by Simon Conway
He had always known that revealing bin Laden’s location might cause the Americans to react but he had anticipated a drone strike not a full-scale commando assault. And he had expected to receive some kind of prior warning. Even so, he had known exactly what it meant when he woke to the sound of the circling helicopters. Naked, pausing only to snatch his belt from the chair, he had gone straight to the hide and strangled Omar, who was in the act of tapping numbers into his phone, presumably to raise the alarm. He had looped the belt around Omar’s neck and twisted savagely, pulling him down off the stool onto the floor, tightening his grip until eventually he’d stopped struggling.
Afterwards, he’d dressed quickly to the sound of gunfire and explosions, and then he had gone out into the street.
There was an armed man in shalwar kameez and a flak jacket standing outside bin Laden’s house. He was yelling at the neighbours in Pashto to go back inside their houses and turn off their lights. Behind him in the shadows by the gate there was another larger man, the unmistakable outline of an American with a German Shepherd on a lead.
‘I am Nightingale,’ he called out as he approached, first in Pashto and then Urdu, and then Punjabi, and finally in English. He felt certain they had been briefed to extract him along with bin Laden at the end of their operation.
‘Get back!’ the man in the shalwar kameez shouted at him, raising his rifle.
‘It’s me,’ he protested. ‘Tariq! Rule Britannia!’
‘Get back!’
The dog lunged with its teeth bared and the man in the shalwar kameez swung the rifle around and slammed the butt into the side of Tariq’s head. He fell to the ground.
He came around as the Americans were leaving. The crashed helicopter was burning and the others were lifting off in a storm of dust. He picked himself up and staggered away from the house. He wasn’t sure for how long he kept moving or in which direction but at some stage he curled up and slept for several hours.
He woke up with a raging headache and the certainty that he was being hunted.
#
The Peshawar apartment was the remnant of a long defunct intelligence operation run in the late eighties by a British Military Intelligence outfit known as the Afghan Guides. It had served its purpose as a safe location to de-brief Afghan military defectors in the late eighties and then after the Wall came down, it had somehow remained on the books as a final fallback position, only to be used in extremis. He’d collected the key from the blind vendor on the corner, who sold stripped and cubed bags of sugar cane, and warily climbed the stairwell of the crumbling concrete building to the apartment on the fourth floor. Inside there was a thick layer of dust covering everything and it looked as if it had been unoccupied for years. There was running water, though, and he was able to wash the blood out of his hair.
He settled in to wait, alternating between sleeping fitfully on the cot bed and standing at the window.
Hakimullah came on the afternoon of the second day. Tariq watched him scurry across the courtyard. He brought the news that there were roadblocks the length of the Grand Trunk Road, the border was closed and army patrols were scouring the tribal areas for any sign of him. It wasn’t safe to move. He’d sent the old man out for a second-hand phone and a pay-as-you-go sim card and then scribbled the number on a piece and paper and entrusted it to him.
‘Find Ed. He’ll be waiting for me on the other side. Tell him to call me.’
Hakimullah had accepted the task without complaint. That was more than thirty hours ago and Tariq was getting increasingly desperate. What if Hakimullah had been arrested? He wouldn’t last long under questioning. Perhaps the ISI already knew his location. Perhaps they were even now surrounding the house, Black Stork Commandos climbing the stairs and crawling across the roof. He knew that his wife and parents must already be in custody. He couldn’t bear to think what must be happening to them.
The phone in his hand lit up and began to vibrate.
‘Ed?’
‘Yes.’
He was flooded with relief. ‘Can you get me out of here?’
‘It’s not safe for you to cross the border.’
‘I can’t stay here much longer. They’re looking everywhere.’
‘I’ll talk to the British Embassy in Islamabad. Maybe they can offer you refuge until we sort something out.‘
‘Maybe? Maybe? What do you mean maybe? I’m way out on a limb here, Ed!’
‘I’ll talk to them. I’ll make a case. We can get a local contact to pick you up and drive you down there.’
‘Which local contact?’
‘I don’t know yet.’
