Frederick Forsyth - The Afghan

“But not until October and November 2001.” said al-Khattab.

“There were no Americans in Afghanistan until then,” said Martin. “True. So you fought for Afghanistan… and lost. Now you wish to fight for Allah.”

Martin nodded.

“As the sheikh predicted,” he said.

For the first time, Dr. al-Khattab’s urbanity completely forsook him. He stared at the black-bearded face across the table for a full thirty seconds, mouth agape, pen poised but unmoving. Finally, he spoke, in a whisper, “You… have actually met the sheikh?”

In all his weeks in the camp, al-Khattab had never actually met Osama bin Laden. Just once, he had seen a black-windowed Land Cruiser passing by, but it had not stopped. But he would, quite literally, have taken a meat cleaver and severed his left wrist for the chance of meeting, let alone conversing with, the man he venerated more than any other on earth. Martin met his gaze and nodded. Al-Khattab recovered his poise.

“You will start at the beginning of this episode and describe exactly what happened. Leave out nothing, no tiny detail.”

So Martin told him. He told him of serving in his father’s lashkar as a teenager freshly back from the madrassah outside Peshawar. He told of the patrol with others, and how they had been caught on a mountainside with only a group of boulders to shelter in.

He made no mention of any British officer, nor any Blowpipe missile, nor the destruction of the Hind gunship. He told only of the roaring chain gun in the nose; the fragments of bullet and rock flying around until the Hind-eternal praise be to Allah-ran out of ammunition and flew away. He told of feeling a blow like a punch or a hit from a hammer in the thigh, and being carried by his comrades across the valleys until they found a man with a mule and took it from him.

And he told of being carried to a complex of caves at Jaji and being handed over to Saudis who lived and worked there.

“But the sheikh, tell me of the sheikh,” insisted al-Khattab. So Martin told him. The Kuwaiti took down the dialogue word for word. “Say that again, please.”

“He said to me: ‘The day will come when Afghanistan will no longer have need of you, but the all-merciful Allah will always have need of a warrior like you.’” “Then what happened?”

“He changed the dressing on the leg.”

“The sheikh did that?”

“No, the doctor who was with him. The Egyptian.” Dr. al-Khattab sat back and let out a long breath. Of course, the doctor, Ayman al-Zawahiri. companion and confidant, the man who had brought Egyptian Islamic jihad to join the sheikh to create Al Qaeda. He began to tidy up his papers. “I have to leave you again. It will take a week, maybe more. You will have to stay here. Chained, I am afraid. You have seen too much, you know too much. But if you are indeed a true believer, and truly ‘the Afghan,’ you will join us as an honored recruit. If not…”

Martin was back in his cell when the Kuwaiti left. This time, al-Khattab did not return straight to London. He went to the Hilton, and wrote steadily and carefully for a day and a night. When he had done, he made several calls on a new and “lily-white” cell phone that then went into the deepwater harbor. In fact, he was not being listened to, but even if he had been his words would have meant little. But Dr. al-Khattab was still in freedom because he was a very careful man.

The calls he made arranged a meeting with Faisal bin Selim, master of the Rasha, which was moored in Dubai. That afternoon, he drove his cheap rental car to Dubai and conversed with the elderly captain, who took a long personal letter and hid it deep in his robes. And the Predator kept circling at twenty thousand feet.

Islamist terror groups have already lost far too many senior operatives not to have realized that for them, however careful they are, cell phone and sat phone calls are dangerous. The West’s interception, eavesdrop and decryption technology is simply too good. Their other weakness is the transferring of sums of money through the normal banking system.

To overcome the latter danger, they use the hundi system, which, with variations, is as old as the first caliphate. Hundi is based on the total-trust concept, which any lawyer will advise against. But it works because any money launderer who cheated his customer would soon be out of business or worse. The payer hands over his money in cash to the hundi man in place A and asks that his friend in place B shall receive the equivalent minus the hundi man’s cut. The hundi man has a trusted partner, usually a relative in place B. He informs his partner, and instructs him to make the money available-all in cash-to the payer’s friend who will identify himself thus.

Given the tens of millions of Muslims who send money back to families in the home country, and given that there are neither computers nor even checkable dockets, and given that it is all in cash and both payers and receivers can use pseudonyms, the money movements are virtually impossible to intercept or trace. For communications, the solution lies in hiding the terrorist messages in three-figure codes which can be e-mailed or texted round the world. Only the recipient, with a decipher list of up to three hundred such number groups, can work out the message. This works for brief instructions and warnings. Occasionally, a lengthy and exact text must travel halfway round the world. Only the West is always in a hurry. The East has patience. If it takes so long, then it takes that long. The Rasha sailed that night and made her way back to Gwadar. There, a loyal emissary, alerted in Karachi down the coast by a text message, had arrived on his motorcycle. He took the letter and rode north across Pakistan to the small but fanatic town of Miram Shah. There, the man trusted enough to go into the high peaks of South Waziristan was waiting at the named chaikhana and the sealed package changed hands again. The reply came back the same way. It took ten days. But Dr. al-Khattab did not stay in the Arabian Gulf. He flew to Cairo, and then due west to Morocco. There, he interviewed and selected the four North Africans who would become part of the second crew. Because he was still not under surveillance, his journey appeared on no one’s radar.

When the handsome cards were dealt, Mr. Wei Wing Li received a pair of twos. Short, squat and toadlike, his shoulders were surmounted by a football of a head and a face deeply pitted with smallpox. But he was good at his job. He and his crew had arrived at the hidden creek on the Zamboanga peninsula two days before the Java Star. Their journey from China, where they featured in the criminal underworld of Guangdong, had not involved the inconvenience of passports or visas. They had simply boarded a freighter whose captain had been amply rewarded, and had thus arrived off Jolo Island, where two speedboats out of the Filipino creeks had taken them off.

Mr. Wei had greeted his host, Mr. Lampong, and the local Abu Sayyaf chieftain who had recommended him, inspected the living quarters for his dozen crewmen, taken the fifty percent of his fee “up front” and asked to see the workshops. After a lengthy inspection, he counted the tanks of oxygen and acetylene, and pronounced himself satisfied. Then he studied the photos taken in Liverpool. When the Java Star was finally in the creek, he knew what had to be done and set about it.

Ship transformation was his specialty, and over fifty cargo vessels plying the seas of Southeast Asia with false names and papers also had false shapes thanks to Mr. Wei. He had said he needed two weeks and had been given three, but not an hour longer. In that time, the Java Star was going to become the Countess of Richmond. Mr. Wei did not know that. He did not need to know. In the photos he studied, the name of the vessel had been air-brushed out. Mr.