The Agent Runner

by Simon Conway

  After ten minutes Hakimullah stopped and said, ‘We are through the minefield.’

  The path climbed up out of the valley on a winding track between outcrops of rock, and they were shielded from view as the leading edge of the sun rose above the ridgeline behind them.

  At the top of the track they saw a herd of goats, their fur matted with mud, and beyond them the outline of buildings clinging precariously to the rocks and a twist of smoke in the frigid air.

  53. The code of life

  Ed lifted the shaking cup to his mouth. He was still shivering uncontrollably and it burned his chapped lips, but as the hot tea travelled down his throat and into his gut he could feel it warming him to the core.

  They were sitting huddled around an iron pan full of burning firewood in a hujra at the centre of the village. It was a squat building made out of boulders set in mud and the earth floor was covered in rushes of reeds. Large parts of the room were in shadow and, though it was difficult to be sure, Ed estimated that there were more than a dozen men of various ages spread out against the walls and in the corners.

  Leyla was on one side of him and Hakimullah on the other with the village headman facing them across the fire. He was related to Hakimullah by marriage and the two old men spoke with solemn familiarity while staring into the embers. On a rough-hewn shelf in the corner of the room there was a VHF radio and every now and then it crackled into life. Men from the local Taliban were searching the valley for them, calling out to each settlement in turn.

  ‘What happens now?’ Leyla whispered.

  ‘Hakimullah has invoked Pashtunwali,’ Ed replied in a low voice.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘He is asking for asylum,’ Ed explained. ‘He wants them to protect us against our enemies.’

  ‘Why should they?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s the code of life: courage, revenge, hospitality and generosity to the defeated. It’s always been this way.’

  ‘Are we the defeated?’

  ‘Not yet,’ he said with a weary smile. ‘These people are no friends to the Taliban. The headman is complaining that they come and steal their livestock. And they take young girls from the village in temporary marriages and discard them when they get tired of them. He says the girls are no use after that.’

  Leyla shook her head. ‘It’s so screwed up.’

  ‘Hakimullah is urging him to take a stand,’ Ed told her. ‘There’s a chance for us.’

  A man’s voice on the radio interrupted them. It was frighteningly loud.

  ‘They’re getting closer.’

  After another five minutes, the headman turned his attention to Ed. He had a wizened face the colour and texture of a walnut and his beard was completely white.

  ‘Will you fight?’ he asked.

  Ed nodded. ‘Yes.’

  The headman got up and reached up into the gloom amongst the rafters with his arthritic antler-like hands. He lifted down two Kalashnikovs, one after the other, and handed them to Hakimullah and Ed.

  ‘We will fight with you,’ he said.

  Ed pressed his good hand to his chest. ‘Thank you.’

  He heard the rustling of reeds as the men got up from the floor and the click-clack of working parts as they prepared their weapons.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Leyla demanded.

  ‘He’s agreed. Here, help me with this.’ He passed the rifle to her. ‘Pull on this.’ She used the heel of her palm to pull back the cocking lever and the first bullet fed into the chamber. He set the rifle down in his lap and reached into his belt for the Makarov.

  ‘Take this,’ he told her, giving her the pistol. ‘I want you to stay here. If they make it this far into the village it’s over for us.’

  She stared at it as if it terrified her. ‘What do you want me to do with it?’

  ‘They’re bad men, Leyla.’

  Her eyes were wide as saucers. ‘You’re scaring me.’

  ‘Don’t let yourself be taken alive.’

  Tenderly, he touched the side of her face and then drew her to him. They kissed tenderly.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I love you.’

  Using the gun as a crutch he climbed to his feet and followed the men out of the building and into the bright morning light.

  #

  Ed crouched in the stark shadow of a rock at the top of the trail, just outside the village. It was a bright morning without a cloud in the sky. Soon it would be ferociously hot. Hakimullah was somewhere close by and the other men of the village were spread out in the rocks around him.

  He was listening as hard as his concentration allowed. His arm was throbbing and he felt light-headed. His mouth was dry and he needed a drink of water. He wished that Leyla were beside him. He didn’t want to die alone.

  Somewhere up ahead he heard the soft slap of sandals and the patter of dislodged stones. A shape flitted between two rocks, a twist of turban in the morning breeze.

  He opened fire. Three round bursts.

  Someone nearby started firing as well. Then they stopped.

  A momentary hiatus: everyone conserving ammunition.

