The Afghan

CHAPTER 4

The decision in the Hampshire orchard led to a blizzard of decision making from the two spymasters. To start with, sanction and approval had to be sought from both men’s political masters.

This was easier said than done, because Mike Martin’s first condition was that no more than a dozen people should ever know what Operation Crowbar was about. His concern was completely understood.

If fifty people know anything that interesting, one will eventually spill the beans. Not intentionally, not viciously, not even mischievously, but inevitably. Those who have ever been in deep cover in a lethal situation know that it is nerve-racking enough to trust in one’s own tradecraft never to make a mistake and be caught. To hope that one will never be given away by some utterly unforeseeable fluke is constantly stressful. But the ultimate nightmare is to know that the capture and the long, agonizing death to follow happened because some fool in a bar boasted to his girlfriend and was overheard-that is the worst fear of all. So Martin’s condition was acceded to at once. In Washington, John Negroponte agreed that he alone would be the repository and gave the go-ahead. Steve Hill dined at his club with a man in the British government and secured the same result. That made four. But each man knew he personally could not be on the case twenty-four hours a day. Each needed an executive officer to run things day to day. Marek Gumienny appointed a rising Arabist in the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism division; Michael McDonald dropped everything, explained to his family that he had to work in the UK for a while and flew east as Marek Gumienny returned home. Steve Hill picked his own deputy on the Middle East Desk, Gordon Phillips. Before they parted company, the two principals agreed that every aspect of Crowbar would have a plausible cover story so that no one lower than the top ten would really know that a Western agent was going to be slipped inside Al Qaeda. Both Langley and Vauxhall Cross were told that the two men about to go missing were simply on a career-improving, academic-study sabbatical and would be away from their desks for about six months.

Steve Hill introduced the two men who would now be working together, and told them what Crowbar was going to try to do. Both McDonald and Phillips went very silent. Hill had installed them both not in offices in the headquarters building by the Thames but in a safe house, one of several retained by the Firm, out in the countryside.

When they had unpacked and convened in the drawing room, he tossed them both a thick file.

“Finding an Ops HQ^starts tomorrow,” he said. “You have twenty-four hours to commit this to memory. This is the man who is going to go in. You will work with him until that day, and for him after that. This”-he tossed a thinner file on the coffee table “is the man he is going to replace. Clearly, we know much less. But that is everything the U.S. interrogators have been able to secure from him in hundreds of hours of interrogations at Gitmo. Learn this also.” When he was gone, the two younger men asked for a large pot of coffee from the household staff and started to read.

IT WAS during a visit to the Farnborough Airshow in the summer of 1977, when he was fifteen, that the schoolboy Martin fell in love. His father and younger brother were with him, fascinated by the fighters and bombers, acrobatic fliers and first-viewing prototypes. For Mike, the high point was the visit of the Red Devils, the stunt team from the Parachute Regiment, free-falling, from tiny specs in the sky to swooping to earth in their harnesses right in the heart of the tiny landing zone. That was when he knew what it was he wanted to do. He wrote a personal letter to the Paras during his last summer term at Haileybury, in 1980, and was offered an interview at the Regimental Depot at Aldershot for that same September. He arrived, and stared at the old Dakota, out of which his predecessors had once dropped to try to capture the bridge at Arnhem, until the sergeant escorting the group of five ex-schoolboys led them to the interview room.

He was regarded by his school-and the Paras always checked-as a moderate scholar but a superb athlete. That suited the Paras just fine. He was accepted, and began training at the end of the month, a grueling twenty-two weeks that would bring the survivors to April 1981.

There were four weeks of square bashing, basic weapons handling, field craft and physical fitness; then two more weeks of the same, plus signals, first aid and precautions against NBC-nuclear, bacteriological and chemical-warfare. The seventh week was for more witness training, getting harder all the time; but not as bad as weeks eight and nine-endurance marches through the Brecon range in Wales in midwinter, where fit men have died of exposure, hypothermia and exhaustion. The numbers began to thin out.

Week ten saw the course at Hythe, Kent, for shooting on the range where Martin, just turned nineteen, was rated a marksman. Eleven and twelve were “test” weeks-just running up and down sandy hills carrying tree trunks in the mud, rain and hail.

“Test weeks?” muttered Phillips. “What the hell has the rest been?” After test weeks, the remaining young men got their coveted red beret, and then three more weeks in the Brecons for defense exercises, patrolling and “live firing.” By then, late January, the Brecons were utterly bleak and freezing. The men slept, rough and wet, without fires.

