The Afghan (16 page)

With permission granted, the ‘works and bricks’ people from the Royal Air Force went on a ‘blitz’ assignment to bring Edzell back into commission. The good folk of Edzell village noticed that something was afoot but with much winking and tapping of the sides of noses accepted that once again it would be hush-hush, just like the good old days. The local landlord laid in some extra supplies of ale and whisky, hoping that custom might revert to the level he had enjoyed before decommissioning. Otherwise, nobody said a thing.

While the painters were running their paintbrushes over the walls of the officers’ quarters of a Scottish air base, the office of Siebart and Abercrombie, in a modest City of London street called Crutched Friars, received a visit.

Mr Ahmed Lampong had arrived by appointment following an exchange of e-mails between London and Jakarta, and was shown into the office of Mr Siebart, son of the founder. Had the London-based shipping broker known it, Lampong is simply one of the minor languages of the island of Sumatra whence his Indonesian visitor originally came. And it was an alias, though his passport would confirm the name and his passport was flawless.

So also was his English, and in response to Alex Siebart’s compliments he admitted that he had perfected it while studying for his master’s degree at the London School of Economics. He was fluent, urbane and charming; more to the point, he brought the prospect of business. There was nothing to suggest he was a fanatical member of the Islamist terrorist organization Jemaat Islamiya, responsible for a wave of bombings in Bali.

His credentials as senior partner of Sumatra Trading International were in order, as were his bank references. When he asked permission to outline his problem, Mr Siebart was all ears. As a preamble Mr Lampong solemnly laid a sheet of paper in front of the British ship broker.

The sheet had a long list. It began with Alderney, one of the British Channel Islands, and continued through Anguilla, Antigua and Aruba. Those were just the ‘A’s. There were forty-three names, ending with Uruguay, Vanuatu and Western Samoa.

‘These are all tax-haven countries, Mr Siebart,’ said the Indonesian, ‘and all practise banking secrecy. Like it or not, some extremely dubious businesses, including criminal enterprises, shelter their financial secrets in places like these. And these’ – he produced a second sheet – ‘are just as dubious in their way. These are merchant shipping flags of convenience.’

Antigua was again up front, with Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, Bolivia, Burma and Cambodia to follow. There were twenty-seven in this list, ending with St Vincent, Sri Lanka, Tonga and Vanuatu.

There were African hellholes like Equatorial Guinea, flyspecks on the world map like Sao Tome and Principe, the Comoros and the coral atoll Vanuatu. Among the more enchanting were Luxembourg and Mongolia, which have no coast at all. Mr Siebart was perplexed though nothing he had seen was news to him.

‘Put the two together and what do you come up with?’ asked Mr Lampong in triumph. ‘Fraud, my dear sir, fraud on a massive and increasing scale. And alas most prevalent of all in the part of the world where I and my partners trade. That is why we have decided in future to deal only with the institution renowned for its integrity. The City of London.’

‘Very kind of you,’ murmured Mr Siebart. ‘Coffee?’

‘Cargo theft, Mr Siebart. Constant and increasing. Thank you, no, I have just had breakfast. Cargos are assigned, valuable cargos, and then vanish. No trace of the ship, the charterers, the brokers, the crew, the cargo and least of all the owners. All hiding amidst this forest of different flags and banks. And far too many of them highly corrupt.’

‘Dreadful,’ agreed Siebart. ‘How can I help?’

‘My partners and I have agreed we will have no more of it. True, it will cost a bit more. But we wish to deal in future only and solely with ships of the British merchant fleet flying the Red Ensign, out of British ports under a British skipper and vouched for by a London broker.’

‘Excellent.’ Siebart beamed. ‘A wise choice, and of course we must not forget full insurance coverage for vessel and cargo by Lloyd’s of London. What cargoes do you want shipped?’

Matching freighters to cargoes and cargoes to freighters is precisely what a shipping broker does, and Siebart and Abercrombie were long-standing pillars of the City of London’s ancient partnership, the Baltic Exchange.

