by Jason Elliot
Mr Raouf gives H and me a tour of the trust’s new facility in Wazir, then drives us to a training area on a hillside in the east of the city, where his men are learning to detect mines. We have lunch in his office, where the shelves are lined with a slightly macabre collection of deactivated anti-personnel mines.
‘In a few days,’ I tell him, ‘I need to drive to a place in the south-west of the country. I need a few reliable men who can help me and who will not talk about what they have done.’
‘Dorost. Right. They will be at your service,’ he says without hesitating. ‘What will you do in this place?’
‘I will make a big explosion.’
A smile spreads slowly over his face, and he strokes his beard as he nods admiringly at us both.
‘I am proud to help you,’ he says. ‘Especially for an explosion.’
To confirm that I will make it worth his while would be to offend him, so I don’t.
‘Your men will be generously rewarded,’ I say.
There’s a knock at the door and one of his staff announces that the men are ready for their afternoon game of soccer, but that they’re short of two men. Mr Raouf looks at us with a questioning twinkle in his eye, and we’re too surprised to refuse. I am lent a pair of boots several sizes too small, and hobble to the pitch outside. It’s a grassless stretch of land that’s as rough and hard as bulldozed rubble. The air is so thin I can’t seem to suck enough of it into my lungs. And since the Afghan body is made out of a substance harder and more durable than ordinary flesh and bone, when our shins and arms make contact with our opponents, H and I agree that it’s as if we’ve been hit with wooden bats.
We haven’t had so much fun for ages.
The mornings are quiet and cool, and on the balcony we soak up the rays of the sun like lizards. There’s little to suggest that the country is a place torn apart by conflict. The occasional rumble of artillery far to the north can be easily mistaken for distant thunder, and the sound of AK-47 fire on the outskirts of the city is indistinguishable from that of a horse trotting on tarmac, carried from afar on an uneven wind.
H busies himself with the equipment we’ll need for the overland journey, with which Mr Raouf has agreed to help us. We also receive a message from London to tell us that the special items we’ve requested are ready to be picked up. The friendly embassy is one of the few that has not been abandoned, and lies in the centre of town. We are given two large black nylon bags, which we take back home and unpack on the floor of a locked bedroom. It feels like Christmas, and we lift out the layers of supplies with the thrill of children who’ve never had presents before.
Uppermost are several maps of Afghanistan printed on silk, of the kind usually issued to special forces. They can be easily concealed without being damaged by crumpling up into a ball, and it doesn’t matter if they get wet because they can still be read and will dry in the open air within a few minutes. There’s a pair of two-way radios with chargers and adaptors for use in vehicles. There’s a modified weapons sight called a Kite which looks like a stubby telescope and will allow us to see in near-total darkness, and a second telephone which like my own switches to satellite frequencies when there’s no cellular signal. There’s a fifty-metre length of black nylon climbing rope, which I idly presume is for H in case he needs to abseil through any embassy windows. There are also two quick-draw plastic holsters and the pair of Brownings that H has been secretly dreaming of, together with several hundred rounds of 9-millimetre ammunition.
‘It’s like an Andy McFuck novel,’ says H with a grin, removing the magazine from one of the pistols and peering along the sights. ‘Not very deniable, though.’
I reach into the bag to see what’s left. In another moulded plastic carrying case there’s a Trimpack military GPS receiver and a metal mounting bracket for use in a vehicle. It’s not new and has seen a few years’ service, though God knows where. Then I find what looks like a man’s black leather belt, which is so unexpectedly heavy I need two hands to pull it free.
‘Feels like it’s full of gold,’ I joke.
‘It is full of gold,’ says H. He takes the belt and pulls open a long zip on the inside face, revealing a line of twenty solid gold sovereigns nestling in a waterproof sleeve. I don’t know the exact value of a sovereign, but each one must be worth several hundred dollars, so there’s roughly ten thousand dollars’ worth of gold in a belt. There are two. ‘Should get us a few kebabs,’ he says.
