Frederick Forsyth - The Afghan

If the young Talib bodyguard had known that making the cell phone call would kill him, he would not have done it. But he did not know, so he did, and it did.

On the seventh of July 2005, four suicide bombers let off their haversack bombs in Central London. They killed fifty-two commuters and injured about seven hundred, at least one hundred crippled for life. Three of the four were British born and raised but of Pakistani immigrant parentage. The fourth was a Jamaican by birth, British by naturalization, and had converted to Islam. He and one other were still teenagers; the third was twenty-two and the group leader thirty. All had been radicalized, or brainwashed, into extreme fanaticism, not abroad but right in the heart of England after attending extremist mosques and listening to similar preachers. Within twenty-four hours of the explosion, they had been identified and traced to various residences in and around the northern city of Leeds; indeed, all had spoken with varying strengths of Yorkshire accent. The leader was a special-needs teacher called Mohammad Siddique Khan. During the scouring of their homes and possessions, the police discovered a small treasure trove that they chose not to reveal. There were four receipts showing that one of the senior two had bought cell phones of the buy-use-and-throw variety, tri-band versions usable almost anywhere in the world, and each containing a prepaid SIM card worth about twenty pounds sterling. The phones had all been bought for cash and all were missing. But the police traced their numbers and “red-flagged” them all in case they ever came on stream. It was also discovered that Siddique Khan and his closest intimate in the group, a young Punjabi called Shehzad Tanweer, had visited Pakistan the previous November and spent three months there. No trace was found of whom they had seen, but weeks after the explosions the Arab TV station Al Jazeera broadcast a defiant video made by Siddique Khan as he planned his death, and it was clear this video had been made during that visit to Islamabad. It was not until late 2006 that it also became clear that one of the bombers took one of the “lily-white” untraceable cell phones with him and presented it to his Al Qaeda organizer/instructor. (The British police had already established that none of the bombers had the technical skill to create the bombs themselves without instruction and help.)

Whoever this AQ higher-up was, he seems to have passed on the gift as a token of respect to a member of the elite inner committee grouped around the person of Osama bin Laden in his invisible hideaway in the bleak mountains of South Waziristan that run along the Pakistani/Afghan border west of Peshawar. It would have been given for emergency purposes only, because all AQ operatives are extremely wary of cell phones, but the donor could not have known at the time that the British fanatic would be stupid enough to leave the receipt lying around his desk in Leeds.

There are four divisions to bin Laden’s inner committee. They deal with operations, financing, propaganda and doctrine. Each branch has a chieftain, and only bin Laden and his coleader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, outrank them. By September 2006, the chief organizer of finance for the entire terror group was al-Zawahiri’s fellow Egyptian, Tewfik al-Qur.

For reasons which became plain later, he was under deep disguise in the Pakistani city of Peshawar on September 15, not departing on an extensive and dangerous tour outside the mount redoubt but returning from one. He was waiting for the arrival of the guide who would take him back into the Waziri peaks and into the presence of the Sheikh himself.

To protect him in his brief stay in Peshawar, he had been assigned four local zealots belonging to the Taliban movement. As befits men who originate in the northwestern mountains, the chain of fierce tribal districts that runs along this ungovernable frontier, they were technically Pakistanis but tribally Waziris. They spoke Pashto rather than Urdu, and their loyalties were to the Pashtun people, of whom the Waziris are a subbranch. All were raised from the gutter in a madrassah, or Koranic boarding school, of extreme orientation, adhering to the Wahhabi sect of Islam, the harshest and most intolerant of all. They had no knowledge of, or skill in, anything other than reciting the Koran, and were thus, like teeming millions of madrassah-raised youths, virtually unemployable. But, given a task to do by their clan chief, they would die for it. That September, they had been charged with protecting the middle-aged Egyptian, who spoke Nilotic Arabic but had enough Pashto to get by. One of the four youths was Abdelahi, and his pride and joy was his cell phone. Unfortunately, its battery was flat because he had forgotten to recharge it.

It was after the midday hour. Too dangerous to emerge to go to the local mosque for prayers; al-Qur had said his orisons along with his bodyguards in their top-floor apartment. Then he had eaten sparingly and retired for a short rest. Abdelahi’s brother lived several hundred miles to the west in the equally fundamentalist city of Quetta, and their mother had been ill. He wished to inquire after her, so he tried to get through on his cell phone. Whatever he wished to say would be unremarkable, just part of the trillions of words of “chatter” that pass through the ether of all five continents every day. But his phone would not work. One of his companions pointed out the absence of black bars in the battery window and explained about charging. Then Abdelahi saw the spare phone lying on the Egyptian’s attache case in the sitting room. It was fully charged. Seeing no harm, he dialed his brother’s number and heard the rhythmic ringing tone far away in Quetta. And in an underground rabbit warren of connecting rooms in Islamabad that constitute the listening department of Pakistan ’s Counter-Terrorism Center, a small red light began to pulse.

Many who live in it regard Hampshire as England ’s prettiest county. On its south coast, facing the waters of the Channel, it includes the huge maritime port of Southampton and the naval dockyard of Portsmouth. Its administrative center is the historic city of Winchester, dominated by its cathedral, almost a thousand years old.

At the very heart of the county, away from all the motorways and even the main roads, lies the quiet valley of the River Meon, a gentle chalk stream along whose banks lie villages and townlets that go back to the Saxons. One single A-class road runs through from south to north, but the rest of the valley is a network of winding lanes edged with overhanging trees, hedges and meadows. This is farm country the way it used to be, with few fields larger than ten acres, and even fewer farms larger than five hundred. Most of the farmhouses are of ancient beam, brick and tile, and some of these are served by clusters of barns of great size, antiquity and beauty.

The man who perched at the apex of one such barn had a panorama of the Meon Valley and a bird’s-eye view of his nearest village, Meonstoke, barely a mile away. At the time, several zones to the east, that Abdelahi made the last phone call of his life, the roof climber wiped some sweat off his forehead and resumed his task of carefully removing the clay peg tiles that had been placed there hundreds of years earlier.

He should have had a team of expert roofers, and they should have clad the whole barn in scaffolding. It would have been faster and safer to do the job that way, but much more expensive. And that was the problem. The man with the claw hammer was an ex-soldier, retired after his twenty-five-year career, and he had used up most of his bounty to buy his dream: a place in the country to call home at last. Hence the barn with ten acres, and a track to the nearest lane and then to the village.