"The Afghan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Forsyth Frederick)

CHAPTER 2

There were four men in the Koran Committee, three Americans and a British academic. All were professors, none were Arabs, but all had spent their lives steeped in the study of the Koran and its thousands of attendant scholarly commentaries.

One was resident at Columbia University, New York, and following the order from Fort Meade a military helicopter was dispatched to bring him to the NSA. Two were respectively with the RAND Corporation and the Brookings Institution, both in Washington. Army staff cars were detached to collect them. The fourth and youngest was Dr. Terry Martin, on secondment to Georgetown University, Washington, from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Part of the University of London, SOAS manages to enjoy a worldwide reputation for Arabic scholarship.

In terms of the study of matters Arabic, the Englishman had had a head start. He had been born and raised in Iraq, the son of an accountant with a major oil company operating there. His father had deliberately not sent him to the Anglo-American school but to a private academy that schooled the sons of the elite of Iraqi society.

By the time he was ten, he could, linguistically at least, pass for an Arab boy among the others. Only his pink face and tufty ginger hair made plain that he could never completely pass for an Arab.

Born in 1965, he was in his eleventh year when Mr. Martin Senior decided to leave Iraq and return to the safety of the UK. The Ba’ath Party was back in power, but that power truly resided not with President Bakr but with his vice president, who was carrying out a ruthless pogrom of his political enemies, real and imagined.

The Martins had already lived through the tumultuous times since the balmy days of the fifties when the boy king Feisal was on the throne. They had seen the massacre of the young king and his pro-Western premier, Nuri Said, the equally gory murder on camera in the TV studio of his successor General Kassem, and the first arrival of the equally brutal Ba’ath Party. That in turn had been toppled, then returned to power in 1968. For seven years, Martin Senior watched the growing power of the psychotic Vice President Saddam Hussein and in 1975 decided it was time to leave.

His elder son, Mike, was thirteen and ready for a British boarding school. Martin Senior had obtained a good post with Burmah Oil in London, thanks to a kind word from a certain Denis Thatcher, whose wife, Margaret, had just become leader of the Conservative Party. All four of them-the father, Mrs. Martin, Mike and Terry-were back in the UK by Christmas.

Terry’s brilliant brain had already been noted. He walked through exams for boys two and even three years his senior as a knife through butter. It was presumed, as it turned out almost rightly, that a series of scholarships and bursaries would carry him through senior school and Oxford or Cambridge. But he wanted to continue with Arabic studies. While still at school, he had applied to the SOAS, attending the spring interview in 1983, joining as an undergraduate that same autumn, studying the history of the Middle East. He walked through a First-Class degree in three years, and then put in two more for his doctorate, specializing in the Koran and the first four caliphates. He took a sabbatical year to continue Koranic studies at the famed Al-Azhar Institute in Cairo and on his return was offered a lectureship at the young age of twenty-seven, a signal honor because when it comes to matters Arabic SOAS is one of the toughest schools in the world. He was promoted to a readership at the age of thirty-four, earmarked for a professorship by forty. He was forty-one the afternoon the NSA came seeking his advice, spending a year as a visiting professor at Georgetown because that same spring of 2006 his life had fallen apart.

The emissary from Fort Meade found him in a lecture hall, concluding a talk on the teachings of the Koran as relevant to the contemporary age. It was plain from the wings of the stage that his students liked him. The hall was packed. He made his lectures have the feeling of a long and civilized conversation among equals, seldom referring to notes, jacket off, pacing up and down, his short, plump body radiating enthusiasm to impart and share, to give serious attention to a point raised from the floor, never putting a student down for lack of knowledge, talking in layman’s language, keeping the body of the lecture short with plenty of time for student questions. He had reached that point when the spook from Fort Meade appeared in the wings. A red-plaid shirt from the fifth row raised a hand. “You said you disagreed with the use of the term ‘fundamentalist’ to refer to the philosophy of the terrorists. Why?”

