And then the sheikh began a short speech to which he’d given, the colonel reckoned, long thought.
“I don’t want to go into what happened to Jaz’s brother,” he began, “nor into my own ideas about my tribe’s future. But Jaz has vowed to avenge his brother’s death, as is his duty, and I too have responsibilities.”
Major Ali broke in, eyes closed: “Retaliation shall be taken on the slayer with a stone or in the same manner as he killed.”
Seeing a jug of water and some metal cups the colonel lifted himself off his haunches and began pouring.
“We cannot mount an attack like 9/11. I don’t have the resources. And anyway I don’t want these suicide attacks. It’s an Arab idea, not Baluch. But we can take revenge and strike a blow and create confusion. Amidst chaos we can protect ourselves. Make ourselves a low priority for those who would control us. That will be my legacy. I feared Pakistan was winning control of my people but 9/11 changed everything. Islamabad is on the back foot. The West too. 9/11 was the Chamakis’ salvation.”
He paused to indicate he was moving on to a fresh point.
“Most of the attacks on the US or the UK have made the most stupid, elementary mistakes. It’s all in the news reports. They have spoken on their phones and let the security agencies bug their homes. They have met in public places and been filmed on CCTV. In some cases,” he looked up with an astonished, exasperated air: “they have even filmed themselves. I have 10, maybe 20 years to live. After me my children will have to do as they see fit. But for me there is only one way. Let the big players fight all around us. And who knows, if we are quick on our feet we may even squeeze some money out of them as they come asking for our help.”
He ignored the colonel’s offer of a cup of water.
“The jihadis have achieved so little – sometimes giving up their lives in the process. I know we can do better. Major Ali here can help us do better.”
The colonel thought he could detect a trace of doubt in the major’s face.
“These are very ambitious plans,” the major said, “maybe too ambitious. After all even my old employers ...”
But the sheikh broke in. “Major, I am not the ISI. I don’t claim to have its strength. But all we need to do is avoid error. This we can do.”
Major Ali backed down: “Insha’Allah.” God willing.
“We can attack. We can provoke them to lash out. Look what that pious bore bin Laden did. First he got them into Afghanistan. And then Iraq. Who knows maybe they’ll hit Iran.”
“Insha’Allah,” again and then silence. There was no conversation. His audience was contemplating the scale of the task ahead of them.
Years later when the colonel reminisced about that evening in the tent he thought they had been alone because the sheikh had been worried about informers. But over time he came to a different view. After all, the sheikh at other times demonstrated total trust in all the people around him. No, the colonel eventually concluded, it had all been about atmosphere: creating ties and bonds to hold the group together. What the army would nowadays probably call team building. AKA leadership. In the tribal bones. No doubt about it.
*****
Mouthing an apology Natasha grabbed her bag of emergency nappies, left the sitting room where the women were drinking tea and wondered, not for the first time, when she would meet just one woman in Peshawar who wanted to talk about something more substantial than the failings of the local nursery schools. And then, as she started to undress Rosie in a washroom off the hallway, she overheard the remark. Just a few seconds of conversation. Two women were walking towards the front door.
“... she can’t come,” one said, “Ali has gone down to the Chamakis for something. Took off without a word.”
“I thought he was retired,” the other woman said.
The first again, in a mock-serious, deep voice. “The ISI never retire.” Their laughter trailed away as the women moved towards their drivers.
Natasha looked down at her daughter, raising her eyebrows as she grasped Rosie’s two ankles in one hand. “Come on my darling, stay still.”
*****
It was night and the heat of the day had given way to the chill of the desert deprived of sun. But as he lay on a quilt Jaz was sweating, restless. He was thinking about Major Ali. All his talk of Allah. Hundreds of images flicked through his mind.
He thought of his father, picturing him in the pose that had always stuck in his mind, before he left for the UK. He and Mahmud, not yet at school, were practising shooting by firing with an old British-era rifle at a mark they had made on the wall inside their compound. Their father looked on shouting pieces of advice as he sat cross-legged on the ground drinking a cup of tea.