We hide the equipment in the roof space of the house and I mark it with the ultraviolet pen. Reminded of its usefulness, and as a further precaution, I also mark the handles on our bedroom doors. Even the tiniest variation in their position will be detectable, and tell us if our rooms have been visited in our absence.
The biggest present is yet to come. When we get the message from Mr Raouf’s office that there’s been a delivery H is mystified, but I already know what’s waiting for us. We drive with Mr Raouf in the trust’s pickup to an immense car and truck park in the north-west of the city. In so far as the Taliban have a customs clearance centre, this is it. It’s here that the goods that have survived the long drive from the Pakistani port of Karachi are finally unloaded and spread over an area the size of several football fields.
It’s guarded by two armoured personnel carriers at the gates. We drive past several thousand truck containers and vehicles and are escorted by an armed Talib to a succession of run-down offices. Endless paperwork is endlessly inspected and approved over equally endless pots of tea. But it’s worth the wait. Several hours later, we’re led to a long line of dusty pickup trucks with registration plates from Dubai where an unmistakable shape leaps out at me. The design hasn’t really changed for twenty-five years.
‘Meet son of Gerhardt,’ I say. My hand comes to rest on the bonnet of a Mercedes G400 CDI. It’s the more serious version. It has a four-litre turbocharged diesel V8 engine that generates 250 brake horsepower, which makes it rather more powerful and sophisticated than Gerhardt. It also costs about fifty times more.
‘How the bloody hell did you manage that?’ asks H.
‘Called in a favour.’
‘That’s quite a favour.’
It is. I don’t know how Gemayel has done it. I’m guessing that his friends in the Arab world have friends in the Taliban world, and things have been smoothed over at a high level.
Mr Raouf looks a bit disappointed.
‘Is this it?’ he asks, stroking his beard thoughtfully. I suspect he’s a Land Cruiser sort of man. The G-Wagen is unheard of in Afghanistan, where its talents are unknown, and its boxy profile has yet to become an object of desire. From carjackers and bandits whose idea of heaven is the cab of a Toyota Hilux, at least we’ll be less of a target. They’ll also be unlikely to know about its built-in satellite tracker.
I offer Mr Raouf the key but he defers with a grimace. He’ll drive back in the trust’s pickup, which is more to his taste.
H circles the vehicle and taps the greenish glass of one of the windows.
‘Bloody thing’s armoured.’
He’s right. I didn’t ask Gemayel for the armour, but he’s had it added anyway, which is a thoughtful gesture. All the windows look about half an inch thick, which will be useful if anyone is in the mood to have a snipe at us, because they’ll need a 50-calibre to get past these windows. We climb in. The armour makes the doors feel as though they weigh half a ton each, and the windows don’t come down. The interior smells of leather and dust, but has a luxurious feel, as if we’ve entered the private quarters of a billionaire’s yacht. I recognise and am at home with the basic layout, but there’s more buttons on the steering wheel alone than all the cars I’ve ever owned. For those with sensitive fingers, I notice, the steering wheel itself can be heated. The rear-view mirror darkens automatically in response to glare, and there are sensors to monitor the tyre pressures. My eye is caught by the satellite television and the triple electronic differential locks, which means I can drive it almost anywhere exc
ept a vertical rock face and watch a badly dubbed Arab soap opera beamed out of Dubai at the same time.
‘Shall we see how it goes?’ I ask H.
In Afghanistan cars sound as if they’re about to fall apart when you slam their doors. This one sounds as if we’ve just closed the hatch of a nuclear shelter. The engine starts first time and purrs. It’s done less than a thousand kilometres and is good for about another half-million. Mr Raouf drives ahead of us and heads back to the office, but I take the road to Kart-e Parwan and turn west around Aliabad hill. I have my reasons. As we reach the Deh Mazang crossroads by the zoo I turn onto the broad avenue that leads in a straight line to the presidential palace, nearly a mile away. The surface is scarred by shell and rocket blasts and the G weaves between the craters, handling magnificently.
