The Afghan

The British Foreign Office is situated in King Charles Street, just off Whitehall, and within easy glancing distance of the window across Parliament Square outside of which King Charles I was decapitated. As the New Year’s holiday slipped into memory, the small protocol team that had been set up the previous summer resumed its task.

This was to coordinate with the Americans the ever more complex details of the forthcoming 2007 G8 conference. The 2005 meeting of the governments of the eight richest states in the world had been at Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland, and it had been a success up to a point. The point however had been, as always, the roaring crowds of protesters that presented problems which each year got steadily worse and worse. At Gleneagles, the Perthshire landscape had had to be disfigured by miles and miles of chain-link fencing to create a complete cordon sanitaire round the entire estate. The access road had had to be fenced and guarded. Led by two fading pop stars, the call had gone out for a million protesters at world poverty to march though Edinburgh close by. That was just the antipoverty brigade. Then the antiglobalization cohorts had thrown their flour bombs and waved their placards.

“Don’t these yo-yos realize that global trade generates the wealth with which to fight poverty?” asked one angry diplomat. The answer: Apparently not. Genoa was remembered with a shudder. That was why the idea out of the White House, who would be hosting 2007, was acclaimed: simple, elegant, brilliant. A location sumptuous but utterly isolated: immune, unreachable, secure, totally under control. It was the mass of detail that concerned the protocol team-that, and the advancement to mid-April. Something about the U.S. midterm elections. So the British team accepted what had been agreed and a

Far away to the southeast, two huge USAF Starlifters began to drop toward the sultanate of Oman. They came from the East Coast of the USA, with one midair refueling by a tanker out of the Azores. The two aerial juggernauts came out of the sunset on the Dhofari hills, heading east, and asking for landing instructions at the Anglo-American desert air base of Thumrait. In their cavernous hulls, the two giants contained an entire military unit. One had the living accommodations, from flat-pack, skilled-assembly hutments to generators, air-conditioning, refrigeration plants, TV aerials and even corkscrews for the fifteen-person technical team. The other cargo aircraft carried what is called “the sharp end.” Two pilotless reco

A week later, they were set up. On the far side of the air base, out of bounds to nonunit perso

Mike Martin’s final briefing took a full three days, and it was important enough that Marek Gumie

There were only five of them in the room, for Gordon Phillips operated what he called “the slide show” himself. Rather more developed than the slide projectors of yesteryear, this projector threw up picture after picture on a high-definition plasma screen in perfect color and detail. At a touch on the remote, it could close in on any detail, and bring that detail up in magnification to fill the screen.

The point of the briefing was to show Mike Martin every last piece of information in the possession of the entire gamut of Western agencies concerning faces he might meet.

The sources were not just the Anglo-American agencies. Over forty nations’ agencies were pouring their discoveries into central databases. Apart from the rogue states- Iran, Syria and the failed states like Somalia -governments across the planet were sharing information on terrorists of the ultra-aggressive Islamist creed.

Rabat was invaluable in targeting its own Moroccans; Aden fed in names and faces from South Yemen; Riyadh had swallowed its embarrassment and provided columns of faces from its own Saudi list.

Martin stared at them all as they all flashed up. Some were face-on portraits taken in a police station; others were snatched with long lenses on streets or in hotels. The faces’ possible variants were shown: with or without beard; in Arab or Western dress; long hair, short hair or shaven. There were mullahs and imams from various extremist mosques; youths believed to be simple message carriers; faces of those known to help with support services like funds, transport, safe houses.

And there were the big players, the ones who controlled the various global divisions and had access to the very top.

Some were dead, like Mohammed Atef, first director of operations, killed by an African bomb in Afghanistan; his successor, serving life without parole; his successor, also dead; and the believed present one. Somewhere in there was the doctorly face of Tewfik al-Qur, who dove over a balcony in Peshawar five months earlier. A few faces down the line was Saud Hamud al-Utaibi, new head of AQ in Saudi Arabia, and believed very much alive. And there were the blanks, the outline of a head, black on white. These included the AQ chief from Southeast Asia, successor to al-Hanbali, and probably the man behind the latest bombi ngsof tourist resorts in the Far East. And, surprisingly, the AQ chief for the United Kingdom. “We knew who he was until about six months ago,” said Gordon Phillips. “Then he quit just in time. He is back in Pakistan, hunted day and night. The ISI will get him eventually…”

“And ship him up to us in Bagram,” grunted Marek Gumie

“You will certainly seek out this one,” said Steve Hill, as a grim-faced imam flashed on the screen. It was a snatched shot and came from Pakistan. “And this one.”

It was an elderly man, looking mild and courtly; also a snatched shot, on a quayside somewhere, with bright blue water in the background; it came from the Special Forces of the United Arab Emirates in Dubai. They broke, ate, resumed, slept and started again. Only when the housekeeper was in the room with trays of food did Phillips switch off the TV screen. Tamian Godfrey and Najib Qureshi stayed in their rooms or walked the hills together. Finally, it was over.

“Tomorrow, we fly,” said Marek Gumie

Mrs. Godfrey and the Afghan analyst came to the helipad to see him off. He was young enough to be the Koranic scholar’s son.

“Take care of yourself, Mike,” she said, then swore. “Damn, stupid me, I’m choking up. God go with you, lad.”

“And if all else fails, may Allah keep you in His care,” said Qureshi. The JetRanger could only take the two senior controllers and Martin. The two executive officers would drive down to Edzell and resume their mission. The Bell landed well away from prying eyes and the group of three ran across to the CIA Grumman V A Scottish snow squall caused them all to shelter under waterproofs held over their heads, so no one saw that one of the men was not in Western dress.