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

CHAPTER 3

The Fort Meade report on the deliberations of the Koran Committee was ready by dawn that Saturday and destroyed several planned weekends. One of those roused Saturday night at his home in Old Alexandria was Marek Gumienny, deputy director of operations at the CIA. He was bidden to report straight to his office without being told why.

The “why” was on his desk when he got there. It was not even dawn over Washington, but the first indications of the coming sun pinked the distant hills of Prince George ’s County, where the Patux-ent River flows down to join the Chesapeake.

Marek Gumienny’s office was one of the few on the sixth and top floor of the big, oblong building among the cluster that forms the headquarters of the CIA and is known simply as “ Langley.” It had recently been redubbed “the Old Building,” to distinguish it from the mirror-image New Building that housed the expanding agency since 9/11.

In the hierarchy of the CIA, the director of Central Intelligence has traditionally been a political appointment, but the real muscle is habitually the two deputy directors. Ops handles the actual intelligence gathering, while the DD Intelligence covers the collation and analysis of the incoming harvest to turn raw information into a meaningful picture. Just below these two are Counter-intelligence (to keep the agency free from penetration and in-house traitors) and Counter-Terrorism (increasingly becoming the boiler room as the agency’s war swerved from the old USSR to the new threats out of the Mideast).

DDOs, back to the start of the Cold War around 1945, had always been Soviet experts with the Soviet Division and SE (Satellites and East Europe) making the running for an ambitious career officer. Marek Gumienny was the first Arabist to be appointed DDO. As a young agent, he had spent years in the Middle East, mastered two of its languages (Arabic and Farsi, the language of Iran) and knew its culture.

Even in this twenty-four-hour-a-day building, predawn on a Saturday is not an easy time to rustle up piping hot, aromatic black coffee the way he liked it, so he brewed his own. While it perked, Gumienny started on the package on his desk containing the slim, wax-sealed file.

He knew what to expect. Fort Meade may have handled the file recovery, translation and analysis, but it was CIA in collaboration with the British and Pakistan ’s CTC over in Peshawar who had made the capture. CIA’s stations in Peshawar and Islamabad had filed copious reports simply to keep their boss in the picture.

The file contained all the documents downloaded from the AQ financier’s computer, but the two letters-taking up three pages-were the stars. The DDO spoke fast and fluent street Arabic, but reading script is always harder so he repeatedly referred to the translations.

He read the report of the Koran Committee, prepared jointly by the two intelligence officers at the meeting, but it offered him no surprises. To him, it was clear the references to al-Isra, the magical journey of the prophet through the night, could only be the code for some kind of important project. That project now had to have a name in-house for the American intelligence community. It could not be al-Isra; that alone would betray to others what they had found out. He checked with file cryptography for a name to describe, in the future, how he and all his colleagues would call the Al Qaeda project, whatever it was.

Code names come out of a computer by a process known as random selection, the aim being to give nothing away. The CIA naming process that month was using fish; the computer chose “Stingray,” so “Project Stingray” it became. The last sheet in the file had been added Saturday night. It was brief and short. It came from the hand of a man who disliked wasting words, one of the six principals, the director of national intelligence. Clearly, the file out of Fort Meade had gone straight to the National Security committee (Steve Hadley), to the DNI and to the White House. Marek Gumienny imagined there would have been lights burning late in the Oval Office.

The final sheet was on the DNI-headed paper. It said in capital letters:

WHAT IS AL-ISRA

IS IT NUCLEAR, BIOLOGICAL, CHEMICAL, CONVENTIONAL? FIND OUT WHAT, WHEN AND

WHERE. TIME SCALE: NOW. RESTRAINTS: NONE. POWERS: ABSOLUTE

JOHN NEGROPONTE

There was a scrawled signature. There are nineteen primary intelligence-gathering and archive-storing agencies in the USA. The letter in Marek Gumienny’s hand gave him authority over them all. He ran his eye back to the top of the sheet. It was addressed to him personally. There was a tap on the door.

A young GS15 stood there with yet another delivery. General Service is simply a salary scale; a “15” means a very junior staffer. Gu-mienny gave the young man an encouraging smile; he had clearly never been this high up the building before. Gumienny held out his hand, signed the clipboard to confirm receipt and waited until he was alone again.