He thought of Aysha and tried to work out what time it was in London. He wondered whether she’d ever agree to live in Baluchistan and tried to picture her in burqa. Perhaps he could go to Gaza. Apart from the fact that Palestinians lived there he knew nothing about the place and he wondered whether he’d be able to hide there. More chance of that than getting her to Baluchistan. An image of her filled his head and Jaz felt a light fluttering in his chest as his body was suffused with wistful melancholy. He couldn’t quite understand why but it wasn’t an unpleasant feeling: he almost enjoyed wallowing in her memory.
But most of all he thought of Mahmud. The brother he should have protected. The only person who really understood him: a sure unshakable bond in a world of shifting uncertainty. For the thousandth time Jaz shook his head admonishing himself for ever having gone to London leaving Mahmud behind alone. And hard on the heels of that thought came the inevitable sense of frustration and regret that had Mahmud lived just a few more months the two of them would have been safe in London together. Jaz thought of the night he’d raided the Rais and wished once again that he had actually seen some action that night to better prepare him for whatever the sheikh was planning. But he also thought of his neighbour killing the boy and later his daughter so as to protect his honour. No one ever said a good life was an easy one.
He pictured himself with a grenade at an army checkpoint in Baluchistan and on his feet in front of a congregation at a mosque in London denouncing the Western occupation of Muslim lands. And then, time and time again, sitting in front of a bank of lights and switches at the controls of a 747 paralysed. Each time he reached for the joystick he woke, heart pounding. He couldn’t do that, he thought, but would he be asked to? As he tossed and turned, the sheets stuck to his clammy skin and his thoughts dwelt on Mahmud. “Tak, tak, tak ...” his brother smiled and drilled into Jaz’s deepest recesses. “Tak, tak, tak ...”
Jaz wondered if he would ever be able to sleep soundly again. And he knew revenge offered the only release.
*****
Major Ali started with how to make a bomb.
He had already deployed one of the sheikh’s many sons – who had happily accepted the commission – to fly down to Karachi with a shopping list. As he was driven around the city by one of his father’s drivers the boy tried to figure out what it was all about, but it was beyond him. So muttering to the shopkeepers about how he was helping out his mother, he criss-crossed Karachi working through the list:
200 litres of hair bleach
40 cans of 100% pure acetone paint thinner
20 bottles of drain cleaner
30 bottles of nail polish remover
50 vibrating alarm clocks
50 plastic buckets
10 yards of copper wire
10 small tubes of epoxy glue
20 car batteries
40 bags of chapatti flour
Back at the fort, the sheikh had a generator, a deep freeze and an electric cooker moved into an outbuilding, placed a couple of guards at the door and left Major Ali and Jaz to their own devices.
“Bismillahi ar rahman ar rahim” the major whispered so as to command attention and imbue the moment with significance. “We are going to start,” declared Major Ali, “with the easy bit. The bomb.”
And
in front of Jaz’s eyes the major transformed himself into a chemist or perhaps a cook.
“At my old employers,” it was his standard phrase for the ISI, “we made people do this blindfolded. Bleach and flour. Simple as that. All you have to worry about is the concentration, the amounts and the temperature.”
And Jaz tried it. Time after time. Mixing, pouring, cooling, heating, boiling, stirring. First with Major Ali watching and then alone.
“Car batteries have sulphuric acid of about 40% purity and it will work,” the major explained. “But drain cleaner is over 90%. If you can find it, use it. Or you can mix the two.”
Several times each day the guards saw the two men emerge from the room coughing and gasping for air. Two shrubs in pots either side of the door started to shrivel and whither, unable to withstand the noxious fumes escaping through the door.
At Major Ali’s insistence, Jaz wrote down what precisely he had done each time. How many litres of bleach? Cooled in ice cubes for how long? Mixed with how much flour? Heated to what temperature? How much remained?
