was there with MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service. He thought he might mention it.

Ariel was right in his assessment of the Troll. The Iraqi from Manchester was possessed of an overweening arrogance. In cyberspace, he was the best and he knew it. Everything in that world to which he put his hand had the stamp of perfection. He insisted on it. It was his hallmark.

He not only recorded the sermons of the Preacher but he alone sent them out into the world, to be watched on who knew how many screens. And he managed the growing fan base. He vetted aspirant members with intense checking before he would accept a comment or deign to reply. But he still did not notice the mild virus that slipped into his program from a dark little attic in Centerville, Virginia. As designed, it began to have its effect a week later.

Ariel’s malware simply caused the Troll’s website to slow down, periodically and only marginally. But the effect was to cause small pauses in the transmission of the picture as the Preacher spoke. But the Troll noticed at once the tiny aberration from perfection that the pauses made in his work. It was not acceptable. It irritated and finally enraged him.

He tried to correct it, but the flaw remained. He concluded that if website 1 had developed a flaw, he would have to create website 2 and move to it. Which he did. Then he had to transfer the fan base to the new website.

Before he had invented his proxy server to create a false Internet protocol address, he had a real one, the IP that would serve as a sort of mailing address. To move the entire fan base from website 1 to 2, he had to pass back through the true IP. It only took a hundredth of a second, maybe less.

Yet in the move across, the original IP was exposed for that nanosecond. Then it was gone. But Ariel had been waiting for that minuscule window. The IP address gave him a country, but it also had an owner — France Télécom.

If the NASA supercomputers were going to prove no impediment to Gary MacKinnon, the database of France Télécom was not going to hold up Ariel for long. Within a day, he was inside the FT database, unseen and unsuspected. Like a good burglar, he was back out without leaving a trace. He now had a latitude and a longitude — a city.

But he had a message for Col. Jackson. He knew better than send him the news by e-mail. People listen in to that sort of thing.

The Australian captain was right on two counts. The chance remark of the Taliban veteran was indeed worth mentioning, and his friend was indeed part of the large and active SIS unit inside the British embassy. And the tip was acted on without delay. It went by secure encryption to London and thence to TOSA.

For one thing, Britain had also had three deliberate murders encouraged by the faceless and nameless Preacher. For another, an all-points request to friendly agencies had already been disseminated. Given that the Preacher was strongly suspected of being originally from Pakistan, the British SIS stations in Islamabad and neighboring Kabul were particularly alert.

Within twenty-four hours, a J-SOC Grumman Gulfstream 500 with one passenger aboard had lifted off from Andrews field on the outskirts of Washington. It refueled at USAF base Fairford in Gloucestershire, UK, and again at the large U.S. base at Doha, Qatar. Its third stop was at the base still retained by the USA on the enormous sprawl of Bagram, north of Kabul.

The Tracker chose not to go into Kabul. He did not need to and his transport was safer under guard at Bagram than at Kabul International. But his needs had been sent on ahead of him. If there were any financial restraints on the Reintegration Program, they did not apply to J-SOC. The power of the dollar kicked in. Capt. Hawkins was brought by helicopter to Bagram. Refueled, the same chopper brought them and a close-in protection unit drawn from a Rangers company to Qala-e-Zal.

It was midday when they landed outside the impoverished hamlet, and the spring sun was warm. They found Mahmud Gul doing what he had wanted to do for so long: sitting in the sun playing with his grandchildren.

At the sight of the roaring Black Hawk overhead and the soldiers who poured from it when it had landed on the communal threshing floor, the women rushed inside. Doors and shutters slammed. Silent, stony-faced men stood in the only street the hamlet boasted and watched the farangi walk into their home.

The Tracker ordered the Rangers to stay with the machine. With just Capt. Hawkins beside him as introducer and translator, he walked down the street, nodding from side to side and uttering the traditional “Salaam” greeting. A few grudging Salaam s came back. The Australian knew where Mahmud Gul lived. The veteran was sitting outside. Several children scattered in alarm. Just one, a three-year-old girl, more curious than afraid, clung to her grandfather’s cloak and stared up with huge saucer eyes. The two white men sat cross-legged in front of the veteran warrior and offered greetings. They were returned.