The Agent Runner (8 page)

At the end of the valley was the Durand line marking the eastern edge of Afghanistan, a border as incomprehensible as the Iron Curtain or any other arbitrary ceasefire line or swerve of a pen on a map. It is unlikely that the Emir of Afghanistan, who could read no English, knew what he was signing when he put his mark to the one-page document drawn up by Sir Henry Mortimer Durand of the colonial office of British India. It was winter 1893, and with his pen the Emir divided the unruly Pashtun lands. It is equally unlikely that the British regarded the line as anything more than a temporary demarcation beyond which either side agreed not to interfere. But interfere they did just as those who followed them also interfered, and went on interfering. From the Third Anglo-Afghan war in which the Royal Air Force bombed Kabul and Jalalabad in 1919, through Operation Cyclone in the eighties in which CIA and Saudi funded Mujahideen groups crossed into Afghanistan to fight the Soviet occupation, and through to the present day when Taliban fighters emerged from Pakistani tribal areas to do battle with the Americans.

‘This is a really fucking dark place,’ said Winslow, the Agency man, who had known many dark places in his life.

The remark was accepted in silence. No one took the trouble to grunt even. The long-limbed soldier kneeling in the dirt lifted a scratched metal tin from the gas stove and poured coffee into four chipped enamel mugs. He passed them to the four visitors, two Americans and two Brits, who were squatting in the dirt.

‘
Mocha Harrar
,’ the soldier said with grim satisfaction He was a sharp-featured and dark-skinned Ethiopian from Minneapolis. ‘Peaberry beans…’

Winslow and the two security guards drank the coffee without comment.

‘Its delicious,’ Ed Malik said. ‘Thank you.’

He stared out through the sandbags at the dirty ribbon of the river far below and across the valley at the dark face and snow-capped peak of Arghush Ghar, the Black Mountain. The enemy owned the Arghush Ghar. He was
reminded of a line in
Heart of Darkness
, of a young Roman citizen in some inland outpost who felt:
The savagery, the utter savagery, had closed all around him

‘We can’t wait here much longer,’ Winslow said.

Ed said nothing. He was aware of both Winslow and Draper watching him closely, trying to gauge his reaction. Winslow, an ex-army ranger whose ruddy complexion made his face appear perpetually sunburned, was a CIA officer based out of FOB Chapman down in Khost. Draper was his security guard, a similarly weathered forty-five year old former Green Beret working for the private contactor Xe Services, formerly known as Blackwater. He was wearing an M4 carbine slung across his back.

‘Your man is twenty-four hours late,’ Winslow said.

‘You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to,’ Ed told him. Winslow had been wounded in the 2009 attack on Camp Chapman, when the Jordanian asset Humam al-Balawi had crossed over from Pakistan to meet with his handlers and blown himself up, killing seven CIA officers. It had been the most lethal attack on the CIA in twenty-five years. It was no wonder Winslow was jumpy.

‘I’m staying,’ Ed told him.

Beside him Dai nodded to indicate that he was steadfast, that he wouldn’t argue with his boss in front of strangers.

‘How long are you gonna wait?’ Winslow asked.

‘As long as it takes.’

‘You said he’d come across yesterday.’

Ed suppressed his anger. ‘His cover’s blown. He’s on the run. Khan is hunting for him. Somewhere out there he’s terrified. If you’d told us what you were going to do maybe we could have got him out earlier.’

‘And risk the integrity of our mission?’ Winslow shook his head. ‘Only a handful of people outside the White House situation room knew we were going after bin Laden. We’ve been burned by you Brits before.’

And so Tariq had been sacrificed in the interests of the greater good and Ed’s work had been written off. Four years’ work, four years of burrowing Tariq into the ISI and the painstaking gathering of evidence linking the ISI to militant groups responsible for the death of coalition servicemen across Afghanistan, and evidence linking the ISI to training camps providing bomb-making lessons to British-born South Asians – all of it burned in a single operation.

Ed went over to speak to the squad leader.

‘It’s a big risk letting an unknown in here,’ the squad leader said. The shadow cast by the attack at Camp Chapman was a long one.

‘I appreciate what you’re offering to do,’ Ed told him.

‘No problem,’ the man said after a pause. ‘We’re all on the same side.’

‘What are your rules for engaging the enemy?’ Ed asked him.

