The Afghan (7 page)

And there were pictures of Miss Indira Bohse, gentle, loving and very beautiful. When Terence Granger would not be dissuaded the tea company, rather than create an alternative scandal by firing him, hit on a solution. They posted the young couple to the wilds of Assam, up on the Burmese border.

If it was supposed to be a punishment, it did not work. Granger and his new bride loved the life up there: a wild, ravined countryside teeming with game and tigers. And there Susan was born in 1930. By 1943 war had rolled towards Assam, the Japanese advancing through Burma to the border. Terence Granger, though old enough to avoid the army, insisted on volunteering and in 1945 died crossing the River Irrawaddy.

With a tiny widow’s pension from the company, Indira Granger went the only place she could, back into her own culture. Two years later came more trouble; India was being partitioned for independence. Ali Jinnah insisted on his Muslim Pakistan to the north, Pandit Nehru settled for mainly Hindu India to the south. Waves of refugees rolled north and south and violent fighting broke out.

Fearing for her daughter’s safety Mrs Granger sent Susan to stay with her late husband’s younger brother, a very proper architect of Haslemere, Surrey. Six months later the mother died in the rioting.

Susan Granger came at seventeen to the land of her fathers, which she had never seen. She spent a year at a girls’ school and three as a nurse at Farnham General Hospital. At twenty-one, the youngest age allowed, she applied to be a stewardess with the British Overseas Airways Corporation. She was drop-dead beautiful, with tumbling chestnut hair, her father’s blue eyes and the skin of an English girl with a honey-gold suntan.

BOAC put her on the London–Bombay route because of her fluent Hindi. The route then was long and slow: London to Rome to Cairo to Basra to Bahrain to Karachi and finally Bombay. No crew could make it all the way; the first crew-change and stopover was at Basra, southern Iraq. There, at the country club in 1951, she met oil company accountant Nigel Martin. They married in 1952.

There was a ten-year wait until the birth of the first son, Mike, and three more years to second son Terry. But the two boys were like chalk and cheese.

Marek Gumienny stared at the photo in the file. Not a suntan but a naturally saturnine complexion, black hair and dark eyes. He realized the genes of the grandmother had jumped a geneation to the grandson; he was not even remotely like his brother the academic in Georgetown, whose pink face and ginger hair came from his father.

He recalled the objections of Dr Ben Jolley. Any infiltrator with a chance of getting away with it inside Al-Qaeda would have to look the part and speak the part. Gumienny skipped through the rest of the boyhood.

They had both gone in succession to the Anglo-Iraqi school and learned also from their
dada
, or nanny, the gentle plump Fatima from up country, who would go back to the tribe once she had saved enough wages to find a proper young man for a husband.

There was a reference that could only have come from an interview with Terry Martin: the older boy in his white Iraqi dishdash, racing about the lawn of the house in Saadun suburb, Baghdad, and his father’s delighted Iraqi guests laughing with pleasure and shouting, ‘But, Nigel, he’s more like one of us.’

More like one of us, thought Marek Gumienny, more like one of them. Two points down of Ben Jolley’s four: he looked the part and could pass for an Arab in Arabic. Surely with intensive schooling he could master the prayer rituals?

The CIA man read a bit more. Vice-President Saddam Hussein had started nationalizing the foreign-owned oil companies, and that included Anglo-Iraq Petroleum in 1972. Nigel Martin had stuck it out three more years before bringing the whole family home in 1975. The boy Mike was thirteen, ready to go to senior school at Haileybury. Marek Gumienny needed a break and a coffee.

‘He could do it, you know,’ he said when he came back from the toilet. ‘With enough training and back-up he really could. Where is he now?’

‘Apart from two stints working for us when we borrowed him, he spent his military career between the Paras and the Special Forces. Retired last year after completing his twenty-five. And no, it wouldn’t work.’

‘Why not, Steve? He has it all.’

‘Except the background. The parentage, the extended family, the birthplace. You don’t just walk into Al-Qaeda except as a youthful volunteer for a suicide mission; a low-level low-life; a gopher. Anyone who would have the trust to get near the gold-standard project in preparation would have to have years behind him. That’s the killer, Marek, and it remains the killer. Unless . . .’