  He heard the sound, like a cork popping, of an RPG leaving its launcher. In a moment a ball of smoke and dust and shattered rock swelled up behind him. He was pattered with flying grit. Raising his head he caught a glimpse of one of the Taliban rolling across the trail.

  Ed surged upwards and around the rock with the rifle butt in his shoulder and the barrel rising into the path of the Taliban who was rising from the crouch that he’d landed in. Close enough to make eye contact, a stiff unwashed beard and kohl-rimmed eyes. Ed pulled the trigger. The Taliban’s body heaved.

  There was firing all around him. Another RPG warhead exploded amongst the rocks and another cloud of dust billowed. It was impossible to see the trail or the sky overhead. Ed struggled back up from cover to cover, pausing to fire at the Taliban coming up the trail. Behind a boulder he found one of the men from the village sitting down, trying to pick rock chips out of his flesh. He had an expression of intense concentration on his face.

  Ed thought he heard a helicopter. His first thought was that the Pakistanis must want him dead very much. He took the magazine from the villager’s rifle and reloaded his weapon, jamming it between his knees before slowly and painfully pulling the cocking handle.

  Then he heard a machine-gun firing, close by. He crawled to the edge of the boulder and risked a glimpse. The dust was beginning to clear. He saw movement on the trail and fired. He slumped back into cover. The injured villager had stopped moving. Ed didn’t have the strength to get himself back into the village. This was it, he realised, the ground where he would make his stand.

  He smiled. The Weald of Kent.

  June 1940. Churchill’s last stand: We will never surrender.

  He dried his trigger finger against his shirt and slipped it back into the guard. He was ready.

  The machine-gun opened up again, first near Ed, pummelling the rocks and shredding the dirt in a maelstrom of sparks and rock chips, and then, drifting towards the rising sun, it found the advancing Taliban – in an instant their bodies whipped like tattered flags in a high wind. Within a few seconds the assault was broken, the surviving fighters retreating down the trail.

  Ed let his rifle drop to his side. A large black man in combat fatigues emerged out of the smoke. He was wearing a helmet and carrying a rifle.

  Ed didn’t recognise him at first.

  ‘Jonah?’

  Jonah knelt beside him. ‘How are you doing?’ he asked.

  ‘Just fucking dandy,’ he managed.

  Jonah reached across him and felt for a pulse at the neck of the villager beside him. He shook his head and closed the man’s eyes.

  ‘Is she ok?’ Ed demanded. ‘Leyla, I mean, is she ok?’

  ‘She’s fine.’

  He felt a wave of relief.

  ‘Medic!’ shouted Jonah. ‘You’re the one that needs attention.’

  ‘How did you
know how to find us?’ Ed asked.

  ‘We were listening in on the Taliban. We knew you were out here somewhere. When they announced they were going to attack the village we knew it must be you.’

  ‘I thought you wanted me dead.’

  Jonah laughed.

  ‘It would have been tidier,’ he conceded, ‘but who wants tidy?’

  54. The finger of God

  ‘They make a desert, and call it peace.’

  Tacitus, Agricola

  Khan paid no attention to him at first, a boy pulling at his sleeve. The market was full of beggars. He was choosing mangoes for Mumayyaz.

  ‘Sir?

  Irritated, Khan turned on him, raising his cane to strike him. But something made him pause. The boy was small, dirty and barrel-chested with a narrow, pinched face and a glob of snot on the end of his nose. He was wearing a filthy black coat that was far too large for him. There was something strangely familiar about him. Khan had seen him somewhere before. An odd thought struck him: this was what Noman must have looked like, before the army fashioned him into a man.

  ‘Do I know you?’ Khan demanded.

  ‘Yes indeed sir,’ said the boy, politely.

  ‘How?’

  The boy opened his coat, revealing row upon row of shiny steel ball bearings like chain mail. Khan remembered him from dinner with the one-legged mullah on the banks of the Kabul River on the night before bin Laden was killed. The boy had sat just out of reach and watched them eat.

  ‘What do you want?’ Khan said, softly.

  ‘It is time.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Time for the death of Pharaoh.’

  Pharaoh? Was that how they saw him?

  ‘Now?’ Khan asked.

