Thor's Haven

by Richard S Young

  In one of the envelopes are details about the border crossing and it might be easier for you to take a slight detour as you approach Torkham. You can read it when you are aboard the train as the city is the major border crossing point between Pakistan and Afghanistan and connects the Nangarhar province of Afghanistan with Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. As the busiest point of entry between the two countries, it serves as a major transportation, shipping and receiving site, but the major problem you’ll have is possibly encountering Afghan Border Police and Pakistan’s Frontier Corps, the main agencies for controlling access in and out of Torkham.

  They’re backed up by having Pakistani and Afghan Armed Forces close to hand to call upon and you will need to somehow get past them all un-noticed. There are some NATO forces operating on the Afghan side of the crossing, mainly United States Armed Forces as their Forward Operating Base Torkham (FOB Torkham) is located only a few kilometres away from the crossing in Nangarhar province, but when I checked with Military Intelligence, there appears to be contingents of Danish Frømandskorpset troops currently operating out of there along with some military personnel from other countries.

  The other envelope has all the details I was able to find out about the mercenary types you left behind at the hotel. I did a quick trace on this Belibasta and ran the tattoos through our databases and printed off all I could get for you to read. Best I could do for you in such a short space of time.”

  Daniel just looked at Rifat and before he could say thanks, Rifat spoke again.

  “I’ve sorted out some food and water for your trip, the motor bike is fully fuelled and I’ve put a crash helmet in with it as well. There’s also a train timetable with all the times of the stops and I’ve included some directions on probably the safest way out of the railway yard at the Peshawar Cantonment station and the best way onto the National 5 highway for you to get to Torkham. It’s fairly simple as it’s only about 48 kilometres from the station. Normally takes about 30 minutes to get there but you will be driving the Fireblade with a top speed of 299 km/h (186 mph) so I reckon you’ll be getting there quite quickly.” Rifat smiled when he finished that last sentence.

  Daniel opened the envelopes and started to have at look at the contents. He read Rifat’s hand-written directions for Torkham, the railway timetable and the advice for the approach to Torkham and crossing the border.

  Leaves Rawalpindi at 05:59 and arrives at Attock City Junction at 07:29.

  Departs Attock City Junction at 07:33 and arrives at Jhangira Road at 08:20.

  Departs Jhangira Road at 08:22 and arrives at Nowshera Junction at 08:42.

  Departs Nowshera Junction at 08:46 and arrives at Peshawar City at 09:26.

  Departs Peshawar City at 09:30 and terminates at Peshawar Cantonment Railway Station at 09:45.

  Turn right onto the Saddar Road, turn first left into Sahibzada Abdul Qayyum Road and drive towards the bright red roofline of the Sharqi Police Station at the end. Turn sharp left onto the National 5 highway and head for Torkham. 30 minutes driving.

  Take the first road on your right at the mosque and drive along it for a couple of kilometres. Head for the ruined chimney in the distance and when you get to it, there is a gap in the double rolls of security barbed-wire fencing. The A101 highway is only a few hundred metres to your north.

  He quickly scanned the contents of the envelope containing the available ISI information about the mercenaries, Belibasta and the tattoos. “Thanks Rifat. You are going way beyond what would be expected of you in helping me and I don’t really know how to say thank you for this.”

  Rifat just grinned his toothy smile. “Just get out of Pakistan and give me some peace and quiet. I really am getting too old for this adventure nonsense.”

  They had arrived at the railway freight yard and Rifat drove through a gateway and turned onto the aggregate of a railway track. To the left of the landrover, a long row of wagons signalled the whereabouts of the stationary freight train that would be shortly heading towards Peshawar. Railway workers were portering heavy sacks of soil fertiliser onto a wagon while a guard ticked the contents off on a clipboard. The guard moved to the next wagon and pulled the sliding door open for the railway workers to enter and then take materials away on their trolleys. The guard ticked off the removals on his clipboard and walked down the platform to the next wagon. Rifat switched off the headlights of the landrover and drove the vehicle slowly parallel to the wagons.

