A Covert War

by Michael Parker

  Hudson should have been languishing in a police cell in America right now, awaiting charges of conspiracy, drugs and arms smuggling, and most other crimes that would send him to the electric chair, or at least many years on death row hoping he would beat the death penalty.

  Hudson must have seen him; it was the only explanation Cavendish could think of. He was attacked last night to stop him; nothing else. He knew then that his own life was in jeopardy if Hudson learned that he had not succumbed to the attack, but in fact was recovering in the Base hospital.

  He threw the covers from his bed and swung his legs round, sitting up at the same time. He was wearing a standard issue, hospital gown, which barely covered his backside as he stood up and went in search of his clothes.

  As he reached into the slim, tall locker beside his bed, he heard his mobile phone ringing and vibrating. He put his hands into the pocket of his trousers which were hanging up and pulled the phone out. A text message had come through from MI6 in London. The message had been sent in ‘clear’, so Cavendish read the actual letters that Susan had entered; there was no code.

  Five minutes later and Cavendish walked out of the Base hospital knowing that the next phase of the game had shifted; it had now become critical.

  ***

  Shortly after Cavendish had read the text message from Susan, the CIA liaison officer at Khost base punched in a selection of numbers on his desk phone. He only waited a few seconds when he heard the voice of Randolph Hudson on the line.

  ‘Sir, I have something I think you will want to see.’ He put the phone down without waiting for a reply. Five minutes later Randy Hudson walked into the liaison officer’s room.

  ‘We picked up a transmission,’ the young official told him. ‘It’s from somewhere in Afghanistan to MI6 in London. We listen in on their Mercury 6 satellite sir,’ he reminded Hudson. ‘The message wasn’t coded sir, transmitted in clear. Headquarters at Langley interpreted the message and sent an encrypted version here.’ He picked up a sheet of notepaper. ‘I’ve written the message down sir.’ He passed it to Hudson.

  The CIA man read the message nodded briefly and thanked the young CIA official. ‘Time to kick ass,’ he said, and left the room.

  ***

  Milan Janov was watching an Arab channel on the hotel room TV when the phone rang. It was Hudson. He told Janov that his informer, an interpreter who was paid by the CIA had told him where Abdul was heading. He passed the details on to Janov.

  Janov’s face broke out into a broad grin as he put the phone down. He switched the TV off and picked up his leather jacket from the foot of the bed. Then he went to the room next door to his and knocked gently on the door.

  ‘Rafiq, it’s me; Milan!’

  Maggot opened the door and let him in. Janov closed the door behind him.

  ‘I know where Abdul is going; north from here, about twenty miles.’

  Maggot looked surprised. ‘That was quick, Milan.’

  It should have come as no surprise to Maggot that Janov had picked the information up quickly; there were that many spies in Afghanistan and people in other people’s pockets that it was amazing that they didn’t publish daily bulletins in the local press concerning the whereabouts of people.

  ‘I’ll go and pick up a hire car now.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I’ll meet you down in the lobby in one hour.’

  ‘What about manpower?’

  Janov shook his head. ‘No extra men this time; just you and me. It’s better that way.’ He put his hand on Maggot’s shoulder. ‘We will make our way to Charika and then, after dark we go to where he is hiding and when they are sleeping, we will finish Abdul Khaliq and his friends.’

  ***

  Cavendish hurried over to Base Headquarters and called in at the Base Security office. He asked to see McCain. Cavendish hadn’t known the head of security very long, less than forty eight hours in fact; but he was about to put a lot of trust and faith in his own instincts and tell Lieutenant McCain the reason why he had paid an unexpected visit to Afghanistan.

  Brad McCain was a ruddy looking character, reaching his mid-forties and wearing well in the manner of many Americans in the armed forces. He hailed from Kentucky and had told Cavendish many yarns the previous evening about the county, the horses and the whiskey during their encounter. Cavendish had taken to him quite quickly.

  ‘Come in Sir Giles. Have a seat.’ McCain had risen from his chair and was pointing to the single chair facing his desk.

