AllFreeNovel
Share Us
In Islamabad the listening sergeant told his superior: ‘The conversation has finished.’
‘Damn,’ said the major. ‘Three minutes and forty-four seconds. Still, one could hardly have expected more.’
‘But he doesn’t appear to have switched off,’ said the sergeant.
In a top-floor apartment in the Old Town of Peshawar Abdelahi had made his second mistake. Hearing the Egyptian emerging from his private room, he had hastily ended his call to his brother and shoved the cellphone under a nearby cushion. But he forgot to turn it off. Half a mile away Colonel Razak’s sweepers came closer and closer.
Both Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have big operations in Pakistan, for obvious reasons. It is one of the principal war zones in the current struggle against terrorism. Part of the strength of the western alliance, right back to 1945, has been the ability of the two agencies to work together.
There have been spats, especially over the rash of British traitors starting with Philby, Burgess and Maclean in 1951. Then the Americans became aware they too had a whole rogues’ gallery of traitors working for Moscow and the inter-agency sniping stopped. The end of the Cold War in 1991 led to the asinine presumption among politicians on both sides of the Atlantic that peace had come at last and come to stay. That was precisely the moment that the new Cold War, silent and hidden in the depths of Islam, was having its birth pangs.
After 9/11 there was no more rivalry and even the traditional horse-trading ended. The rule became: if we have it, you guys had better share it. And vice versa. Contributions to the common struggle come from a patchwork quilt of other foreign agencies but nothing matches the closeness of the Anglosphere information-gatherers.
Colonel Razak knew both the Heads of Station in his own city. On personal terms he was closer to the SIS man, Brian O’Dowd, and the rogue cellphone was originally a British discovery. So it was O’Dowd he rang with the news when he came down from the roof.
At that moment Mr Al-Qur went to the bathroom and Abdelahi reached under the cushion for the cellphone to put it back on top of the attaché case where he had found it. With a start of guilt, he realized it was still ‘on’ so he switched it off at once. He was thinking of battery wastage, not interception. Anyway, he was too late by eight seconds. The direction-finder had done its job.
‘What do you mean, you’ve found it?’ asked O’Dowd. His day had suddenly become Christmas and several birthdays rolled into one.
‘No question, Brian. The call came from a top-floor apartment of a five-storey building in the Old Quarter. Two of my undercover people are slipping down there to have a look and work out the approaches.’
‘When are you going in?’
‘Just after dark. I’d like to make it three a.m., but the risk is too big. They might fly the coop . . .’
Colonel Razak had been to Camberley Staff College in England on a one-year Commonwealth-sponsored course and was proud of his command of idiom.
‘Can I come?’
‘Would you like to?’
‘Is the Pope Catholic?’ said the Irishman.
Razak laughed out loud. He enjoyed the banter.
‘As a believer in the one true God I would not know,’ he said. ‘All right. My office at six. But it is mufti. And I mean our mufti.’
He meant there would not only be no uniforms but no western suits either. In the Old Town, and especially in the Qissa Khawani Bazaar, only the shalwar kameez assembly of loose trousers and long shirt would pass unnoticed. Or the robes and turbans of the mountain clans. And that also applied to O’Dowd.
The British agent was there just before six, with his black and black-windowed Toyota Land Cruiser. A British Land-Rover might have been more patriotic, but the Toyota was the preferred vehicle of local fundamentalists and would pass unnoticed. He also brought a bottle of the whisky known as Chivas Regal. It was Abdul Razak’s favourite tipple. He had once chided his Pakistani friend on his taste for the alcoholic tincture from Scotland.
‘I regard myself as a good Muslim but not an obsessive one,’ said Razak. ‘I do not touch pork, but see no harm in dancing or a good cigar. To ban these is Taliban fanaticism which I do not share. As for the grape, or even the grain, wine was widely drunk during the first four Caliphates and if, one day in Paradise, I am chided by a higher authority than you, then I shall beg the all-merciful Allah for forgiveness. In the meantime, give me a top-up.’
It was perhaps strange that a tank corps officer should have made such an excellent policeman, but such was Abdul Razak. He was thirty-six, married with two children and educated. He also embodied a capacity for lateral thought, for quiet subtlety and the tactics of the mongoose facing the cobra rather than the charging elephant. He wanted to take the apartment at the top of the block of flats without a raging fire-fight, if he could. Hence his approach was quiet and stealthy.
Peshawar is a most ancient city and no part is older than the Qissa Khawani Bazaar. Here caravans travelling the Great Trunk Road through the towering and intimidating Khyber Pass into Afghanistan have paused to refresh men and camels for many centuries. And like any good bazaar the Qissa Khawani has always provided for man’s basic needs: blankets, shawls, carpets, brass artefacts, copper bowls, food and drink. It still does.
It is multi-ethnic and multilingual. The accustomed eye can spot the turbans of Afridis, Waziris, Ghilzai and Pakistanis from nearby, contrasting with the chitral caps from further north and the fur-trimmed winter hats of Tajiks and Uzbeks.
In this maze of narrow streets and lanes where a man can lose any pursuer are the shops and food stalls of the clock bazaar, basket bazaar, money-changers, bird market and the bazaar of the storytellers. In imperial days the British called Peshawar the Piccadilly of Central Asia.
The apartment identified by the D/F sweeper as the source of the phone call was in one of those tall, narrow buildings with intricately carved balconies and shutters; it was four floors above a carpet warehouse in a lane wide enough for only one car. Because of the heat in summer, all these buildings have flat roofs where tenants may catch a breath of cool night air, and open stairwells leading up from the street below. Colonel Razak led his team quietly and on foot.
He sent four men, all in tribal clothes, up to the roof of a building four houses down the street from the target. They emerged on to the roof and calmly walked from roof to roof until they reached the final building. Here they waited for their signal. The colonel led six men up the stairs from the street. All had machine pistols under their robes save the point man, a heavily muscled Punjabi who bore the rammer.
When they were all lined up in the stairwell the colonel nodded to the point man who drew back the rammer and shattered the lock. The door sprang inwards and the team went inside at the run. Three of the men on the roof came straight down the access stairs; the fourth remained aloft in case anyone tried to escape upwards.
When Brian O’Dowd tried to recall it later, it all appeared extremely fast and blurred. That was the impression the occupants received as well.