  “When that guard opens the next wagon, you jump out, go and open the back of the landrover and then slide the nearest door of a railway wagon open and climb aboard. I’ll get in the back and we can then manhandle the Fireblade onboard the wagon and get you on your way.” said Rifat and he nudged Daniel to get out the vehicle. Daniel opened the rear of the landrover, slid the railway wagon door to its right and jumped up into it. Rifat already had the motor cycle by the handlebars and the two men then bumped it from the landrover aboard the railway wagon. Rifat returned to the landrover and passed the helmet and Daniel’s belongings to him and then threw aboard the two holdalls they had removed from the van in the hotel car park. The train whistle blew further along the track and Rifat reached into the landrover and passed a bag of food and water to Daniel. He started to pull the wagon door shut as the train juddered into motion to begin the next part of its journey.

  “Good luck Daniel.”

  “Thanks Rifat” said Daniel as he pulled the wagon door shut.

  Rifat climbed back into the driver’s seat of the landrover and noticed something lying on the passenger seat beside him. It looked like a crumpled ball of paper and when he reached across to retrieve it, he wasn’t expecting the ball to be solid and heavy. Rifat began to open the paper and discovered the white stone with its markings. There was a hand-written message on the inside of the paper:

  Rifat,

  Thanks for all your help but I need to ask one last favour of you. This stone is obviously very important for some reason and people want to have it for themselves and are prepared to kill to have it. If I don’t have it on my person, nothing bad can happen to me because I alone will know where the stone is and whoever wants it doesn’t.

  Please send the stone by special express courier to my friend in the Faroe Islands. I hope to be there in 7 days time. If people are after the stone, they will have to go to the Faroes to get it – and I’ll be waiting for them.

  Thanks,

  Daniel

  Sólrun Jacobsen

  Jónas Broncksgøta,

  Tórshavn,

  Faroe Islands

  Rifat simply smiled at the hand-written note and then spoke to himself out loud. “That’s very clever of you, Daniel my boy. Post the stone to a safe address and head there to collect it and then wait to see who’s interested in coming to try and take it from you. Good luck with that, whoever you are.”

  He started the landrover’s engine up and began to make his way back to the ISI headquarters in Islamabad and an urgent appointment with the mail room before reporting in to his superiors as directed.

  10.03am – 11th April, present day.

  Peshawar Cantonment Railway Station, Pakistan.

  After slowly rumbling into the railway depot about 15 minutes earlier, the freight train clanked and shuddered itself to a stop in a siding far from the station buildings. Daniel watched the activity of the railway yard from inside the boxcar through the slight opening he had made with the sliding door. The near 5 hour trip had given him an opportunity to review the information he had gathered so far about the white stone and had ordered it into a folder that he had tucked away into his backpack.

  The scant information about the mercenaries, their tattoos and Belibasta that Rifat had given him was added into the folder and Daniel made a mental note to himself that he had to try and get more information about it all from somewhere as there w
as probably something really blatantly important in amongst it but wasn’t evident to him yet. He had gone through the data he had collected on his laptop and had backed it up onto a USB stick as a failsafe measure but there were still considerable amounts of photographs and information contained on his mobile telephone that he really needed to research.

  Daniel had switched his mobile telephone off back in Islamabad so he wouldn’t be able to be tracked or traced but he couldn’t afford to lose it. He slid the back cover off the telephone, removed the battery and popped the memory card out of its internal compartment. The data the memory card contained was important and Daniel realised that he couldn’t afford to be deprived of its information if he was ever apprehended. Unbuttoning his shirt, he gingerly peeled back the elastoplast bandage covering the knife slice-wound on his chest, inserted the memory card onto the sticky adhesive and then smoothed the covering back over his skin. After re-assembling the telephone back together, he placed it into the backpack with all the other essentials it contained.

