The Afghan

CHAPTER 12

In fact, the interrogator was gone for a week. Martin remained in his cell with only the Koran for company. He would, he felt, soon be among that revered company who had memorized every one of the 6,666 verses in it. But years in Special Forces had finally given him a rare gift among humans: the ability to remain motionless for exceptionally long periods and defy boredom and the urge to fidget.

So he schooled himself again to adapt to the i

Dr. al-Khattab returned when he had confirmed every aspect of the story as it concerned Guantanamo Bay. It had not been easy. He had not the slightest intention of betraying himself to any of the four British inmates who had been sent home. They had all declared repeatedly that they were not extremists and had been swept up in the American net by accident. Whatever the Americans thought, Al Qaeda could confirm it was all true. To make it harder, Izmat Khan had spent so long in solitary for noncooperation that no other detainee had got to know him well. He admitted he had picked up fragmentary English, but that was from the endless interrogations when he had listened to the CIA man and then the translation by the one Pashto-speaking ‘terp.

From what al-Khattab could discover, his prisoner had not slipped up once. What little could be gleaned from Afghanistan indicated that the breakout from the prison van between Bagram and Pul-i-Charki jail had indeed been genuine. What he could not know was that this episode had been accomplished by the very able head of station of the SIS office inside the British Embassy. Brigadier Yusef had acted out his rage most convincingly, and the agents of the by-now-resurgent Taliban were convinced. And they said so to Al Qaeda inquiries. “Let us go back to your early days in the Tora Bora,” he proposed when the interrogation resumed. “Tell me about your boyhood.” Al-Khattab was a clever man, but he also could not know that, even though the man in front of him was a ringer, Martin knew the mountains of Afghanistan better than he. The Kuwaiti’s six months in the terrorist training camps had been exclusively among fellow Arabs, not Pashtun mountain men. He noted copiously even the names of the fruits in the orchards of Maloko-zai. His hand sped across the legal pad, covering page after page. On the third day of the second session, the narrative had reached the day that proved a crucial hinge in the life of Izmat Khan: August 21, 1998, the day the Tomahawk cruise missiles crashed in the mountains. “Ah, yes, truly tragic,” he murmured. “And strange, for you must be the only Afghan for whom no family member remains alive to vouch for you. It is a remarkable coincidence, and as a scientist I hate coincidences. What was the effect on you?”

In fact, Izmat Khan, at Guantanamo, had refused to talk about why he hated Americans with such a passion. It was information from the other fighters who had survived Qala-i-Jangi and reached Camp Delta that filled the gap. In the Taliban army, Izmat Khan had become an iconic figure, and his story was whispered round the campfires as the man immune to fear. The other survivors had told the interrogators the story of the a

“But not until October and November 2001.” said al-Khattab.

“There were no Americans in Afghanistan until then,” said Martin. “True. So you fought for Afghanistan… and lost. Now you wish to fight for Allah.”

Martin nodded.

“As the sheikh predicted,” he said.

For the first time, Dr. al-Khattab’s urbanity completely forsook him. He stared at the black-bearded face across the table for a full thirty seconds, mouth agape, pen poised but unmoving. Finally, he spoke, in a whisper, “You… have actually met the sheikh?”

In all his weeks in the camp, al-Khattab had never actually met Osama bin Laden. Just once, he had seen a black-windowed Land Cruiser passing by, but it had not stopped. But he would, quite literally, have taken a meat cleaver and severed his left wrist for the chance of meeting, let alone conversing with, the man he venerated more than any other on earth. Martin met his gaze and nodded. Al-Khattab recovered his poise.

“You will start at the begi

So Martin told him. He told him of serving in his father’s lashkar as a teenager freshly back from the madrassah outside Peshawar. He told of the patrol with others, and how they had been caught on a mountainside with only a group of boulders to shelter in.

He made no mention of any British officer, nor any Blowpipe missile, nor the destruction of the Hind gunship. He told only of the roaring chain gun in the nose; the fragments of bullet and rock flying around until the Hind-eternal praise be to Allah-ran out of ammunition and flew away. He told of feeling a blow like a punch or a hit from a hammer in the thigh, and being carried by his comrades across the valleys until they found a man with a mule and took it from him.

And he told of being carried to a complex of caves at Jaji and being handed over to Saudis who lived and worked there.

“But the sheikh, tell me of the sheikh,” insisted al-Khattab. So Martin told him. The Kuwaiti took down the dialogue word for word. “Say that again, please.”

“He said to me: ‘The day will come when Afghanistan will no longer have need of you, but the all-merciful Allah will always have need of a warrior like you.’” “Then what happened?”

“He changed the dressing on the leg.”

“The sheikh did that?”

“No, the doctor who was with him. The Egyptian.” Dr. al-Khattab sat back and let out a long breath. Of course, the doctor, Ayman al-Zawahiri. companion and confidant, the man who had brought Egyptian Islamic jihad to join the sheikh to create Al Qaeda. He began to tidy up his papers. “I have to leave you again. It will take a week, maybe more. You will have to stay here. Chained, I am afraid. You have seen too much, you know too much. But if you are indeed a true believer, and truly ‘the Afghan,’ you will join us as an honored recruit. If not…”

Martin was back in his cell when the Kuwaiti left. This time, al-Khattab did not return straight to London. He went to the Hilton, and wrote steadily and carefully for a day and a night. When he had done, he made several calls on a new and “lily-white” cell phone that then went into the deepwater harbor. In fact, he was not being listened to, but even if he had been his words would have meant little. But Dr. al-Khattab was still in freedom because he was a very careful man.

The calls he made arranged a meeting with Faisal bin Selim, master of the Rasha, which was moored in Dubai. That afternoon, he drove his cheap rental car to Dubai and conversed with the elderly captain, who took a long personal letter and hid it deep in his robes. And the Predator kept circling at twenty thousand feet.

Islamist terror groups have already lost far too many senior operatives not to have realized that for them, however careful they are, cell phone and sat phone calls are dangerous. The West’s interception, eavesdrop and decryption technology is simply too good. Their other weakness is the transferring of sums of money through the normal banking system.