‘I have done my research well,’ said Mr Lampong, producing more letters of recommendation. ‘We have been in discussion with this company: importers of high-value British limousines and sports cars into Singapore. For our part, we ship fine furniture timbers like rosewood, tulipwood and padauk from Indonesia to the USA. This comes from North Borneo, but would be a part-cargo with the remainder being sea containers on deck with embroidered silks from Surabaya, Java, also bound for the USA. Here’ – he laid down a final letter – ‘are the details of our friends in Surabaya. We all agree we wish to trade British. Clearly, this would be a triangular voyage for any British freighter. Could you find us a suitable UK-registered freighter for this task? I have in mind a regular and ongoing partnership.’

Alex Siebart was confident he could find a dozen suitable Red Ensign vessels to pick up the charter. He would need to know vessel size, price and desired dates.

It was finally agreed that he would supply Mr Lampong with a ‘menu’ of vessels of the needed tonnage for the double-cargo and the charter price. Mr Lampong, when he had consulted his partners, would provide desired collection dates at the two Far Eastern ports and the US delivery port. They parted with mutual expressions of confidence and good will.

‘How nice,’ sighed Alex Siebart’s father when he told him over lunch at Rules, ‘to be dealing with old-fashioned and civilized gentlemen.’

If there was one place that Mike Martin could not show his face it was Edzell air base. Steve Hill was able to call into play the array of contacts that exists in every business called the ‘old boys’ network’.

‘I won’t be at home most of this winter,’ said his guest at lunch in the Special Forces Club. ‘I’m going to try and see a bit more of the Caribbean sun. So I suppose you could borrow the place.’

‘There will be a rent, of course,’ said Hill. ‘As much as my modest budget can afford.’

‘And you won’t knock it about?’ asked the guest. ‘All right then. When can I have it back?’

‘We hope to be there no longer than mid-February. It’s just for some instructional seminars. Tutors coming and going, that sort of thing. Nothing . . . physical.’

Martin flew from London to Aberdeen and was met by a former SAS sergeant whom he knew well. He was a tough Scot who clearly had returned to his native heather in his retirement.

‘How are you keeping, boss?’ he asked, employing the old jargon for SAS men talking to an officer. He hefted Martin’s kitbag into the rear and eased out of the airport car park. He turned north at the outskirts of Aberdeen and took the A96 road in the direction of Inverness. The mountains of the Scottish Highlands enveloped them within a few miles. Seven miles after the turn he pulled left off the main road.

The signpost said simply: ‘Kemnay’. They went through the village of Monymusk and hit the Aberdeen–Alford road. Three miles later the Land-Rover turned right, ran through Whitehouse and headed for Keig. There was a river beside the road; Martin wondered whether it contained salmon or trout or neither.

Just before Keig the off-road turned across the river and up a long, winding private drive. Round two bends the stone bulk of an ancient castle sat on a slight eminence looking out over a stunning vista of wild hills and glens.

Two men emerged from the main entrance, came forward and introduced themselves.

‘Gordon Phillips. Michael McDonald. Welcome to Castle Forbes, family seat of Lord Forbes. Good trip, Colonel?’

‘It’s Mike, and you were expecting me. How? Angus here made no phone call.’

‘Well, actually we had a man on the plane. Just to be on the safe side,’ said Phillips.

Mike Martin grunted. He had not spotted the tail. He was clearly out of practice.

‘Not a problem, Mike,’ said the CIA man McDonald. ‘You’re here. Now a range of tutors have your undivided attention for eighteen weeks. Why not freshen up and after lunch we’ll start the first briefing.’

During the Cold War the CIA maintained a chain of ‘safe houses’ right across the USA. Some were inner-city apartments for the holding of discreet conferences whose participants were better not seen at head office. Others were rural retreats such as renovated farmhouses where agents back from a stressful mission could have a relaxed vacation while also being debriefed detail by detail on the time abroad.

And there were some chosen for their obscurity where a Soviet defector could be held in the kindliest of detention while checks were made on his authenticity, and where a vengeful KGB, working out of the Soviet Embassy or Consulate, could not get at him.

Agency veterans still wince at the memory of Colonel Yurchenko who defected in Rome and was amazingly allowed to dine out in Georgetown with his debriefing officer. He went to the men’s room and never came back. In fact he had been contacted by the KGB who reminded him of his family back in Moscow. Full of remorse, he was daft enough to believe the promises of amnesty and redefected. He was never heard of again.

