by Simon Conway
‘The guest is out in the garden, sir,’ Omar said.
Excited suddenly, Noman went over to the hide and Omar slid off the stool to allow him to look through the scope. He pressed his eye to the viewfinder and the house opposite sprang into high relief, the electronically enhanced lenses bringing the figure of a man in the courtyard close enough to touch. A tall, frail, stooping man shuffling along under an umbrella, his beard shot through with two distinctive white streaks.
In the house next door, under the very nose of the military establishment, lived the leader of the most flagged group of all, the world’s most wanted man.
The Sheikh Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden.
For all that he regarded him as little more than a prisoner, and this half-arsed and poorly manned operation as a pointless drain on the Directorate’s resources, Noman couldn’t help but feel humbled and a little awe-struck in the presence of bin Laden. The scything airplanes and the plunging towers had often featured in his dreams.
He watched as bin Laden completed his slow circuit of the courtyard and went back into the house, careful to furl the umbrella before stepping inside. Looking up from the scope Noman realised that his eyes had filled with tears. Rather than have Omar see him like this, he pretended to study the ledger of observations open on the music stand beside the tripod.
‘I’m leaving,’ he announced after a minute or so.
‘Sure,’ Omar replied and then remembered who he was talking to, ‘I mean … yes, sir! Thank you for visiting.’
Noman put on his mirrored sunglasses, picked up his briefcase and went out into the morning.
4. Apache Commando
Bouncing down one of the narrow dirt streets in his glossy black Range Rover, Noman found his way blocked by a crowd of determined-looking women and howling brats. Beyond them, in a trash-strewn open space, he observed a white tent with a banner announcing a mother-and-child vaccination programme. After pumping the horn a few times he realised it was futile and reversed up the alley.
Soon he was speeding south on the Murree Road with the windows down and the supercharged V8 engine growling, his hands too busy for driving. Steering through the curves and bends of the national park with his knees, the pine forest rising above him on one side and the ravine falling away on the other, he loosened the tobacco in the barrel of a Gold Flake cigarette and squeezed it out onto his palm, crumbling hash into the tobacco, kneading and mixing before re-filling the Flake, twisting it shut, and lighting up. Deep drag.
Hakuna Matata, as the Africans would say. No tension.
A welcome jolt to the brain.
He rooted around amongst the CDs on the passenger seat until he found what he was looking for, a bootleg of Adil Omar’s freshly cut track Paki Rambo. He cranked it up to full volume and the words rattled around in his head like an un-shooable fly:
I’m a junky on a binge and damn I’m so faded
Apache Commando
Put my foot in your asshole
He felt his spirits soar.
The P…The A…The K…The I
Paki Rambo!
#
Above all, Noman thought of himself as a survivor. Not the lickspittle, ass-kissing kind of survivor that made General these days. He was the opposite – the dogged, undeterred-by-anything, approach-every-task-with-utter-concentration-kind of survivor. He knew how to endure, and what it was that got you through. It was a quality that his superiors had recognised and valued in him – there was no job too difficult or too morally compromised for him to accept.
He was up for anything, he thought, anything that is except facing his wife this sunny morning. Irritated, the mood just as suddenly broken, he pulled over at a roadside café that overlooked the river. He sat in a plastic chair and they brought him chai that had been steeped long enough to acquire a rich dark colour and made creamy with full fat milk.
What I need is a plan, he told himself, something other than alcohol and drugs and arse to get by on. I’ll make a plan.
Back in the car he rolled himself another joint. Newly fortified, he set off again. He drove past an abandoned fairground with a rusting ferris wheel and dropped down into Murree. He nudged forwards through narrow, crowded streets that were festooned with electrical cables, between market stalls with plastic awnings. Then he was out the other side, with his foot down, on the Expressway heading south.
Instead of taking a left towards Rawalpindi – and home – he turned right towards the office.
The ISI headquarters was a sprawling complex of buildings beside a private hospital in the G-5 district of Islamabad. With its neatly clipped lawns and tinkling fountains it resembled the campus of a well-funded university. The entrance on Khayaban-e-Suhrawardy Avenue was suitably discreet: no sign, just a plainclothes officer with a pistol who directed Noman through a chicane of barriers, soldiers and sniffer dogs.