Given the blizzard of publicity concerning matters Arabic, Islamic and Koranic that had swept across America since 9/11, every question session swerved quickly from theoretical scholarship to the onslaught on the West that had occupied so much of the previous ten years.

“Because it is a misnomer,” said the professor. “The very word implies ‘back to basics.’ But the planters of bombs in trains, buses and malls are not going back to the basics of Islam. They are writing their own new script, then arguing retroactively, seeking to find Koranic passages that justify their war.

“There are fundamentalists in all religions. Christian monks in a closed order, sworn to poverty, self-denial, chastity, obedience-these are fundamentalists. Ascetics exist in all religions, but they do not advocate indiscriminate mass murder of men, women and children. That is the key phrase. Judge all religions and all sects within those religions by that phrase and you will see that to wish to return to the basic teachings is not terrorism, for in no religion, including Islam, do the basic teachings advocate mass murder.” In the wings, the man from Fort Meade tried to attract Dr. Martin’s attention. The professor glanced sideways and noted the young man with the short-barbered hair, button-down shirt and dark suit. He had government written all over him. He tapped the watch on his wrist. Martin nodded.

“Then what would you call the terrorists of today? Jihadists?” It was an earnest young woman farther back. From her face, Dr. Martin judged her parents must have come from the Mideast: India, Pakistan, Iran perhaps. But she did not wear the hijab scarf over the head to indicate strict Muslim. “Even ‘jihad’ is the wrong word. Of course jihad exists, but it has rules. Either it is a personal struggle within oneself to become a better Muslim, but in that case it is completely nonaggressive. Or it means true holy war, armed struggle in the defense of Islam. That’s what the terrorists claim they are about. But they choose to airbrush the rules out of the text. “For one thing, true jihad can only be declared by a legitimate Koranic authority of proven and accepted repute. Bin Laden and his acolytes are notorious for their lack of scholarship. Even if the West had indeed attacked, hurt, damaged, humiliated and demeaned Islam and thus all Muslims, there are still rules, and the Koran is absolutely specific on these. “It is forbidden to attack and kill those who have offered no offense and done nothing to hurt you. It is forbidden to kill women and children. It is forbidden to take hostages, and it is forbidden to mistreat, torture or kill prisoners. The AQ terrorists and their followers do all four on a daily basis. And let us not forget that they have killed far more fellow Muslims than Christians or Jews.”

“Then what do you call their campaign?”

The man in the wings was becoming agitated. A full general had given him an order. He did not wish to be the last to report back. “I would term them ‘the New Jihadis,’ because they have invented an unholy war outside the laws of the holy Koran and thus of true Islam. True jihad is not savage, but what they practice is. Last question, I am afraid.” There was a gathering of books and notes. A hand shot up from the front.

Freckles, white T-shirt advertising a student rock group.

“All the bombers claim to be martyrs. How do they justify this?” “Badly,” said Dr. Martin, “because they have been duped, well educated though some of them are. It is perfectly feasible to die a shahid, or martyr, fighting for Islam in a truly declared jihad. But again there are rules and these are quite specific in the Koran. The warrior must not die by his own hand even though he has volunteered for a no-return mission. He must not know the time and place of his own death.

“Suicides do exactly that. Yet suicide is specifically forbidden. In his lifetime, Muhammad absolutely refused to bless the body of a suicide even though the man had ended his own life to avoid the crippling agony of disease. Those who commit mass murder of innocents and commit suicide are destined for hell, not paradise. The false preachers and imams who trick them down this road will join them there. And now I fear, we must rejoin the world of Georgetown and hamburgers. Thank you for your attention.”

They gave him a standing ovation, and, pink with embarrassment, he took his jacket and walked into the wings.

“Sorry to interrupt. Professor,” said the man from Fort Meade. “But the brass need the Koran Committee back at the fort. The car is outside.” “In a hurry?”

“Yesterday, sir. There’s a flap.”

“Any ideas?” asked Martin.

“No, sir.”