By the end of a week he had a chronic headache from the fumes and five different mixes. On Major Ali’s instruction he ladled them into buckets, and after waiting for the substance to cool, pressed down on the surface to remove any air bubbles.
While Jaz had been working, Major Ali had been busy too, preparing some detonators. “Insha’Allah, I’ll show you how to do these later. Some with paint thinner and others with nail polish remover. Just now, trust me. You will be able to make these.” And then looking outside through the outbuilding door, “Let’s see how you got on.”
They asked one of the guards to find the colonel, fetch a Land Cruiser and to load it with the buckets. With the sun setting and the cool of the night causing Major Ali to shiver, they headed out into the desert, well away from the fort. It took just 25 minutes to set it all up. And then lying on the ground behind a bank of sand, wire snaking to the bombs, Jaz set off the detonators one by one, looking up each time to see the result. One failed to explode, one let out a pop and then hissed feebly and three went off: bright orange flames leaping into the darkening sky.
Jaz stood, his muscles tight and his frame silhouetted against the orange light.
The colonel saw the young man’s broad smile and walked towards him, signalling to the major that he should stay back and lifting his forearm to his eyes to protect them from the heat of the flames.
“Ever heard of the devil’s advocate?”
“Don’t think so!” Jaz replied, his reserve for once forgotten.
“Well I am going to play it.”
Unsure what to do Jaz mirrored the colonel’s movements until they were both sat cross-legged on the cold sand.
“This may be bigger than you understand Jaz, Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Of course.”
Jaz went on: “No, I mean do I have a choice? You saw what those Americans did.”
“Maybe it’s not your fight.”
“Then whose? Uncle, if your brother had been shot in cold blood and his finger cut off, what would you do? Or your wife? Play golf?” He picked a small stone and tossed it away. “I don’t know what I can do. But I cannot do nothing. I have a chance here. And I am going to take it, whatever you say.”
The colonel looked at the ground. “I won’t stop you. How can I? But you must be sure.”
“Is he al Qaeda?” Jaz asked looking at the major.
“No, not al Qaeda. Just ISI. He’s not a fanatic. It’s just habit.”
The next morning Major Ali and Jaz went through the notes. Then back to the electric cooker to do it again. And again.
By the end of the third week Jaz could make a bomb. A big bang, every time. Some he filled with nails. Others he put in metal tins, glass bottles and plastic containers. The major told him to make up 10 more and to leave them outside, five in direct sunlight and five under a tarpaulin.
“Now, the detonator.”
“Right,” Jaz was enjoying himself. He was doing something. It felt good.
“This is trickier,” Major Ali warned.
Trickier but much the same process, this time with hair bleach, nail varnish and sulphuric acid from the car batteries. They experimented with paint thinner and then nail polish to see which worked best. Jaz boiled and cooled; mixed and poured; coughed and wheezed, Major Ali watching over his shoulder, encouraging and urging him on. Once the substance was made Major Ali showed Jaz how to dry it and make it cooler so that it would be more stable. Then they pressed the resultant white crystals into a small pipe, one end blocked off with layer upon layer of hardened superglue. Next the triggering mechanism from copper wires, batteries and alarm clocks. Clocks that would vibrate and connect the battery to the wire, which would send a charge to the detonator, which would initiate the explosion.
By the end of another week, Jaz could not only make a bomb but he could set it to go off at any time he liked.
Major Ali told him to gather the 10 extra bombs he had left outside at the end of the third week. “Think about the effects of time and of temperature,” he said. “The hotter it is the more quickly it deteriorates. And the longer you leave it, the more volatile it gets. They call it the Mother of Satan for a reason Jaz; so often, it destroys its creator.” And then they went to the desert and blew them up and observed the difference between the ones that had been in the sun and those that he had stored in the shade under the tarpaulin.
Later Major Ali held up one of the detonators they had made. “To be trusted for one week only.” And then they made some more which they would leave for a week and others for two weeks so that Jaz could not just hear what Major Ali was saying but see that he was right.
