To judge from his reports, Orpheus has also gained access to lists of names, financial details and plans for plots against targets all over the world. I can only wonder about how he’s being affected by the company he’s keeping. He writes at length about the ideas and aspirations of the organisations he’s learning about. A new kind of international war, aimed far beyond Afghanistan, is steadily incubating. Its proponents use Islam, traditionally a religion of tolerance, as a rallying banner, but increasingly stripped of its humane principles and twisted towards violence.
Extremism is new to Afghanistan, but it’s on the rise. One of Orpheus’s reports accurately predicts the unprecedented mas-sacre of Hazara families in Afshar by henchmen of the brutal warlord Sayyaf, and in another he forecasts the assassinations of rival mujaheddin leaders both in Pakistan and Afghanistan. But there are also details of larger-scale acts of terror, which are increasingly inventive and ambitious. They seem fantastic and unrealisable. There are plots to blow up hotels in the Middle East and public buildings in New York, and to hijack airliners in Europe. There are details of a plan to kill both the Pope and the US president. Orpheus has been tasked to translate American military manuals on improvised explosives, poisons and the manufacture of biological toxins. But in the very country where these unprecedented campaigns are taking shape, the powers at which they are directed have no plans to intervene.
Then the reports stop. The newly formed Taliban is advancing through the south and west of the country, and I can only assume that the headquarters where Orpheus lives has been overrun or dispersed. Communication and transport between Kabul and the rest of the country are virtually severed. I allow myself to hope that he’s safe, but that it’s become impossible for him to get messages out from wherever he is.
Three months pass and there’s nothing from him. The daily stress of life adds to my feelings of desperation. Twice I visit the front lines in the west of the city towards the Taliban positions in Maidan Shahr, and find myself drawn too close to the fighting for my own good. I notice that I am taking risks with my own security and losing my sensitivity to danger. I don’t know it at the time, but the effects of the war are reaching into me in unexpected ways, and I am being changed by them. I am surrounded by destruction and the randomness of death, which I cannot fathom. I have felt the closeness of death as tangibly as the intimate whisper of a murderous seducer, and felt the richness, twinged by guilt, of having escaped its grasp. I have seen too often the numb lost look of men consumed by undiluted grief, and heard the howl of children as their mothers are pulled from the rubble of a rocket-blasted home, and I am coming to understand the long dark pain of those who silently endure what at first seems unendurable.
One evening, in the gloomy, oak-panelled bar of the United Nations club, an Australian journalist friend who’s been covering the war gives me his characteristically frank assessment.
‘You’re a bloody basket case,’ he says. ‘Got it written all over you,’ he gestures, drawing a finger across his chest. ‘Burned out. You need to get yourself out of this shit hole and get some R & R before someone has to pick you up in little bits and put them in a paper bag.’
A week later he’s badly wounded by a mortar explosion and is flown out of the city by the International Red Cross. He’s paralysed and will live the rest of his life in a wheelchair. The news hits me hard. It’s as if he’s shown me my own fate.
I have no wish to abandon Orpheus, but it’s time to pull out, so after nearly two years I resign from the trust. Nothing can describe my feelings of devastation as I board a United Nations flight to New Delhi and circle away from the airfield at Kabul, where the surrounding fields are still littered with the debris of destroyed Soviet aircraft. My sense of ruin is complete.
I return to England. I am racked by feelings of guilt at what I have seen of a conflict to which the world is largely indifferent, and experience shock and loathing at the comforts of ordinary life back home. In Afghanistan I have lived surrounded by random death, destruction and misery of every kind, and am mystified at why people in England, a country at peace, seem so very miserable.
The Network’s operation in Afghanistan has died. There is nothing more that can be done. As time passes I make my peace with ordinary life, and my hopes of seeing Manny again harden into a knot of despair. I refuse to believe he is dead, and he haunts me like the phantom limb of an amputee. There is not a day that passes when I do not think of him. I know in the deepest part of myself that one day, somewhere, I will find him, or his corpse, and be free of this pain, which is like a barrier between me and life, and through which all my experience is unwillingly filtered. When I experience moments of joy, I wish Manny were there to share them; when I am stalked by misery, I think of the difficulties and loneliness he must be having to face. He is my closest friend. With Manny I have shared the unforgettable intimacy of being alive – not only with the personal intensity that war or a shared love can bring to a friendship, but with the greater and impersonal love born of being in the service of something wholly bigger than us both.