The new file was a courtesy from the colleagues at Fort Meade. It was a transcript of a conversation held by two of the Koran eggheads in the car on the way back to Washington. One of them was British. It was his last line that someone at Fort Meade had underlined with a brace of question marks in red ink. During his time in the Middle East, Marek Gumienny had had much to do with the British, and, unlike some of his fellow countrymen who had been trying to cope with the hellhole of Iraq for three years, he was not too proud to admit that the CIAs closest allies, in what Kipling once called “the Great Game,” were a repository of much arcane knowledge about the badlands between the Jordan River and the Hindu Kush.

For a century and a half, either as soldiers or administrations of the old empire, or as eccentric explorers, the British had been trudging over desert, mountain range and goat pen in the zone that had now become the intelligence time bomb of the world. The British code-named the CIA “the Cousins” or “the Company,” and the American called the London-based Secret Intelligence Service “the Friends” or “the Firm.” For Marek Gumienny, one of those friends was a man with whom he had shared good times, not-so-good times and downright dangerous times when they were both field agents. Now he was pinned to a desk in Langley, and Steve Hill had been pulled out of the field and elevated to controller Middle East at the Firm’s Vauxhall Cross headquarters. Gumienny decided a conference would do no harm and might yield some good. There was no security problem. The Brits, he knew, would have just about everything he had. They, too, had transmitted the guts of the laptop from Peshawar to their own listening and cryptography HQ in Cheltenham. They, too, would have gutted the laptop and printed out its contents. They, too, would have analyzed the strange references to the Koran contained in the coded letters. What Marek Gumienny had that was probably not with London was the bizarre remark by a British academic in the back of a car in the middle of Maryland. He punched up a number on the console on his desk. Central switchboards are fine up to a point, but modern technology has meant that any senior executive can be connected faster by speed dial on his personal satellite telephone. A number rang in a modest commuter house in Surrey, just outside London. Eight a.m. in Langley, one p.m. in London, the house about to sit down to a roast beef lunch. A voice answered on the third ring. Steve Hill had enjoyed his golf and was about to enjoy his beef.

“Hallo?”

“Steve? Marek.”

“My dear chap, where are you? Over here, by any chance?”

“No, I’m at my desk. Can we go to secure?”

“Sure. Give me two minutes”-and, in the background-“Darling, hold the roast.”

The phone went down.

With the next call, the voice from England was slightly tinny but uninterceptable.

“Am I to understand that something has hit the ventilation system close to your ear?” asked Hill.

“All over my nice clean shirt,” admitted Gumienny “I guess you have much the same stuff as I have out of Peshawar?”

“I expect so. I finished reading it yesterday. I was wondering when you would call.”

“I have something you may not have, Steve. We have a visiting professor over here from London. He made a chance remark Friday evening. I’ll cut to the chase. Do you know a man called Martin?”

“Martin who?”

“No, that’s his surname. His brother over here is called Dr. Terry Martin. Does it ring a bell?”

Steve Hill had dropped all banter. He sat holding the phone and staring into space. Oh, yes, he knew the Martin brother. Back in the first Gulf War of 1990-91, he had been one of the control team in Saudi Arabia when the academic’s brother had slipped into Baghdad and lived there as a humble gardener under the noses of Saddam’s secret police while transmitting back priceless intelligence from a source inside the dictator’s cabinet. “Could be,” he conceded. “Why?” “I think we should talk,” said the American. “Face-to-face. I could fly over. I have the Grumman.”

“When do you want to come over?”

“Tonight. I can sleep on the plane. Be in London for breakfast.”

“Okay. I’ll arrange it with Northolt.”

“Oh, and Steve, while I’m flying could you get out the full file on this man Martin? I’ll explain when I see you.”

West of London, on the road to Oxford, lies the Royal Air Force base of Northolt. For a couple of years after World War II it was actually London ’s civil airport as Heathrow was hastily constructed. Then it relapsed to a secondary airfield, and finally to a field for private and executive jets. But because it remains an RAF property, flights in and out can be fixed to take place in complete security without the usual formalities. The CIA has its own very private airfield near Langley and a small fleet of executive jets. Marek Gumienny’s all-powerful piece of authority paper secured him the Grumman V, aboard which he slept in perfect comfort on the flight over. Steve Hill was at Northolt to meet him.

He took his guest not to the green-and-sandstone ziggurat at Vauxhall Cross on the south bank of the Thames by Vauxhall Bridge, home of the SIS, but to the much quieter Cliveden Hotel, formerly a private mansion, set inside its own estate not thirty miles from the airport. He had reserved a small conference suite with room service and privacy.

