The Alexandria Connection

by Adrian D'hagé

  The twin V8 Chrysler engines throbbed into life and the boatman eased into the seemingly impossible traffic that plied Venice’s canals. Cream and green vaporetti, the ferries that formed the mainstay of the Venetian transport system, fought for right of way among water taxis and lighters, barges and gondolas, and the boatman throttled back to allow a vaporetto dell’arte to pass. More comfortable than the normal vaporetti, the vaporetto dell’arte carried tourists from Ferrovia at the Santa Lucia train station, down the grand canal to San Marco Piazza and the Giardini jetty, allowing them to visit the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, La Fenice Opera Theatre, the Doge’s Palace and a host of other museums and galleries.

  The speedboat surged toward the western industrial end of the canal, leaving behind centuries-old buildings that boasted a rich compendium of Byzantine, Ottoman, Phoenician, Renaissance and Baroque architecture, alongside the Venetian Gothic style and the ubiquitous lancet arch of the elegant palazzi lining the canal. The boat passed under the rail bridge and the Ponte Della Libertà, the bridge opened by Benito Mussolini in 1933 to provide road access from the mainland, but that traffic was restricted to the western edge of the city. No cars were allowed in the centre of Venice itself. The boatman glanced around. The familiar blue and white polizia boats of the Venice water police were nowhere in sight. He ignored the 20 km/h limits for the Leguna Veneta, and opened the throttles. The superbly maintained engines roared into life and Crowley’s silvery-grey locks streamed in the wind as the boat planed to 50 knots, powering north toward Venice’s Marco Polo airport where Crowley’s private jet, a long range Gulfstream G550, was waiting to take him to Corsica.

  Crowley stared unseeingly across the lagoon, the boat’s deep leather seats cushioning his ride. His thoughts turned to the Rhind Papyrus and its companion, the Euclid Papyrus. Unbeknown to the Jewish art dealer, Crowley had already acquired a priceless fragment of the Euclid Papyrus from an even less reputable dealer in one of the souks in Cairo. A competent Egyptologist in his own right, Crowley had been able to decipher some of the hieroglyphics, and it had been enough to send a chill down his spine.

  The Euclid Papyrus purported to contain details of the real reason behind the construction of the pyramids. But Crowley only had a fragment, and some of it had been encoded. The Greeks and the Romans, Crowley knew, were the first to employ encryption aggressively, but the Egyptians and Mesopotamians had also used codes. A Babylonian tablet, dating as far back as 2500 BC, contained words from which the first consonant had been deleted. Most of the ancient codes, by today’s standards of encryption, were relatively simple, but the Euclid fragment had stubbornly refused to yield its secret, one that had the potential to threaten Crowley’s vast fossil-fuel, forest and arms empire. The need to decrypt the fragment was now urgent, he reflected, and the recovery of the rest of the papyrus even more urgent. But if Rubinstein was right, O’Connor and Weizman might lead him to it.

  Crowley extracted a ‘clean’ mobile phone from his soft leather attaché case. He typed in a short text and sent it to General Khan. Short or not, it was a text he would come to regret.

  5 Peshawar, Pakistan

  When General Khan’s driver pulled up outside the safe house in Peshawar, the young, slightly built Taliban field commander, Tayeb Jamal, was waiting for him, sitting in the back seat of one of the Taliban’s ubiquitous Toyota pick-ups. Two more Taliban warriors sat in the open tray behind, ready to tear the tarpaulin off their heavy anti-aircraft machine gun. Jamal’s driver gave the signal for the convoy of six trucks behind to start their engines.

  Khan knew well the risks he was about to take. The Taliban and al Qaeda were unlikely bedfellows, but when it suited their purpose, they would work together. Khan fully intended to harness that synergy to attack the West, with the ultimate aim of imposing Sharia law.