  Cavendish sat down. ‘Please call me Giles,’ he said. ‘It is so less formal.’

  McCain smiled and threw a wink at Cavendish. ‘Anything you say, Giles.’ He sat down. ‘Now, what can I do for you?’

  ‘Have you ever heard of The Chapter of Mercy?’ Cavendish began.

  McCain’s expression changed instantly. Gone was the ruddy, smiling, hail-fellow-well-met countenance, replaced by one of caution. He said nothing, just nodded his head.

  Cavendish tried to read something in the man’s face, but still had to go with his instincts. ‘They run a mission here in Afghanistan for deprived children. They also operate in Pakistan and India. They do terrific work for the underprivileged and deprived kids in those countries.’

  McCain picked up a paper knife and began tapping out a gentle tattoo on his desk top. He looked thoughtful for a while. Then he nodded and told Cavendish that he knew of The Chapter of Mercy.

  ‘And did you know that they smuggle drugs out of the country and into Europe?

  ‘I have heard the rumour,’ McCain admitted.

  ‘And did you know that they smuggle arms back into Afghanistan to keep the armed jihad going?’

  McCain’s eyes narrowed and a frown dived from his forehead into deep creases like furrows across his eyebrows.

  ‘Can you substantiate this?’ he asked.

  Cavendish shrugged and gestured with his hands. ‘Of course not, but how often have you, as a security man known facts that you couldn’t prove either because of lack of evidence or because you were under strict orders from your superiors to keep your mouth shut?’

  McCain nodded his head and a smile of recognition wandered across his face. He hunched forward, lifting his head slightly.

  ‘Why don’t you just come right out with it, Giles? Make it so much easier.’

  ‘Do you know Randy Hudson, CIA chief who was in England until a week ago? ‘ McCain tilted his head slightly and looked up as though he was trying to recall something lodged somewhere in his brain. He snapped his fingers and pointed at Cavendish with the paper knife.

  ‘Randy Hudson; flew in a couple of days ago. Yeah, that’s the guy. Why, what’s he done?’

  So Cavendish told him; as much as he dared. When he had finished, McCain whistled softly through his teeth. He got up from his desk, put the paper knife down and went over to a water cooler. He filled a plastic cup from it, holding it towards Cavendish as an offering. Cavendish shook his head.

  What’s your next question?’ he asked, lifting his jaw.

  ‘I think he had something to do with the attack on me last night,’ Cavendish told him. ‘I saw him coming out of this building with an officer in uniform. I want to know if they were with you and who the officer was.’

  McCain pushed himself away from the water cooler and went back to his desk. He tossed the empty cup into his waste basket and sat down.

  ‘I could tell you to go to hell,’ McCain told him.

  Cavendish agreed, and deep down he knew this would be the point at which his raison d’être would either fail or succeed.

  ‘But you won’t, will you?’ he put to McCain carefully.

  McCain shook his head and gave a short, snuffling laugh. ‘I hate those cocky bastards,’ he said with venom. ‘They act like they’re top guys; look down on us. Probably call us all grunts, I shouldn’t wonder.’ He wrung his hands together, working the knuckles into each palm.

  ‘What’s your call on this then, Sir Giles?’ he asked suddenly, forgetting Cavendish’s
suggestion that he dropped the formality. ‘You wanna get even with him because you got socked over the head?’

  Cavendish shook his head. ‘No. What I want to do is bring some signal traffic through your resources, and I don’t want any CIA officer looking in on it. I also want to know the names of any officers that Hudson might be real friendly with.’

  ‘The signal traffic’s not a problem; I can give you clearance on that effective immediately. But collecting names?’ He shook his head vigorously. ‘The C.O. would have my balls if he thought I was going round collecting names.’

  Cavendish put his hand up. ‘OK Lieutenant, sorry I asked.’

  McCain opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a folder. He extracted a small form from it and passed it across the desk to Cavendish.

  ‘Just jot your particulars on there. It will be needed for your clearance once I’ve signed it.’