‘If we feel we’re in danger we can shoot. That’s the rule. Then the tactical directive says that’s fine but asks should we? There’s an interpretation that says we need to see a weapon no matter what the circumstances.’

‘What about on the other side?’

The whites of the squad leader’s eyes shone in the fading afternoon light. ‘In Pakistan?’

‘Yes.’

He shrugged. ‘If they’re firing at us, maybe.’

‘And if it’s the Pakistan Army?’

The man shook his head. ‘Shit! I don’t know.’

#

Darkness came and with it another attack. The enemy launched a salvo of RPGs from a nearby ridgeline and then raked the outpost with plunging fire from the Arghush Ghar.

They knew it was coming:
Prophet
, the American eavesdropping operation further up the valley, had warned them minutes before that there was an uptick in enemy radio communications. They ran to the mortar pit, firing shells back at grid co-ordinates they’d long since memorised, and then darted back behind the sandbags for cover.

The squad leader called in fire support from Company Headquarters and a few minutes later, 155-millimetre artillery shells began to explode on the ridgeline. An air strike took longer. By the time an Air Force jet roared by and dropped a 500-pound bomb, the enemy fire had stopped.

Silence followed.

There were no casualties. It was the third such attack since Ed and Winslow had arrived at the outpost. Dusk and dawn seemed to be the most dangerous times. It was when the soldiers wore their body armour and hunkered down in their fire positions to wait.

Ed knelt against a sandbag wall.

You were too damn bold, Tariq, Ed thought. You were too damn confident of yourself. You should have done what you promised and stayed well away from Abbottabad and I should have made sure of it. As he was thinking this the soldier manning the tripod-mounted Long Range Acquisition System called out and his colleagues eased into their fire positions.

‘There’s someone out there, on the far side. I can see him on the thermal imager. He’s heading this way.’

Ed stepped up to the observation platform and looked through the viewfinder.

A bright white shape moving casually amongst the rocks: three thousand metres out. It was Tariq. It had to be. He’ll make it. He’ll be here soon. And when he gets here I’ll give him a bloody great hug because he’s the best damn agent we ever had and I’ll forgive him every transgression, every lie and sly barb.

The soldier began his commentary at two thousand metres, calling out each time the target advanced a hundred metres. When he was less than a kilometre out, Ed lifted his binoculars and gazed at the dark figure flitting amongst the boulders.

‘Is this your man?’ Winslow said.

‘Hang on.’

‘Where is he?’ Winslow demanded. ‘Can you see him?’

‘I can see him,’ Ed confirmed.

Come on!
Tariq was at the border. He was almost through it. He had nearly made it.

At that moment the figure stopped and crouched down.

Then Ed heard it, a helicopter approaching.

The helicopter’s searchlight flicked on, a bright white spear in the darkness.

‘Open fire!’ Ed roared. ‘The chopper’s crossed over to our side. Open fire!’

Then the figure was running. There came the sound of a voice shouting through a loudspeaker, the searchlight sweeping across the rocks.

‘Open fire,’ Ed pleaded. ‘Please.’

The soldiers stared through their night-sights and did not fire. The helicopter banked suddenly, turning away from them, heading back into Pakistan. Tariq was still coming.

‘Let him through,’ Ed shouted. ‘Let the guy through.’

The man ran out into open ground and scrambled up the steep sides of the hilltop. He was barefoot, his legs covered in scratches and bruises. He scaled the sandbag walls and dropped like a sack into the centre of the outpost.

Ed was the first to reach him. It was Hakimullah, Tariq’s elderly Hazara manservant. He was crouching in the dirt wrapped in the remnants of his blanket. He looked like a beaten dog.

‘Where’s Tariq?’ Ed demanded in Pashto, shaking him.

‘It’s not safe for him to cross,’ Hakimullah replied. ‘They are searching everywhere for him.’

‘Where did he go?’

‘The safe house in Peshawar.’

Winslow was standing at Ed’s side. The two guards were hanging back, pointing their rifles at Hakimullah.

‘This is the guy?’ Winslow demanded. ‘This is your agent?’

‘No,’ Ed replied. ‘This isn’t him.’

‘Jesus Christ!’ Winslow swore. ‘Are you crazy?’

‘Fuck you,’ Ed snapped.

