The Afghan

Bin Selim hailed a taxi, and instructed the driver to take him three miles up the coast to the Sultanate of Ajman, smallest and second poorest of the seven. There, he dismissed the taxi, ducked into a covered soukh of twisting alleys and clamoring stalls and lost himself to any following “tail,” should there have been one.

There was not. The Predator was concentrating on a guesthouse in the heart of Ras al-Khaimah. The dhow master slipped from the soukh into a small mosque, and made a request of the imam. A boy was sent scurrying through the town and came back with a young man who genuinely was a student in the local technical college. He was also a graduate of the Darunta training camp owned and run by Al Qaeda outside Jalalabad until 2001.

The old man whispered in the ear of the younger, who nodded and thanked him. Then the dhow master went back through the covered market, emerged, hailed a taxi and returned to his freighter in the Creek. He had done all he could. It was up to the younger men now. Inshallah.

That same morning, but later due to the time difference, the Countess of Richmond eased out of the estuary of the Mersey and into the Irish Sea. Captain McKendrick had the co

FOUR DAYS passed before the Afghan sheltering in Ras al-Khaimah received his visitors. Following his instructions, he had not gone out, or at least not as far as the street. But he had taken the air in the closed courtyard at the rear of the house, screened from the streets by double gates eight feet high. Here various deliver)’ vans came and went.

While in the courtyard he was seen by the Predator, and his controllers in Scotland noted his change of dress.

His visitors, when they came, did not arrive to deliver food, drink or laundry, but to make a collection. They backed the van close to the rear door of the building. The driver stayed at the wheel; the other three entered the house. The lodgers were both away at work, the room keeper by agreement out at the shops. The team of three had their directions. They went swiftly to the appropriate door and entered without knocking. The seated figure, reading his Koran, rose to find himself facing a handgun in the grip of a man trained in Afghanistan. All three were hooded.

They were quiet and efficient. Martin knew enough of fighting men to recognize his visitors knew their business. The hood went over his head and fell to his shoulders. His hands came behind his back, and the plastic cuffs went on. Then he was marching-or being marched-out the door, down the tiled corridor and into the back of the van. He lay on his side, heard the door slam, felt the van lurch out of the gate and into the street.

The Predator saw it, but the controllers thought it was another laundry delivery. In minutes, the van was out of sight. There are many miracles that modern spy technology can accomplish, but controllers and machines can still be fooled. The snatch squad had no idea there was a Predator above them, but their shrewdly choosing midmorning for the snatch rather than midnight fooled the watchers at Edzell.

It took three more days before they realized that their man no longer appeared daily in the courtyard to give the “sign of life.” In short, he had disappeared. They were watching an empty house. And they had no idea which of the several vans had taken him.

In fact, the van had not gone far. The hinterland behind the port and city of Ras al-K is wild and rocky desert rising to the mountains of Ras al-Jibal. Nothing can live here but goats and salamanders. Just in case the man they had snatched was under surveillance, with or without his knowledge, the kidnappers were taking no chances. There were tracks leading up into the hills, and they took one. In the rear, Martin felt the vehicle leave the tarred road and start to jolt over pitted track. Had there been a tailing vehicle, it could not have avoided detection. Even staying out of sight, its plume of rising desert dust would have given it away. A surveillance helicopter would have been even more obvious. The van stopped five miles up the track into the hills. The leader-the one with the handgun-took powerful binoculars and surveyed the valley and the coast, right back to the Old Town, whence they had come. Nothing came toward them. When he was satisfied, the van turned and went back down the hills. Its real destination was a villa standing in a walled compound in the outer suburbs of the town. With the gates relocked, the van reversed up to an open door, and Martin was marched back out and down another tiled passage. The plastic ties came off his wrists, and a cool metal shackle went on the left one. There would be a chain, he knew, and a bolt in the wall that could not be ripped free. When his hood came off, it was the kidnappers who had their heads covered. They withdrew backward, and the door slammed. He heard bolts go into sockets.

The cell was not a cell in the true meaning. It was a ground-floor room that had been fortified. The window had been bricked up, and though Martin could not see it a painting of a window adorned the outside to fool even those with binoculars peering over the compound wall.

Considering what he had undergone years before in the SAS program of “interrogation resistance,” it was even comfortable. There was a single bulb in the ceiling protected against thrown objects by a wire cage. The light was subdued but adequate.

There was a camp bed, and just enough slack in his chain to allow him to lie on it to sleep. The room also had an upright chair that he could also reach, and a chemical toilet. All were within reach but in different directions. His left wrist, however, was in a stainless-steel shackle that linked to a chain, and the chain went to a wall bracket. He could not begin to reach the door, through which his interrogators would enter-if at all-with food and water, and a spy hole in the door meant they could check on him any time and he would neither hear nor see them.

At Castle Forbes, there had been lengthy and passionate discussions over one problem: Should he carry any tracking device on him? There are now tracker transmitters so tiny they can be injected under the skin without cutting the epidermis at all. This is pinhead-sized. Warmed by blood, they need no power source. But their range is limited. Worse, there are ultrasensitive detectors that can spot them.

“These people are absolutely not stupid,” Phillips had stressed. His colleague from CIA Counter-Terrorism agreed.

“Among the best educated of them,” said McDonald, “their mastery of very high technology, and especially the computer sciences, is awesome.” No one at Forbes doubted that if Martin was subjected to a hypertech body search and something were discovered, he would be dead within minutes. Eventually, the decision was no planted bleeper. No signal sender. The kidnappers came for him an hour later. They were hooded again. The body search was lengthy and thorough. The clothes went first, until he was naked, and they were taken away for searching in another room. They did not even employ invasive throat and anal search. The sca