Frederick Forsyth - The Afghan

All had come fresh from the city mortuary. Two were bearded, and they had been dressed in Talib clothing. They were actually construction workers who had been atop some very insecure scaffolding when it collapsed and killed them both. The other two derived from separate car accidents. Afghan roads are so potholed that the smoothest place to drive is the crown at the center. As it is considered rather effeminate to pull over just because someone is coming the other way, the harvest in fatalities is impressive. The two smooth-shaven bodies were in prison service uniform.

The prison officers would be found with handguns drawn, but dead; the bullets were fired into the bodies there and then. The ambushing Taliban were scattered at the roadside, also shot with slugs from the pistols of the guards. The van door was savaged with a pickax and left swinging open. That was how the van would be found sometime the next day.

When the theater had been accomplished, Brigadier Yusef took the front seat of the pickup beside the drive. The former prisoner climbed in the back with the two Special Forces men he had brought with him. All three wrapped the trailing end of their turbans round their faces to shelter from the cold. The pickup skirted Kabul, and cut across country until it intercepted the highway south to Ghazni and Kandahar. There waited, as each night, the long column of what all Asia knows as the “jingly” trucks. They all seem to have been built about a century ago. They snort and snarl along every road of the Middle and Far East, emitting their columns of choking black smoke. Often, they are seen broken down by the roadside, the driver being prepared to trudge many miles to find and buy the needed part. They seem to find their way over impossible mountain passes, along the sides of bare hillsides on crumbling tracks. Sometimes, the gutted skeleton of one can be seen in the defile below the road. But they are the commercial lifeblood of a continent, carrying an amazing variety of supplies to the tiniest and most isolated settlements and the people who live in them. The British named them jingle trucks many years ago because of their decorations. They are carefully painted on every available surface with scenes from religion and history. There are representations from Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism and Buddhism, often gloriously mixed up. They are decorated and caparisoned with ribbons, tinsel and even bells. Hence they jingle. The line on the highway south of Kabul contained several hundred, their drivers sleeping in their cabs, waiting for the dawn. The pickup slewed to a halt beside the line. Mike Martin jumped from the back and walked to the cab. The shrouded figure behind the wheel had his face hidden by a shemagh of checkered cloth. On the other side, Brigadier Yusef nodded but said nothing. End of the road.

Start of the journey. As he turned away, he heard the driver speak.

“Good luck, boss.”

That term again. Only the SAS called their officers “boss.” What the American provost major at Bagram had not known as he made the handover was not only who his prisoner was, but that since the installation of President Ham id Karzai the Afghan Special Forces had been created and trained at his request by the SAS. Martin turned away, and started to walk down the line of trucks. Behind him, the taillights of the pickup faded as it headed back to Kabul. In the cab, the SAS sergeant made a cell phone call to a number in Kabul. It was taken by the head of station. The sergeant uttered two words and terminated. The SIS chief for all Afghanistan also made a call on a secure line. It was four in the morning in Kabul, eleven at night in Scotland. A one-line message came up on one of the screens. Phillips and McDonald were already in the room, hoping to see what they then saw. “Crowbar is running.”

On a freezing, pitted highway, Mike Martin permitted himself one last glance behind him. The red lights of the pickup were gone. He turned and walked on. Within a hundred yards, he had become the Afghan. He knew what he was looking for, but he was a hundred trucks down the line until he found it. A license plate from Karachi, Pakistan. The driver of such a truck would be unlikely to be Pashtun and so would not notice his imperfect command of Pashto. He would be likely to be a Baluchi, heading home to Pakistan ’s Baluchistan Province.

It was too early for the drivers to be rising, and unwise to rouse the driver of the chosen truck; tired men woken suddenly are not in the best of tempers, and Martin needed him in a generous mood. For two hours, he curled up beneath the truck and shivered.

Around six, there was a stirring, and a hint of pink in the east. By the roadside, someone started a fire and set a billy on it to boil. In central Asia, much of life is lived in and around the teahouse, the chaikhana, which can be created even with a fire, a brew of tea and a group of men. Martin rose, walked over to the fire and warmed his hands.

The tea brewer was Pashtun but taciturn, which suited Martin fine. He had taken off his turban, unwound it and stowed it in the tote bag hanging from his shoulder. It would be unwise to advertise being Talib until one knew the company was sympathetic. With a fistful of his Afghanis, he bought a steaming cup and sipped gratefully. Minutes later, the Baluchi clambered sleepily out of his cab and came over for tea.

Dawn broke. Some of the trucks began to kick to life, with plumes of black smoke. The Baluchi walked back to his cab. Martin followed. “Greetings, my brother.”

The Baluchi responded, but with some suspicion.

“Do you by any chance head south to the border and Spin Boldak?” If the man was heading back to Pakistan, the small border town south of Kandahar would be where he would cross. By then, Martin knew, there would be a price on his head. He would have to skirt the border controls on foot. “If it pleases Allah,” said the Baluchi.

“Then in the name of the all-merciful, would you let a poor man trying to get home to his family ride with you?”

The Baluchi thought. His cousin normally came with him on these long hauls to Kabul, but he was sick in Karachi. This trip he had driven alone, and it was exhausting.

“Can you drive one of these?” he asked.

“In truth, I am a driver of many years.”

They drove south in companiable silence, listening to the Eastern pop music on the old plastic radio propped above the dash. It screeched and whistled, but Martin was not sure whether this was just the static or the tune. The day wore on, and they chugged through Ghazni and on toward Kandahar. On the road, they paused for tea and food-the usual goat and rice-and filled the tank. Martin helped with the cost from his bundle of Afghanis, and the Baluchi became much more friendly.

Though Martin spoke neither Urdu nor the Baluchi dialect, and the man from Karachi spoke only a smattering of Pashto, with sign language and some Arabic from the Koran they got along well.

There was a further overnight stop north of Kandahar, for the Baluchi would not drive in the dark. This was Zabol Province, wild country, and peopled by wild men. It was safer to drive in the daylight with hundreds of other trucks in front, behind and yet more heading north. Bandits prefer the night. At the northern outskirts of Kandahar, Martin claimed he needed a nap, and curled up along the bench behind the seats that the Baluchi used as his bed. Kandahar had been the headquarters and stronghold of the Taliban, and Martin wanted no reformed Talib to think he saw an old friend in a passing truck. South of Kandahar, he again spelled the Baluchi at the wheel. It was still midafternoon when they came to Spin Boldak; Martin claimed he lived in the northern outskirts, bade his host a grateful farewell and dropped off miles before the border checkpoint.