It’s a surreal drive. We see the world through a greenish haze, silenced and deceptively harmless-looking, as if we’ve descended like aliens and are observing the life around us from a protective bubble. Some men on bicycles and the occasional taxi pass us in the opposite direction, but there’s no other traffic. Men haul at overloaded carts of timber and sacks, and ghost-like women in pale-blue burqas float past us as if carried on air.
I’ve never dared to visit this part of the city before because it was so vulnerable to attack and came under rocket fire almost daily when I was last in Kabul. The buildings on either side of the road are in a state of utter ruin. Floors, columns and lintels all sag and droop, held together only by the metal reinforcement inside them. Lesser structures are shattered and split and crumbling into the earth. There’s isn’t a square foot that hasn’t been riddled with gunfire. Sometimes we see the dark scar of a rocket blast that looks as if someone has thrown a bucket of paint against a wall, only it’s been caused by an explosion of white-hot metal.
We are in the centre of a capital city, but it looks more like one of the battlefields of the First World War. In the early 1990s the area was first devastated by Hekmatyar’s rockets, vast stockpiles of which were generously financed by American taxpayers and supplied by the CIA. Later it became the southern front of prolonged battles as the government’s rivals converged on the city from every direction except the north. They were fought off in a series of desperate counter-attacks organised by Massoud, whose exhausted forces were unable to counter the swift advance of the Taliban a year later.
Ahead, the palace looms. It’s a shell of a building now. The roof has been torn open in several places by rocket blasts, and resembles a botched attempt to open a tin can. The walls are saturated with bullet holes. I park nearby, and for a few minutes H and I wander around the deserted arcades of the lower floor, where kings and heads of state were once received and where our feet now crunch the fragments of its shattered walls.
Then we return to the G, circle the palace on a dusty track and drive north again along the equally devastated Jade-ye Maiwand, named after the battle in which the British 66th Foot were decisively defeated by Afghan forces in 1880. The Afghans were rallied, so the story goes, by a Pashtun woman called Malalai.
As we near the house, we round a final bend and nearly collide with an ageing Land Rover, whose occupants gawp at us with a look of horror. It’s the BBC’s official car, and I recognise the pale and scarved face of the Kabul correspondent. I’ve had a bit of a crush on her ever since she interviewed me years ago in Islamabad, when I was on my way home and Kabul was going to hell. I feel guilty at not stopping to say hello, but it’s better that H and I remain as invisible as possible. I don’t want a journalist to be able to position us in Kabul just before a rather large act of sabotage is committed.
Back at the guest house I park the G in the garage and put a new lock on the door.
‘Looks a bit like a hearse,’ says H, ‘but very impressive. Let’s look at the manual and check the consumption. We need to sort out how much fuel we need.’
You never quite know what a person has gone through in life to make him what he is. This is especially true in Afghanistan, where no one has escaped the effects of more than twenty years of war without some sort of scar. I don’t want to pry too much into this young man’s life, but he’s a sullen character and I wonder what’s made him that way.
He comes to the house after dusk but before curfew begins. I’d prefer him not to know where we’re staying, but H and I agree it’s a necessary risk, and it would somehow be a breach of Afghan protocol to show mistrust. He’s supposed to be our ally, after all. Sattar is a member of the tribal intelligence unit raised by the CIA. He’s the only one who can provide a link to Orpheus because he’s the one who made contact with him in Jalalabad and knows what he looks like, though he knows nothing of my connection with him.
‘You remember this man?’ I ask, showing him the photograph taken of Manny earlier in the year.
‘The foreigner,’ he says.
‘You can deliver him a message?’
‘Sure.’
‘How will you do it?’
‘I will just do it,’ he says. ‘It will take a few days.’
‘You speak good English, Sattar.’
‘I learned at University of Kabul.’
‘I thought the university was closed.’
‘It was open when I was there.’ He smiles but only with the lower part of his face.