Sixteen to nineteen covered what Mike Martin had come for: the parachute course at RAF Abingdon, where a few more dropped out, and not just from the aircraft. At the end came the “wings parade,” when the wings of a paratrooper were finally pinned on. That night, the old IOI club at Aldershot saw another riotous party. There were two more weeks devoted to a field exercise called “last fence,” and some polishing up of parade ground skills; week twenty-two saw the “Pass Out Parade,” when proud parents could finally view their spotty youths amazingly transformed into soldiers.

Private Mike Martin had long been earmarked as POM-potential officer material-and in April 1981 went to join the new short course at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, passing out in December as a second lieutenant. If he thought glory awaited him, he was entirely mistaken. There are three battalions in the Parachute Regiment, and Martin was assigned to 3 Para, which happened to be Aldershot in penguin mode. For three years out of every nine, or one tour out of three, each battalion is off of parachuting and used as ordinary truck-borne infantry. Paras hate penguin mode.

Martin, as a platoon commander, was assigned to Recruit Platoon, putting newcomers through the same miseries he had endured. He might have remained there for the rest of 3 Para’s tour as penguins but for a faraway gentleman called Leopoldo Galtieri. On I April 1982, the Argentine dictator invaded the Falkland Islands. Three Para was told to kit up and get ready to move out. Within a week, driven by the implacable Margaret Thatcher, a British task force was steaming south in a collection of vessels, bound for the far end of the Atlantic, where southern winter, with its roaring seas and driving rain, was waiting for them.

The journey south was on the liner Canberra, with a first stop at Ascension Island, a bleak button of a place lashed by constant wind. Here there was a pause as, far away, the last diplomatic efforts were pursued to persuade Galtieri to evacuate or Margaret Thatcher to back off. Neither could dream of agreeing and surviving in office. The Canberra sailed on, shadowing the expedition’s only carrier, the Ark Royal.

When it became clear that invasion was inevitable, Martin and his team were “cross-decked” by helicopter from Canberra to a landing craft. Gone were the civilized conditions of the liner. The same wild and stormy night that Martin and his men cross-decked in Sea King helicopters, another Sea King went down and sank, taking with her nineteen of the Special Air Service Regiment, the biggest one-night loss the SAS has ever sustained.

Martin took his thirty men ashore with the rest of 3 Para, landing at San Carlos Water. It was miles from the main island’s capital at Port Stanley, but for that reason it was unopposed. Without a pause, the Paras and the Marines began the grueling forced march through the mud and rain east to the capital. They carried everything in Bergen rucksacks so heavy it was like carrying another man. The appearance of an Argentine Skyhawk meant diving into the slime, but, in the main, the “Argies” were after the ships offshore, not the men in the mud below. If the ships could be sunk, the onshore men were finished. The real enemy was the cold, the constant freezing rain, the exhausting “tab” across a landscape that could not support a single tree. Until Mount Longdon. Pausing below the hills, 3 Para set themselves up in a lonely farm called Estancia House, and prepared to do what their country had sent them seven thousand miles to do. It was the night of 11-12 June. It was supposed to be a silent night attack, and remained so until Corporal Milne stepped on a mine. After that, it became noisy. The Argie machine guns opened up, and flares lit the hills and the valley like daylight. Three Para could either run back to cover or run into the fire and take Longdon. They took Longdon, with twenty-three dead and over forty injured. It was the first time, as bullets tore the air around his head and men fell beside him, that Mike Martin experienced that strange, brassy taste on the tongue that is the taste of fear.

But nothing touched him. Of his own platoon of thirty, including one sergeant and three corporals, six were dead and nine injured. The Argentine soldiers who had held the ridge were forced recruits, lads from the sunny pampas-the sons of the well-off could avoid military service-and wanted to go home, out of the rain, cold and mud. They had quit their bunkers and foxholes and were heading back to shelter in Port Stanley. At dawn, Mike Martin stood atop Wireless Ridge, looked east to the town and rising sun, and rediscovered the God of his fathers, whom he had neglected for many years. He prayed his thanks, and vowed never to forget again.

At TH E time the ten-year-old Mike Martin was capering round his father’s garden at Saadun, Baghdad, to the delight of the Iraqi guests, a boy was being born a thousand miles away.

West of the road from Pakistani Peshawar to Afghan Jalalabad lies the range of the Spin Gahr, the White Mountains, dominated by the towering Tora Bora. These mountains, seen from afar, are like a great barrier between the two countries, bleak and cold, always tipped with snow, and in winter wholly covered.

