Spider Shepherd 10 - True Colours (8 page)

‘I’m serious, this is a tough one. But I need to find him.’

‘Because?’

‘Because?’

‘He’s the guy that shot you, right? I’m assuming you don’t want to shake him by the hand and tell him that bygones are bygones.’

‘Best you don’t know.’

‘Best I do, actually,’ said Sharpe. ‘If something happens to this Khan character I don’t want my name in the frame.’

‘That’s why it needs to be done on the QT,’ said Shepherd.

Sharpe held Shepherd’s look and Shepherd could see the concern in his friend’s eyes. ‘Revenge can get nasty, Spider,’ he said quietly.

‘He shot me. He killed my captain, shot him in the head and he died in my arms. And he shot three Paras in the back.’

‘It was war, right?’

‘Even in a war situation you don’t shoot people in the back. There are rules. Some of them are in the Geneva Convention and some of them aren’t written down, but there are rules.’ He took another sip of his drink. ‘He shot them in the back, Razor. Two of them while they were sitting in a Land Rover, the other one when he was running away. And now he’s in the UK. That can’t be right.’

Sharpe nodded slowly. ‘Yeah, the days of the Queensberry Rules are long gone,’ he said. ‘OK, I won’t ask you what you’re going to do because it’s best I don’t know. Just be careful, yeah?’

‘Always,’ said Shepherd.

Sharpe reached over and clinked his pint glass against Shepherd’s whiskey and soda. Then he raised his glass in the air. ‘To crime!’ he said.

Shepherd laughed and repeated the toast and then the two men drank.

‘There’s something else,’ said Shepherd as he put down his glass.

‘There usually is,’ growled Sharpe.

‘I need you to check up on the guy who gave me the info on Khan. A former Para by the name of Alex Harper. Everyone calls him Lex. He was a Para with me in Afghanistan. He was my spotter for a while.’

‘Spotter?’

‘I did a bit of sniping and you always need a spotter, someone who watches your back, helps ID targets, checks the wind and stuff. Sniping’s a two-man game and Lex was my number two. Bloody good, he was. Pulled my nuts out of the fire a few times.’

‘I’m sensing a but, here.’

Shepherd laughed. ‘Yeah, a lot’s changed in ten years, that’s for sure,’ he said. ‘He’s left the army and lives out in Thailand now.’

‘Ah, the Land of Smiles,’ said Sharpe.

‘Yeah, well, turns out it’s a small world. He knows the Moore brothers and he’s in the same line of work.’

‘Armed robbery?’

Shepherd nodded. ‘Yeah, he left the army and did a few banks. I think in his mind he was a sort of Robin Hood, told me that it was a way of getting back at the banks because of what they did to the country.’

‘That’s logical for you.’

‘In a crazy way he made sense,’ said Shepherd. ‘The banks screwed the economy, the MoD has to get rid of men to save money, Lex loses his job, so Lex hits back at the banks.’ He shrugged. ‘Sort of made sense at the time.’

‘He hurt anyone?’

‘Doesn’t seem to have done,’ said Shepherd. ‘You know that the key to successful blagging is shock and awe. It’s a bit like being an armed cop – if you get to the stage where you actually have to pull the trigger, you’ve pretty much failed.’ He swirled his whiskey and soda around his glass. ‘Anyway, he’s moved on now. Drugs. The big league.’

Sharpe grimaced. ‘That’s not good,’ he said.

‘You’re telling me.’

‘You need to watch yourself, Spider. Seriously.’

‘I know, I know.’

‘I mean it. If you get caught in bed with a drugs dealer your feet won’t touch the ground.’

Shepherd put up his hand dismissively. ‘I’m not stupid, Razor.’

‘Never said you were, but you sometimes have a blind spot where friends are concerned. You can cut people too much slack, you know? I get that he was a Para, I get that he saved your bacon in Afghanistan.’ He realised what he had said and laughed. ‘Ha ha, bacon in a Muslim country. Not much chance of that.’

‘Very funny, Razor. Hilarious. I sense another racism and diversity course on the horizon.’

‘OK, dietary humour aside, people change. And if you get caught passing confidential information to a drugs dealer, you’re screwed and you’re screwed big-time.’

‘I hear you. I’ll be careful. And whatever happens, you know your name won’t be mentioned.’

‘Just be careful,’ said Sharpe. ‘So what do you need?’