  The boy nodded, solemnly. His right index finger curled around the trigger switch. He began to recite from the Koran: ‘And the guilty behold the fire and know that they are about to fall therein, and they find no way of escape…’

  Khan realised that the boy was right. There was no point running, no point sounding the alarm. It would only start a stampede. Really, there was nothing to be done. Khan looked around him at the bustling market and the sights and smells assailed him, the crowded stalls with their chaotic ever-changing vibrancy and the warren of alleyways slipping away in all directions, the sacks of spices – saffron, turmeric, cumin and halved burls of nutmeg – the bolts of brightly-coloured cloth, the mottled stacks of fruit, the aroma of dust on the warm breeze and beneath it all the sly whiff of rotting fish. And everywhere people. He loved this place. This verdant valley. This teeming city. He imagined it moments from now as a slaughterhouse of legs and arms and torsos with glistening loops of entrails and a torrent of blood. It was depressing, really. He found that he had nothing to say. He knew he should be making peace with God but the truth was he did not believe in God. There was just this world and nothing beyond it.

  He would not wake up in Paradise.

  He looked down at the boy and saw that his face had become a mask. The boy’s eyes were shocking. They looked through him and beyond him to some place of pain and torture, to some inward hell that Khan would never experience and could not even imagine.

  ‘Go on,’ Khan said, closing his eyes. He realised that he’d wasted his final moments watching a child re-live his life when really he should have been reliving his own.

  The boy squeezed the trigger.

  Acknowledgements

  In the Acknowledgements to The Tailor of Panama, his 1996 homage to Graham Greene, Le Carré wrote: “After Greene’s our Man in Havana, the notion of an intelligence fabricator would not leave me alone.”

  The Agent Runner would not have been written without John Le Carré. In Kabul, during a snowstorm, I re-read The Spy who came in from the Cold, and the notion came to me (and would not leave me alone) of classic espionage tropes knocked about and re-worked in a contemporary setting - Moscow Rules in the Hindu Kush - with the Durand line as arbitrary a division as the Berlin Wall, and Pakistan’s shadowy Inter-Services Intelligence Agency as duplicitous a foe as the KGB.

  There was a fad around the time the Soviet Union collapsed to assert that the spy novel was similarly over. The enemy that emerged from the cauldron of Afghanistan over the next decade was too alien and asymmetric, and its adherents too unlike us, for it to be portrayed as a game of chess between equals. But a look behind them to who is working the levers reveals a much more familiar adversary. The ISI is an organisation born of the break up of Empire, run by a three-star general in a uniform that would not look out of place in our own Ministry of Defence.

  After more than a decade of questionable conflicts in the name of democracy modern scepticism of intervention by democratic powers is stronger than ever. We no longer accept the bold claims of governments and we have come to realise that dirty tactics often underlines the noble goals of democracy. There is a moral vacancy on both sides. In such circumstances, there is plenty of room for the morally compromised world of spy fiction.

  For the details of the Abbottabad raid I drew on Nicholas Schmidle’s article Getting Bin Laden in the New Yorker and for the valley at the edge of the world Sebastian Junger’s War. For some of the details of Ed Malik’s early life and upbringing I raided Ed Hussein’s The Islamist and Only Half of Me by Rageh Omar.

  For insight into what went wrong in Iraq and Afghanistan I can recommend: The Triple Agent by Joby Warrick, The Operators by Michael Hastings, Task Force Black by Mark Urban and Losing Small Wars by Frank Ledwidge. For their assistance on my various trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan I am very grateful to Dr Farid Homayoun and Raza Shah Khan as well as to Tim Porter, Chris Alexander and Hedvig Boserup.

  In seeking to understand how Pakistan works I was helped enormously by Anatol Lieven’s excellent Pakistan: A Hard Country.

  I must also acknowledge the influence of Mohsin Hamid’s novel Moth Smoke, which I read in Lahore in 2005 before I travelled to Peshawar and the tribal areas. Thanks for inspiring Nadifa’s story and the boxing lesson. Huge thanks also to the rapper Adil Omar for granting his permission to reproduce lyrics from Paki Rambo. He’s a brave young satirist in a country where violence is commonplace and comedy is dangerous.

  For the whiff of brimstone about Noman Butt I am indebted to Mailer, Roth and Stone and for the widow’s seduction Shakespeare’s Richard III.

  Thank you to my wife Sarah, my first and most diligent reader. I cannot thank you enough for your unwavering support and incisive advice. Also to Nick Sayers, Jane Rogerson and Phil Robertson for reading and commenting on early drafts. My gratitude to Mark Stanton who offered wise counsel at a time when it seemed like the book might never see the light of day and David Smith who stuck by me.

  Edinburgh, 2014