Of course. “Need to know.” The unshakable rule. If you do not need to know to do your job, they are not going to tell you. Martin’s curiosity would have to wait. The car was the usual dark sedan with telltale aerial on the roof. It needed to be in touch with base all the time. The driver was a corporal, but even though Fort Meade is an Army base the man was in plain clothes, not uniform. No need to advertise, either.

Dr. Martin climbed into the back while the driver held the door open. His escort took the front passenger’s seat, and they began to drive through the traffic out to the Baltimore highway.

Far to the east, the man converting his own barn into a retirement home stretched out by the campfire in the orchard. He was perfectly happy like that. If he could sleep in rocks and snowdrifts, he could certainly sleep on the soft grass beneath the apple trees.

Campfire fuel was absolutely no problem. He had enough rotten old planks to last a lifetime. His billycan sizzled above the red embers, and he prepared a welcome mug of steaming tea. Fancy drinks are fine in their way, but after a hard day’s work a soldier’s reward is a mug of piping tea. He had in fact taken the afternoon off from his lofty task up on the roof and walked into Meonstoke to visit the general store and buy provisions for the weekend.

It was clear everyone knew that he had bought the barn and was trying to restore it himself. That went down well. Rich Londoners with a checkbook to flash and a lust to play the squire were greeted with politeness up front but a shrug behind their back. But the dark-haired single man who lived in a tent in his own orchard while he did the manual work himself was, so ran the growing belief in the village, a good sort.

According to the postman, he seemed to receive little mail save a few official-looking, buff envelopes, and even these he asked to be delivered to the Buck’s Head public house to save the postman the haul up the long, muddy track-a gesture appreciated by the postman. The letters were addressed to “Colonel,” but he never mentioned that when he bought a drink at the bar or a newspaper or food at the store. Just smiled and was very polite. The local and growing appreciation of the man was tinged with curiosity. So many “incomers” were brash and forward. Who was he, and where had he come from, and why had he chosen to settle in Meonstoke?

That afternoon, on his ramble through the village, he had visited the ancient church of St. Andrew ’s, and met and fallen into conversation with the rector, Reverend Jim Foley.

The ex-soldier was beginning to think he would enjoy life where he had decided to settle. He could pedal his rugged mountain bike down to Droxford on the Southampton road to buy straight-from-the-garden food in the produce market. He could explore myriad lanes he could see from his roof and sample ale in the old beamed pubs they would reveal.

But in two days, he would attend Sunday matins at St. Andrew’s in the quiet gloom of the ancient stone and he would pray, as he often did. He would ask for forgiveness of the God in whom he devoutly believed for all the men he had killed and for the rest of their immortal souls. He would ask for eternal rest for all the comrades he had seen die beside him, he would give thanks that he had never killed women or children nor any who came in peace and he would pray that one day he too could expiate his sins and enter into the kingdom.

Then he would come back to the hillside and resume his labors. There were only another thousand tiles to go.

Vast AS is the National Security Agency complex of buildings, it is only a tiny fraction of Fort Meade, one of the largest military bases in the USA. Situated four miles east of the Interstate 95 and halfway between Washington and Baltimore, the base is home to around ten thousand military staff and twenty-five thousand civilian employees. It is a city in itself, and has all the habitual facilities of a small city. The “spook” part is tucked away in one corner, inside a rigidly guarded security zone that Dr. Martin had never visited before.

The sedan bearing him glided through the sprawling base with no let or hindrance until it came to the zone. At the main gate, passes were examined, and faces peered through the windows at the British academic as his escort vouched for him. Half a mile later, the car drew up at a side door of the huge main block, and Dr. Martin and his escort entered. There was a desk guarded by Army personnel. More checks, some phoning, thumbs placed on pads, iris recognition, final admission.

After what seemed like another marathon of corridors, they came to an anonymous door. The escort knocked and went in. Martin found himself at last among faces he knew, and recognized friends, colleagues and fellow members of the Koran Committee.

Like so many government service conference rooms, it was anonymous and functional. There were no windows, but air-conditioning kept the air fresh. A circular table and padded upright chairs. On one wall, a screen, presumably for displays and graphics, should it be needed. Side tables with coffee and trays of food for the insatiable American stomach.