The Spin Gahr lies inside Afghanistan, with the Safed range on the Pakistani side. Running down to the rich plains around Jalalabad are myriad streams that carry the snowmelt and rain off the Spin Gahr, and these form many upland valleys where small patches of land may be planted, orchards raised and flocks of sheep and goats grazed.

Life is harsh, and with the life-support system being so sparse the communities of the valleys are small and scattered. The people bred up here are the ones the old British Empire knew and feared, calling them the Pathans, now Pashtun. Back then they fought from behind their rocky fastness with long, brass-bound muskets called the “jezail,” with which each man was accurate as a modern sniper. Rudyard Kipling, the poet of the old Raj, evoked the deadliness of the mountain men against subalterns expensively educated in England in just four lines:

A scrimmage in a Border Station – A canter down some dark defile – Two thousand pounds of education – Drops to a ten-rupee jezail-

In 1972, there was a hamlet in one of these upland valleys called Maloko-zai-like all these hamlets, named after a long-dead warrior founder. There were five walled compounds in the settlement, each the home of one extended family of about twenty persons. The village headman was Nuri Khan, and it was in his compound and round his fire that the men gathered on a summer evening to sip hot, unmilked, sugarless tea.

As with all the compounds, the walls were where the residences and livestock pens were built, so that all faced inward. The fire of mulberry logs blazed as the sun dropped far to the west and darkness clothed the mountains, bringing chill even in high summer.

From the women’s quarters, the cries were muted, but if one was especially loud the men would cease their jovial conversation and wait to see if news would arrive. The wife of Nuri Khan was bearing her fourth child, and her husband prayed that Allah would grant him a second son. It was only right that a man should have sons to take care of the flocks when young and defend the compound when he had become a man. Nuri Khan had a boy of eight and two daughters. The darkness was complete and only the flames lit the hawk-nosed faces and black beards when a midwife came scurrying from the shadows. She whispered in the ear of the father, and his mahogany face broke into a flashing smile. “Inshallah, I have a son,” he cried. His male relatives and neighbors rose as one, and the air crackled and roared with the sound of their rifles exploding upward into the night sky. There was much embracing and congratulations and thanks to all-merciful Allah, who had granted His servant a son. “How will you call him?” asked a herdsman from a nearby compound. “I shall call him Izmat after my own grandfather, may his soul rest in eternal peace,” said Nuri Khan. And so it was when an imam came to the hamlet a few days later for the naming and the circumcision.

There was nothing unusual about the raising of the child. When he could toddle, he toddled, and when he could run he ran furiously. Like farm boys, he wanted to do the things the older boys did, and by five was entrusted to help drive the flocks up to the high pastures in summer and watch over them while the women cut forage for the winter.

He yearned to be out of the house of the women, and on the proudest day of his life so far was at last allowed to join the men round the fire and listen to stories of how the Pashtun had defeated the red-coated Angleez in these mountains only a hundred and fifty years ago, as if it was yesterday. His father was the richest man in the village in the only way a man could be rich-in cows, sheep and goats. These, along with relentless caring and hard work, provided meat, milk and hides. Patches of corn yielded porridge and bread; fruit and nut oil came from the prolific mulberry and walnut orchards. There was no need to leave the village, so for the first eight years of his life Izmat Khan did not. The five families shared the small mosque, and joined each other for communal worship on Fridays. Izmat’s father was devout but not fundamentalist, and certainly not fanatical.

Beyond this mountain existence, Afghanistan called itself the Democratic Republic, or DRA, but as was so often the case this was a misnomer. The government was communist, and heavily supported by the USSR. In terms of religion, this was an oddity, because the people of the wild interior were traditionally devout Muslims for whom atheism was godlessness and therefore unacceptable.

But equally traditionally, the Afghans of the cities were moderate and tolerant-the fanaticism would be imposed on them later. Women were educated, few covered their faces, singing and dancing was not only allowed but commonplace, and the feared secret police pursued those suspected of political opposition, not religious laxity.

Of the two links the hamlet of Maloko-zai had with the outside world, one was the occasional party of Kuchi nomads passing through with a mule train of contraband, avoiding the Great Trunk Road through the Khyber Pass, with its patrols and border guards, seeking the track to the town of Parachinar across in Pakistan.

They would have news of the plains and the cities, of the government in faraway Kabul and the world beyond the valleys. And there was the radio, a treasured relic that squawked and screeched but then uttered words they could understand. This was the BBC’s Pashto service, bringing the Pashtun a noncommunist version of the world. It was a peaceful boyhood. Then came the Russians. It mattered little to the village of Maloko-zai who was right or wrong. They neither knew nor cared that their communist president had displeased his mentors in Moscow because he could not control his bailiwick. It mattered only that an entire Soviet Army had rolled across the Amu Darya River from Soviet Uzbekistan, roared through the Salang Pass and taken Kabul. It was not yet about Islam versus atheism; it was an insult.

