Frederick Forsyth - The Afghan

Because the Baluchi spoke no Pashto, he had kept his radio tuned to a pop station and Martin never heard the news. At the border, the lines were longer even than usual, and when he finally rolled to the barrier he was shown a picture. A black-bearded Talib face stared at him. He was an honest and hardworking man. He wanted to get home to his wife and four children. Life was hard enough. Why spend days-even weeks-in an Afghan jail trying to explain that he had been totally ignorant? “By the prophet, I have never seen him,” he swore, and they let him go. Never again, he thought as he trundled south on the Quetta road. He might hail from the most corrupt city in Asia, but at least you knew where you were in your own hometown. Afghans were not his people. Why get involved? He wondered what the talib had done.

Martin had been warned that the hijack of the prison van, the murder of its two warders and the escape of a returnee from Guan-tanamo Bay could not be covered up. To start with, the U.S. Embassy would make a fuss. The “murder” scene had been discovered by patrols sent up the Bagram road when the prison van failed to arrive at the jail. The separation of the van from its military escort was put down to incompetence. But the freeing of the prisoner was clearly by a criminal gang of Taliban leftovers. A hunt was mounted for them.

Unfortunately, the U.S. Embassy offered the Karzai government a photograph, which could not be refused. The CIA and SIS heads of station tried to slow things down, but there was only so much they could do. By the time all border posts received a faxed photograph, Martin was still north of Spin Boldak. Though he knew nothing of this, Martin was determined there would be no chances taken at border crossings. In the hills above Spin Boldak, he hunkered down and waited for night. From the position he had climbed to, he could see the lie of the land, and the route he would take on the march to come. The small town was five miles ahead and half a mile below him. He could see the road snaking in and the trucks on it. He could see the massive old fort that had once been a stronghold of the British Army.

He knew the capture of that fort in 1919 had been the last time the British Army used medieval scaling ladders. They had approached secretly by night, and, apart from the bellowing of the mules, the clang of ladles on cauldrons and the swearing of the soldiers when they stubbed their toes, were silent as the grave so as not to wake the defenders.

The ladders had been ten feet too short, so theyd crashed into the dry moat with a hundred soldiers on them. Happily, the Pashtun defenders, crouching behind the walls, presumed the force attacking them must be enormous, so theyd quit through the back door and run for the hills. The fort fell without a shot. Before midnight, Martin stole quietly past its walls, through the town and into Pakistan. Sunrise found him ten miles down the Quetta road. Here he found a chaikhana and waited until a truck that accepted paying passengers came along and gave him passage to Quetta. At last, the black Talib turban, instantly recognizable in those parts, became an asset and not a liability. So on it went. If Peshawar is a fairly extreme Islamist city, Quetta is more so, only exceeded in its ferocity of sympathy for Al Qaeda by Miram Shah. These are within the Northwest Frontier provinces, where local tribal law prevails. Though technically across the border from Afghanistan, the Pashtun people still prevail, as does the Pashto language, and extreme devotion to ultratraditional Islam. A Talib turban is the mark of a man to be reckoned with. Though the main road south from Quetta heads for Karachi, Martin had been advised to take the smaller highway southwest to the wretched port of Gwadar. This lies almost on the Iranian border at the extreme western end of Baluchistan. Once a sleepy and malodorous fishing village, it has developed into a major harbor and entrepot, contentedly devoted to smuggling, especially opium. Islam may denounce the use of narcotics, but that is for Muslims. If the infidels of the West wish to poison themselves and pay handsomely for the privilege, that has nothing to do with true servants and followers of the prophet.

Thus, the poppies are grown in Iran, Pakistan and, most of all, Afghanistan, refined to base morphine locally and hence smuggled farther west to become heroin, and death. In this holy trade, Gwadar plays its part. In Quetta, seeking to avoid conversation with Pashto speakers who might unmask him, Martin had found another Baluchi truck driver heading for Gwadar. It was only in Quetta that he learned there was a five-million-afghani price on his head-but only in Afghanistan.

It was on the third morning after he heard the words “Good luck, boss” that he dropped off the truck and settled gratefully for a cup of sweet green tea at a sidewalk cafe. He was expected, but not by locals.

The first of the two Predators had taken off from Thumrait twenty-four hours earlier. Flying in rotation, the UAVs would keep up a constant day-and-night patrol over their assigned surveillance area.

A product of General Atomics, the Predator UAV RQ-i is not much to look at. It resembles something that might have come from the airplane modeler’s doodling pad.

It is only twenty-seven feet long and pencil slim. Its tapered seagull wings have a span of forty-eight feet. Right at the rear a single 113-horsepower Rotax engine drives the propellers that push it along, and the Rotax just sips petrol from its hundred-gallon fuel tank.

Yet from this puny impulsion, it can speed up to 117 knots, or loiter along at seventy-three. Its maximum endurance aloft is forty hours, but its more normal mission would be to fly up to four hundred nautical miles radius from home base, spend twenty-four hours on the job and fly home again. Being a rear-engined “pusher” device, its directional controls are up front. They can be operated by its controller manually, or switched to remote control from a computerized program to do what is wanted and keep doing it until given fresh instructions.

The Predator’s true genius lies in its bulbous nose, the detachable Skyball avionics pod.

All of the communications kit faces upward, to talk to and listen to the satellites up there in space. These receive all its photo images and overheard conversations and pass them back to base.

What faces downward is the Lynx synthetic-aperture radar and the L-3 Wescam photographic unit. More modern versions, such as the two used over Oman, can overcome night, clouds, rain, hail and snow with the multispectral targeting system.

After the invasion of Afghanistan, when the juiciest of targets were spotted but could not be attacked in time, the Predator went back to the makers, and a new version emerged. It carried the Hellfire missile, giving the eye in the sky a weaponized variant.

Two years later, the head of Al Qaeda from Yemen left his compound far in the invisible interior with four chums in a Land Cruiser. He did not know it, but several pairs of American eyes were watching him on a screen in Tampa. On the word of command, the Hellfire left the belly of the Predator, and seconds later the Land Cruiser and its occupants simply vaporized. It was all witnessed in full color on a plasma screen in Florida.

The two Predators out of Thurait were not weaponized. Their whole task was to patrol at twenty thousand feet-out of sight, inaudible, radar immune-and watch the ground and sea below.

THERE WERE four mosques in Gwadar, but discreet British inquiries of the Pakistani IS1 extracted the information that the fourth and smallest was flagged as a hotbed of fundamentalist agitation. Like most of the smaller mosques in Islam, it was a one-imam place of worship, surviving on donations from the faithful. This one had been created and was run by imam Abdullah Halabi. He knew his congregation well, and from his raised chair as he led the prayers he could spot a visiting newcomer at a glance. Even at the back, the black Talib turban caught his eye.