Frederick Forsyth - The Afghan

But soldiers are not always shrewd with money, and the conversion of the medieval barn into a country house and a snug home had produced estimates from professional companies that specialize in such conversions that took his breath away. Hence the decision that, whatever time it took, to do it himself. The spot was idyllic enough. In his mind’s eye he could see the roof restored to its former leakproof glory, with nine-tenths of the original and unbroken tiles retained and the other ten percent bought from a yard selling the artifacts of old demolished buildings. The rafters of the hammer beam roof were still sound as the day they were hacked from the oak tree, but the cross-batons would have to come off, to be replaced over good, modern roofing felt. He could imagine the sitting room, kitchen, study and hall he would make far below him where dust now smothered the last old hay bales. He knew he would need professionals for the electrics and the plumbing, but he had already signed on at Southampton Technical College for night courses in bricklaying, plastering, carpentry and glazing.

One day, there would be a flagstone patio and a kitchen garden; the track would be a graveled drive, and sheep would graze the old orchard. Each night, camping in the paddock as nature favored him with a balmy late-summer heat wave, he went over the figures and reckoned that with patience and a lot of hard work he could just survive on his modest budget.

He was forty-four, olive-skinned, black-haired and -eyed, lean and very hard of physique. And he had had enough. Enough of deserts and jungles, enough of malaria and leeches, enough of freezing cold and shivering nights, enough of garbage food and pain-racked limbs. He would get a job locally, find a Labrador or a couple of Jack Russells and maybe even a woman to share his life. The man on the roof removed another dozen tiles, kept the ten whole ones, threw down the fragments of the broken ones, and in Islamabad the red light pulsed.

Many think that with a prepaid SIM card in a cell phone all future billing is canceled out. That is true for the purchaser and user but not for the service provider. Unless the phone is used only within the parameters of the transmitting area where it was bought, there is still a settling up to be accomplished, but between the cell phone companies, and their computers do it. As Abdelahi’s call was taken by his brother in Quetta, he began to use time on the radio mast situated just outside Peshawar. This belongs to Paktel. So the Paktel computer began to search for the original vendor of the cell phone in England with the intent of saying, electronically, “One of your customers is using my time and airspace, so you owe me.” But the Pakistani CTC had for years required both Paktel and its rival Mobitel to patch through every call sent or received by their networks to the CTC listening room. And, alerted by the British, the CTC had inserted British software into its eavesdropping computers, with an intercept program for certain numbers. One of these had suddenly gone active.

The young Pashto-speaking Pakistani Army sergeant monitoring the console hit a button and his superior officer came on the line. The officer listened for several seconds, then asked, “What is he saying?” The sergeant listened, and replied, “Something about the speaker’s mother. He seems to be speaking to his brother.”

“From where?”

Another check. “The Peshawar transmitter.”

There was no need to tell the sergeant any more. The entire call would automatically be recorded for later study. The immediate task was to locate the sender. The CTC major on duty that day had little doubt this would not be possible in one short phone call. Surely the fool would not spend long on the line?

From his desk high above the cellars, the major pressed three buttons, and by speed dial a phone trilled in the office of the CTC head of station in Peshawar. Years earlier, and certainly before the event now known as 9/11, the destruction of the World Trade Center, on 11 September 2001, the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Department, always known as the ISI, had been deeply infiltrated by fundamentalist Muslims of the Pakistani Army. That was its problem, and the reason for its complete unreliability in the struggle against the Taliban and their guests, Al Qaeda.

But Pakistan ’s president General Musharraf had had little choice but to listen to the USA ’s strongly worded “advice” to clean house. Part of that program has been the steady transfer of extremist officers out of ISI and back to normal military duties; the other part had been the creation inside ISI of the elite Counter-Terrorism Center, staffed by a new breed of young officers who had no truck with Islamist terrorism, no matter how devout the terrorists might be. Colonel Abdul Razak, formerly a tank commander, was one. He commanded the CTC in Peshawar, and he took the call at half past two. He listened attentively to his colleague in the national capital, then asked, “How long?”

“About three minutes, so far.”

Colonel Razak had the good fortune to have an office just eight hundred yards from the Paktel mast, within the thousand-yard-or-less radius normally needed for his direction finder to work efficiently. With two technicians, he raced to the flat roof of the office block to start the D/F sweeps of the city that would seek to pin the source of the signal to a smaller and ever-smaller area. In Islamabad, the listening sergeant told his superior, “The conversation has finished.”

“Damn,” said the major. “Three minutes and forty-four seconds. Still, one could hardly have expected more.”

“But he doesn’t appear to have switched off,” said the sergeant. In a top-floor apartment in the Old Town of Peshawar, Abdelahi had made his second mistake. Hearing the Egyptian emerging from his private room, he had hastily ended his call to his brother and shoved the cell phone under a nearby cushion. But he forgot to turn it off. Half a mile away. Colonel Razak’s sweepers came closer and closer.

Both Britain ’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and America ’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have big operations in Pakistan for obvious reasons. It is one of the principal war zones in the struggle against the present terrorism. Part of the strength of the Western alliance, right back to 1945, has been the ability of the two agencies to work together. There have been spats, especially over the rash of British traitors starting with Philby Burgess and Maclean in 1951. Then the Americans became aware they, too, had a whole rogues’ gallery of traitors working for Moscow, and the interagency sniping stopped. The end of the Cold War in 1991 led to the asinine presumption among politicians on both sides of the Atlantic that peace had come at last and come to stay. That was precisely the moment that the new Cold War, silent and hidden in the depths of Islam, was experiencing birth pangs. After 9/11, there was no more rivalry, and even the traditional horse trading ended. The rule became: If we have it, you guys had better share it. And vice versa. Contributions come into the common struggle from a patchwork quilt of other foreign agencies, but nothing matches the closeness of the Anglosphere information gatherers.

Colonel Razak knew both the heads of station in his own city. On personal terms, he was closer to the SIS man, Brian O’Dowd, and the rogue cell phone was originally a British discovery. So it was O’Dowd he rang with the news when he came down from the roof. At that moment, Mr. al-Qur went to the bathroom, and Abdelahi reached under the cushion for the cell phone to put it back on top of the attache case where he had found it. With a start of guilt, he realized it was still on, so he switched it off at once. He was thinking of battery wastage, not interception. Anyway, he was too late by eight seconds. The direction finder had done its job.