‘I’ll go,’ Hakimullah said. He reached into a pocket and retrieved a scrap of paper that he pressed into Ed’s hand. ‘This is Tariq’s number. You can call him.’

‘Where will you go?’ Ed asked, after a pause.

‘Back over. My granddaughter is there.’

‘They’ll hunt you down.’

Hakimullah shrugged. He climbed wearily to his feet, re-arranged the blanket around his shoulders and without a backward glace climbed back over the sandbag walls, slid down the hillside and disappeared amongst the rocks and bushes.

Ed groaned in frustration. He wanted to punch a wall. After a few carefully controlled breaths he regained his composure. Winslow was watching him.

‘I have to make a call.’

He squatted down in the shelter of a sandbag wall and punched the numbers written on the piece of paper into his sat-phone.

11. A knock on the door

For the third time that minute, Tariq glanced down at the phone in his hand and willed it to ring.

Please Ed, bloody well call me!
Meri madat karo!
Help me!

He was standing in darkness at the window’s edge, shielded by the weathered carcass of a wooden shutter, shivering despite the heat. From his vantage point he could see the shadowy entrance to the courtyard several floors below. He had never felt more alone and afraid. It was only a matter of time before he was discovered. He listened to the hiss and drip of elderly air conditioning units lashed to boards on the surrounding walls and tried not to imagine that the rooftops and passageways sheltered men with guns. He had been standing here for hours, tracking the movement of the sun as it crossed the sky and sank beneath the jumble of roofs in the Khyber Bazaar. In the morning he had watched as the pot-seller moved stacks of cooking pots from his shop out on the street to the storage unit on the ground floor and, in the far corner of the courtyard, the tailor at his sewing machine, running up American flags in preparation for a flag burning protest planned that afternoon.

The safe house was close to the Street of Storytellers and he had listened to the chanting of the crowd and watched as several times groups of protestors had spilled into the courtyard for respite from the late afternoon heat. The whiff of tear gas made his eyes smart.

He had always known that revealing bin Laden’s location might cause the Americans to react but he had anticipated a drone strike not a full-scale commando assault. And he had expected to receive some kind of prior warning. Even so, he had known exactly what it meant when he woke to the sound of the circling helicopters. Naked, pausing only to snatch his belt from the chair, he had gone straight to the hide and strangled Omar, who was in the act of tapping numbers into his phone, presumably to raise the alarm. He had looped the belt around Omar’s neck and twisted savagely, pulling him down off the stool onto the floor, tightening his grip until eventually he’d stopped struggling.

Afterwards, he’d dressed quickly to the sound of gunfire and explosions, and then he had gone out into the street.

There was an armed man in
shalwar kameez
and a flak jacket standing outside bin Laden’s house. He was yelling at the neighbours in Pashto to go back inside their houses and turn off their lights. Behind him in the shadows by the gate there was another larger man, the unmistakable outline of an American with a German Shepherd on a lead.

‘I am
Nightingale
,’ he called out as he approached, first in Pashto and then Urdu, and then Punjabi, and finally in English. He felt certain they had been briefed to extract him along with bin Laden at the end of their operation.

‘Get back!’ the man in the
shalwar kameez
shouted at him, raising his rifle.

‘It’s me,’ he protested. ‘Tariq! Rule Britannia!’

‘Get back!’

The dog lunged with its teeth bared and the man in the
shalwar kameez
swung the rifle around and slammed the butt into the side of Tariq’s head. He fell to the ground.

He came around as the Americans were leaving. The crashed helicopter was burning and the others were lifting off in a storm of dust. He picked himself
up and staggered away from the house. He wasn’t sure for how long he kept moving or in which direction but at some stage he curled up and slept for several hours.

He woke up with a raging headache and the certainty that he was being hunted.

#

The Peshawar apartment was the remnant of a long defunct intelligence operation run in the late eighties by a British Military Intelligence outfit known as the Afghan Guides. It had served its purpose as a safe location to de-brief Afghan military defectors in the late eighties and then after the Wall came down, it had somehow remained on the books as a final fallback position, only to be used
in extremis
. He’d collected the key from the blind vendor on the corner, who sold stripped and cubed bags of sugar cane, and warily climbed the stairwell of the crumbling concrete building to the apartment on the fourth floor. Inside there was a thick layer of dust covering everything and it looked as if it had been unoccupied for years. There was running water, though, and he was able to wash the blood out of his hair.