  Cavendish took the form and filled in the blank spaces. Then he signed it and handed it back to McCain who countersigned it.

  ‘Give me one hour and I’ll take you over to the ops room; you can send your signal then.’

  Cavendish got up and shook McCain’s hand.

  ‘Thank you Lieutenant. One hour.’

  ‘By the way,’ McCain said to him as he was making his way to the door, ‘the guy who was with Hudson? His name is Berry. Lieutenant Chuck Berry; posted in recently. He was on transports, the Hercs, but he had a problem and had to be medically downgraded for a while, so he’s been assigned to the MQ-9 Reaper Flight. I’ll see you in one hour.’

  TWENTY ONE

  It was late afternoon as Abdul pulled off the main highway north of Charika and brought the Landcruiser rumbling down on to a dirt road. They were immediately surrounded in a cloud of dust as the wheels bit into the dry, sandy rock that had seen the passage of weather and traffic over many years and had crumbled beneath the onslaught. The hills rose up on either side of the road, but soon those on the east side began to lose their height against the mountains that were rising up in the west.

  The green valley they were driving into began to lose its colour as the light faded. Although they passed several dwellings, most of them looked unoccupied. Marcus wondered idly how much of that was to do with the war, and how much was to do with the locals going off in search of work in the towns and cities.

  Their journey up to Charika had been uneventful. It had taken them about five hours. There hadn’t been much talking; mainly small talk when they did open their mouths. From time to time they passed small convoys of army trucks and armed vehicles. Most of them were American. Occasionally they would see a British convoy, but because they were not travelling through the British Zone, they didn’t expect to come across many.

  Susan had been thinking of her brother more and more as the journey progressed. Abdul had assured her that her brother was alive and well, and would be released to her as soon as he had received instructions from the British when and where they could complete the handover ? providing the guarantees had been put in place.

  Marcus had asked Abdul why he could even contemplate leaving Afghanistan and seeking political asylum in England when he had such a powerbase in this country. Abdul had explained that he was under threat from what he called ‘discontents’ in his province, and that he believed his life was forfeit because of the increasing pressure from the American and British presence in Afghanistan.

  Abdul didn’t elaborate, but he did believe the Americans had been actively trying to kill him. And he also believed that Janov was jostling for position and had the Americans on his side. For Abdul that was too powerful an opposition; asylum in Britain was the only way out.

  Suddenly Abdul spun the wheel of the Landcruiser and it tilted over as he drove on to a rutted track. Susan clung to Marcus as the Landcruiser bucked and rolled over the uneven ground. After what seemed like an eternity to Susan and Marcus, Abdul pulled into a yard and up alongside a plain wall, about two metres high. The rudimentary brickwork could be plainly seen even in the half light.

  The dust swept past them in a cloud as Abdul stepped on the brakes and brought the Landcruiser to a halt. He killed the engine and got out of the car. Then he turned to Susan and Marcus and beckoned them to follow him.

  Susan now felt extremely nervous and excited. She knew she was about to see her brother, the man she believed long ago to be dead. And as she followed Abdul through the open gateway, she prayed that this would not be a false dawn for her or for David.

  There was a light burning inside the single storey dwelling. No sound could be heard save for the occasional sound of an animal somewhere behind the house. Abdul walked up to the front door and rattled his fist on it noisily, calling out something in Farsi.

  The door was opened almost immediately by one of Abdul’s lieutenants. They greeted each other warmly. Abdul’s man stepped back and let the three of them pass through the door. They then followed him in to a room which was sparsely furnished. Abdul asked Marcus and Susan to sit down. Marcus sat on an old, wooden chair, leaving the one remaining chair that had a cushion for Susan. She sat on it, rigid and bolt upright. Abdul left the room saying nothing. Two minutes later he returned with a stranger.

  The man was dressed in traditional dress; the pakol hat and chapan jacket over baggy pantaloons. He had a full beard that showed some grey. His eyebrows were dark and shaggy and seemed to merge with the deep furrows across his brow. Beneath those eyebrows were eyes of piercing blue, and just to the side of one eye was a scar that climbed up beneath the pakol hat.