‘Lex is clever, he knows how to keep off the grid. There’s nothing on him on the Five databases, I’ve already checked, but I don’t want to go on to the PNC, so can you do that for me? Then maybe reach out to Intel and to Drugs? See what, if anything, is known. He was in Spain for a while, but now he’s based in Thailand. He’s super-careful about CCTV and communications, so he might have been lucky.’

‘I’ll check,’ said Sharpe.

Shepherd took his wallet and slipped a piece of paper across the table. ‘I got some basic info from his army record,’ he said.

Sharpe picked up the piece of paper, folded it, and slid it into his pocket. ‘This Lex was a friend of the Paras who were killed?’

Shepherd nodded. ‘Yeah. In fact, if I hadn’t warned him not to go with them, he’d probably be dead now too.’

‘So he’s out for revenge, too?’

Shepherd nodded again. ‘Yeah.’

‘So why not just let him have what intel we get and leave it up to him? Keep yourself out of it.’

Shepherd sighed. ‘It’s not as easy as that.’

‘It never is,’ said Sharpe.

L
ittle Lailuna loved to sing, but singing was forbidden by the Taliban. Afghanis had kept caged birds from time immemorial but they were now banned, for the beauty of their song and of their plumage was considered too distracting for those whose lives should be devoted to the serious study of the Quran. The flying of kites, which had always drawn watching crowds as they swooped and soared against the backdrop of the azure sky and the snow-capped peaks of the Hindu Kush, was also outlawed, as were films, magazines containing pictures, and music, singing and dancing.

Little Lailuna didn’t know that as she sang for her classmates. She was only five years old, and she loved to sing. She didn’t know that Taliban patrols attacked and beat women and even girls as young as nine years old for not wearing the chadri – the Afghan burqa. Nor did she know that high-heeled shoes were also forbidden as ‘no man should hear a woman’s footsteps lest it excite him’. Or that women were forbidden to speak loudly ‘lest a strange man should hear their voice’, and they were banned from leaving their houses unless accompanied by a male blood relative.

She was so lost in her song that Lailuna didn’t hear the Taliban militants pull up outside the school building in a Toyota Landcruiser. Lailuna was singing to her classmates, her back to the dusty street. She saw their smiles fade and she faltered and stopped as she saw them back away from her. She turned around and her eyes widened as she saw the four tall, bearded men in the black robes and turbans of the Taliban glowering at her. They were carrying canes. She shot a glance at her teacher, who was now ghost white and visibly trembling. Still Lailuna did not understand. ‘Shall I finish my song?’ she asked, hesitantly.

One of the Taliban swung back his bamboo cane and began lashing out at her, striking her on the legs and back. She fell to the floor crying, but still the cane whistled down, again and again. She curled up into a ball, still sobbing, and through her tears saw her teacher kicked, punched, dragged away and thrown into the back of the Toyota.

The men returned to herd Lailuna and her classmates out of the building with more kicks and blows. Then they took a can of petrol, splashed it around the classroom and set fire to it, and as the building burned, they told Lailuna and the other girls to go home and never return, that the school was finished. Then the Taliban jumped into the Toyota and drove off with Lailuna’s teacher in the back. The teacher was never seen again. Lailuna ran home and hid in the dark corner beneath the stairs. She was still there when her father, Ahmad Khan, returned several hours later, and it was some time before he was able to persuade her to tell him what had happened. He sat with her throughout the night as she tossed and turned in the grip of nightmares.

Ahmad Khan had been born the son of a poor farmer from Nangahar province in the far east of Afghanistan. The remote and lawless lands straddling the border were ruled by warlords and tribal headmen, and neither the Afghani nor the Pakistani governments had more than minimal control or influence over them. Khan’s father grew opium poppies in the arid, stony soil, the only cash crop that would produce enough income to feed his family. Khan’s father was a devout Muslim, a haji who had scraped and saved for over twenty years to raise the money for his pilgrimage to Mecca, one of the five pillars of his faith that was required of all Muslims at some point in their lives.

Khan had suffered an eye infection as a child which went untreated because there was no doctor in the village and richer men than his father could not afford the cost of the doctor in Jalalabad, fifty miles away. For a while it looked as if he would lose his sight, but in time he recovered, though his left eye, while still functioning, was left with a strange milky-white pupil instead of its previous hazel colour. When they saw him, some of their more superstitious neighbours muttered about ‘the evil eye’, and ushered their children away from him. From then on Khan was something of an outsider even in his own community, feared more than liked.

