Frederick Forsyth - The Afghan

It took three more days before they realized that their man no longer appeared daily in the courtyard to give the “sign of life.” In short, he had disappeared. They were watching an empty house. And they had no idea which of the several vans had taken him.

In fact, the van had not gone far. The hinterland behind the port and city of Ras al-K is wild and rocky desert rising to the mountains of Ras al-Jibal. Nothing can live here but goats and salamanders. Just in case the man they had snatched was under surveillance, with or without his knowledge, the kidnappers were taking no chances. There were tracks leading up into the hills, and they took one. In the rear, Martin felt the vehicle leave the tarred road and start to jolt over pitted track. Had there been a tailing vehicle, it could not have avoided detection. Even staying out of sight, its plume of rising desert dust would have given it away. A surveillance helicopter would have been even more obvious. The van stopped five miles up the track into the hills. The leader-the one with the handgun-took powerful binoculars and surveyed the valley and the coast, right back to the Old Town, whence they had come. Nothing came toward them. When he was satisfied, the van turned and went back down the hills. Its real destination was a villa standing in a walled compound in the outer suburbs of the town. With the gates relocked, the van reversed up to an open door, and Martin was marched back out and down another tiled passage. The plastic ties came off his wrists, and a cool metal shackle went on the left one. There would be a chain, he knew, and a bolt in the wall that could not be ripped free. When his hood came off, it was the kidnappers who had their heads covered. They withdrew backward, and the door slammed. He heard bolts go into sockets.

The cell was not a cell in the true meaning. It was a ground-floor room that had been fortified. The window had been bricked up, and though Martin could not see it a painting of a window adorned the outside to fool even those with binoculars peering over the compound wall.

Considering what he had undergone years before in the SAS program of “interrogation resistance,” it was even comfortable. There was a single bulb in the ceiling protected against thrown objects by a wire cage. The light was subdued but adequate.

There was a camp bed, and just enough slack in his chain to allow him to lie on it to sleep. The room also had an upright chair that he could also reach, and a chemical toilet. All were within reach but in different directions. His left wrist, however, was in a stainless-steel shackle that linked to a chain, and the chain went to a wall bracket. He could not begin to reach the door, through which his interrogators would enter-if at all-with food and water, and a spy hole in the door meant they could check on him any time and he would neither hear nor see them.

At Castle Forbes, there had been lengthy and passionate discussions over one problem: Should he carry any tracking device on him? There are now tracker transmitters so tiny they can be injected under the skin without cutting the epidermis at all. This is pinhead-sized. Warmed by blood, they need no power source. But their range is limited. Worse, there are ultrasensitive detectors that can spot them.

“These people are absolutely not stupid,” Phillips had stressed. His colleague from CIA Counter-Terrorism agreed.

“Among the best educated of them,” said McDonald, “their mastery of very high technology, and especially the computer sciences, is awesome.” No one at Forbes doubted that if Martin was subjected to a hypertech body search and something were discovered, he would be dead within minutes. Eventually, the decision was no planted bleeper. No signal sender. The kidnappers came for him an hour later. They were hooded again. The body search was lengthy and thorough. The clothes went first, until he was naked, and they were taken away for searching in another room. They did not even employ invasive throat and anal search. The scanner did it all. Inch by inch, it was run over his body in case it bleeped, meaning it had discovered a non-body-tissue substance. Only his mouth caused it to bleep. They forced his mouth open and examined every filling. Otherwise-nothing. They returned his clothing, and prepared to leave. “I left my Koran at the guesthouse,” said the prisoner. “I have no watch or mat, but it must be the hour of prayer.”

The leader stared at him through the spy hole. He said nothing, but two minutes later he returned with mat and Koran. Martin thanked him gravely. Food and water were brought regularly. Each time, he was waved back with the handgun as the tray was deposited where he could reach it. The chemical lavatory was emptied in the same way.

It was three days before his interrogation began, and for this he was masked, lest he look out the windows, and led down two corridors. When his mask was removed, he was astonished. The man in front of him, sitting calmly behind a carved refectory table, for all the world like a potential employer interviewing an applicant, was youthful, elegant, civilized, urbane and uncovered. He spoke in perfect Gulf Arabic.

“I see no point in masks,” he said, “nor silly names. Mine, by the way, is Dr. al-Khattab There is no mystery here. If I am satisfied you are who you say you are, you will be welcome to join us. In which case, you will not betray us. If not, then I am afraid you will be killed at once. So let us not pretend, Mr. Izmat Khan. Are you really the one they call ‘the Afghan’?” “They will be concerned about two things,” Gordon Phillips warned him during one of their interminable briefings at Forbes Castle. “Are you truly Izmat Khan, and are you the same Izmat Khan who fought at Qala-i-Jangi? Or have five years in Guantanamo turned you into something else?”

Martin stared back at the smiling Arab. He recalled the warnings of Tamian Godfrey. Never mind the wild-bearded screamers; watch out for the one who will be smooth-shaven; who will smoke, drink, consort with girls; who will pass for one of us. Wholly Westernized. A human chameleon, hiding the hatred. Totally deadly. There was a word… takfir.

“There are many Afghans,” he said. “Who calls me ‘the Afghan’?” “Ah, you have been incommunicado for five years. After Qala-i-jangi, word spread about you. You do not know about me, but I know much about you. Some of our people have been released from Camp Delta. They spoke highly of you. They claim you never broke. True?”

“They asked me about myself. I told them that.” “But you never denounced others? You mentioned no names? That is what the others say of you.”

“They wiped out my family. Most of me died then. How do you punish a man who is dead?”

“A good answer, my friend. So, let us talk about Guantanamo. Tell me about Gitmo.”

Martin had been briefed hour after hour about what had happened to him on the Cuban peninsula. The arrival on 14 January 2002-hungry thirsty, soiled with urine, blindfolded, shackled so tightly the hands were numb for weeks. Beards and heads shaved, clothed in orange coveralls, stumbling and tripping in the darkness of the hoods…

Dr. al-Khattab took copious notes, writing on yellow legal note-paper with an old-fashioned fountain pen. When a passage was reached where he knew all the answers, he ceased, and contemplated his prisoner with a gentle smile. In the late afternoon, he offered a photograph.

“Do you know this man?” he asked. “Did you ever see him?” Martin shook his head. The face looking up from the photograph was General Geoffrey D. Miller, successor as camp commandant to General Rick Baccus. The latter had sat in on interrogations, but General Miller left it to the CIA teams.

“Quite right,” said al-Khattab. “He saw you, according to one of our released friends, but you were always hooded as a punishment for noncooperation. And when did the conditions start to improve?”