There he read the analysis of the American Koran Committee, remarkably similar to the analysis from Cheltenham, and the transcript of the conversation in the back of the car.

“Damn fool,” he muttered when he reached the end. “The other Arabist was right. It can’t be done. It’s not just the lingo, it’s all the other tests. No stranger, no foreigner, could ever pass them.”

“So, given my orders from the All-High, what would you suggest?”

“Pick up an AQ insider and sweat it out of him,” said Hill. “Steve, if we had the faintest idea of the location of anyone that high in Al Qaeda, wed take them as a matter of course. We don’t have any such target in our sights as of now.”

“Wait and watch. Someone will use the phrase again.” “My people have to presume that if al-Isra is to be the next spectacular, it will be the USA that is the target. Waiting for a miracle that may not happen will not pacify Washington. Besides, AQ must know by now we got the laptop. Chances are, they will never use that phrase again, except person to person.” “Well,” said Hill, “we could put it about in places they would hear it, that we have it all and are closing in. They would discontinue, cut and run.” “Maybe, maybe not. But we’d never know. We’d still be in limbo, never knowing whether Project Stingray had been terminated or not. And if not? And if it works? Like my boss says: Is it nuclear, biochemical, conventional? Where and when? Can your man Martin really pass for an Arab among Arabs? Is he really that good?”

“He used to be,” grunted Hill, and passed over a file. “See for yourself.”

The file was an inch thick, standard buff manila, labeled simply with a name:

COLONEL MIKE MARTIN.

The Martin boys’ maternal grandfather had been a tea planter at Darjeeling, India, between the two world wars. While there, he had done something almost unheard of. He had married an Indian girl.

The world of the British tea planters was small, remote and snooty. Brides were brought out from England or found among the daughters of the officer class of the Raj. The boys had seen pictures of their grandfather Terence Granger, tall, pink-faced, blond-mustached, pipe in mouth and gun in hand, standing over a shot tiger.

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 toward 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 to 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, in Haslemere, Surrey. Six months later, the mother died in the rioting.

Susan Granger came at the age of 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 as a stewardess with the British Overseas Airways Corporation. She was drop-dead beautiful, with tumbling chestnut hair, her father’s blue eyes and a 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-Rome-Cairo-Basra-Bahrain-Karachi-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, Michael, and three more years to second son, Terry. But they 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 generation to the grandson; he was nothing 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 dad, or their nanny, the gentle plum Fatima from up-country, who would go back to the tribe with enough saved wages to find a proper young man for a husband.

There was a reference which could only have come from an interview with Terry Martin; the older boy in his white Iraqi dishdasha, racing about the lawn of the house in the Saadun suburb of Baghdad, and his father’s delighted 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. As Vice President Saddam Hussein had started nationalizing the foreign-owned oil companies, and that included Anglo-Iraq 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 Hailey-bury. Marek Gumienny needed a break and coffee. “He could do it, you know,” he said when he came back from the restroom. “With enough training and backup, 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 lowlife, a gofer. 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 doppelganger. But that’s flawed, too. If the real object were still alive, ACMvould 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, ol’ buddy My eyes only. And my personal safe. Or the incinerator.”

The DD Ops flew back to Langley, but a week 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 CIA to SIS in complete secrecy, and in 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 later. 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 batons to keep it down. Within a week, he could be waterproof. He heard the tinkling notes of “Lillibolero” from his mobile. It was in the pocket of his jacket, which was hanging from a nail nearby. He inched across the dangerously frail rafters to reach it. The screen announced it was his brother in Washington. “Hi, Terry.”

“Mike, it’s me.” He still could not work out how people he was ringing knew already. “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 gray Jaguar nosing slowly up the track that led from the lane to the barn. “It’s okay, 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 campfire 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, wed 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 anymore. 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 moukhabarat. This time, youd 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 by, barely yards away.” “This,” said Martin, tapping the file about the man in the Guanta-namo 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 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 openmouthed.

“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 muj 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 2001, just after 9/11. 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 resume. 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 lockdown. 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 now been released, say he now has some halting English that 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 while Martin studied the file. He 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. Id 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 tax man. 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-favorite 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. “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 upon under apple trees in a Hampshire orchard. Two days later, by random selection, a computer 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 in a place called Jaji.