Izmat Khan’s education had been very basic. He had learned the Koranic verses necessary for prayer, even though they were in a language called Arabic and he could not understand them. The local imam was not resident; indeed, it was Nuri Khan who led the prayers-yet he had taught the boys of the village the rudiments of reading and writing, but only in Pashto. It was his father who had taught him the rules of the Pukhtunwali, the code by which a Pashtun must live. Honor, hospitality, the necessity of vendetta to avenge insult-these were the rules of the code. And Moscow had insulted them.

It was in the mountains that the resistance began, and they called themselves “Warriors of God,” Mujaheddin. But first the mountain men needed a conference, a shura, to decide what to do and who would lead them. They knew nothing of the Cold War, but they were told they now had powerful friends, the enemies of the USSR. That made perfect sense. He who is the enemy of my enemy… First among these were Pakistan, lying right next door, and ruled by a fundamentalist dictator. General Zia-ul-Haq. Despite the religious difference, he was allied with the Christian power called America, and her friends, the Angleez, the onetime enemy.

Mike Martin had tasted action and knew he enjoyed it. He did a tour in Northern Ireland, operating against the IRA, but the conditions were miserable, and though the danger of a sniper’s bullet in the back was constant the patrols were boring. He looked around, and in the spring of 1986 applied for the SAS. Quite a proportion of the SAS comes from the Paras because their training and combat roles are similar, but the SAS claims their tests are harder. Martin’s papers went through the regiment’s records office at Hereford, where his fluent Arabic was noted with interest, and he was invited to a selection course. The SAS claims they take very fit men and then start to work on them. Martin did the standard “initial” course of six weeks among others drawn from the Paras, infantry, cavalry, armor, artillery and even engineers. Of the other “crack” units, the Special Boat Squadron draws their recruits exclusively from the Marines.

It is a simple course based on a single precept. On the first day, a smiling sergeant instructor told them all: “On this course, we don’t try to train you. We try to kill you.”

They did, too. Only ten percent of applicants pass the initial. It saves time later. Martin passed. Then came continuation training: jungle training in Belize, and an extra month back in England devoted to interrogation resistance. “Resistance” means trying to stay silent while some extremely unpleasant practices are being inflicted. The good news is that both the regiment and the volunteer have the right every hour to insist on an RTU-return to unit. Martin started in the late summer of 1986, with twenty-two SAS, as a troop commander with the rank of captain. He opted for “A” Squadron, the free-fallers, a natural choice for a Para.

If the Paras had no use for his Arabic, the SAS did, for it has a long and intimate relationship with the Arab world. It was formed in the Western Desert in 1941, and its empathy with the sands of Arabia has never left it. It had the jokey reputation of being the only Army unit that actually makes a profit-not quite true but close. SAS men are the world’s most sought-after bodyguards and trainers of bodyguards. Throughout Arabia, the sultans and emirs have always sought out the SAS to train their own personal guards, and they pay handsomely for it. Martin’s first assignment was with the Saudi National Guard in Riyadh, when, in the summer of 1987, he was called home. “I don’t like this sort of thing,” said the CO in his office at Sterling Lines, the regiment’s Hereford HQ. “No, I bloody well don’t. But the green slime wants to borrow you. It’s the Arabic thing.“ He had used the occasionally friendly phrase reserved by fighting soldiers for intelligence people. He meant the SIS-the Firm. “Haven’t they got their own Arabic speakers?” asked Martin. “Oh, yes, desks full of them. But this isn’t just a question of speaking it. And it’s not really Arabia. They want someone to go behind the Soviet lines in Afghanistan and work with the resistance, the Mujaheddin.” The military dictator of Pakistan had decreed that no serving soldier of a Western power was to be allowed to penetrate into Afghanistan via Pakistan. He did not say so, but his own ISI military intelligence much enjoyed administering the American aid pouring in the direction of the muj, and he further had no wish to see a serving American or British soldier, infiltrated via Pakistan, captured by the Russians and paraded around.

But halfway through the Soviet occupation, the British had decided the man to back was not the Pakistani choice Hekmatyar, but the Tajik named Shah Massoud, who, rather than skulking in Europe or Pakistan, was doing real damage to the occupiers. The trouble was in bringing that aid to him. His territory was up in the north.

Securing good guides from the muj units near the Khyber Pass was not a problem. As in the time of the Raj, a few pieces of gold go a long way. There is an aphorism that you cannot buy the loyalty of an Afghan, but you can always rent it.