  Susan rose slowly to her feet.

  ‘David?’ she said softly, the question in her voice showed her disbelief. ‘Is it really you?’

  He stepped forward and held his arms out wide. ‘Susan.’ He couldn’t get another word out because the tears burst from his eyes and his voice choked on his sobs.

  Susan ran across the room and threw herself at him, sobbing wildly. ‘David! David!’

  Marcus stood up. What he was witnessing, no- one would ever have believed possible. But he saw it with his own eyes; Susan and David reunited. What was it, he wondered had brought Susan this far, her own dogged perseverance? Chance encounters?

  He thought back to his office in Oliver’s Yard in London and the grubby letter she had with her. Now the writer of that horrifying passage was standing in front of them, alive and well. But not yet free.

  Susan stepped back from her brother’s embrace. She put her hand to his face and wiped his tears with her thumb, brushing them aside like a doting mother.

  ‘Oh David, what have they done to you?’

  He took hold of her hand and held on to it. ‘I never thought I would live to see this day.’ He looked over at Abdul. ‘He has looked after me well because I was worth something to him.’ He looked back at Susan. ‘Believe me, I’m fine. All I need is to get home to England and pick up my life again.’

  Abdul stepped forward and separated the two of them. ‘Time for talking later; now we must eat. Tomorrow I want to know what your government intends to do.’

  Susan felt a ripple of fear in her stomach. She had absolutely no authority whatsoever to negotiate David’s release on her government’s behalf, and she had no idea how Abdul would react to that.

  She looked at David and thought how dreadful it would be if she was unable to persuade Abdul to release her brother.

  Susan spent the next hour sick to the stomach. She tried to eat the food put before her, but her appetite had disappeared. David was in very high spirits, naturally and kept her and Marcus entertained, if that was the right word with details of his captivity. He never mentioned Shakira once.

  But one thing Susan did notice, despite her fretful condition, was that Marcus was unusually quiet. Whenever he responded to something David had said, it was monosyllabic. And when David told them something funny, she thought that Marcus’s laugh was affected. She knew how she herself felt, but had a suspicion that Marcus’s thoughts were not in the room but elsewhere. It was if he
was planning something, and that began to worry Susan intensely.

  After the evening meal, Abdul allowed Susan and David to spend a little more time together before taking him away and shackling him in a room somewhere. Then he returned and showed Marcus and Susan where they would be sleeping.

  ***

  Marcus couldn’t sleep; he daren’t sleep because of what he was planning. He knew that Susan would not be able to negotiate her brother’s release simply because she had sent a text message to Cavendish; no, it was much more involved than that.

  His best guess was that someone in the government would ask to meet Abdul on neutral ground, which was hardly likely in Afghanistan. Abdul would sense duplicity in that because that was the way governments played the rules. This would antagonise Abdul and he would more than likely take Susan and himself as hostages and use the three of them, David included, as bargaining chips.

  He thought about Cavendish and realised the man had sent them into the lion’s den deliberately and was probably relying on some inspiration from Marcus. Perhaps he thought that David would help, but then Cavendish had no idea how fit and strong his former agent was.

  The more he thought about it, the more Marcus realised that their lives were almost certainly forfeit unless he could think of something. And it was these thoughts that had been running through his mind the moment he had seen David. And the more he thought about what would probably happen, the angrier he became.

  He looked at his watch and could see from the luminous dial that it was almost four o’clock in the morning and soon the dawn light would begin to fill the house. Hopefully everybody in the house would be asleep, although he guessed that Abdul would have posted a guard. It surprised him that Abdul didn’t have a small army with him, but then if the Arab was expecting to be welcomed into the arms of the British Government, he probably would not have wanted his loyal band of thugs watching.

  Marcus got out of bed and walked on the balls of his feet to the door. He opened it carefully, surprised that it was not locked and peered out along the corridor that ran the length of the house. He saw a shadowy figure walking towards the short passage that led to the front doors of the house. Marcus had no idea who it was.