He drifted off into a reverie, then shook his head.

‘Unless what?’ asked the American.

‘No, it’s not on the table,’ said Hill.

‘Indulge me.’

‘I was thinking of a ringer. A man whose place he could take. A doppelgänger. But that’s flawed too. If the real object were still alive, AQ would have him in their ranks. If he were dead, they’d know that too. So no dice.’

‘It’s a long file,’ said Marek Gumienny. ‘Can I take it with me?’

‘It’s a copy, of course. Eyes only?’

‘You have my word, ole buddy. My eyes only. And my personal safe. Or the incinerator.’

The DD Ops flew back to Langley but a few days later he phoned again. Steve Hill took the call at his desk in Vauxhall Cross.

‘I think I should fly back,’ the DDO said without preamble. Both men knew that by then the British Prime Minister in Downing Street had given his friend in the White House his word on total cooperation from the British side on tracking down Project Stingray.

‘No problem, Marek. Do you have a breakthrough?’ Privately Steve Hill was intrigued. With modern technology there is nothing that cannot be passed from the CIA to the SIS in complete secrecy and a matter of seconds. So why fly?

‘The ringer,’ said Gumienny. ‘I think I have him. Ten years younger but looks older. Height and build. Same dark face. An AQ veteran.’

‘Sounds fine. But how come he’s not with the bad guys?’

‘Because he’s with us. He’s in Guantanamo. Has been for five years.’

‘He’s an Arab?’ Hill was surprised; he ought to have known about a high-ranking AQ Arab in Gitmo these past five years.

‘No, he’s an Afghan. Name of Izmat Khan. I’m on my way.’

Terry Martin was still sleepless a week after his meeting at Fort Meade. That stupid remark. Why could he not keep his mouth shut? Why did he have to brag about his brother? Supposing Ben Jolley had said something? Washington was one big, gossiping village, after all. Seven days after the remark in the back of the limousine he rang his brother.

Mike Martin was lifting the last clutch of unbroken tiles off his precious roof. At last he could start on the laying of the roofing felt and the battens to keep it down. Within a week he could be waterproof. He heard the tinkling of Lillibulero from his mobile phone. It was in the pocket of his jerkin which was hanging from a nail nearby. He inched across the now dangerously frail rafters to reach it. The screen said it was his brother in Washington.

‘Hi, Terry.’

‘Mike, it’s me.’ He could still not work out how people he was ringing already knew who he was. ‘I’ve done something stupid and I want to ask your pardon. About a week ago I shot my mouth off.’

‘Great. What did you say?’

‘Never mind. Look, if ever you get a visitation from any men in suits – you know who I mean – you are to tell them to piss off. What I said was stupid. If anyone visits—’

From his eagle’s nest Mike Martin could see the charcoal-grey Jaguar nosing slowly up the track that led from the lane to the barn.

‘It’s OK, bro,’ he said gently, ‘I think they’re here.’

The two spymasters sat on folding camp chairs and Mike Martin on the bole of a tree that was about to be chainsawed into bits for camp-fire timber. Martin listened to the ‘pitch’ from the American and cocked an eyebrow at Steve Hill.

‘Your call, Mike. Our government has pledged the White House total cooperation on whatever they want or need, but that stops short of pressuring anyone to go on a no-return mission.’

‘And would this one fit that category?’

‘We don’t think so,’ Marek Gumienny interjected. ‘If we could even discover the name and whereabouts of one single AQ operative who would know what is going down here, we’d pull you out and do the rest. Just listening to the scuttlebutt might do the trick.’

‘But, passing off . . . I don’t think I could pass for an Arab any more. In Baghdad fifteen years ago I made myself invisible by being a humble gardener living in a shack. There was no question of surviving an interrogation by the Mukhabarat. This time you’d be looking at intensive questioning. Why would someone who has been in American hands for five years not have become a turncoat?’

‘Sure, we figure they would question you. But with luck the questioner would be a high-ranker brought in for the job. At which point you break out and finger the man for us. We’ll be standing right by, barely yards away.’

‘This’ – Martin tapped the file on the man in the Guantanamo cell – ‘is an Afghan. Ex-Taliban. That means Pashtun. I never got to be fluent in Pashto. I’d be spotted by the first Afghan on the plot.’