“The key word at every stage, Captain,” they told him at SIS headquarters, which back then was at Century House near the Elephant and Castle, “is ‘deniability.’ That is why you actually have to-just a technicality-resign from the Army. Of course, the moment you come back”-he was nice enough to say when, not if-“you will be completely reinstated.”

Mike Martin knew perfectly well that within its ranks the SAS already had the ultrasecret Revolutionary Warfare Wing, whose task was to stir up as much trouble for communist regimes worldwide as they could handle. He mentioned this. “This is even more covert,” said the mandarin. “We call this unit Unicorn-because it doesn’t exist. There are never more than twelve, and at the moment only four men, in it. We really need someone to slip into Afghanistan through the Khyber Pass, secure a local guide and be brought north to the Panjshir Valley where Shah Massoud operates.”

“Bringing gifts?” asked Martin. The smooth one made a helpless gesture. “Only tokens, I am afraid. A question of what a man can carry. But later, we might move to mule trains and a lot more kit, if Massoud will send his own guides south to the border. It’s a question of first contact, don’t you see.” “And the gift?”

“Snuff. He likes our snuff. Oh, and two Blowpipe surface-to-air tubes with missiles. He is much troubled by air attacks. You’d have to teach his people how to use them. I reckon you’d be away six months. How do you feel about it?”

Before the invasion was half a year old, it was clear that the Afghans would still not do one thing that had always been impossible for them: unite. After weeks of arguing in Peshawar and Islamabad, with the Pakistani Army insisting it would not distribute American funds and weapons to any but the resisters accredited to them, the number of rival resistance groups was reduced to seven. Each had a political leader and a war commander. These were the Peshawar 7. Only one was not Pashtun: Professor Rabbani, as well as his charismatic war leader, Ahmad Shah Massoud, both Tajiks from the far north. Of the other six, three were soon nicknamed the “Gucci commanders,” because they rarely-if ever-entered occupied Afghanistan, preferring to wear Western dress in safety abroad.

Of the other three, two-Sayyaf and Hekmatyar-were fanatical supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood of ultra-Islam, the latter being so cruel and vindictive that by the end he had executed more Afghans than he had killed Russians. The one who tribally controlled the province of Nangarhar where Izmat Khan had been born was the mullah Maulvi Younis Khalis. He was a scholar and preacher, but he had a twinkle in his eye that spoke of kindness, as opposed to the cruelty of Hekmatyar, who loathed him.

Although the oldest of the seven and over sixty, for much of the next ten years Younis Khalis made forays into occupied Afghanistan to lead his men personally. When he was not there, his war commander was Abdul Haq. By 1980, the war had come to the valleys of the Spin Gahr. The Soviets were teeming through Jalalabad below the mountains, and their air force had started punitive raids on mountain villages. Nuri Khan had sworn allegiance to Younis Khalis as his warlord, and been granted the right to form his own lashkar, or fighting yeomanry.

He could shelter much of the animal wealth of his village in the natural caves that riddled the White Mountains, and his people could shelter in them, too, when the air raids came. But he decided it was time for the women and children to cross the border to seek refuge in Pakistan. The small convoy would of course need a male chaperone for the journey and the stay at Peshawar, however long that would last. As mahram, he appointed his own father, over sixty and stiff of limb. Donkeys and mules were secured for the journey.

Fighting back his tears at the shame of being sent out like a child, eight-year-old Izmat Khan was embraced by his father and brother, took the bridle of the mule bearing his mother and turned toward the high peaks and Pakistan. It would be seven years before he returned from exile, and when he came it would be to fight the Russians with cold ferocity. To legitimize themselves in the eyes of the world, it had been agreed the warlords would each form a political party. That of Younis Khalis was called Hizb Islami, and everyone under his rule had to join it. Outside Peshawar, a rash of tented cities had sprung up under the auspices of something called the United Nations, though Izmat Khan had never heard of it. The U N had agreed that each warlord, now masquerading as political parties, should have his separate refugee camp, and no one should be admitted who was not a member of the appropriate party.

There was another organization handing out food and blankets. Its insignia was a stumpy red cross. Izmat Kahn had never seen one of those, either, but he knew hot soup, and after the arduous crossing of the mountains he drank his fill. There was one more condition required of inhabitants of the camps and those benefiting from the largesse of the West, funneled through United Nations and General Zia-ul-Haq: Boys needed to be educated at a Koranic school, or madrassah, in each refugee camp. This would be their only education. They would not learn about math or science, history or geography. They would just learn endlessly to recite the verses of the Koran. For the rest, they would only learn about war.