The Baroness offers me a new role. While I start my landscaping business, finding consolation in working with nature, I’m given the task of advising and instructing new recruits to the Network. In London I teach the rudiments of counter-surveillance and field codes to a small number of men and women who will operate in places I don’t know about.
One afternoon I’m in Selfridges to demonstrate the use of switchback escalators as a surveillance trap. The idea is to carefully clock the faces of travellers on a lower escalator, ‘trapping’ them into becoming visible. Part of good counter-surveillance is not giving any indication that you suspect you’re being followed, which means techniques like stopping to tie shoelaces or peering at reflections in shop windows are never really used, and the switchback configuration of escalators in big department stores is one of the few ordinary means to see who’s behind you without having to turn around in the manner of a fugitive. But life is so strange you couldn’t make it up. I’m just wondering about a good way to challenge the three pairs of young watchers trying to keep up with me when I spot a striking-looking woman on the escalator below. I follow her, deciding that I’ll demonstrate to my watchers impromptu techniques for getting the telephone number of a perfect stranger. I catch up with the woman I’ve chosen on an upper floor. She’s flicking through clothes on a rail, and already I’m thinking of a story about being a designer and how, if she loves those designs, she’ll love the line I’ve designed, which is about to be launched. But she’s unexpectedly beautiful, and has the predatory gaze of a panther, and I’ve already fallen under the spell of her feline power and grace. I make a joke about the colour of a dress she’s considering. She’s American, it turns out, and within a few seconds she asks me the question that takes English people months to get around to, enquiring what line of business I’m in.
‘I teach spies how to pick up good-looking foreign women.’
‘Saw you coming,’ she says.
And perhaps she did. I manage to get her phone number, but I haven’t had to tell a single lie. Six months later we’re married, and our first child is soon on the way. But we’re not happy. I’ve been blinded by her beauty and energy, and have failed to notice a cruel streak that makes all the other cruel people I’ve met seem like Good Samaritans. My attempt at family life turns out to be a multiplying sequence of disasters, and my wife is destructively angry at the whole of life. She’s angry at England, angry at the English, angry at my friends and angry at me. One day, before I’ve lost all hope for the relationship, I call her mother in America to ask why her daughter is so angry.
‘Angry?’ she laughs chillingly. ‘She was born angry.’
I’m two years back into life as a bachelor when the Baroness calls an urgent meeting. I drive from London to Chevening House, where she occasionally holds quiet gatherings with members of the Foreign Office. With her are two nameless officials who are eager to know my assessment of a piece of intelligence just received by the Americans. It’s single-threaded, meaning it comes from only one source, and as such would normally be unactionable. But it’s so hot the CIA is screaming for help to assess its authenticity, and has turned to its allies for advice. The source suggests that a summit meeting is about to be held in Afghanistan involving all the leading jihadist commanders currently in the country. Bin Laden, who’s on the ascendant, is planning to be there himself, and the Americans need to decide how to act. Based on everything I’ve learned from Orpheus’s reports, I confirm that the details seem credible, and that the location and the names of the parties involved are consistent with what I know. The officials thank me for my contribution.
Later, I stroll with the Baroness through the grounds, and we walk to the green boathouse on the northern edge of the lake. We sit on a small bench. ‘I thought I should tell you first,’ she says as we look across the water. I feel a momentary sense of dread as she speaks these words, and I remember how at that moment my eyes fall on the dark green calfskin gloves she is wearing, and how her hands are folded in her lap. ‘There’s a rumour,’ she goes on, ‘of an Englishman operating in one of bin Laden’s groups. He’s been in prison in Chechnya for a year, which makes him a bit of a hero. The Americans felt they should share it with us.’ She pauses, then speaks again before I can ask the question. ‘They don’t have a name, but apparently he’s called the Christian commander, based on a military operation he led in the time of the jihad against the Soviets.’ Then she turns to me with a slight smile. ‘They remember that sort of thing, don’t they?’
