The Afghan

“What do you mean you’ve found it?” asked O’Dowd. His day had suddenly become Christmas and several birthdays rolled into one. “No question, Brian. The call came from a top-floor apartment of a five-story building in the Old Quarter. Two of my undercover people are slipping down there to have a look and work out the approaches.”

“When are you going in?”

“Just after dark. I’d like to make it three a.m., but the risk is too big. They might fly the coop…”

Colonel Razak had been to Camberley Staff College in England on a one-year, Commonwealth-sponsored course, and was proud of his command of idiom. “Can I come?”

“Would you like to?”

“Is the pope Catholic?” said the Irishman.

Razak laughed out loud. He enjoyed the banter. “As a believer in the one true God, I wouldn’t know,” he said.

“All right. My office at six. But it is mufti. And I mean our mufti.” He meant there would not only be no uniforms but no Western suits, either. In the Old Town, and especially in the Qissa Khawani Bazaar, only the shalwar kameez assembly of loose trousers and long shirt would pass u

Peshawar is a most ancient city, and no part older than the Qissa Khawani Bazaar. Here caravans traveling the Great Trunk Road through the towering and intimidating Khyber Pass into Afghanistan have paused to refresh men and camels for many centuries. And, like any good bazaar, the Qissa Khawani has always provided for man’s basic needs-blankets, shawls, carpets, brass artifacts, copper bowls, food and drink. It still does.

It is multiethnic and multilingual. The accustomed eye can spot the turbans of Afridis, Waziris, Ghilzai and Pakistani from nearby, contrasting with the Chitrali caps from farther north and the fur-trimmed winter hats of Tajiks and Uzbeks.

In this maze of narrow streets and lanes where a man can lose any pursuer are the shops and food stalls of the clock bazaar, basket bazaar, money changers, bird market and the bazaar of the storytellers. In imperial days, the British called Peshawar the Piccadilly of Central Asia. The apartment identified by the D/F sweeper as the source of the phone call was in one of those tall, narrow buildings with intricately carved balconies and shutters; it was four floors above a carpet warehouse on a lane wide enough for only one car. Because of the heat in the summer, all these buildings have flat roofs where tenants can catch a breath of cool night air, and open stairwells leading up from the street below. Colonel Razak led his team quietly and on foot.

He sent four men, all in tribal clothes, up to the roof of a building four houses down the street from the target. They emerged on the roof, and calmly walked from roof to roof until they reached the final building. Here, they waited for their signal. The colonel led six men up the stairs from the street. All had machine pistols under their robes save the point man, a heavily muscled Punjabi, who bore the rammer.

When they were all lined up in the stairwell, the colonel nodded to the point man, who drew back the rammer and shattered the lock. The door sprang inward, and the team went inside at the run. Three of the men on the roof came straight down the access stairs; the fourth remained above in case anyone tried to escape.

When Brian O’Dowd tried to recall later, it all seemed extremely fast and blurred. That was the impression the occupants got as well. The attack squad had no idea how many men would be inside or what they would find. It could have been a small army; it could have been a family sipping tea. They did not even know the layout of the apartment; architect’s plans may be filed in London or New York but not in the Qissa Khawani Bazaar. All they knew was that a call had been made from a red-flagged cell phone. In fact, they found four young men watching TV. For two seconds, the attack group feared they might have raided a perfectly i

Then he realized there was no time, turned and ran for the window, which was wide-open. Colonel Razak screamed, “Grab him,” but the Pakistani missed. The Egyptian had been caught naked to the waist because of the heat, and his skin was slick with sweat. He did not even pause for the banister but went straight over and crashed on the cobbles forty feet below. Bystanders gathered round the body within seconds, but the AQ financier gurgled twice and died. The building and street had become a chaos of shouting and ru

The corpse on the street was surrounded by the army and blanketed. A stretcher would appear. The dead man would be carried away to the morgue of Peshawar General Hospital. No one still had the faintest idea who he was. All that was clear was that he had preferred death to the tender attention of the Americans at Bagram Camp up in Afghanistan, where he would surely have been horse-traded by Islamabad with the CIA station chief in Pakistan. Colonel Razak turned back from the balcony. The three prisoners were handcuffed and hooded. There would have to be an armed escort to get them out of here; this was “fundo” territory. The tribal street would not be on his side. With the prisoners and the body gone, he would spend hours scouring the flat for every last clue about the man with the red-flagged cell phone. Brian O’Dowd had been asked to wait on the stairs during the raid. He was now in the bedroom holding the damaged Toshiba laptop. Both knew this would almost certainly be the crown jewel. All the passports, all the cell phones, any scrap of paper however insignificant, all the prisoners and all the neighbors-the lot would be taken to a safe place and wrung dry for anything they could yield. But first the laptop…