The imams of these madrassahs were, in the main, donated, salaried and funded by Saudi Arabia, and many were Saudis. They brought with them the only version of Islam permitted in Saudia Arabia: Wahhabism, the harshest and most intolerant creed within Islam. Thus, within sight of the sign of the cross dispensing food and medications, a whole generation of young Afghans was about to be brainwashed into fanaticism.

Nuri Khan visited his family as often as he could, two or three times a year, leaving his lashkar in the hands of his elder son. But it was a harsh journey, and Nuri Khan looked older each time. In 1987, when he arrived, he looked lined and drawn. Izmat’s elder brother had been killed in a bombing raid while ushering others toward the safety of the caves. Izmat was fifteen, and his chest nearly burst with pride when his rather bade him return, join the resistance and become Mujahid.

There was much weeping from the women, of course, and mumbling from Grandfather, who would not survive another winter on the plain outside Peshawar. Then Nuri Khan, his remaining son and the eight men he had brought with him to see their families turned west to cross the peaks into Nangarhar Province and the war. The boy who came back was different, and the landscape he found was shattered. In all the valleys, hardly a stone bothy was standing. The Sukhoi fighter-bombers and the Hind helicopter gunships had devastated the valleys in the mountains from the Panj-shir to the north, where Shah Massoud had his fighting zone, down to Paktia and the Shinkay range. The people of the plains could be controlled or intimidated by the Afghan Army or by the KHAD, the secret police taught and stiffened by the Soviet KGB.

But the people of the mountains, and those from the plains and cities who chose to join them, were intractable, and, as it later turned out, unconquerable. Despite air cover, which the British had never had, the Soviets were experiencing something like the fate of the British column cut to pieces on the suicidal march from Kabul to Jalalabad.

The roads were unsafe from ambush, the mountain unapproachable save by air. And the deployment in muj hands of the American Stinger missile since September 1986 had forced the Soviets to fly higher-too high to be accurate-or risk being hit. The Soviet losses were mounting relentlessly, with further manpower reductions due to wounds and disease, and even in a controlled society like the USSR the morale was dropping like a falcon on the swoop. It was a savagely cruel war. Few prisoners were ever taken, and the quickly dead were the lucky ones. The mountain clans especially hated the Russian fliers, and, if taken alive, they could be pegged out in the sun with a small cut in the stomach wall so the entrails would burst forth and fry in the sun until death brought release. Or they could be given over to the women and their skinning knives.

The Soviet response was to bomb, rocket and strafe anything that moved: man, woman, child or animal. They seeded the mountains with untold millions of air-dropped mines, which eventually created a nation of crutches and prosthetic limbs. Before it was over, there would be a million Afghans dead, a million crippled and five million refugees.

Izmat Khan knew all about guns from his time in the refugee camp, and the favorite was, of course, the Kalashnikov AK-47. It was a supreme irony that this Soviet weapon, the preferred assault rifle of every dissident movement and terrorist in the world, was now being used against them. But the Americans were providing them for a reason: Ever)’ Afghan could replenish his ammunition from the packs of a dead Russian, which saved carrying time across the mountains if the ammunition had been noncompatible.

Assault rifle apart, the weapon of choice was the rocket-propelled grenade, the RPG-simple, easy to use, easy to reload and deadly at short-to-medium range. This, too, was provided by the West.

Izmat Khan was big for fifteen, desperately trying to grow a fuzz round the chin, and the mountains soon made him as hard as he had ever been. Witnesses have seen the Pashtun mountain men moving like mountain goats through their own terrain, legs seemingly immune to exhaustion, breathing unlabored when others are gasping for breath.

He had been back home for a year when his father summoned him. There was a stranger with him; face burned dark from the sun, black-bearded, wearing a gray woolen shalwar kameez over stout hiking boots and a sleeveless jerkin. On the ground behind him stood the biggest backpack the boy had ever seen, and two tubes wrapped in sheepskin. On his head was a Pashtun turban. “This man is a guest and a friend,” said Nuri Khan. “He has come to help us and fight with us. He has to take his tubes to Shah Massoud in the Panjshir, and you will guide him there.”

CHAPTER 5

The young Pashtun stared at the stranger. He did not seem to have understood what Nuri Khan had said.

“Is he Afghan?” he asked.

“No, he is Angleez.”