I hardly dare believe it. Despite periods of numbing doubt I have never fully believed he was dead. It strikes me that the east, where fate put us together like a cosmic matchmaker, is now delivering him back to me.
The Baroness has read my mind again. ‘I know,’ she says with a look that suggests she understands how much the news means to me. ‘We need to get you back there. I shall have to arrange a context.’
My mind’s racing, then comes to a sudden halt at a dark thought. ‘It’s been a long time,’ I say. ‘We don’t know what’s happened to him in the meantime.’
‘He should come in. You either bring him back,’ says the Baroness quietly, looking across the water, ‘or you deal with the situation on the ground as you see fit. You were his best friend, and it must be for you to decide.’
It’s February and I realise I’ve forgotten that the next day is my birthday.
8
It’s now Saturday, five days after my temporary incarceration with Billy, the Face and the charming colonel with the nice green beret. My rib still hurts when I take a deep breath or laugh, and my eye has a purplish corona around it which gives me a slightly menacing look that I enjoy. It’s time for another briefing with Seethrough and, as promised, he’s laid on transport.
At dusk I drive with H to the outskirts of Hereford, where we board a black Puma helicopter fitted with additional fuel tanks and passenger seats around the sides. It’s run by the best specialist pilots from the RAF and is called the Special Duties Flight, part of the Firm’s special operations capability. It’s the limousine of helicopters, says H, and rattles much less than others because it’s maintained more diligently and they actually take the trouble to tighten up all the nuts and bolts. Even the pilot sounds quite posh. It’s the Firm’s preferred means of transport between London, Hereford and Fort Monckton on the coast, where among other things, H now tells me, he occasionally teaches the finer points of MOE – covert methods of entry – to selected aspirants, based on the exceptional talents of his mentor, a Major Freddy Mace.
We belt ourselves in and H gives a thumbs up to the loadmaster, who makes sure everything is properly stowed. The aircraft winds into the air and swoops south-east. I watch the Cotswolds race past beneath us as we roar at spectacularly low altitude towards London and over a carpet of glittering lights to a heliport that I didn’t know existed. It hangs over the Thames not far from Battersea and is marked
london
in big illuminated white letters. I can’t imagine why anyone who already knows how to fly a helicopter to Battersea might need to be reminded of this, and H is none the wiser.
A squat and pale-faced driver meets us and whisks us along Battersea Park Road in a powerful Vauxhall. A few minutes later the towers of Legoland, bathed in orange light, loom up ahead of us. We draw to a stop alongside the building beneath a security barrier where our IDs are checked, and descend into an underground car park.
I recognise Stella, Seethrough’s secretary, who’s there to meet us. I wonder whether this timid-looking Moneypenny, whose face and manner are so very forgettable and who asks us meekly whether we’ve had a pleasant journey, has perhaps just come up from the subterranean ops room where she’s been assisting the running of some far-off minor war. I’m tempted to make a joke and ask how saving the world has been for her today, but keep silent as she leads us to a row of capsule-like doors, runs her card through the reader and admits us to the lift.
Seethrough is ready for us upstairs with a briefing list of three items. The first is the latest imagery from our Cousins, as he calls the Americans. He unrolls two poster-sized satellite photographs of astonishingly high resolution and clarity, and military topographic maps that cover the same area.
For the first time we have the thrill of studying our target: a huge, medieval-looking fort with four giant turrets, nestling in the mountains north-west of Kandahar. In its cellars are the Stinger missiles that the Cousins have paid their tribal agents so handsomely to gather together. At the going rate, a minimum of $100,000 per missile, there’s over ten million dollars’ worth of them stashed in the fort, according to the TRODPINT reports. Some have been bought from the same commanders to whom they were originally supplied, others from profiteering middlemen, and others from the Taliban themselves. A few have been smuggled into Pakistan and spirited away by the CIA, who maintain a light aircraft at Peshawar airport for this very purpose.