He parked the Range Rover outside the central building, dispensed a few drops of Visine in his eyes (nothing to be gained from letting the top brass know you’re a waster) and went in, crossing the circular echoing lobby to the elevators.
Seated in his windowless office he unpacked his briefcase: two vodka bottles, dirty socks and underwear, Valium, condoms, a couple of wraps of cocaine, several packets of Gold Flake cigarettes. He stuffed them randomly in drawers. He noticed that there was a memo in his in-tray calling for all serving offices to wear uniform when in headquarters. He crumpled it up and threw it in the direction of his overflowing wastepaper basket. Next in the pile was a report from a source inside the Swat branch of the Tehrik-i-Taliban, the Pakistani Taliban, whose leadership were getting hot under the collar over some girl in the valley who was using Facebook to demand education for women. There was nothing those crazy old goats in the Taliban were more afraid of than a girl with opinions. He scrawled Kill Her in the margin and then thought better of it and crossed it out. He wrote Leave her alone, thought better of that and finally consigned it to the wastepaper basket. Let them sort it out.
He spread his hands palms-down on the desk. This is where I begin again, he told himself. I re-invent myself. I make my plan.
In a moment he had another shot of vodka.
Back to the in-tray. There was an approach from a Lashkar-e-Taiba affiliated group based in Free Kashmir who had devised a plan to demolish the turbines on the giant Bhakra Dam in Indian-controlled Kashmir.
You had to give it to the Lashkar boys, they always thought big. They had already trained a cadre of fighters in night swimming, cliff climbing and explosives handling. They just needed help with moving the explosives into India on the Dubai-Bombay run. There was no way the Joint Chiefs would give the green light. They had already war-gamed it. Blowing the dam would likely lead to the collapse of the government in Delhi and might precipitate all-out war. Still, it was a plan worth developing and keeping in a drawer in preparation for an uncertain future. The speed with which the glaciers that fed the Indus were melting meant that Pakistan was likely to run out of water in the next twenty years. A hundred and eighty million people without a cup of water between them; that exceeded in scale even the most apocalyptic of Noman’s dreams. The only possible response to such a situation was to start blowing Indian dams. He wrote More Info in the margin.
The phone rang.
‘Noman?’
‘The very same.’
It was Major Tufail Hamid. He sounded pleased to hear him. Tufail was Chief of Staff to Khan. He was a lean, neat unobtrusive man with a fastidious nature and dark pouches beneath his eyes. Like Noman he had completed the arduous Special Service Group selection course before transferring to the ISI. At one time he had been one of SS Directorate’s most valuable spies. In his final undercover operation his cover had been blown and he had been tortured for several days in a basement. Now he was the poacher-turned-gamekeeper, nurturing his own position as key-holder to Khan where he once nurtured networks of informants. He wore white gloves to disguise the damage wrought by acid.
Tu
fail had served under Noman in Seventh Commando Battalion and it was Noman who got him his first job with the ISI and, after the acid attack, it was Noman who had recommended him to Khan when he was looking for an aide-decamp. Khan had tentacles that reached into every corner of Pakistan and beyond, and it was good to have a friendly set of eyes and ears in his immediate circle.
‘How is the old man?’ Noman asked.
‘Disappointed,’ Tufail replied in a brittle, chiding tone. Noman had been expecting the call ever since he took the decision, against Khan’s wishes, to visit the surveillance house in Abbottabad. ‘He wants to meet you for lunch. He’s booked a table at Kinara.’
‘I’ll be there,’ Noman said.
‘Good.’
‘Why don’t we have dinner tonight?’ Noman asked him suddenly. ‘Why don’t we go to the Cave and eat super nachos?’
Noman loved the Flintstone’s fakery of the Cave restaurant with its honey-coloured plastic rock walls and glowing stalactites, its mock stone-age façade on the edge of a shopping mall.
Tufail was silent for a moment.
‘How are you, Noman?’ he asked.
‘Not so good.’