The hosts were clearly two nonacademic intelligence officers who introduced themselves with give-nothing-away courtesy. One was the deputy director of the NSA, sent to attend by the general himself. The other was a senior officer from Homeland Security in Washington.

And there were the four academics, including Dr. Martin. They all knew each other. Before agreeing to be co-opted onto the no-name, no-publicity committee of experts steeped in one book and one religion, they’d known each other vicariously from their published works and personally from seminars, lectures and conferences. The world of such intense Koranic study is not large. Terry Martin greeted Drs. Ludwig Schramme from Columbia University, Ben Jolley from RAND, and “Harry” Harrison from Brookings, who certainly had a different first name but was always known as Harry. The oldest and therefore the presumed senior was Ben Jolley, a great bearded bear of a man who, promptly and despite pursed lips from the deputy director, drew out and lit up a fearsome briar pipe from which he drew happily, once it got going like an autumn bonfire. The Westinghouse extraction technology overhead did its best and almost succeeded, but was clearly going to need a complete servicing. The deputy director cut straight to the heart of the reason for the convocation of the scholars. He distributed copies of two documents, one file to each. There were the Arabic originals as teased out of the AQ financier’s laptop, and translations by the in-house Arabic division. The four men went straight to the Arabic versions and read in silence. Dr. Jolley puffed; the man from Homeland Security winced. The four finished more or less at the same time. Then they read the English translations to see what had been missed and why.

Jolley looked up at the two intelligence officers. “Well?”

“Well… what, Professor?”

“What,” asked the Arabist, “is the problem that has brought us all here?”

The deputy director leaned over and tapped a portion of the English translation.

“The problem is that. There. What does it mean? What are they talking about?” All four of them had spotted the Koranic reference in the Arabic text. They had no need of translation. Each had seen the phrase many times and studied its possible various meanings. But that had been in scholarly texts. This was in modern letters. Three references in one of the letters, a single reference in the other.

“Al-lsra? It must be a code of some kind. It refers to an episode in the life of the Prophet Muhammad.”

“Then forgive our ignorance,” said the man from Homeland. “What is al-lsra?”

“You explain, Terry,” said Dr. Jolley.

“Well, gentlemen,” said Terry Martin, “it refers to a revelation in the life of the prophet. To this day, scholars argue as to whether he experienced a genuinely divine miracle or whether it was simply an out-of-body experience. “Briefly, he was asleep one night, a year before his emigration from his birthplace of Mecca to Medina, when he had a dream. Or a hallucination. Or a divine miracle. For brevity, let me say dream and stick with it. “In his dream, he was transported from the depths of modern Saudi Arabia across deserts and mountains to the city of Jerusalem, then a city holy to only Christians and Jews.”

“Date? On our calendar?”

“Around 622 A.D.”

“Then what happened?”

“He found a tethered horse, a horse with wings. He was bidden to mount it. The horse flew up to heaven, and the prophet confronted Almighty God Himself, who instructed him in all the prayer rituals required of a true believer. These he memorized and later dictated to a scribe as what became an integral part of the 6666. These verses became and remain the basis of Islam.” The other three professors nodded in agreement.

“And they believe that?” asked the deputy director. “Let us not be too patronizing,” Harry Harrison interrupted sharply. “In the New Testament, we are told that Jesus Christ fasted in the wilderness for forty days and forty nights and then confronted and rebuffed the Devil himself. After that period alone with no food, a man would surely be hallucinating. But for Christian true believers, it is Holy Scripture, and not to be doubted.” “All right, my apologies. So al-Isra is the meeting with the archangel?” “No way” said Jolley. “Al-Isra is the journey itself. A magical journey. A divine journey, undertaken on the instructions of Allah Himself.” “It has been called,” Dr. Schramme cut in, “a journey through the darkness to great enlightenment…”

He was quoting from an ancient commentary. The other three knew it well and nodded.