‘There would be months of tutorials, Mike,’ said Steve Hill. ‘No way you go until you feel you are ready. Not even then if you don’t think it will work. And you would be staying well away from Afghanistan. The good news about Afghan fundos is that they hardly ever appear outside their own manor. Do you think you could talk poor Arabic with the accent of a Pashtun of limited education?’

Mike Martin nodded.

‘Possibly. And if the towelheads bring in an Afghan who really knew this guy?’

There was silence from the other two men. If that happened, everyone round the fire knew it would be the end.

As the two spymasters stared at their feet rather than explain what would happen to an agent unmasked at the heart of Al-Qaeda, Martin flipped open the file on his lap. What he saw caused him to freeze.

The face was five years older, lined by suffering and looking ten years more than his calendar age. But it was still the boy from the mountains, the near-corpse at Qala-i-Jangi.

‘I know this man,’ he said quietly. ‘His name is Izmat Khan.’

The American stared at him open-mouthed.

‘How the hell can you know him? He’s been cooped up at Gitmo since he was captured five years ago.’

‘I know, but many years before that we fought the Russians in the Tora Bora.’

The men from London and Washington recalled the Martin file. Of course, that year in Afghanistan helping the Mujahidin in their struggle against Soviet occupation. It was a long shot, but not unfeasible that the men had met. For ten minutes they asked him about Izmat Khan to see what else he could add. Martin handed the file back.

‘What is he like now, Izmat Khan? How has he changed in five years with your people at Camp Delta?’

The American from Langley shrugged.

‘He’s tough, Mike. Very, very hard. He arrived with a bad head wound and double concussion. Injured during capture. At first our medics thought he was maybe . . . well . . . a bit simple. Backward. Turned out he was just totally disoriented. The concussion and the journey. This was early December two thousand and one, just after Nine/Eleven. Treatment was . . . how shall I put it . . . not gentle. Then it seemed nature took its course and he recovered enough for questioning.’

‘And what did he tell you?’

‘Not very much. Just his résumé. Resisted all third degree and all offers. Just stares at us and what the grunts see in those black eyes is not brotherly love. That is why he is in lock-down. But from others we understand he has passable Arabic, learned inside Afghanistan and before that from years in a
madrassah
rote-learning the Koran. And two British-born AQ volunteers who were in there with him and have been released say he now has some halting English which they taught him.’

Martin glanced sharply at Steve Hill.

‘They’d have to be picked up and kept in quarantine,’ he said. Hill nodded.

‘Of course. It can be arranged.’

Marek Gumienny rose and wandered round the barn as Martin studied the file. Martin stared into the fire and deep in the embers saw a bleak and bare hillside far away. Two men, a cluster of rocks and the Soviet Hind helicopter gunship swinging to the attack. A whisper from the turbaned boy: ‘Are we going to die, Angleez?’ Gumienny came back, squatted on the ground and poked the fire. The image went up in a cloud of sparks.

‘Quite a project you have taken on here, Mike. I’d have thought this was a job for a crew of professionals. You doing it all yourself?’

‘As much as I can. For the first time in twenty-five years I have the time.’

‘But not the dough, eh?’

Martin shrugged. ‘There are scores of security companies out there if I want a job. Iraq alone has spawned more professional bodyguards than one can count, and still more are wanted. They make more in a week working for your guys in the Sunni Triangle than they made in half a year as soldiers.’

‘But that would mean back to the dust, the sand, the danger, the too-early death. Didn’t you retire from that?’

‘And what are you offering? A vacation with AQ in the Florida Keys?’

Marek Gumienny had the grace to laugh.

‘Americans are accused of many things, Mike, but not often of being ungenerous to those who have helped them. I am thinking of a consultancy at, say, two hundred thousand dollars a year for five years. Paid abroad, no need to disturb the taxman. No need actually to show up for work. No need to go into harm’s way ever again.’

Mike Martin’s thoughts flitted to a scene in his all-time favourite film. T. E. Lawrence has offered Auda Abu Tayi money to join him in the attack on Aqaba. He recalled the great reply: Auda will not ride to Aqaba for the British gold, he will ride to Aqaba because it pleases him. He stood up.