I’m not entirely sure I believe him. I don’t know when the university was last teaching English, but I’ve never met an Afghan who made the same claim and was under fifty years old. I wonder whether his English wasn’t acquired from a spell with the Afghan secret police or the Pakistani ISI, the intelligence service on which the Americans rely too much. And I know it’s wrong to expect him to be cheerful so that he better fits my idea of how Afghans should be, but he noticeably lacks the friendliness and spontaneity of nearly every Afghan I’ve known, and the combination of these things amounts to a kind of private suspicion. It’s not such an odd feeling to have towards someone who you know is a spy.
We talk over the situation around the country and discuss the best route to take for the operation, though I don’t reveal the exact location of where we’re going. He suggests as a precaution that we travel via Bamiyan, where the Taliban have a regional headquarters and can give us a letter of safe passage through the area under their control. I can’t help suspecting that this might be the trap that is waiting to be set for us, but I thank him for the suggestion.
‘What is the message?’ he asks.
I take out a fifty-afghani banknote, almost worthless in itself.
‘Give him this note,’ I say, ‘and this one only. Tell him it comes from England.’
He looks at it with an expression of disappointment. He doesn’t know that I’ve made several tiny holes in the note with the point of a needle. There’s one in the centre of the note, over the engraving of the Darul Aman Palace, and several more over the serial numbers in the corners. It’s taken me a while to find a note which contains the right numbers, but I’ve got about a thousand of them.
If Manny gets the note and knows it’s from me, he’ll know that there’s a message contained in it somehow, and will examine it minutely for clues. He’ll find the pinprick that shows him I want to meet at the ruined Darul Aman Palace. Then he’ll look at the numbers and realise they represent the time, 1800, and the days of the week, indicated by the Persian initials for Monday and Tuesday. I space the holes so that even under inspection they’ll look as though they were made by a staple, and add Manny’s initials to garble the signal. Only he will recognise them and know to eliminate them from the message.
‘How will I know if you’ve delivered it?’
‘You just wait,’ he says.
So I wait. The weekend passes. H and I visit the famous walled gardens of the sixteenth-century ruler Babur, who despite conquering much of Afghanistan and India expressed the wish to be buried in his beloved Kabul. Once the most popular venue in the city, the park is deserted but for an elderly guardian, and his shrine is peppered with bullet marks. We a
lso pay a visit to the former British embassy, once the grandest foreign residence in Kabul. It’s a burned-out shell now, and the emerald lawns have turned to dust.
On the Monday I take a taxi to a suburb in the south of the city called Deh Qalandar and walk the final stretch alone to the ruined palace. The giant rooms have long ago been stripped of their furniture and fittings and are strewn with smashed masonry, plaster and glass. I wait an hour, but no one comes. I return again at the same time the following day. There are a few children playing in the rubble, but there is no one to meet me. Realising how slim the chances are of re-establishing contact with Manny in this way, and dwelling on the many factors that make it unlikely, my sense of expectation begins to waver.
‘Don’t let it get to you,’ says H, who spent a good deal of his time in Northern Ireland waiting in unmarked cars for informers who never showed up. He knows I’m hoping to meet a source useful to London, but he knows nothing of my history with Manny and can’t know how disappointed I am.
On the Thursday a message comes from Mr Raouf. Our supplies are ready, which means it’s time to get the operation underway. We drive to the trust’s headquarters, where Mr Raouf is waiting for us, beaming mischieviously. He leads us to a storeroom and throws aside a dusty tarpaulin to reveal several metal trunks.
‘Befarmaid.’ He grins, stretching out his hand. ‘Be my guest.’
We unpack the trunks with a feeling of awe. There are several wooden boxes of plastic explosive, each containing half a dozen blocks the size of small bricks wrapped in brown waterproof paper to keep out moisture. I recognise the type. It’s Iranian Composition 4, C4 for short, made from the high explosive RDX with a small percentage of non-explosive plasticiser which allows it to be cut or shaped. It has a detonation velocity of nearly 30,000 feet per second, which makes it more powerful than dynamite and an ideal demolition charge.