‘Are you drinking?’ Tufail asked.
‘Maybe.’
‘You bloody well better be there tonight.’
‘I’ll be there,’ he said. He meant it when he said it.
5. The House of War
Arriving at Kinara on the south bank of Rawal Lake, Noman was shown to a table in a gazebo with a view across the water. He ordered a Pakola ice cream soda. He wished that he could have a beer, something to dull the edges of his headache. Khan came in fifteen minutes late to find him ordering a second Pakola.
‘Bring me tea,’ Khan told the waiter.
Major-General Javid Aslam Khan considered his son-in-law. Seventy years old and lean as a compass needle, he had hard, unforgiving eyes behind thick bi-focal glasses.
‘How are you, Noman? How is Mumayyaz?’
‘She wants a divorce.’
Khan looked at him without expression. ‘That’s not funny, Noman.’
They both knew that Mumayyaz would never leave him. The only reason Khan was asking was because Noman hadn’t been home for several weeks. He’d been on a binge, criss-crossing the country, visiting regional outposts and surveillance operations from Free Kashmir to Balochistan, a tour that had ended close to home, in bin Laden’s neighbour’s house.
The waiter brought tea. Khan waited until he had left before speaking again. ‘Tell me about Abbottabad?’
Noman thought that Khan almost certainly knew about what happened last night with the boy. In all likelihood either Tariq or Omar had called Khan the moment he left the house. They were Khan’s boys. There was almost nothing that Khan didn’t know. It occurred to him that part of the reason he had fucked the boy was as a gesture of defiance. How juvenile and ridiculous that seemed now.
‘No change,’ he told Khan, grudgingly. ‘Our guest remains confined. A courier comes and goes. They burn their rubbish.’
Khan sipped at his tea and looked around the restaurant. Nothing seemed to disturb his air of having his mind on something more important than his surroundings. He carried with him an inscrutable scheme of things next to which Noman’s sarcasm often seemed childish.
‘I went up there to make sure the operation was being run properly,’ Noman told him, peevishly. ‘It is my responsibility as a serving officer.’
‘You did what you had to,’ Khan told him.
#
There were times, watching Noman in action, that Khan felt a tearing inside at the prospect of the torch passing to such a new and unfathomable bearer. He regarded his son-in-law as a man of lavish and prodigal talent, in many ways an admirable fellow. It was his untamed libido and his loud-mouthed swagger that Khan struggled to understand. It was as if, like Napoleon, Noman’s character had been fixed for the lack of a couple of inches, which in conjunction with a shameful past, a brutal upbringing in an orphanage and a murderous army career, had produced a creature more akin to an Afreet, a demon, than a regular intelligence officer.
Khan was still trying to understand why he had gone to Abbottabad. He didn’t give much credit to Noman’s claim that it was his professional responsibility, and it was surely more complex than simple boredom or deliberately going against Khan’s wishes. It was as if he had gone there to tip his hat, to pay homage to a hero. The last thing Khan wanted was for bin Laden’s house to turn into some kind of shrine.
The decision to hide Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad had been taken by a small secretive group of “retired” former ISI officers, Khan foremost amongst them, who had taken on responsibility for bin Laden’s welfare after he crossed the border into Pakistan in early 2002. A group chosen because if it ever came out that they had been hiding him, the Joint Chiefs of Staff would be able to semi-plausibly deny any knowledge of it.
The obvious choice for hiding bin Laden, the tribal areas, was deemed too risky, too volatile. And so it had proved. There were the American drone attacks to worry about, but more than that too many fighters holed up there had turned against their former masters in the ISI. There was a time when an ISI officer could count on easy access to any Jihadi training camp or madrassa on the border but that was true no longer. It was only three months since the Pakistani Taliban had executed Sultan Amir Tarar, best known as Colonel Imam.
Grey-bearded Imam, who was a guerrilla-warfare specialist and hero of the Jihad against the Soviets, regarded the tribal areas as his spiritual home and the motley gangs hiding there as his children. He was always offering them advice on how to tackle the enemy. It didn’t stop them turning against him. They filmed the execution. After a short speech a masked man shot him five times, four more than looked strictly necessary.
