The Afghan

The leader stared at him through the spy hole. He said nothing, but two minutes later he returned with mat and Koran. Martin thanked him gravely. Food and water were brought regularly. Each time, he was waved back with the handgun as the tray was deposited where he could reach it. The chemical lavatory was emptied in the same way.

It was three days before his interrogation began, and for this he was masked, lest he look out the windows, and led down two corridors. When his mask was removed, he was astonished. The man in front of him, sitting calmly behind a carved refectory table, for all the world like a potential employer interviewing an applicant, was youthful, elegant, civilized, urbane and uncovered. He spoke in perfect Gulf Arabic.

“I see no point in masks,” he said, “nor silly names. Mine, by the way, is Dr. al-Khattab There is no mystery here. If I am satisfied you are who you say you are, you will be welcome to join us. In which case, you will not betray us. If not, then I am afraid you will be killed at once. So let us not pretend, Mr. Izmat Khan. Are you really the one they call ‘the Afghan’?” “They will be concerned about two things,” Gordon Phillips warned him during one of their interminable briefings at Forbes Castle. “Are you truly Izmat Khan, and are you the same Izmat Khan who fought at Qala-i-Jangi? Or have five years in Guantanamo turned you into something else?”

Martin stared back at the smiling Arab. He recalled the warnings of Tamian Godfrey. Never mind the wild-bearded screamers; watch out for the one who will be smooth-shaven; who will smoke, drink, consort with girls; who will pass for one of us. Wholly Westernized. A human chameleon, hiding the hatred. Totally deadly. There was a word… takfir.

“There are many Afghans,” he said. “Who calls me ‘the Afghan’?” “Ah, you have been incommunicado for five years. After Qala-i-jangi, word spread about you. You do not know about me, but I know much about you. Some of our people have been released from Camp Delta. They spoke highly of you. They claim you never broke. True?”

“They asked me about myself. I told them that.” “But you never denounced others? You mentioned no names? That is what the others say of you.”

“They wiped out my family. Most of me died then. How do you punish a man who is dead?”

“A good answer, my friend. So, let us talk about Guantanamo. Tell me about Gitmo.”

Martin had been briefed hour after hour about what had happened to him on the Cuban peninsula. The arrival on 14 January 2002-hungry thirsty, soiled with urine, blindfolded, shackled so tightly the hands were numb for weeks. Beards and heads shaved, clothed in orange coveralls, stumbling and tripping in the darkness of the hoods…

Dr. al-Khattab took copious notes, writing on yellow legal note-paper with an old-fashioned fountain pen. When a passage was reached where he knew all the answers, he ceased, and contemplated his prisoner with a gentle smile. In the late afternoon, he offered a photograph.

“Do you know this man?” he asked. “Did you ever see him?” Martin shook his head. The face looking up from the photograph was General Geoffrey D. Miller, successor as camp commandant to General Rick Baccus. The latter had sat in on interrogations, but General Miller left it to the CIA teams.

“Quite right,” said al-Khattab. “He saw you, according to one of our released friends, but you were always hooded as a punishment for noncooperation. And when did the conditions start to improve?”

They talked until sundown, then the Arab rose.

“I have much to check on,” he said. “If you are telling the truth, we will continue in a few days. If not, I’m afraid I shall have to issue Suleiman with the appropriate instructions.”

Martin went back to his cell. Dr. al-Khattab issued rapid orders to the guard team and left. He drove a modest rented car, and he returned to the Hilton Hotel in Ras al-Khaimah town, elegantly dominating the AI Saqr deepwater harbor. He spent the night and left the next day. By then, he was wearing a well-cut cream tropical suit. When he checked in with British Airways at Dubai International Airport, his English was impeccable.

In fact, Ali Aziz al-Khattab had been born a Kuwaiti, the son of a senior bank official. By Gulf standards, that meant that his upbringing had been effortless and privileged. In 1989, his father had been posted to London as deputy manager of the Bank of Kuwait. The family had gone with him, and avoided the invasion of their homeland by Saddam Hussein in 1990.

Ali Aziz, already a good English speaker, was enrolled in a British school at age fifteen and emerged three years later with accentless English and excellent grades. When his family returned home, he elected to stay on and go for a degree at Loughborough Technical College. Four years later, he emerged with a science degree in chemical engineering, and proceeded on to a doctorate. It was not in the Arabian Gulf but in London that he began to attend the mosque run by a firebrand preacher of anti-Western hatred and became what the media like to call “radicalized.” In truth, by twenty-one he was fully brainwashed, and a fanatical supporter of Al Qaeda.

A “talent spotter” suggested he might like to visit Pakistan; he accepted, and then went on, through the Khyber Pass, to spend six months at an Al Qaeda terrorist training camp. He had already been marked out as a “sleeper” who should lie low in England and never come to the attention of the authorities. Back in London, he did what they all do: He reported to his embassy that he had lost his passport and was issued a new one, which did not carry the telltale Pakistan entry stamp. As far as anyone who asked was concerned, he had been visiting family and friends in the Gulf and had never been near Pakistan, let alone Afghanistan. He secured a post as lecturer at Aston University, Birmingham, in 1999-Two years later, Anglo-American forces invaded Afghanistan. There were several weeks of panic in case any trace of him in the terror camps had been left lying round, but, in his case, AQ head of perso

As Dr. AL-KHATTAB’S London-bound airliner was taking off, the Java Star eased away from her berth in the Sultanate of Brunei on the coast of Indonesian North Borneo and headed for the open sea.

Her destination was the West Australian port of Fremantle, as usual, and her Norwegian skipper, Knut Herrma

He knew that the seas in those parts remain the most dangerous waters in the world, but not because of shoals, riptides, rocks, tempests, reefs or tsunamis. The danger here is pirate attacks.

Every year, between the Straits of Malacca to the west and the Celebes Sea to the east, there are over five hundred pirate attacks on merchant shipping, and up to a hundred hijackings. Occasionally, the crew are ransomed back to the shipowners. Sometimes they are all killed and never heard of again; in those cases, the cargo is stolen and sold on the black market. If Captain Herrma

The first leg of his course lay north, away from his eventual destination. It took him six hours to pass the ramshackle town of Kudat and come round the northernmost tip of Sabah and the island of Borneo. Only then could he run southeast for the Sulu Archipelago.

He intended to move through the coral-and-jungle islands by taking the deepwater strait between Tawitawi and Jolo islands.