Izmat Khan was staggered. This was the old enemy. More, he was what the imam in the madrassah had condemned with constant venom. He must be kafir, an unbeliever, a Nasrani, a Christian, destined to burn for all eternity in hell. And he was to escort this man over a hundred miles of mountainside to a great valley in the north? To spend days and nights in his company? Yet his father was a good man, a good Muslim, and he had called him friend. How could this be? The Englishman tapped his forefingers lightly on his chest near the heart. “Salaam aleikhem, Izmat Khan,” he said. The father spoke no Arabic, even though there were now many Arab volunteers farther down the mountain range. The Arabs kept themselves to themselves, always digging, so there was no cause to mix with them and learn some of their language. But Izmat had read the Koran over and over again; it was written in Arabic only, and his imam had spoken only his native Saudi Arabic. Izmat had a good working knowledge. “Aleikhem as-salaam,” he acknowledged. “How do you call yourself?”

“Mike,” said the man.

“Ma-ick.” Izmat tried it. Strange name.

“Good, let us take tea,” said his father. They were sheltering in a cave mouth about ten miles from the wreckage of their hamlet. Farther inside the cave, a small fire glowed, too far inside to let a visible plume of smoke emerge to attract a Soviet aircraft.

“We will sleep here tonight. In the morning, you will go north. I go south to join Abdul Haq. There will be another operation against the Jalalabad-to- Kandahar road.”

They chewed on goat and nibbled rice cakes. Then they slept. Before dawn, the two heading north were roused, and left. Their journey led them through a maze of linking valleys where there would be some shelter. But between the valleys were mountain ridges, and the sides of the mountains had steep slopes covered in rock and shale but with little or no cover. It would be wise to scale these by moonlight and stay in the valleys by day.

Bad luck struck them on the second day out. To speed the rate of march, they had left night camp before dawn, and just after first light they found themselves forced to cross a large expanse of rock and shale to find cover on the next spine of hills. To wait would have meant hiding all day until nightfall. Izmat Khan urged that they cross in daylight. Halfway across the mountainside, they heard the growl of the gunship engines.

Both man and boy dived for the ground and lay motionless, but not in time. Over the crest ahead, menacing as a deadly dragonfly, came the Soviet Mi-24 D, known simply as the Hind. One of the pilots must have seen a flicker of movement or perhaps the glint of metal down there on the rock field, for the Hind turned from its course and headed toward them. The roar of the two Isotov engines grew in their ears, as did the unmistakable tacka-tacka-tacka of the main rotor blades.

With his head buried in his forearms, Mike Martin risked a quick glance. There was no doubt they had been spotted. The two Soviet pilots, sitting in their tandem seats, with the second above and behind the first, were staring straight at him as the Hind went into attack mode. To be caught in the open without cover by a helicopter gunship is every foot soldier’s nightmare. He glanced round. One hundred yards away was a single group of boulders; not as high as a man’s head, but just enough to shelter behind. With a yell to the Afghan boy, he was up and running, leaving his hundred-pound Bergen rucksack where it was but carrying one of the two tubes that had so intrigued his guide. He heard the running feet of the boy behind him, the roaring of his own blood in his ears and the matching snarl of the diving Hind. He would never have made the dash had he not seen something about the gunship that gave a flicker of hope. Its rocket pods were empty and it carried no underslung bombs. He gulped at the thin air, and hoped his guess was right. It was. Pilot Simonov and his copilot Grigoriev had been on a dawn patrol to harass a narrow valley where agents had reported that muj were hiding out. They had dropped their bombs from a higher altitude, then gone in lower to blast the rocky cleft with rockets. A number of goats had pelted from the crack in the mountains, indicating there had indeed been human life sheltering in there. Simonov had shredded the beasts with his 30mm cannon, using up most of the shells.

He had gone back to a safe altitude and was heading home to the Soviet base outside Jalalabad when Grigoriev had spotted a tiny movement on the mountainside below and to the port side. When he saw the figures start to run, he flicked his cannon to fire mode and dived. The two running figures far below were heading for a cluster of rocks. Simonov steadied the Hind at two thousand feet, watched the two figures hurl themselves into the rock cluster and fired. The twin barrels of the GSH cannon shuddered as the shells poured out, then stopped. Simonov swore as his ammunition ran out. He had used his cannon shells on goats, and here were muj to kill and he had none left. He lifted the nose and turned in a wide arc to avoid the mountain crest and the Hind clattered out over the valley.