  Khan had been born in Karachi into one of the wealthiest families in Pakistan, and he could trace his lineage back to the Pashtun tribal areas that straddled the modern border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, marked by the old British colonial Durand Line. British colonialism was just one of many issues that fuelled Khan’s anger. The British, he reflected, with their ‘big hands on little maps’ approach to the world, had a habit of drawing borders along ridge lines and rivers, because they were easier to identify on the ground, and the Durand Line was no exception. Named after Mortimer Durand, foreign secretary for nineteenth-century British India, well before Pakistan came into existence in 1947, the line had been put in place in 1893. After the British withdrew from Afghanistan after the second Anglo Afghan war, the Durand Line served to define the spheres of influence between the British and the Emir of Afghanistan, Abdur Rahman Khan. But the line ran straight through Pashtun tribal areas, splitting villages and towns. Further south, it split the Baluchistan area, similarly dividing the ethnic Baluch on both sides. What had become the border between Afghanistan and India, and later Pakistan, might appear on international maps, Khan thought, but he and his Pashtun tribesmen would never recognise it.

  Where the meddling British had left off, the United States had stepped in. Just after 9/11, the Afghan Taliban had sheltered al Qaeda terrorists in caves in the soaring snow-capped mountains of the Hindu Kush, and the Pakistani Taliban had similarly provided shelter on the Pakistan side of the border, in the notorious Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Washington had pressured the president of Pakistan to either join the US in the hunt for Bin Laden and al Qaeda, or face the consequences. ‘You are either with us, or against us,’ President Bush had demanded. No one in the world would be allowed to remain neutral.

  The United States had also demanded a crack down on the Islamists inside the ISI Agency, insisting that ‘the beards’ be weeded out. Khan and many other Pakistani generals in both the Army and the powerful ISI had watched aghast as their government had kowtowed to a United States who supported Pakistan’s arch-enemy, India. The Pakistani president had started at the top, sacking Khan for ‘being too Islamic’. Ever since he’d been awarded the sword of honour for graduating at the top of his class at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, Khan had harboured a burning desire to assume the top job as chief of staff of the Pakistan Army. But with his career now in tatters, and the mask of Tutankhamun on offer, the risks of crossing into Afghanistan to harness the Taliban and al Qaeda would be worth it.

  ‘It’s market day here in Peshawar, but we should be across the border in an hour, insha’Allah, God willing,’ said Jamal, as the driver approached the centre of the city and slowed for a herd of goats blocking the road. Tayeb Jamal was one of a number of rising young Taliban field commanders who had appeared on the scene since 9/11. The US drone strikes over Afghanistan and Pakistan had been increasingly successful, and many of the older Taliban commanders, who might have been willing to negotiate peace, had been killed. Their places had been taken by a new breed of fanatical young Islamists whose only education had been gained at the hands of hardline clerics in the Madrassas, the Islamic religious schools that had proliferated in the border area.

  ‘You have the Khyber covered?’ queried Khan. At its narrowest point, still short of the border, the ancient pass was only two hundred metres wide.

  Jamal smiled, cradling his AK-47 in his lap. He was wearing the traditional Afghan shalwar kameez – loose baggy brown trousers covered by a three-quarter tunic. His face was almost covered by a black shemagh, the customary Afghan scarf favoured by Taliban fighters. ‘As much as the Infidel likes to think he has subdued this area of Pakistan and Afghanistan, General, nothing moves across the border without my men observing it. We should be in Jalalabad before midday, and once it’s dark, we’ll turn north toward Asadabad and the Hindu Kush.’

  The convoy slowed as it moved down the Grand Trunk Road running through the middle of Peshawar. Young men on motorcycles fought for road space with the tuk-tuks, the three-wheeled motorised rickshaws that were weaving around herds of goats and brightly coloured buses belching thick, black diesel fumes. Pitifully thin donkeys
pulled tongas, two-wheeled flat bed carts running on rubber car tyres, piled high with carpets, vegetables, freshly baked bread and live chickens. The lanes and alleys running off the trunk road into the old city, with its narrow wooden-shuttered buildings, were even more crowded. In the nineteenth century, the Kissa Khawana bazaar, the ‘street of the storytellers’, was famous for its Kawa Khana – tea shops festooned with tea cups, teapots and brass samovars – the big ornate charcoal-burning pots used to heat water. Here, professional storytellers would regale tea drinkers with poetry and prose. Then, as now, Pakistanis mingled with Afghans, Tajiks, Uzbeks and Iraqis, and the Taliban mingled with all of them; moving unnoticed among the barrows piled with pyramids of fruit, and coal braziers where chickens were already roasting, the whole permeated by an aroma of cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, mango powder, turmeric and myriad other spices. Sounds of gunfire rent the morning as gunsmiths tested their dubious homemade weapons.