Marek Gumienny had one simple question for the small office inside Langley that runs and maintains the safe houses: ‘What is the most remote, obscure and hard-to-get-into-or-out-of facility that we have?’

The answer from his real-estate colleague took no time at all.

‘We call it the Cabin. It is lost to the human race, somewhere up in the Pasayten Wilderness of the Cascades Range.’

Gumienny asked for every detail and every picture available. Within thirty minutes of receiving the file he had made his choice and given his orders.

East of Seattle, in the wilds of Washington State, is the range of steep, forested and, in winter, snow-clothed mountains known as the Cascades. Inside the borders of the Cascades are three zones: the National Park, the logging forest and the Pasayten Wilderness. The first two have access roads and some habitations.

Hundreds of thousands of visitors go to the Park every year while it is open, and it is riddled with tracks and trails; the former viable for rugged vehicles, the latter for hikers or horses. And the wardens know every inch of it.

The logging forest is off limits to the public for safety reasons, but it too has a network of tracks along which snarling trucks habitually haul the felled tree trunks to the delivery points for the sawmills. In deep winter both have to close down because the snow makes most movement almost impossible.

But east of them both, running up to the Canadian border, is the Wilderness. Here there are no tracks, one or two trails and only in the far south of the terrain, near Hart’s Pass, a few log cabins.

Winter and summer the Wilderness teems with wildlife and game; the few cabin owners tend to summer in the Wilderness, then disconnect all systems, lock up and withdraw to their city mansions. There is probably nowhere in the USA as bleak or remote in winter, with the possible exception of the area of northern Vermont known simply as ‘the Kingdom’, where a man may vanish and be found rock-solid in the spring thaw.

Years earlier a remote log cabin had come up for sale and the CIA bought it. It was an impulse purchase, later regretted but occasionally used by senior officers for summer vacations. In October when Marek Gumienny made his enquiry it was closed and locked. Despite the looming winter and the costs, he demanded it be reopened and that its transformation begin.

‘If that’s what you want,’ said the head of the real-estate office, ‘why not use the North-west Detention Centre in Seattle?’

Despite the fact he was talking to a colleague, Gumienny had no choice but to lie.

‘It is not just a question of keeping an ultra-high-value asset away from prying eyes, nor yet preventing him from escape. I have to consider his own safety. Even in supermax jails there have been fatalities.’

The head of safe houses got the point. At least, he thought he had. Utterly and completely invisible, utterly and completely escape-proof. Totally self-contained for at least a six-month period. It was not really his speciality. He brought in the team who had devised the security at the fearsome Pelican Bay Supermax in California.

The Cabin was almost inaccessible to start with. A very basic road went a few miles north of the tiny town of Mazama and then ran out, still ten miles short. There was nothing for it but to use sky-hooks and use them extensively. With the power invested in him Marek Gumienny commandeered a Chinook heavy-lift helicopter from McChord Air Force Base south of Seattle to be used as a carthorse.

A build team from the Army’s Corps of Engineers; raw materials were purchased locally with State Police advice. Everyone was on a need-to-know basis and the legend was that the Cabin was being converted into an ultra-high-security research centre. In truth it was to become a one-man jail.

At Castle Forbes the regime started intensive and became more so. Mike Martin was required to change out of western clothes into the robes and turban of a Pashtun tribesman. His beard and hair were to grow as long as the time allowed.

The housekeeper was allowed to stay on; she had not the slightest interest in the laird’s guests and nor did Hector the gardener. The third remaining resident was Angus, the former SAS sergeant who had become Lord Forbes’s estate manager, or factor. Even if an interloper had wished to penetrate the estate, he would have been most unwise with Angus on the prowl.

For the rest, ‘guests’ came and went, save two whose residence had to be permanent. One was Najib Qureshi, a native Afghan and former teacher in Kandahar, once a refugee given asylum in Britain, now a naturalized citizen and translator at GCHQ Cheltenham. He had been detached from his duties and transferred to Castle Forbes. He was the language tutor and coach in all forms of behaviour that would be expected of a Pashtun. He taught body language, gestures, how to squat on the heels, how to eat, how to walk and the postures for prayer.