“So what would a modern Muslim and a senior operative in Al Qaeda mean by it?” This was the first time the academics had been given an inkling as to the source of the documents. Not an intercept but a capture. “Was it fiercely guarded?” asked Harrison.

“Two men died trying to prevent us seeing it.”

“Ah, well, yes. Understandable.” Dr. Jolley was studying his pipe with great attention. The other three looked down. “I fear it can be nothing but a reference to some kind of project, some operation. And not a small one.”

“Something big?” asked the man from Homeland Security. “Gentlemen, devout Muslims-not to say fanatical ones-do not regard al-Isra lightly. For them, it was something that changed the world. If they have code-named something al-Isra, they intend that it should be huge.” “And no indication what it might be?”

Dr. Jolley looked round the table. His three colleagues shrugged. “Not a hint. Both the writers call down divine blessings on their project, but that is all. That said, 1 think I can speak for us all in suggesting you find out what it refers to. Whatever else, they would never give the title al-Isra to a mere satchel bomb, a devastated nightclub, a wrecked commuter bus.” No one had been taking notes. There was no need. Every word had been recorded.

This was, after all, the building known in the trade as “the Puzzle Palace.” Both professional intelligence officers would have the transcripts within an hour, and would spend the night preparing their joint report. That report would leave the building before dawn, sealed and couriered with armed guard, and it would go high. Very high. As high as it gets in the USA, which is the White House.

Terry Martin shared a limousine with Ben Jolley on the ride back to Washington. It was bigger than the sedan in which he had come, with a partition between front and rear compartments. Through the glass, they could see the backs of two heads: the driver and their youthful escorting officer. The gruff old American thoughtfully kept his pipe in his pocket and stared out at the passing scenery, a sea of the russet and gold of autumn leaves. The younger Britisher stared the other way and also lapsed into reverie. In all his life, he had only really loved four people, and he had lost three of them in the past ten months. At the start of the year, his parents, who had had their two sons in their thirties and were both over seventy, had died almost together. Prostate cancer had taken his father, and his mother had simply been too brokenhearted to want to go on. She wrote a moving letter to each of her sons, took a bottle of sleeping pills in a piping hot bath, fell asleep and, in her own words, “went to join Daddy.”

Terry Martin was devastated but survived by leaning on two strong men, the only two he loved more than himself. One was his partner of fourteen years, the tall, handsome stockbroker with whom he shared his life. And then, one wild March night, there had been the drunken driver, going crazily fast, and the crunch of metal hitting a human body, and that body on a slab, and the awful funeral, with Gordon’s parents stiffly disapproving of his open tears. He had seriously contemplated ending his own by-now-miserable life, but his elder brother, Mike, seemed to sense his thoughts, moved in with him for a week and talked him through the crisis.

Hed hero-worshipped his brother since they were boys in Iraq, and through their years at the British public school at Haileybury, outside the market town of Hertford.

Mike had always been everything he was not. Dark to his fair, lean to his plump, hard to his soft, fast to his slow, brave to his frightened. Sitting in the limousine, gliding through Maryland, he let his thoughts return to that final rugby match against Tonbridge, with which Mike had ended his five years at Haileybury.

When the two teams came off the field, Terry had been standing by the roped passageway, grinning. Mike had reached out and ruffled his hair. “Well,” he said, “we did it, Bro.”

Terry had been seized by gut-wrenching fear when the moment had come to tell his brother that he now knew he was gay. The older man, by then an officer in the Paras and just back from combat in the Falklands, had thought about it for a moment, cracked his mocking grin and handed back the final line given by Joe E. Brown in Some Like It Hot: “Well, nobody’s perfect.”

From that moment, Terry’s hero worship of his elder brother knew no limits.

In Maryland, the sun set. In the same time zone, it was setting over Cuba, and on the southwestern peninsula known as Guanta-namo a man spread his prayer mat, turned to the east, knelt and began his prayers. Outside the cell, a GI watched impassively. He had seen it all before, many times, but his instructions were never, ever to let his watchfulness slip.

