Greg Rucka - A gentleman_s game

"Then why the hell did they call us in? What are we supposed to do?" Lankford took the folders without looking away from her, and again, she could read the frustration in his gaze.

"It's hurry up and wait, you knew that was the job when you signed up. Months of sitting on your soft end punctuated by bouts of bowel-freeing panic. Just because the tragedy was local doesn't mean it moves any faster."

Lankford hesitated, frowned, then gave her a grudging nod of comprehension.

Chace gathered the second pile, dropped it with Poole, then returned to her desk.

"Harakat ul-Mujihadin, Abdul Aziz faction," she told them. "No positive ID yet, but it's the working theory. D-Ops wants anything useful, anything vaguely operational. Start reading."

Without a word, Poole and Lankford dove into the folders.

Chace took her seat, wooden and designed, it seemed, by one of England's crueler chiropractors, and began working through her own pile. Most of the information was already known to her, and the files served as a refresher course more than anything else.

The HUM began as the Harakat ul-Ansar, formed in central Punjab in Pakistan in the early 1980s by Islamic religious elements. The group almost immediately began sending fighters into Afghanistan to assist the Afghani Mujihadin in their war against the Soviet occupation. Fighters were recruited from both central Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, and the CIA estimated up to five thousand troops had entered Afghanistan to join the fight by 1987, with recruitment funding coming from Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, including the bin Laden family.

As the war in Afghanistan progressed, more recruits were drawn from Muslim communities in other countries, including Tunisia, Algeria, Jordan, Egypt, Bangladesh, Myanmar, the Philippines, and of course Kashmir. Recruits were trained in camps set up in the Paktia province of Afghanistan and run by Hezb Islami (Khalis) Afghan Mujihadin leader Jalaluddin Haqqani, who later went on to join the taleban leadership as Minister of Tribal Affairs.

The file noted that Haqqani was still alive and at liberty, presumably hiding in the mountains of western Pakistan.

Following its initial entry into the conflict, the HUM established its own camps in Afghan territory, and Chace found herself leafing through old satellite surveillance shots, views of tents and training courses, and clusters of men engaged in all manner of paramilitary training. The camps were constructed just across the Miran Shah in the NWFP, and declassified Russian intelligence stated that some of the Soviet army's fiercest opposition had come from HUM-trained soldiers.

After the Mujihadin taking of Kabul in 1992 and the establishment of the taleban government, the HUA merged with the Harakat ul-Jihad-al-Islami, another Afghani partisan organization, and took the new name Harakat ul-Mujihadin, now directing its energies to defending the rights of Muslims all over the world. It expanded operations to those same countries it had drawn recruits from, and added Chechnya, Bosnia, and Tajikistan for good measure.

In the aftermath of the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the Americans launched cruise missile attacks at the HUM training camps, and then again during the Coalition action in Afghanistan, virtually destroying the groups' training infrastructure and scattering its various elements. D-Int's assessment, and here Chace found a corresponding CIA analysis, was that the HUM had been driven out of Afghanistan entirely and pursued underground in Pakistan. Given the activity in the region, and the HUM's ideological similarities to other radical Islamist-read Wahhabist-organizations, it was likely that those HUM elements still surviving had been absorbed into other militant groups throughout the region.

It was out of these surviving elements that the Abdul Aziz faction was believed to have been born, founded by Sheikh Abdul Aziz Sa'id, an Arab of unknown origin who had been linked to Muslim extremist organizations throughout the Middle and Far East. Abdul Aziz was suspected of supplying material and support to al-Qaeda operatives in northern Africa, as well as providing the Semtex used in the recent Jamaat al-Islamiyya bombings in Micronesia.

As with all such organizations, information on HUM finances was hard to come by. It was known that the HUM took donations from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf and Islamic states, as well as from individuals and organizations inside Pakistan and Kashmir. Rayburn noted that the HUM also solicited donations via magazine advertisements and through pamphlets, videotapes, and the like. The extent of the group's holdings was unknown, but since the crackdown in Pakistan in late 2001, it was assumed much of its money had been redirected into more legitimate ventures-real estate, commodities trading, and the production of consumer goods.

Chace shut the last folder and sat back, rubbing her eyes. Her watch now read nine minutes to ten, and she realized that she was both tired and ravenous.

"You find anything in the circulars?" she asked Poole.

Poole looked up from his file, shook his head slowly. He was a big man, perfect for rugby or leg-breaking, and, if he was to be believed, had spent much of his youth doing both. He certainly was adept with violence, though whether that was a result of his time in the SAS or something else seated far deeper, Chace didn't know and, in fact, labored to avoid drawing conclusions. It mattered less where the Minders were from than what they could learn, and Chace herself was living proof of that. Everything in her own upbringing and education should have led her to a good marriage and a proper job, and yet here she was.

Still, of any Minder she had ever known, it was Poole who looked most like the thugs Whitehall and the FCO and all the rest took the Special Section to be. He wasn't, of course; Crocker would suffer no bullies and no violence junkies, gourmet cooking notwithstanding. Chace trusted and respected Poole, all the more since he hadn't batted an eye when Tom had left and they had all shifted desks anticlockwise, with Tara taking the first chair. Poole treated her exactly as he had treated Wallace, and Chace was grateful for that.

"No mention of HUM, no mention of anything brewing targeted at us." Poole pushed aside the folders on his desk and pulled open his desk drawer, rummaging about. "Unless something got dropped through the cracks, this one was a complete surprise."

"I'm not sure I like that very much," Chace said.

"Suppose it could be a good sign, at least with regard to follow-ups. You have to figure if they moved more than three men into England, someone somewhere would have noticed something."

"You're putting a lot of faith in the boys at Box."

"I am a pillar of faith," Poole said, smiling now, with a rubber band dangling from an index finger and a paper clip held between two others.

"Christ, I hate this," Lankford said abruptly. "I bloody hate this."

Chace canted her head toward him, curious. "All fired up, are you, Chris?"

"If you're asking if I want a chance to hit back for this, that's a no-brainer, Tara. I'd give a year's pay for a crack at these bastards."

"And who, exactly, would you hit, Chris? Any suggestions? Unless you're planning on taking on the whole of the Harakat ul-Mujihadin? And that's assuming, of course, that it was the HUM and not someone else."

Lankford's chair groaned with dismay as he tilted back in it, looking to Poole, trying to conceal a growing frown. "You know that's not what I meant. I'm talking about cutting off the head, not taking pieces out of the body."

"You're talking about assassination."

He looked back to Chace, and his expression surprised her with its certainty. "Absolutely," he said.

Chace didn't respond, instead glancing to Poole, who was studiously avoiding involvement in the conversation by tilting back in his chair and trying to snatch the darts embedded in the board above him with the makeshift grappling hook he'd made from the rubber band and the paper clip. She didn't know his stories, but the action told her that Poole understood, in the same way that Lankford's certainty made it clear that the new Minder Three didn't.