  Daniel had used some of the time of the train journey to search through the contents of the two holdalls that he and Rifat had removed from the van in the hotel car park back in Mirpur. The holdall that contained the Barrett XM500 sniper rifle with the Leupold Mark 4 sniper-scope, ammunition, box magazine, bipod mount and a suppressor, he had been able to break down the weapon into parts and then fit them all into the underseat storage space of the Fireblade motorcycle.

  The other holdall contained various handguns, pistols and ammunition and Daniel had taken possession of two fully-loaded SIG Sauer P229 service pistols along with six 15-round box magazines as back-up ammunition. He placed one of the pistols inside his jacket and the other he secured within his backpack.

  As the train journey moved through the countryside of northern Pakistan, Daniel carefully disassembled the other weapons in the holdall and casually tossed the constituent parts and spare ammunition out of the boxcar into rivers, ditches and ravines along the way.

  He slung the back-pack onto himself and slid the boxcar door open far enough to allow him to step out onto the adjacent platform. Daniel scanned the railway yard looking for an exit point while trying to get his bearings from what Rifat had written down for him.

  ‘Turn right onto the Saddar Road, turn first left into Sahibzada Abdul Qayyum Road and drive towards the bright red roofline of the Sharqi Police Station at the end. Turn sharp left onto the National 5 highway and head for Torkham. 30 minutes driving.’

  He could see the top of a three-storey building away in the distance with its bright red roofline which he presumed must be the police station. There were no other buildings with red roofs to be seen and as luck would have it, there was an access point onto the Saddar Road about 70 metres to his left. Daniel pushed the boxcar door open wider and stepped back inside, put the motorcycle helmet on, sat astride the Fireblade, rocked it off its centre stand, turned the ignition key and brought a powerful mechanical beast to life. Slowly driving onto the platform, he followed it to its end and headed for the access point out onto the Saddar Road. He waited for a gap in the traffic to appear to turn right, crossed over the carriageway and then turned left into Sahibzada Abdul Qayyum Road and aimed himself towards the red roofline in the distance.

  Driving along the road, Daniel thought that there was a certain irony to be found with him trying to evade apprehension from police authorities and here he was now driving towards a police station by using it as a landmark in his attempt to flee a country. For what seemed to him like an eternity but was really only a few minutes, he drove towards the red roofline and was relieved to finally turn left onto the National 5 highway.

  He could feel the sweat running down his back as he negotiated the highway through Peshawar and its suburbs and then feeling the exhilaration of relief as he suddenly found himself alone in the barren and arid countryside of the almost deserted Torkham Highway. The Fireblade roared into life as Daniel ran through the gears and opened the motorcycle up to speed along the tarmac. The countryside whizzed past in a speedy blur as the altitude slowly began to rise as he drove. The National 5 highway meandered through ravines and valleys with little traffic cluttering the route while the passing signposts indicated that he was fast approaching Torkham. The Pakistan/Afghanistan border was ahead of him in the distance and he pulled over at the top of a summit. He scanned ahead looking for the minaret of a mosque that he was to turn right at but couldn’t make one out. After unhinging the seat, Daniel took the sniper-scope from the storage space and used it as a telescope to check out what lay ahead of him.

  Torkham itself just seemed to be a throng of people and vehicles while the border crossing point stood out with its defences of concrete blocks, black and yellow painted barriers, guard-posts and turreted crenulations all in the shadow of a massive Pakistan flag fluttering in the breeze. Lots of people were crossing over the border on foot and were being herded along a covered walkway that had painted blue steel bar security fencing along its path. The walkway was on the right hand-side of the Pakistan part of the border for about 100 metres before turning left above the roadway via an overhead enclosed bridge and then turned right towards the Afghan border. Lines of differing vehicles were queued towards the border gates waiting for permission to move forward as groups of Pakistan Frontier Corps and Pakistani military personnel carried out comprehensive searches of every single mode of transport wishing to cross over the border into Afghanistan.