Chapter Six
“You have the watches but we have the time.” -- Modern Afghan saying
17:15, 25th November, Peshawar
ULTRA
TO: DEPSASIALDN;HOSISLM;HOSDEL
FROM: HOMPESH
1715GMT2511210
THYR
RE: Folk music
I will be leaving 26 – twenty six – November for Dera Chamak. Chamaki folk music, combining influences from both sides of the Pakistan and Iranian border, is unique and, needless to say, suffering from the onward march of Bollywood. If I can find a suitable group, the British Council might want to sponsor a UK tour. Will return 28 – twenty eight −Nov. ENDS
In his office overlooking the Thames, Roger Keane’s ample buttocks slipped an inch on the surface of his mock leather chair. He raised his eyes to the heavens. “Baluch folk music.” And then an awful thought occurred to him: she doesn’t take her bloody baby with her does she? He didn’t want to think about it and jabbing his pudgy fingers at the keyboard entered his PIN and signed the memo off by putting an ‘x’ in a box marked “approved”.
*****
“How is he doing?”
It was 10 at night and with the colonel and Jaz in their rooms, the sheikh had gently knocked on Major Ali’s door and let himself in. The major, who had been lying propped up on his bed making notes, swung his legs to the floor and stood in his socks, fighting the urge to put his shoes on.
“Allah has been kind,” he said with a rather self-satisfied smile suggesting that Jaz’s progress was in fact also the result of his own contribution.
“Quiet, though.”
“Better that than a chatter box.”
“True,” agreed the sheikh moving towards the door: “and I think he is growing in confidence. He needs that. Self-reliance. I am thinking of sending him to the desert.”
The major did not respond.
“Well, if you require anything ...”
“We need a computer expert. And we need another room away from the bomb factory. We’ll need to go back there, Insha’Allah, from time to time,” he said: “to keep him up to speed. But we need somewhere we can talk and make notes.”
And as quietly as he had arrived, the sheikh left.
/> ******
The next morning the sheikh showed Major Ali the highest room in the main part of the fort. At one end was a large window edged with deep blue glass. The wall opposite was covered in wooden recesses. Each one was about 30 cm square and contained stuffed birds, dusty, tatty and neglected. “The folly of youth,” the sheikh mused as he showed them in. “All my own kills.”
And after he had gone, lesson number two. Personal protection. Major Ali was enjoying himself now, trying to impress his pupil. Showing off his expertise.
“As you drive your minicab from Waterloo to the Pakistani High Commission in Lowndes Square, who is gathering information on you?” he asked.
“My neighbours as they see me leave,” Jaz hesitated, “anyone I talk to on the phone.” He looked up for approval. “And the speed cameras,” he added.
Major Ali shook his head, delighted to puncture Jaz’s ignorance.
“CCTV. For over 75 per cent of your journey you will be filmed. There are cameras on the streetlights, on the shop fronts, in the traffic lights. Everywhere. Simply, you can never avoid it.”
“Yeah. CCTV. I know”
“ANPR.” Major Ali shot back.
Before Jaz could respond Major Ali opened a brief case and produced a pen and paper. He drew out a British number plate explaining as he did so what the letters and numbers revealed about where the car and been sold and when.
“That’s what the police used to have,” he expounded. “They could look at a number plate and see what part of the country – which county - it came from and which year it was first sold in. But now ...”
He put another sheet of paper on a table and stroked it with his hand to iron out any creases. Jaz watched as Major Ali wrote out some words in capitals.
NAME. ADDRESS. POLICE RECORD. INSURANCE. MOT. TAX.
“They can have all that within 40 seconds,” Major Ali said. “Automatic number plate recognition. ANPR. They are installing it all over London and in other cities too.”
“But I don’t have a police record. And my tax and everything is fine. So, no problem.”
TARGET BRITAIN: a political thriller Page 9