His two younger brothers worked the fields but Khan’s father had always had greater ambitions for his eldest son. His dream was that Khan would one day become a mullah or imam – a leader of the faith – or a hafiz – devoting himself to memorising the entire Quran. With that in mind, his father had enrolled him in a madrassa across the border in Peshawar. But Khan was more interested fighting than studying, and when he turned nineteen he recrossed the border to join the mujahedin fighting the Russians in the dying days of the war against the Soviets. Most Afghan men were good shots, but Khan was exceptional, a lethal sniper at long range and equally deadly with an AK-47 or an RPG.

Eventually the Soviets withdrew after their final humiliation at the hands of the mujahedin and Khan returned to the family farm and reconciled with his father. He shared the work in the poppy fields and married the wife his father had chosen for him, the young, doe-eyed daughter of a cousin, named Bahara – ‘the bringer of spring’. For a while, Khan remained aloof from the fighting that again engulfed the country as the rival mujahedin factions plunged Afghanistan into civil war.

Time after time, rival warlords either stole his opium crop or demanded tribute for leaving it unmolested. So when Mullah Omar, ‘The Commander of the Faithful’, pledged that his new movement would eliminate corruption and the rule of the warlords, and bring peace and order to Afghanistan, Khan was one of the first to enlist in the cause – known as the Taliban.

He rose rapidly through the ranks and was a commander by the time that the Taliban liberated Kandahar province, and was one of those who hanged the principal warlord from the barrel of one of his own tanks. Herat followed next and within two years Kabul had also fallen to the Taliban, with Mullah Omar taking power and renaming the country ‘the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’.

Khan returned home to his wife, but although several years had passed since their marriage, still they had not been blessed with a child. He had almost despaired, believing that Bahara must be barren, but at last she told him she was pregnant, and in time she gave birth to a daughter. Born during the full moon, she was christened Lailuna – bright moonlight. Three years later came a double tragedy. Pregnant again, Bahara died in childbirth and her baby, the son they had both dreamed of, died with her.

That was why Lailuna was everything to him now, all that he had. She was the sun, the moon, the stars in the winter sky, the blossom on the mulberry trees in spring, and when she sang, her voice was as sweet to him as the song of the mountain nightingale, whose beautiful call was always the first, long-awaited harbinger of summer.

Khan’s father grumbled that raising children was women’s work and urged him to marry again, but Khan refused. When he was away, he left Lailuna in the care of his sister, but whenever he was at home, his daughter was at his side. Few Afghan girls were educated, least of all in the frontier territories, but Khan defied his father’s opposition to the idea and sent her to a small school in the nearest town. Funded by foreign charities, it was run by an Afghan emigrée who had returned to her native land after living abroad for twenty years. There Lailuna blossomed. If Khan’s Taliban comrades disapproved of his actions in seeking an education for his daughter, they kept their opinions to themselves, for he was a great warrior, feared and respected by all.

When the Americans invaded the country, Khan again took up arms, fighting shoulder to shoulder with the Taliban against Americans, Britons and the new Afghan army, using the same guerrilla warfare tactics with which the mujahedin had brought the Soviets to their knees.

But the freedoms that Mullah Omar had promised never materialised. A new breed of Taliban commander emerged, hard-eyed fanatics determined to impose their own interpretation of the Prophet’s teachings on the areas they controlled. Khan watched with mounting unease as the soldier-monks of the Taliban clamped down on almost all sources of recreation and pleasure.

Lailuna was never the same after she had been beaten by the Taliban. She would start at any sudden noise and tense at the sound of any approaching vehicle. Her ready smile no longer sprang to her lips, the songs that had gladdened both their hearts had now been silenced and she barely left the house at all. Khan longed for his daughter to change, trying to coax her out of the dark place to which she had retreated, but the old Lailuna now seemed beyond his reach.

Khan’s burning anger at the men who had done this to his daughter remained, hardening into a cold, implacable hatred. He knew now that as long as she remained in Afghanistan there would be reminders of what had happened. As the weeks passed, he decided that he had no choice other than to seek a new life in the West. That was the only way that he and his beloved daughter had any sort of future together. So he cradled her on his lap and made his plans.