  Daniel could see something similar happening over on the Afghan side of the border with both the Afghan Border Police and Afghan Armed Forces in swarms conducting identical searches of every vehicle. Behind them, the very obvious presence of United States Armed Forces could be seen with their unsubtle show of force of armoured vehicles, American flags and coal-scuttle helmet-wearing troops milling around while postulating their obvious attendance. It never failed to annoy Daniel that the upper echelons of American military hierarchy could not understand or appreciate a stark fact that by the simple measure of adopting a passive and non-confrontational attitude, their presence wouldn’t alienate the local populations they were supposedly protecting. This ill-thought necessity to show their military might and power upon a populace more often than not led to the unnecessary spilling of young American blood all over the world when it could be so easily prevented by just being discreet instead of constantly displaying an intimidating stance that could be regarded as aggressive.

  Daniel widened his search over the city and eventually found the mosque that Rifat had referred to and the road that he was to take. He continued adjusting the sights of the sniper-scope until he could make out the profile of a ruined chimney standing by itself in the distance. He packed the sniper-scope away, started the Fireblade back up and drove towards the mosque, turned right onto a dirt road and continued in the direction of this chimney.

  Very quickly, Daniel had left the outskirts of Torkham and back into the desolate countryside of the north-western frontier of Pakistan. On his left, the border fence comprising of a continuous barrier of double rolls of barbed wire topped with razor wire, glinted in the early afternoon sunshine, while the chimney stack in front of him got closer and closer.

  When he finally arrived at the chimney stack, the rubbled remains of what had once been a brick factory were strewn around its base. Here and there, partial walls still stood and Daniel tried to read some faded Cyrillic script painted on parts of the brickwork. It puzzled him at first and then he remembered that following the end of the Second World War, Russia had financed business opportunities into a fair number of territories under the control of their western allies. Whether it was an attempt to try and destabilise the capitalist ideals of their allies or were just simple humanitarian gestures, these various, and many, building projects had been the topic of countless discussions for decades as to the real reasons why Russia had gone to great lengths to build and provide such structures all over the world. The most famo
us example of one of these projects was the bizarre fact that the airport in the Afghanistan capital, Kabul, had been built in the early 1960s by Soviet engineers, and this ruined brick factory had obviously been another one of these developments.

  He slowly drove the motorcycle up to the double rolls of coiled barbed wire fencing to find a possible gap and observed that its height of 3 metres was topped with the most vicious-looking razor wire he had ever seen. This type of fence was easily erected and served as quite a significant deterrent to all but the most determined. To get past this type of fence required patience to cut the individual strands, provided that you weren’t cut to pieces in the process, or an armoured vehicle to drive over it and burst a crumpled passage through.

  Daniel parked the Fireblade and walked back and forth along a few hundred metres of the fence but he couldn’t find the gap that Rifat had told him was there. A wild goat bleated at him from the Afghan side and he was about to give up when the same wild goat suddenly appeared beside him on the Pakistani side of the barrier. Its sudden appearance made Daniel check the fencing more closely than before and he discovered that there was an optical illusion in the terrain. Rocks and boulders impeded the flow of part of the path of the border fence and the barbed wire had been doubled-back on itself over and around these rocks. By doing so, a metre-wide gap between the rolls had been left behind that wasn’t obvious to the naked eye at ground level, even if you were standing right in front of it as Daniel was just now. The giveaway for Daniel had been the local wild goat slipping through this optical illusion from Afghanistan into Pakistan.

  Daniel carefully pushed the Fireblade through the gap in the fence while mindful of avoiding the spikes of the barbed wire, thanked the nearby wild goat for his help in locating the gap and drove off heading in a northerly direction in search of Highway 7 that connected the cities of Torkham to Kabul through Jalalabad.