Khan had found himself feeling surprisingly sanguine about the murder.
‘These things happen,’ he remembered telling Noman at the time. ‘If you feed a crocodile you must be careful it doesn’t bite off your hand.’
Truth be told, Khan was relieved to have Imam out the way. He had become something of a public embarrassment with his outspoken views on the American presence in Afghanistan. The Americans had loved him once though. George Bush Senior had given him a lump of the Berlin Wall in thanks for bringing the Soviet Union to its knees. But then they had taken against him when they learned he’d been active in Afghanistan after the September 11th attacks, facilitating the movement of Al Qaeda fighters across the border into Pakistan.
The Americans had a habit of taking things personally.
#
It amused Noman to think how angry the Americans would be if they ever learned that bin Laden was being hidden in plain sight. The Americans loved it when they were invited to send their generals up to the Kakul Academy to lecture the officer cadets. They jumped at the chance, and they showered money on the Pakistani military, thirteen billion dollars in the last decade. Little did they know that their greatest foe was living quietly just a few hundred metres from the entrance to the Academy.
It wasn’t a sanctioned operation, of course. The politicians were not informed. It didn’t appear on any paperwork. It wasn’t discussed over tea and tiffin cake at the Punjab Club. That was why Khan didn’t like him going up there. He didn’t want to attract any attention. Stay away, he’d said. But Noman argued that since the budget for the surveillance team was buried in an SS Directorate slush fund under his control it was his duty to keep an eye on the operation.
‘Now that you’ve been are you satisfied?’ Khan inquired.
‘No,’ Noman muttered. ‘I don’t trust those kids you’ve got up there.’
Khan stared evenly at him without comment. Noman could imagine what he was thinking, if you don’t trust them why did you nail one of them on the job? There were times when Noman felt a visceral hatred of his father-in-law. He looked away. ‘I need to do some proper work.’
Khan raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘Proper work?
‘Forget about it,’ Khan replied. ‘It’s a tall tale. A story to frighten the Americans.’
‘I’m not so sure.’
The first whisper of the existence of a cell known as Dar al-Harb, or “The House of War”, had coincided with the much derided declaration in May 2009, by the then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, that Pakistan’s nuclear security was the strongest in the world. An American National Security Agency computer trolling phone lines in South Waziristan had picked up a conversation between two Taliban commanders in which one of them had used the Pashto term itami, meaning “nuclear” or “atomic”. The House of War had an itami device, he said.
A few days later one of the agency’s trawlers intercepted a conversation between two advisers to Baitullah Mehsud, the short thuggish Pashtun who had assumed command of the Pakistani Taliban. The advisers were overheard discussing an ethical dilemma that had recently come to the fore. Was it permissible under the laws of Islam for the House of War to use its “device”?
The Americans had gone ballistic. They had directed their entire intelligence infrastructure on South Waziristan – wire intercepts, drones and covert agents. The ISI, when they were eventually informed, had been more sceptical, scornful even. Baitullah Mehsud was a semi-literate gangster with a big mouth and those he surrounded himself with weren’t any better. His experience with bombs was limited to strapping a few pounds of home-made explosives to hapless teenagers and blowing them up in bazaars. The ISI adamantly assured the Americans that no one would be stupid enough to give Mehsud, or anyone associated with him, a nuclear device.
But what was the House of War and what kind of threat did it pose? In private they went into overdrive, frantically seeking out information from their network of informants across the tribal areas on this hitherto unheard of entity – Dar al-Harb – which was named after the scholar Ibn Taymiyyah’s term for those lands that lay beyond Muslim subjugation and which presumably would be the target of any planned attack. All they uncovered were rumours. It was said of the House of War that its members eschewed all modern forms of communication; that their leader, who was known as Abu Dukhan – “the father of smoke” – lived in a cave that could be sealed by a boulder attached to a hydraulic ram; that they were some kind of millenarian Wahhabi death cult; that they enjoyed the financial backing of a world-weary Gulf sheikh; that, above all, they had dedicated themselves to the acquisition and detonation of a nuclear device.