  ‘The shura is scheduled for tomorrow night.’ The centuries-old assembly of village elders was a Pashtun tribal consultation for settling important village and tribal issues, one that had been in place for as long as the different tribes had been warring among one another in the harsh and unforgiving landscapes of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

  ‘And the Americans?’

  Jamal grinned beneath the scarf covering his face. ‘The Infidel will never learn . . . he had to pull out of Vietnam in the seventies, he was forced out of Lebanon in the eighties and he had to leave Somalia in the nineties, and before too much longer, he will be out of Afghanistan. Time is on our side, General. In the Korengal Valley, he’s in the process of handing over Fire Base Phoenix, which was manned by his airborne 503rd Infantry, and he’s long since closed the southern Korengal outpost further down the valley. The only other base in that area is well to the north near the Pakistan border. But you needn’t worry, there isn’t a unit in the Afghan Army where we don’t have informers. Once we get to the Pech River, we’ll split the loads onto mules. There are six different destinations, but he may be watching Korengal, so we’ll approach through the valleys to the east. Provided the current deployments don’t change, we’ll be able to avoid his ground forces. The Infidel’s drones are another matter though,’ Jamal added ruefully.

  ‘There is a safe place to wait in Jalalabad?’

  ‘My cousin’s timber yard. We can park the trucks there until nightfall, and then we’ll head into the mountains under cover of darkness.’

  ‘What view is the shura likely to take?’

  Jamal shrugged. ‘Mullah Akbar and some of the other tribal elders are old school. They still think it’s possible to reach a peace agreement with Kabul and the Infidel.’ Mullah Mohammed Akbar was one of the Taliban’s senior leaders, second only to the spiritual leader of the Taliban, Mullah Omar, on US intelligence agencies’ ‘most wanted’ lists. ‘But the president and his cronies in Kabul are corrupt, established and propped up by the Kafirs, the unbelievers in the West. My generation is gaining the upper hand, and it doesn’t matter what the elders think, we will never agree to a government that violates the laws of Islam!’ Jamal spat out of the window of the Toyota. ‘After the shura, I will introduce you to Omar Yousef. Perhaps you have heard of him?’

  General Khan nodded. ‘The Americans have a file on him.’

  ‘Then you will know that Yousef is one of al Qaeda’s up and coming commanders. He is young, but already a veteran . . . someone in the mould of Osama bin Laden, Allah Yarhamak, may Allah have mercy on him. Yousef will not be afraid to strike the West.’

  The convoy reached the university campus on the outskirts of the city, where the Grand Trunk Road became Route N5, the dusty highway that led west to Afghanistan. Khan scanned the mountains near the border.

  Twenty-five thousand feet above them, a predator drone circled over the convoy. The pilots were flying it from a remote cockpit 11 000 kilometres away at Creech Air Force Base in the Nevada desert, 80 kilometres north of Las Vegas. Hour by hour, the pilots focused the drone’s cameras on the Toyota and the trucks.

  A short while later, the convoy began its ascent toward the ancient Khyber Pass, for centuries a critical choke point in the Silk Road. The Persians, the Greeks and Alexander the Great, and more recently the British armies had all passed through there from Afghanistan, on their way to the Indus River in what had then been India. The broken, arid foothills of the Safid Kuh mountains rose sharply, and the convoy ground its way up to Ali Masjid Fort, named after the prophet Mohammed’s cousin Ali, and built by the British in the nineteenth century atop a rocky outcrop at the narrowest point in the pass. A mirror flashed and Jamal leaned from the cab with his own mirror and returned the signal. ‘The Infidel can’t intercept these signals,’ he said. ‘Sometimes the simplest means are the best.’

  Khan continued to scan the surrounding hills. Steep precipitous cliffs of shale and limestone soared above the pass. Here it was barely two hundred metres wide. The road, still on the Pakistan side of the border, wound up to Landi Kotal Fort which, at over 3500 feet, was the highest point in the pass. Beyond the pass lay the town of Towr Kham, and the border with Afghanistan.

  The pilots and intelligence analysts at Creech Air Force Base watched the convoy’s progress with interest.