There was a knock on the door.
‘Maa Chod!’
‘What is it?’
‘Someone’s at the door.’
‘Don’t answer it.’
But he was already moving. He paused for a few seconds with his ear to the door and then he pressed his eye to the peephole. It was Khan, staring right back at him through the fisheye lens, an undersea predator emerging sinuously from its reef.
‘I know you’re in there.’
Tariq swore under his breath. Khan had probably known where he would be before he got here. ‘It’s Khan.’
‘Don’t open the door,’ Ed told him.
‘I’ve come alone,’ Khan said.
Tariq opened the door and Khan stepped in and surveyed the room. Tariq carefully closed the door and turned to face him. Khan had produced a pistol and was pointing it at him. His dark eyes, wet and shiny behind glass, were utterly without warmth or compassion.
Tariq held out his hands in supplication. ‘Please don’t do this. Not here.’
Khan pressed the trigger.
#
Ed flinched at the sound of the gunshot and then the clatter of the phone on the floorboards and the thump of the falling body.
‘Tariq? Tariq?’
Silence. Then footsteps followed by a scuffling sound as the phone was picked up.
An unfamiliar voice: ‘Hello?’
Ed kept his mouth shut. Inside, he was yelling. No! No! No!
‘Who’s there?’
12. Kabul by night
By night, Kabul was a city of monstrous shadows and fiery embers, of scurrying human shapes and hole-in-the-wall shops lit by fluorescent tubes that flickered and flared like insect exterminators, revealing skinned carcasses hanging from rafters, stacks of gnarled firewood and piles of charred flatbread.
Ed sat in the passenger seat of the Land Cruiser and watched the brake lights of the battered Afghan Police pickup in front of them, bouncing in the potholes. He glimpsed rutted alleyways strewn with rubbish and festooned with overhead electrical cables, dirty, helot faces lit up by the sparks rising from street fires, and a woman’s hand reaching out from a burqa, pleading.
Beside him Dai steered the car through the melee of traffic with good-humoured vigilance. A Corolla cut in front of them, getting between the Land Cruiser and the Police pickup in front, Hindi pop blaring from its open window.
‘Easy now,’ Dai muttered.
Ed was furious, really furious. At Tariq for ignoring a direct order. At himself for not insisting they pull Tariq out as soon as they’d realised who was in the Abbottabad house. And most of all angry at the Americans for abandoning Tariq to his fate.
They slowed for a police checkpoint, one of the twenty-five that formed the so-called “ring of steel” around central Kabul, and crawled forward through the crumbling concrete chicane while Afghan policemen stared listlessly at them from the shelter of a sandbagged hut.
They turned into a narrow cul-de-sac hemmed in on all sides by pockmarked blast walls, and rolled to a halt.
‘Want to take a condor moment, Boss?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Ed replied through gritted teeth. He paused with his hand on the door handle. ‘I won’t be long.’
‘We’re not going anywhere,’ Dai told him.
Ed got out of the car and crossed in front of the vehicle, aware of
the policemen in the chase vehicle watching him. He slipped through the gap between two blast walls and approached a battered metal door. He knocked twice and a small hatch at eye height slid open. He was studied. Seconds later he listened to the sound of bolts being drawn and the door opened. He stepped into a small and garishly lit vestibule. A large man in a leather coat pointed at a metal detector. Ed put his wallet and mobile phone in a plastic basket and stepped through the detector. On the far side there was another metal door. The man nodded and Ed knocked.
It opened into a different world.
Uzbek waitresses in mini-skirts and carrying bottles of South African red wine weaved between tables. The restaurant was full of the usual crowd of foreign-educated Afghan businessmen and international diplomats. Ed spotted Bob Hagedorn, the CIA Station Chief, sitting in a corner of the windowless room. He was dining with an Afghan MP from the Panjshir Valley who was reputed to be behind Kabul’s largest kidnap and ransom racket.
If Hagedorn noticed Ed approaching he did not openly acknowledge it. Instead he fiddled with his cutlery. That was Bob, always fidgeting. Always interfering, his critics said. He was a small round man in his fifties, with watery eyes behind thick-lens spectacles and reddish hair and a beard flecked with grey.
