Frederick Forsyth - The Afghan

Later, before the black-bearded stranger could replace his sandals and lose himself in the crowds of the street, the imam tugged at his sleeve. “Greeting of our all-merciful Lord be upon you,” he murmured. He used the Arabic phrase, not Urdu.

“And upon you, Imam,” said the stranger. He, too, spoke Arabic, but the imam noticed the Pashto accent. Suspicion confirmed; the man was from the tribal Territories.

“My friends and I are adjourning to the madafa,” he said. “Would you join us and take tea?”

The Pashtun considered for a second, then gravely inclined his head. Most mosques have a madafa attached, a more relaxed and private social club for prayers, gossip and religious schooling. In the West, the indoctrination of the teenagers into ultra-extremism is often accomplished there. “I am Imam Halabi. Does our new worshipper have a name?” he asked. Without hesitation, Martin produced the first name of the Afghan president and the second of the Special Forces brigadier.

“I am Hamid Yusuf,” he said.

“Then, welcome, Hamid Yusuf,” said the imam. “I notice you dare to wear the turban of the Taliban. Were you one of them?”

“Since I joined Mullah Omar at Kandahar in 1994”

There were a dozen in the madafa. a shabby shack behind the mosque. Tea was served. Martin noticed one of the men staring at him. The same man then excitedly drew the imam aside and whispered frantically. He would not, he explained, ever dream of watching television and its filthy images, but he had been past a TV shop and there was a set in the window. “I am sure it is the man.” he hissed. “He escaped from Kabul but three days ago.”

Martin did not understand Urdu, least of all in the Baluchi accent, but he knew he was being talked about. The imam may have deplored all things Western and modern, but, like most, he found the cell phone damnably convenient, even if it was made by Nokia in Christian Finland. He asked three friends to engage the stranger in talk and not to let him leave. Then he retired to his own humble quarters and made several calls. He returned much impressed. To have been a Talib from the start, to have lost his entire family and clan to the Americans, to have commanded half the northern front in the Yankee invasion, to have broken open the armory at Qala-i-Jangi, to have survived five years in the American hellhole, to have escaped the clutches of the Washington-loving Kabul refime- this man was not a refugee; he was a hero. Imam Halabi may have been a Pakistani, but he had a passionate loathing of the government of Islamabad for its collaboration with America. His sympathies were wholly with Al Qaeda. To be fair to him, the five-million-afghani reward that would make him rich for life did not tempt him in the slightest. He returned to the hall and beckoned the stranger to him. “I know who you are,” he hissed. “You are the one they call the Afghan. You are safe with me, but not in Gwadar. Agents of the ISI are everywhere, and you have a price on your head. Where are your lodgings?”

“I have none. I have only just arrived from the north,” said Martin. “I know where you have come from; it is all over the news. You must stay here, but not for long. Somehow, you must leave Gwadar. You will need papers, a new identity, safe passage away from here. Perhaps I know a man.” He sent a small boy from his madrassah running to the harbor. The boat he sought was not in port. It arrived twenty-four hours later. The boy was still patiently waiting at the berth where it always docked.

Faisal bin Selim was a Qatari by birth. He had been born to poor fishermen in a shack on the edge of a muddy creek near a village that eventually became the bustling capital of Doha. But that was after the discovery of oil, the creation of the United Arab Emirates out of the Trucial States, the departure of the British, the arrival of the Americans and long before the money poured in like a roaring tide.

In his boyhood, he had known poverty, and automatic deference to the lordly white-skinned foreigners. But from his first days, bin Selim had determined he would rise in the world. The path he chose was what he knew: the sea. He became a deckhand on a coastal freighter, and as his ship plied the coast from Masirah Island and Sallah in the Dhofari Province of Oman round to the ports of Kuwait and Bahrain at the head of the Persian Gulf he learned many things with his agile mind.

He learned that there was always someone with something to sell, and prepared to sell it cheap. And there was someone else, somewhere, prepared to buy that something and pay more. Between the two stood the institution called customs. Faisal bin Selim made himself prosperous by smuggling. In his travels, he saw many things that he came to admire: fine cloth and tapestries, Islamic art, ancient Korans, precious manuscripts and the beauty of the great mosques. And he saw other things he came to despise: rich Westerners, porcine faces lobster pink in the sun, disgusting women in tiny bikinis, drunken slobs, all that undeserved money.

The fact that the rulers of the Gulf States also benefited from money that simply poured in black streams from the desert sands did not escape him. As they, too, flaunted their Western habits, drank the imported alcohol, slept with the golden whores, he came to despise them, too. By his midforties, twenty years before a small Baluchi boy waited for him at the dock in Gwadar, two things had happened to Faisal bin Selim. He had earned and saved enough money to commission, buy and own outright a superb timber-trading dhow, constructed by the finest craftsmen at Sur in Oman, and called Rasha, the pearl. And he had become a fervent Wahhabi. When the new prophets arose to follow the teachings of Mau-dudi and Sayyid Qutb, they declared jihad against the forces of heresy and degeneracy, and he was with them. When young men went to fight the godless Soviets in Afghanistan, his prayers went with them; when others flew airliners into the towers of the Western god of money, he knelt and prayed that they would indeed enter the gardens of Allah.

To the world, he remained the courteous, fastidious, frugal-living, devout master and owner of the Rasha. He plied his trade along the entire Gulf coast and round into the Arabian Sea. He did not seek trouble, but if a true believer sought his help, whether in alms or a passage to safety, he would do what he could.

He had come to the attention of Western security forces because a Saudi AQ activist, captured in the Hadramaut and confessing all in a cell in Riyadh, let slip that messages of the utmost secrecy destined for bin Laden himself, so secret that they could only be confided verbally to a messenger who would memorize them verbatim and take his own life before capture, would occasionally leave the Saudi peninsula by boat. The emissary would be deposited on the Baluchi coast, whence he would take his message north to the unknown caves of Waziristan where the sheikh resided. The boat was the Rasha. With the agreement and assistance of the ISI, it was not intercepted, just watched. Faisal bin Selim arrived in Gwadar with a cargo of white goods from the duty-free entrepot of Dubai. Here, the refrigerators, washing machines, microwave cookers and televisions were sold at a fraction of their retail price outside the Freeport warehouses.

He was commissioned to take back with him to the Gulf a cargo of Pakistani carpets, knotted by the thin fingers of little-boy slaves, destined for the feet of the rich Westerners buying luxury villas on the sea island being built off Dubai and Qatar.

He listened gravely to the small boy with the message, nodded, and two hours later, with his cargo safely inland without disturbing Pakistani customs, left the Rasha in the charge of his Omani deckhand and walked sedately through Gwadar to the mosque.