The Afghan (8 page)

‘Steve, I want my home shrouded in tarpaulins from top to bottom. When I come back I want it just the way I left it.’

The Controller Middle East nodded. ‘Done,’ he said.

‘I’ll get my kit. There’s not much of it. Enough to fill the boot, no more.’

And so the western strike-back against Project Stingray was agreed under apple trees in a Hampshire orchard. Two days later a computer by random selection dubbed it Operation Crowbar.

If challenged, Mike Martin would never have been able to defend himself. But in all the briefings he later gave them about the Afghan who had once been his friend, there was one detail he kept to himself.

Perhaps he thought that need-to-know was a two-way street. Perhaps he thought the detail too unimportant. It had to do with a muttered conversation in the shadows of a cave hospital run by Arabs at a place called Jaji.

PART TWO

Warriors

CHAPTER FOUR

The decision in the Hampshire orchard led to a blizzard of decision-making from the two spymasters. To start with, sanction and approval had to be sought from both men’s political masters.

This was easier said than done because Mike Martin’s first condition was that no more than one dozen people should ever know what Operation Crowbar was about. His concern was completely understood.

If fifty people know anything that interesting, one will eventually spill the beans. Not intentionally, not viciously, not even mischievously; but inevitably.

Those who have ever been in deep cover in a lethal situation know that to trust in one’s own tradecraft never to make a mistake and be caught is nerve-racking enough. To hope that one will never be given away by some utterly unforeseeable fluke is constantly stressful. But the ultimate nightmare is to know that capture and the long, agonizing death to follow was all caused by some fool in a bar boasting to his girlfriend and being overheard – that is the worst fear of all. So Martin’s condition was acceded to at once.

In Washington John Negroponte agreed with Marek Gumienny that he alone would be the repository, and gave the go-ahead. Steve Hill dined at his club with one man in the British government and secured the same result. That made four.

But Gumienny and Hill knew they could not personally be on the case twenty-four hours a day. Each needed an executive officer for the day-to-day running. Marek Gumienny appointed a rising Arabist in the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Division: Michael McDonald dropped everything, explained to his family that he had to work in the UK for a while, and flew east as Marek Gumienny returned home.

Steve Hill picked his own deputy on the Middle East Desk, Gordon Phillips. Before they parted company the two principals agreed that every aspect of Crowbar would have a plausible cover story so that no one below the top ten would really know that a western agent was going to be slipped inside Al-Qaeda.

Both Langley and Vauxhall Cross were told that the two men about to go missing were simply on a career-improving sabbatical of academic study and would be away from their desks for about six months.

Steve Hill introduced the two men who would now be working together and told them what Crowbar was going to try to do. Both McDonald and Phillips went very silent. Hill had installed them both not in offices in the headquarters building by the Thames, but in a safe house, one of several retained by the Firm, out in the countryside.

When they had unpacked and convened in the drawing room he tossed them both a thick file.

‘Finding an ops HQ starts tomorrow,’ he said. ‘You have twenty-four hours to commit this to memory. This is the man who is going to go in. You will work with him until that day, and for him after that. This’ – he tossed on to the coffee table a thinner file – ‘is the man he is going to replace. Clearly we know much less. But that is everything the US interrogators have been able to secure from him in hundreds of hours of interrogations at Gitmo. Learn this also.’

When he was gone the two younger men asked for a large pot of coffee from the household staff and started to read.

It was during a visit to the Farnborough Air Show in the summer of 1977 when he was fifteen that the schoolboy Mike Martin fell in love. His father and younger brother were with him, fascinated by the fighters and bombers, aerobatic fliers and first-viewing prototypes. For Mike the high point was the visit of the Red Devils, the stunt team from the Parachute Regiment, free-falling from tiny specks in the sky to swoop to earth in their harnesses right in the heart of the tiny landing zone. That was when he knew what it was he wanted to do.