  Darkness cloaked the tall, straight cedars and pine trees on the soaring massifs of the Hindu Kush. Laniyal, a small village of stone huts, sat halfway up a mountain – part of the range overlooking the Korengal Valley. The higher peaks were covered in snow, and the fires from a dozen other villages flickered in the distance on the mountains to the west and south. It was here that the village elders had gathered for the shura. A dozen younger Taliban warriors stood quietly, away from the light of the fire, faces hidden behind their black shemaghs, ubiquitous Soviet Kalashnikov AK-47s and RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade launchers slung over their shoulders.

  On the granite outcrops above the valley, more Taliban fighters protected the approaches through the mountains, and they scanned the dirt road running alongside the river below, their infrared night-vision goggles acquired courtesy of the US Army. It was not the first time US high tech equipment had found its way into the hands of the enemy. Over three hundred Stinger missiles, each capable of bringing down an airliner, had gone missing when the US supplied the freedom fighters, the Mujahideen and Osama bin Laden in their fight against the Soviets in the eighties. Now hundreds of the high-tech goggles originally purchased for the Afghan army and police were in the hands of the Taliban.

  Hakim Babar, the village headman, began by acknowledging the presence of Mullah Akbar, the Taliban’s powerful shadow governor for Eastern Nangarhar Province, before opening the shura for discussion. ‘There is only one item on the agenda tonight, and that’s to reach a decision on whether we join the peace talks, or continue the fight. De Pakhtu lar ba neesa . . . we will be looking at this from the perspective of the Pashtun. The Americans and President Karzai are proposing talks that will lead to a power-sharing arrangement between the Taliban and the current government in Kabul. The alternative is to continue the fight and widen cooperation with al Qaeda.’

  One by one, the village elders put their views.

  ‘The Americans are pulling out,’ one ventured, stroking his straggly white beard. ‘We can consolidate our gains here in Kunar Province and wait them out.’

  ‘And the same can be said for the south in Helmand and Kandahar,’ another agreed.

  ‘But the government in Kabul is not to be trusted,’ warned a third. He was one of the few who had been educated past elementary school and capable of reading English. ‘We are one of the poorest countries in the world,’ he said, ‘yet the banks in Kabul lend millions to their cronies so they can invest in expensive villas overseas . . . like the islands off Jumeirah in Dubai.’

  ‘And we are not being true to the Prophet, peace be upon him,’ Tayeb Jamal interjected, no longer able to contain his frustration. ‘We, the Taliban, have a delegation in Doha in Qatar, waiting to make peace
with the Americans and the Kabul government. They’ve been there for years, and what do we have to show for it? They’ve done nothing but live in air conditioned villas and drive around in luxury cars, while we’re out here on the ground doing the fighting for them,’ he continued angrily. ‘A peace process has to be on our terms . . . and the people in Kabul need reminding of that, and of the Prophet’s teaching, peace be upon him. A government in Afghanistan has to be true to Islam and ensure that Sharia is obeyed.’

  ‘And if the Infidel won’t recognise our rights, then we should join with our al Qaeda brothers, and start attacking him again on his own soil,’ said another.

  Sitting in the shadows, General Khan listened intently, quietly nodding in agreement.

  Mullah Akbar had remained silent during the fiery speeches, but now he intervened. ‘Our delegation in Doha has already agreed not to launch any offensives outside of Afghanistan. We have some things in common with our al Qaeda brothers, but they are focused against the West. Our focus is here, in Afghanistan,’ he warned.

  ‘All the more reason we should support them.’ Jamal’s response was respectful, but his dark eyes were blazing. ‘The Infidel continues to kill our women and our children with his drone strikes . . . here and across the border in Pakistan. His soldiers have killed dozens of our villagers in this valley alone, and he thinks nothing of taking our livestock. The drone strikes will not stop until we bring him to his knees with another 9/11.’ Jamal’s fiery interjection was greeted with a chorus of agreement from the younger fighters.

  At the conclusion of the shura, Mullah Akbar and General Khan retired with Hakim Babar to the latter’s stone hut on the edge of the village clearing. They sat on the worn carpets, and waited until the women had served them with tea and a platter of raisins and almonds.