The man who prayed had been in the jail, formerly Camp X-Ray, now Camp Delta, and in the media usually “Gitmo,” short for Guantanamo Bay, for nearly five years. He had been through the early brutalities and privations without a cry or a scream. He had tolerated the scores of humiliations of his body and his faith without a sound, but when he stared at his tormentors even they could read the implacable hatred in the black eyes above the black beard so he was beaten the more. But he never broke.

In the “stick and carrot” days when inmates were encouraged to denounce their fellows in exchange for favors, he’d remained silent and earned no better treatment. Seeing this, others had denounced him in exchange for concessions, but as the denunciations were complete inventions he had neither confirmed nor denied them.

In the room full of files kept by the interrogator as proof of their expertise, there was much about the man who prayed that night, but almost nothing from him. He had civilly answered questions put to him years earlier by one of the interrogators who had decided on a humane approach. That was how a passable record of his life existed at all.

But the problem was still the same. None of the interrogators had ever understood a word of his native language and had always relied on the interpreters, or “’terps,” who accompanied them everywhere. But the ‘terps had an agenda, too. They also received favors for interesting revelations, so they had a motive to make them up.

After four years, the man at prayer was dubbed “noncooperative,” which simply meant unbreakable. In 2004, he had been transferred across the gulf to the new Camp Echo, a locked-down, permanent-isolation unit. Here, the cells were smaller, with white walls, and exercise was allowed only at night. For a year, the man had not seen the sun.

No family clamored for him, no government sought news of him, no lawyer filed papers for him. Detainees round him became deranged and were taken away for therapy. He just stayed silent and read his Koran. Outside, the guards changed while he prayed.

“Goddamn Arab,” said the man coming off duty. His replacement shook his head.

“He’s not Arab,” he said. “He’s an Afghan.”

“So, what do you think of our problem, Terry?”

It was Ben Jolley out of his daydream, staring at Martin across the rear of the limo.

“Doesn’t sound good, does it?” Terry Martin replied. “Did you see the faces of our two spook friends? They knew we were only confirming what they had suspected, but they were definitely not happy when we left.” “No other verdict, though. They have to discover what it is, this al-Isra operation.”

“But how?”

“Well, I’ve been around spooks for a long time. Been advising as best I can on matters of the Mideast since the Six-Day War. They have a lot of ways: sources on the inside, turned agents, eavesdropping, file recovery, overflying; and the computers help a lot, cross-referencing data in minutes that used to take weeks. I guess they’ll figure it out and stop it somehow. Don’t forget we have come one hell of a long way since Gary Powers was shot down over Sverdlovsk in ‘sixty, or the U2 took those photos of the Cuban missiles in ‘sixty-two. Guess before you were born, right?”

He chuckled chestily at his own antiquity as Terry Martin nodded.

“Maybe they have someone right inside Al Qaeda,” he suggested. “Doubt it,” said the older man. “Anyone that high up would have given us the location of the leadership by now, and we’d have taken them down with smart bombs.”

“Well, maybe they could slip someone inside Al Qaeda to find out and report back.”

Again, the older man shook his head, this time with total conviction. “Come on, Terry, we both know that’s impossible. A native-born Arab would quite possibly be turned and work against us. As for a non-Arab, forget it. We both know all Arabs come from extended families, clans, tribes. One inquiry of the family or clan and the impostor would be exposed. “So he would have to be CV perfect. Add to that, he would have to look the part, speak the part and, most important, play the part. One syllable wrong in all those prayers and the fanatics would hear it. They recite five times a day, and never miss a beat.”

“True,” said Martin, knowing his case was hopeless but enjoying the fantasy.

“But one could learn the Koranic passages, and invent an untraceable family.”

“Forget it, Terry. No Westerner can pass for an Arab among Arabs.” “My brother can,” said Dr. Martin. In seconds, if he could have bitten off his own tongue he would have. But it was all right. Dr. Jol-ley grunted, dropped the subject and studied the outskirts of Washington. Neither head in the front, beyond the glass, moved an inch. He let out a sigh of relief. Any mike in the car must be turned off.

He was wrong.