He wrote a personal letter to the Paras during his last summer term at Haileybury, in 1980, and was offered an interview at the Regimental Depot at Aldershot for the same September. He arrived and stared at the old Dakota out of which his predecessors had once dropped to try to capture the bridge at Arnhem, until the sergeant escorting the group of five ex-schoolboys led them to the interview room.

He was regarded by his school (and the Paras always checked) as a moderate scholar but a superb athlete. That suited the Paras just fine. He was accepted, and began training at the end of October, a gruelling twenty-two weeks that would bring the survivors to April 1981.

There were four weeks of square-bashing, basic weapons handling, fieldcraft and physical fitness; then two more of the same plus first aid, signals and study of precautions against NBC (nuclear, bacteriological and chemical warfare).

The seventh week was for more fitness training, getting harder all the time; but not as bad as weeks eight and nine: endurance marches through the Brecon range in Wales in midwinter, where fit men have died of exposure, hypothermia and exhaustion. The numbers began to thin out.

Week ten saw the course at Hythe, Kent, for shooting on the range where Martin, just turned nineteen, was rated a marksman. Eleven and twelve were ‘test’ weeks – just running up and down sandy hills carrying tree trunks in the mud, rain and freezing hail.

‘Test weeks?’ muttered Phillips. ‘What the hell has the rest been?’

After test weeks the remaining young men got their coveted red beret before three more weeks in the Brecons for defence exercises, patrolling and ‘live firing’. By then, late January, the Brecons were utterly bleak and freezing. The men slept rough and wet, without fires.

Sixteen to nineteen covered what Mike Martin had come for: the parachute course at RAF Abingdon, where a few more dropped out and not just from the aircraft. At the end came the ‘wings parade’ when the wings of a paratrooper were finally pinned on. That night the old 101 club at Aldershot saw another riotous party.

There were two more weeks devoted to a field exercise called ‘last fence’ and some polishing-up of parade-ground skills; week twenty-two saw Pass-Out Parade, when proud parents could finally view their spotty youths amazingly transformed into soldiers.

Private Mike Martin had long been earmarked as POM – potential officer material – and in April 1981 went to join the new short course at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, passing out in December as a Second Lieutenant. If he thought glory awaited him, he was entirely mistaken.

There are three battalions in the Parachute Regiment and Martin was assigned to Three Para, which happened to be Aldershot in penguin mode.

For three years out of every nine, or one tour out of three, each battalion is off parachuting and used as ordinary lorry-born infantry. Paras hate penguin mode.

Martin, as a platoon commander, was assigned to Recruit Platoon, putting newcomers through the same miseries he had endured. He might have remained there for the rest of Three Para’s tour as penguins but for a faraway gentleman called Leopoldo Galtieri. On 2 April 1982, the Argentine dictator invaded the Falkland Islands. Three Para was told to kit up and get ready to move out.

Within a week, driven by the implacable Margaret Thatcher, a British task force was steaming south in a collection of vessels, bound for the far end of the Atlantic where a southern winter, with its roaring seas and driving rain, was waiting for them.

The journey south was on the liner
Canberra
with a first stop at Ascension Island, a bleak button of a place lashed by constant wind. Here there was a pause as, far away, the last diplomatic efforts were pursued to persuade Galtieri to evacuate or Margaret Thatcher to back off. Neither could dream of agreeing and surviving in office. The
Canberra
sailed on, shadowing the expedition’s two aircraft carrier,
Hermes
and
Invincible
.

When it became clear that invasion was inevitable, Martin and his team were ‘cross-decked’ by helicopter from
Canberra
to a landing craft. Gone were the civilized conditions of the liner. The same wild and stormy night that Martin and his men cross-decked in Sea King helicopters, another Sea King went down and sank, taking with her nineteen of the Special Air Service Regiment, the biggest one-night loss the SAS has ever taken.

Martin took his thirty men ashore with the rest of Three Para at the landing ground of San Carlos Water. It was miles from the main island’s capital at Port Stanley, but for that reason it was unopposed. Without a pause the Paras and the Marines began the gruelling forced march through the mud and rain east to the capital.

