Frederick Forsyth - The Afghan

“What is he like now, Izmat Khan? How has he changed in five years with your people at Camp Delta?”

The American from Langley shrugged. “He’s tough, Mike. Very, very hard. He arrived with a bad head wound and double concussion. Injured during capture. At first, our medics thought he was maybe… well… a bit simple. Backward. Turned out he was just totally disoriented. The concussion, and the journey. This was early December 2001, just after 9/11. Treatment was… how shall I put it?… not gentle. Then it seemed nature took its course, and he recovered enough for questioning.”

“And what did he tell you?”

“Not very much. Just his resume. Resisted all third degree, and all offers. Just stares at us, and what the grunts see in those black eyes is not brotherly love. That is why he is in lockdown. But, from others, we understand he has passable Arabic, learned inside Afghanistan, and before that from years in a madrassah rote-learning the Koran. And two British-born AQ volunteers who were in there with him, and have now been released, say he now has some halting English that they taught him.”

Martin glanced sharply at Steve Hill. “They’d have to be picked up and kept in quarantine,” he said.

Hill nodded. “Of course. It can be arranged.”

Marek Gumienny rose and wandered round the barn while Martin studied the file. He stared into the fire, and deep in the embers saw a bleak and bare hillside far away. Two men, a cluster of rocks and the Soviet Hind helicopter gunship swinging to the attack. A whisper from the turbaned boy: “Are we going to die, Angleez?” Gumienny came back, squatted on the ground and poked the fire. The image went up in a cloud of sparks.

“Quite a project you have taken on here, Mike. Id have thought this was a job for a crew of professionals. You doing it all yourself?” “As much as I can. For the first time in twenty-five years, I have the time.”

“But not the dough, eh?”

Martin shrugged. “There are scores of security companies out there, if I want a job. Iraq alone has spawned more professional bodyguards than one can count, and still more are wanted. They make more in a week working for your guys in the Sunni Triangle than they made in half a year as soldiers.” “But that would mean back to the dust, the sand, the danger, the too-early death. Didn’t you retire from that?”

“And what are you offering? A vacation with AQ in the Florida Keys?” Marek Gumienny had the grace to laugh. “Americans are accused of many things, Mike, but not often of being ungenerous to those who have helped them. I am thinking of a consultancy at, say two hundred thousand dollars a year for five years. Paid abroad; no need to disturb the tax man. No need actually to show up for work. No need to go into harm’s way ever again.” Mike Martin’s thoughts flitted to a scene in his all-time-favorite film. T E. Lawrence has offered Auda abu Tayi money to join him in the attack on Aqaba. He recalled the great reply: Auda will not ride to Aqaba for the British gold, he will ride to Aqaba because it pleases him. He stood up. “Steve, I want my home shrouded in tarpaulins from top to bottom. When I come back, I want it just the way I left it.”

The controller Middle East nodded. “Done,” he said.

“I’ll get my kit. There’s not much of it. Enough to fill the boot, no more.” And so the Western strike-back against Project Stingray was agreed upon under apple trees in a Hampshire orchard. Two days later, by random selection, a computer dubbed it “Operation Crowbar.”

If challenged, Mike Martin would never have been able to defend himself. But in all the briefings he later gave them about the Afghan who had once been his friend, there was one detail he kept to himself. Perhaps he thought that “need to know” was a two-way street. Perhaps he thought the detail too unimportant. It had to do with a muttered conversation in the shadows of a cave hospital run by Arabs in a place called Jaji.

The decision in the Hampshire orchard led to a blizzard of decision making from the two spymasters. To start with, sanction and approval had to be sought from both men’s political masters.

This was easier said than done, because Mike Martin’s first condition was that no more than a dozen people should ever know what Operation Crowbar was about. His concern was completely understood.

If fifty people know anything that interesting, one will eventually spill the beans. Not intentionally, not viciously, not even mischievously, but inevitably. Those who have ever been in deep cover in a lethal situation know that it is nerve-racking enough to trust in one’s own tradecraft never to make a mistake and be caught. To hope that one will never be given away by some utterly unforeseeable fluke is constantly stressful. But the ultimate nightmare is to know that the capture and the long, agonizing death to follow happened because some fool in a bar boasted to his girlfriend and was overheard-that is the worst fear of all. So Martin’s condition was acceded to at once. In Washington, John Negroponte agreed that he alone would be the repository and gave the go-ahead. Steve Hill dined at his club with a man in the British government and secured the same result. That made four. But each man knew he personally could not be on the case twenty-four hours a day. Each needed an executive officer to run things day to day. Marek Gumienny appointed a rising Arabist in the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism division; Michael McDonald dropped everything, explained to his family that he had to work in the UK for a while and flew east as Marek Gumienny returned home. Steve Hill picked his own deputy on the Middle East Desk, Gordon Phillips. Before they parted company, the two principals agreed that every aspect of Crowbar would have a plausible cover story so that no one lower than the top ten would really know that a Western agent was going to be slipped inside Al Qaeda. Both Langley and Vauxhall Cross were told that the two men about to go missing were simply on a career-improving, academic-study sabbatical and would be away from their desks for about six months.

Steve Hill introduced the two men who would now be working together, and told them what Crowbar was going to try to do. Both McDonald and Phillips went very silent. Hill had installed them both not in offices in the headquarters building by the Thames but in a safe house, one of several retained by the Firm, out in the countryside.

When they had unpacked and convened in the drawing room, he tossed them both a thick file.

“Finding an Ops HQ^starts tomorrow,” he said. “You have twenty-four hours to commit this to memory. This is the man who is going to go in. You will work with him until that day, and for him after that. This”-he tossed a thinner file on the coffee table “is the man he is going to replace. Clearly, we know much less. But that is everything the U.S. interrogators have been able to secure from him in hundreds of hours of interrogations at Gitmo. Learn this also.” When he was gone, the two younger men asked for a large pot of coffee from the household staff and started to read.

IT WAS during a visit to the Farnborough Airshow in the summer of 1977, when he was fifteen, that the schoolboy Martin fell in love. His father and younger brother were with him, fascinated by the fighters and bombers, acrobatic fliers and first-viewing prototypes. For Mike, the high point was the visit of the Red Devils, the stunt team from the Parachute Regiment, free-falling, from tiny specs in the sky to swooping to earth in their harnesses right in the heart of the tiny landing zone. That was when he knew what it was he wanted to do. He wrote a personal letter to the Paras during his last summer term at Haileybury, in 1980, and was offered an interview at the Regimental Depot at Aldershot for that same September. He arrived, and stared at the old Dakota, out of which his predecessors had once dropped to try to capture the bridge at Arnhem, until the sergeant escorting the group of five ex-schoolboys led them to the interview room.