Ed stood over the table. He hadn’t washed since his return to Kabul and was dirty and smelly, sorely in need of a bath and a change of clothes.
‘I know what you’re gonna say, Ed,’ Bob told him in a quiet voice.
‘Do you now?’
Apart from a brief glance at Ed to gauge the measure of his anger, Bob didn’t take his eyes off the cutlery. He was a moody and mysterious man. It was said that he was a jealous guardian of his patch and given to outbursts of violent temper behind closed doors, but in public he was a man of unassailable emotional control.
‘We couldn’t tell you for reasons of operational security,’ he explained.
Ed pressed his knuckles down on the table. ‘Tariq is dead.’
‘I’m sorry about that.’
‘No you’re not.’
Eventually, reluctantly, Bob pushed back his chair and threw down his napkin. He murmured an apology to the impassive Afghan opposite him and stood up.
‘It’s understandable that you’re angry,’ Bob said, finally making eye contact with him. ‘You formed an emotional attachment to the agent you were running. It happens.’
‘He was my friend.’
‘Grow up, Ed. None of us has friends. You have to cast that aside in order to do what demands to be done.’
Ed looked away.
Even if Bob noticed the tightening of Ed’s jaw he surely didn’t anticipate what was coming. At that stage, Ed was not known for impulsive or self-destructive behaviour.
‘Go and get some rest,’ Bob said. ‘We’ll talk in the morning.’
Ed swung around and head-butted him, smashing his forehead into Bob’s face. Bob staggered backwards and fell into his chair.
The Afghan raised a hand and within seconds Ed was being manhandled out of the restaurant. He was thrown onto the tarmac beyond the blast walls.
Dai stood over him.
‘Let’s get you on the first plane out of here shall we, boss?’
13. Seducing the widow
At first he’d thought he was crazy, that he was seeing treachery everywhere. But then a sneaky thread of suspicion had lodged itself in Noman’s head. What if Khan was a traitor? The evidence was patchy and inconclusive, however a pattern was emerging and Khan was at the centre of it.
Tariq was Khan’s boy. Khan had recruited him and it was his signature on the posting order that had sent Tariq to London in 2005 and brought him back in 2006. Since then Tariq had been one of Khan’s roving sets of eyes-and-ears in Afghanistan and the tribal areas, glad-handing informants and conveying messages. It had been Khan’s decision to put Tariq in the surveillance house in Abbottabad two weeks before. And there had been something strange about Khan’s response to the raid, as if he was surprised not to have received some kind of warning. On top of that, Noman was still seething at the decision by the Director General’s office to issue a kill-on-sight order for Tariq. He couldn’t prove it but he was fairly sure that Khan was behind that as well.
Now that he was dead, Tariq couldn’t implicate any collaborators.
Noman spent the days following the raid talking to his usual contacts in darkened doorways or hunched at his desk trawling through intelligence summaries from across the various ISI directorates. Not long after dawn on 6th May he read a short paragraph that made reference to an altercation in Kabul. A British advisor to the Afghan Ministry of Finance by the name of Ed Malik had attacked the CIA Station Chief in a crowded restaurant. The informant had overheard the outraged Brit say: ‘Tariq is dead.’
Noman furiously rubbed his temples. He red-flagged Ed Malik and made a bid to the Counter-Intelligence Bureau, which handled ISI assets abroad, for a fuller personal profile. He was fairly sure that the Ministry of Finance job was a cover story and Ed Malik would prove to be an MI6 officer. If so, it was likely he was Tariq’s handler. If he could find out how Tariq was recruited and what information he had passed on he might be able to establish whether Tariq was a lone wolf or, as he was beginning to suspect, under the protection of a senior figure in the ISI, namely his father-in-law, Javid Aslam Khan. If Khan was a traitor, Noman had decided he would be the one to unmask him.
There was a knock on the door.
‘Come in.’