They carried everything in Bergen rucksacks so heavy it was like carrying another man. The appearance of an Argentine Skyhawk meant diving into the slime, but in the main the ‘Argies’ were after the ships offshore, not the men in the mud below. If the ships could be sunk, the men on shore were finished.

The real enemies were the cold, the constant freezing rain, the exhausting ‘tab’ across a landscape that could not support a single tree. Until Mount Longdon.

Pausing below the hills, Three Para set themselves up in a lonely farm called Estancia House and prepared to do what their country had sent them seven thousand miles to do. It was the night of 11/12 June.

It was supposed to be a silent night attack and remained so until Corporal Milne stepped on a mine. After that it became noisy. The Argie machine guns opened up and flares lit the hills and the valley as daylight. Three Para could either run back to cover or into the fire and take Longdon. They took Longdon, with twenty-three dead and over forty injured.

It was the first time, as bullets tore through the air around his head and men fell beside him, that Mike Martin experienced that strange, brassy taste on the tongue that is the flavour of fear.

But nothing touched him. Of his own platoon of thirty, including one sergeant and three corporals, six were dead and nine injured.

The Argentine soldiers who had held the ridge were forced recruits, lads from the sunny pampas – the sons of the well-off could avoid military service – and wanted to go home, out of the rain, cold and mud. They had quit their bunkers and foxholes and were heading back to shelter in Port Stanley.

At dawn Mike Martin stood atop Wireless Ridge, looked east to the town and rising sun, and rediscovered the God of his fathers whom he had neglected for many years. He prayed his thanks and vowed never to forget again.

At the time the ten-year-old Mike Martin was capering round his father’s garden at Saadun, Baghdad, to the delight of the Iraqi guests, a boy was being born a thousand miles away.

West of the road from Pakistani Peshawar to Afghan Jalalabad lies the range of the Spin Ghar, the White Mountains, dominated by the towering Tora Bora.

These mountains, seen from afar, are like a great barrier between the two countries, bleak and cold, always tipped with snow and in winter wholly covered.

The Spin Ghar lies inside Afghanistan with the Safed Koh range on the Pakistani side. Running down to the rich plains around Jalalabad are myriad streams that carry the snow-melt and rain off the Spin Ghar, and these form many upland valleys where small patches of land may be planted, orchards raised and flocks of sheep and goats grazed.

Life is harsh and with the life-support system being so sparse the communities of the valleys are small and scattered. The people bred up here are the ones the old British Empire knew and feared, calling them the Pathans, now Pashtun. Back then they fought from behind their rocky fastness with long, brass-bound muskets called the jezail, with which each man was accurate as a modern sniper.

Rudyard Kipling, the poet of the old Raj, evoked the deadliness of the mountain men against subalterns expensively educated in England in just four lines:

In 1972 there was a hamlet in one of these upland valleys called Maloko-zai; like all these hamlets, it was named after a long-dead warrior founder. There were five walled compounds in the settlement, each the home of one extended family of about twenty persons. The village headman was Nuri Khan and it was in his compound and round his fire that the men gathered on a summer evening to sip hot, unmilked and sugarless tea.

As with all the compounds, the walls were where the residences and livestock pens were built, so that all faced inwards. The fire of mulberry logs blazed as the sun dropped far to the west and darkness clothed the mountains, bringing chill even in high summer.

From the women’s quarters the cries were muted, but if one was especially loud the men would cease their jovial conversation and wait to see if news would arrive. The wife of Nuri Khan was bearing her fourth child and her husband prayed that Allah would grant him a second son. It was only right that a man should have sons to take care of the flocks when young and defend the compound when they had become men. Nuri Khan had a boy of eight and two daughters.

The darkness was complete and only the flames lit the hawk-nosed faces and black beards when a midwife came scurrying from the shadows. She whispered in the ear of the father and his mahogany face broke into a flashing smile.