The Afghan

He learned that there was always someone with something to sell, and prepared to sell it cheap. And there was someone else, somewhere, prepared to buy that something and pay more. Between the two stood the institution called customs. Faisal bin Selim made himself prosperous by smuggling. In his travels, he saw many things that he came to admire: fine cloth and tapestries, Islamic art, ancient Korans, precious manuscripts and the beauty of the great mosques. And he saw other things he came to despise: rich Westerners, porcine faces lobster pink in the sun, disgusting women in tiny bikinis, drunken slobs, all that undeserved money.

The fact that the rulers of the Gulf States also benefited from money that simply poured in black streams from the desert sands did not escape him. As they, too, flaunted their Western habits, drank the imported alcohol, slept with the golden whores, he came to despise them, too. By his midforties, twenty years before a small Baluchi boy waited for him at the dock in Gwadar, two things had happened to Faisal bin Selim. He had earned and saved enough money to commission, buy and own outright a superb timber-trading dhow, constructed by the finest craftsmen at Sur in Oman, and called Rasha, the pearl. And he had become a fervent Wahhabi. When the new prophets arose to follow the teachings of Mau-dudi and Sayyid Qutb, they declared jihad against the forces of heresy and degeneracy, and he was with them. When young men went to fight the godless Soviets in Afghanistan, his prayers went with them; when others flew airliners into the towers of the Western god of money, he knelt and prayed that they would indeed enter the gardens of Allah.

To the world, he remained the courteous, fastidious, frugal-living, devout master and owner of the Rasha. He plied his trade along the entire Gulf coast and round into the Arabian Sea. He did not seek trouble, but if a true believer sought his help, whether in alms or a passage to safety, he would do what he could.

He had come to the attention of Western security forces because a Saudi AQ activist, captured in the Hadramaut and confessing all in a cell in Riyadh, let slip that messages of the utmost secrecy destined for bin Laden himself, so secret that they could only be confided verbally to a messenger who would memorize them verbatim and take his own life before capture, would occasionally leave the Saudi peninsula by boat. The emissary would be deposited on the Baluchi coast, whence he would take his message north to the unknown caves of Waziristan where the sheikh resided. The boat was the Rasha. With the agreement and assistance of the ISI, it was not intercepted, just watched. Faisal bin Selim arrived in Gwadar with a cargo of white goods from the duty-free entrepot of Dubai. Here, the refrigerators, washing machines, microwave cookers and televisions were sold at a fraction of their retail price outside the Freeport warehouses.

He was commissioned to take back with him to the Gulf a cargo of Pakistani carpets, knotted by the thin fingers of little-boy slaves, destined for the feet of the rich Westerners buying luxury villas on the sea island being built off Dubai and Qatar.

He listened gravely to the small boy with the message, nodded, and two hours later, with his cargo safely inland without disturbing Pakistani customs, left the Rasha in the charge of his Omani deckhand and walked sedately through Gwadar to the mosque.

From years of trading with Pakistan, the courtly Arab spoke good Urdu, and he and the imam conversed in that language. He sipped his tea, took sweet cakes and wiped his fingers on a small cambric handkerchief. All the while, he nodded and glanced at the Afghan. When he heard of the breakout from the prison van, he smiled in approval. Then he broke into Arabic.

“And you wish to leave Pakistan, my brother?”

“There is no place for me here,” said Martin. “The imam is right. The secret police will find me and hand me back to the dogs of Kabul. I will end my life before that.”

“Such a pity,” murmured the Qatari. “So far… such a life. And if I take you to the Gulf States, what will you do?”

“I will try to find other true believers and offer what I can.”

“And what would that be? What can you do?”

“I can fight. And I am prepared to die in Allah’s holy war.”

The courtly captain thought for a while.

“The loading of the carpets takes place at dawn,” he said. “It will take several hours. They must be well belowdecks, lest the sea spray touch them. Then I shall depart, sails down. I shall cruise close past the end of the harbor mole. If a man were to leap from the concrete to the deck, no one would notice.” After the ritual salutations, he left. In the darkness, Martin was led by the boy to the dock. Here he studied the Rasha so that he would recognize her in the morning. She came past the mole just before eleven. The gap was eight feet, and Martin made it with inches to spare, after a short run. The Omani had the helm. Faisal bin Selim greeted Martin with a gentle smile. He offered his guest fresh water to wash his hands and delicious dates from the palms of Muscat.

At noon, the elderly man spread two mats on the broad coaming round the cargo hold. Side by side, the two men knelt for the midday prayers. For Martin, it was the first occasion of prayer other than in a crowd where a single voice can be drowned by all the others. He was word-perfect.

When an agent is way out there in the cold, on a “black” and dangerous job, his controllers at home are avid for some sign that he is all right: still alive, still at liberty, still functioning. This indication may come from the agent himself, by phone call, a message in the classified ads of a paper or a chalk mark on a wall, a preagreed “drop.” It may come from a watcher who makes no contact but observes and reports back. It is called a “sign of life.” After days of silence, controllers become very twitchy waiting for some sign of life. It was midday in Thumrait, early breakfast time in Scotland, the wee small hours in Tampa. The first and the third could see what the Predator could see, but did not know its significance. Need to know; they had not been told. But Edzell air base knew.

Clear as crystal, alternately lowering the forehead to the deck and raising the face to the sky, the Afghan was saying his prayers on the deck of the Rasha. There was a roar from the terminal operators in the ops room. Seconds later, Steve Hill took a call at his breakfast table, and gave his wife a passionate and unexpected kiss.

Two minutes later, Marek Gumie

CHAPTER 11

With a good wind off the south, the Rasha hoisted sail, closed down her engine, and the rumbling below was replaced by the calm sounds of the sea: the lapping of the water under the bow, the sigh of the wind in the sails, the creak of block and tackle.

The dhow, shadowed by the invisible Predator four miles above her, crept along the coast of southern Iran and into the Gulf of Oman. Here, she turned half to starboard, trimmed her sail as the wind took her full astern and headed for the narrow gap between Iran and Arabia called the Straits of Hormuz. Through this narrow gap, where the tip of Oman ’s Musandam Peninsula is only eight miles from the Persian shore, a constant stream of mighty tankers went past: some low in the water, full of crude oil for the energy-hungry West; others riding high, going up-gulf to fill with Saudi or Kuwaiti crude. The smaller boats like the dhow stayed closer to the shore to allow the leviathans the freedom of the deep cha