It was Raja Mohammed Mahfouz, his massive frame filling the doorway. In the midst of everything, Noman was glad to have such a reliable deputy. Mahfouz was a stubborn and loyal man, slow to offer counsel but indomitable when set in motion.
‘What is it?’ Noman asked.
‘The coroner has released Tariq’s body to the family. They are planning to bury him today.’
‘They’ve got a nerve.’ Noman looked at his watch. If they left now the Range Rover could be in Lahore by early afternoon.
‘Let’s go,’ he said.
#
Less than four hours later, Noman strode into the house at the vanguard of a police raid. Inside they were preparing to carry Tariq’s corpse out, wrapped in a white cloth.
‘Stop that!’ Noman yelled. ‘Put the body down.’
The crowd of mourners outside had fled as soon as the patrol cars swooped so all that now remained were the reluctant pallbearers, Tariq’s elderly mother and his young widow. They knew who he was, of course. And they knew the risk they were taking in being seen in the traitor’s house: a gaggle of lawyers, doctors and other self-righteous scum shitting themselves. All except the widow, he could feel his radar pinging as she lifted her chin in defiance.
‘Let us pass,’ she said.
‘Rip the place apart,’ Noman said. Beside him Mahfouz barked an order and policemen wielding crowbars spread out across the building. They charged up the stairs and down the corridors. ‘Leave no stone unturned.’
‘I said let us pass!’
You had to admire the widow’s pluck. Her whole world had been turned upside down. Her husband and her in-laws had betrayed her. They hadn’t told her what they were up to. Now the family was disgraced with no one to protect them. She faced the prospect of losing her home.
Noman looked her up and down. She was a chikni beauty, curvaceous with lustrous black hair peeping out from beneath her headscarf. She’d been chewing her lips and they were puffed up but it only served to accentuate her beauty. It stirred his unruly cock just to look at her. She wouldn’t last long on her own on the streets of Lahore.
Behind her, her mother-in-law looked half-crazed with grief. She snarled: ‘You devil!’
The old woman had only just been let out of Kot Lakhpat Jail. Her husband, Tariq’s retired-barrister father, was still locked up and probably wouldn’t survive the experience. The last time Noman had seen the old woman was in a basement cell a couple of days ago. He’d almost felt sorry for her. Recent years had not been
prosperous ones for the middle-class in Pakistan. They faced a growing inability to purchase what they once could. All they had left, apart from their large houses and dwindling pensions, was their sense of entitlement, their disdain and envy. How quickly he had demolished that. He’d ripped her shalwar kameez open, scooped her meaty sixty-year-old breasts out of her bra and weighed them in his hands. ‘These teats have fed and nurtured a traitor,’ he’d told her. ‘You would have done better to have dashed his brains against a wall than given him your milk, witch.’
Now, two days later, he was standing in the hallway of their house in Gulberg, one of Lahore’s most prestigious addresses, with his chest puffed out and his cowboy boots spreading dirt all over their heirloom carpets.
‘Put him down or I will kill each and every one of you,’ he said.
‘This is unacceptable harassment,’ a pallbearer protested. He was a small quaking man with shiny shoes.
Noman sneered. ‘Are you taking the piss, panchod?’
‘Why are you trembling?’ The widow asked the pallbearer. ‘Are you scared? Of course you are. I don’t blame you.’ She returned her attention to Noman, ‘Get out of here you filthy blue-eyed devil and take your corrupt policemen with you. You could do what you like to him when he was alive. He’s dead now and beyond your reach.’
‘Put the body down!’ Noman yelled.
They put the body down on the floor.
‘Now get out.’ The pallbearers fled. He jabbed a finger at the widow. ‘Not you.’
The mother-in-law was more difficult to dislodge, he had to raise his hand to strike her. She scuttled away into the depths of the house where the police could be heard breaking up the furniture and knocking holes through the interior walls.
‘That will be all, Mahfouz.’
His deputy nodded and followed the old woman. Finally they were alone in the hallway.
‘I didn’t kill Tariq,’ Noman said. He softened his voice. ‘I did not kill your husband.’
