Frederick Forsyth: The Kill List

The government’s computer ace was not flattered, but he nodded.

“We will, of course, keep trying.”

“There’s a clock ticking. I may have to try some place else.”

“Be my guest.”

“Let me ask this. Control your natural chagrin. Just supposing you were the Preacher. Who would you absolutely not want on your tail? Who would worry the crap out of you?”

“Someone better than me.”

“Is there any such someone?”

The NSA man sighed.

“Probably. Somewhere out there. I would guess from the new generation. Sooner or later, the veterans are overtaken by some beardless kid in every walk of life.”

“Do you know any beardless kids? Any specific beardless kid?”

“Look, I’ve never even met him. But I heard at a recent seminar and trade fair of a youngster right here in Virginia. My informant said he was not at the trade fair because he lives with his parents and never leaves their home. Never, not ever. He’s peculiar. In this world he’s a bundle of nerves, hardly talks. But he flies like a fighter ace when he enters his own world.”

“Which is?”

“Cyberspace.”

“You have a name? Even an address?”

“I figured you might ask.” He took a slip of paper from a pocket and passed it over. Then he rose. “Don’t blame me if he’s no use. It was only a rumor, in-trade gossip among us weirdos.”

When he had gone, the Tracker settled for the muffins and coffee and left. In the parking lot he glanced at the paper. Roger Kendrick. And an address in Centerville, Virginia, one of myriad small satellite towns that had sprung up in the past two decades and then exploded with commuters since 9/11.

All trackers, all detectives, whatever and wherever the hunt, whoever the quarry, need one break. Just one. Kit Carson was going to be lucky. He was going to get two.

One would come from a strange teenage boy too frightened to leave the attic bedroom of his parents’ backstreet house in Centerville, and the other from an old Afghan peasant whose rheumatism was forcing him to lay down his rifle and come in from the mountains.

About the only unconventional or audacious thing Lt. Col. Musharraf Ali Shah of the Pakistan regular army had ever done was marry. It was not the fact of marriage but the girl he wed.

In 1979, at the age of twenty-five and single, he had been briefly posted to the Siachen Glacier, a bleak and wild zone in the far north of his country where the border abutted Pakistan’s mortal enemy, India. Later, from 1984 to 1999, there would be a low-level but festering border war in the Siachen, but back then it was just cold and bleak, a hardship posting.

The then-lieutenant Ali Shah was a Punjabi, like the majority of Pakistanis, and presumed, as did his parents, that he would make a “good” marriage, possibly to the daughter of a senior officer, which would help his career, or a rich merchant, which would help his bank balance.

He would have been lucky to do either, for he was not an exciting man. He was one of those obeyers of orders to the letter, conventional, orthodox, with the imagination of a chapati . But in those jagged mountains, he met and fell in love with a local girl of startling beauty named Soraya. Without the permission or blessing of his family, he married.

Her own family was pleased, thinking a union with a regular army officer would bring elevation in the great cities of the plain. Perhaps a large house in Rawalpindi or even Islamabad. Alas, Musharraf Ali Shah was one of life’s plodders, and, over thirty years, he would plod up the rankings to finish as lieutenant colonel, clearly going no higher. A boy was born in 1980, to be named Zulfiqar.

Lieutenant Ali Shah was in the Armored Infantry, getting his commission at twenty-two in 1976. After his first tour on the Siachen, he returned with his heavily pregnant wife and was promoted to captain. He was allocated a very modest house on the officers’ patch in Rawalpindi, the military concentration a few miles from the capital of Islamabad.

There were to be no more behavior shocks. Like all officers in the Pakistani army, fresh postings came up every two or three years and were divided into “hard” and “soft.” A posting to a city like Rawalpindi, Lahore or Karachi counts as soft and is “with family.” Being sent to the garrison of Multan, Kharian, Peshawar in the throat of the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan or the Taliban-infested Swat Valley counted as hard and are for unaccompanied officers only. Through all these postings, the boy Zulfiqar went to school.

Every Pakistani garrison town has schools for the offspring of officers, but they come in three levels. At the bottom come the government schools, then the army public schools and, for those with family funds, the elite private schools. The Ali Shahs had no money outside the very modest salary, and Zulfiqar went to army schools. They have the reputation of being well run, employing many officers’ wives as teachers, and they are free.

The boy matriculated at fifteen and passed on to army college, taking engineering on his father’s orders. This was the skill that would grant automatic employment and/or a commission in the army. That was in 1996. The parents began to notice a change in their son in his third year.

The now-major Ali Shah, of course, was a Muslim, practicing but not passionately devout. It would have been unthinkable not to attend mosque every Friday or join in the ritual prayers as and when required. But that was all. He habitually dressed in uniform for prestige reasons, but if he had to dress in mufti, it would be the national dress for males: the leg-tight trousers and long, front-buttoned jacket that altogether make up the shalwar kameez .

He noticed his son began to grow a straggly beard and wear the fretted skullcap of the devout. He prostrated himself the required five times a day and snapped his disapproval when he saw his father taking a whisky, the tipple of the officer corps, and stormed out of the room. His parents thought the devotions and intense religiosity were a passing phase.

He began to steep himself in written works about Kashmir, the disputed border territory that has poisoned relations between Pakistan and India since 1947. He began to veer toward the violent extremism of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the terrorist group later responsible for the Mumbai massacre.

His father tried to console himself with the thought that his son would graduate in a year and either enter the army or find a good job as a qualified engineer, a talent always sought after in Pakistan. But in the summer of 2000, he flunked his finals, a disaster his father put down to abandoning his studies and poring over the Koran; that and learning Arabic, the only permitted language in which the Koran may be studied.

This event marked the first of a series of blazing quarrels between the son and his father. Maj. Ali Shah pulled such strings as he was able to in order to plead that his son had been unwell and deserved a chance to take the finals again. Then came 9/11.

Like virtually the entire world in possession of a television set, the family watched in horror as the airliners slammed into the Twin Towers. Except their son Zulfiqar. He rejoiced, he noisily jubilated, as the TV station repeated the spectacle over and over again. That was when his parents realized that along with extreme religious devotion, a constant reading of the original Jihadist propagandists Sayyid Qutb and his disciple Azzam, and a loathing of India, their son had developed a hatred of America and the West.

That winter the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, and within six weeks the Northern Alliance, with enormous U.S. Special Forces help and American air power, had toppled the Taliban government. While the Taliban’s guest Osama bin Laden fled over the Pakistan border in one direction, the Taliban’s one-eyed and bizarre leader Mullah Omar fled into the Pakistani province of Balochistan and settled with his high council, the Shura, in the city of Quetta.