Martin and Izmat Khan crouched behind their pitiable cluster of rocks. The Afghan boy watched as the Angleez rapidly opened his sheepskin case and extracted a short tube. He was vaguely aware that someone had punched him in the right thigh, but there was no pain. Just numbness. What the SAS man was assembling as fast as his fingers would work was one of the two Blowpipe missiles he was trying to bring to Shah Massoud in the Panjshir. It was not as good as the American Stinger, but more basic, lighter and simpler. Some surface-to-air missiles are guided to target by a ground-based radar “fix.” Others carry their own tiny radar set in the nose. Others emit their own infrared beam. These are the beam-riders. Others are heatseekers, whose nose cones “smell” the heat of the airplane’s own engines and home toward it. Blowpipe was much more basic than that; it was styled command to line of sight, or CLOS; and it meant the firer had to stand there and guide the rocket all the way to target by sending radio signals from a tiny control stick to the movable fins in the rocket’s head.

The disadvantage of the Blowpipe was always that to ask a man to stay still in the face of an attacking gunship was to secure a lot of dead operators. Martin pushed the two-stage missile into the launching tube, fired up the battery and the gyro, squinted through the sight and found the Hind coming straight back at him. He steadied the image in the sights and fired. With a whoosh of blazing gases, the rocket left the tube on his shoulder and headed blindly into the sky. Being completely nonautomatic, it now required his control to rise or drop, turn left or right. He estimated the range at fourteen hundred yards and closing fast. Simonov opened fire with his chain gun.

In the nose of the Hind, the four barrels hurling out a curtain of finger-sized machine-gun bullets began to turn. Then the Soviet pilot saw the tiny flickering flame of the Blowpipe coming toward him. It became a question of nerve. Bullets tore into the rocks, blowing away chunks of stone in all directions. It lasted two seconds, but at two thousand rounds per minute some seventy bullets hit the rocks before Simonov tried to evade and the bullet stream swept to one side.

It is proven that in a no-thought instinctive emergency a man will normally pull left. That is why driving on the left of the highway, though confined to very few countries, is actually safer. A panicking driver pulls off the road into the meadow rather than into a head-on collision. Simonov panicked and slewed the Hind to its left.

The Blowpipe had lost its first stage and was going supersonic. Martin tweaked the trajectory to his right just before Simonov swerved. It was a good guess. As it turned out, the Hind exposed its belly, and the warhead slammed into it. It was only just under five pounds weight, and the Hind is immensely strong. But even that size of warhead at a thousand miles per hour is a terrific punch. It cracked the base armor, entered and exploded.

Drenched with sweat on the icy mountainside, Martin saw the beast lurch with the impact, start to stream smoke and plunge toward the valley floor far below. When it impacted in the riverbed, the noise stopped. There was a silent peony of flame as the two Russians died, then a plume of dark smoke. That alone would bring attention from the Russians at Jalalabad. Harsh and long though the journey might be overland, it was only a few minutes for a Sukhoi ground-attack fighter.

“Let’s go,” he said in Arabic to his guide. The boy tried to rise but could not. Then Marin saw the smudge of blood on the side of his thigh. Without a word, he put down the reusable Blowpipe launch tube, went for his Bergen and brought it back.

He used his Ka-bar knife to slit the trouser leg of the shalwar kameez. The hole was neat and small, but it looked deep. If it came from one of the cannon shells, then it was only a fragment of casing, or maybe a splinter of rock, but he did not know how near the femoral artery it might be. He had trained at Hereford Accident and Emergency Ward, and his first-aid knowledge was good; but the side of an Afghan mountain with the Russians coming was no place for complex surgery.

“Are we going to die, Angleez?” asked the boy.

“Inshallah, not today, Izmat Khan. Not today,” he said. He faced a bad quandary. He needed his Bergen and everything in it. He could carry either the Bergen or the boy, not both.

“Do you know this mountain?” he asked as he rummaged for shell dressings.

“Of course,” said the Afghan.

“Then 1 must come back with another guide. You must tell him where to come. I will bury the bag and the rockets.”

He opened a flat steel box and took out a hypodermic syringe. The white-faced boy watched him.

So be it, thought Izmat Khan. If the infidel wishes to torture me. let him. 1 will utter no sound.

The Angleez pushed the needle into his thigh. He made no sound. Seconds later, as the morphine took effect, the agony in his thigh began to diminish. Encouraged, he tried to rise. The Englishman had produced a small, foldable trenching tool and was digging a furrow in the shale among the rocks. When he had done, he covered his Bergen and the two rocket tubes with stones until nothing could be seen. But he had memorized the shape of the cairn. If he could only be brought back to this mountainside, he could recover all his kit. The boy protested that he could walk, but Martin simply hoisted him over one shoulder and began to march. Being all skin and bone, muscle and sinew the Afghan weighed no more than the Bergen at about a hundred pounds. Still, heading upward into ever-thinner air and against gravity was not an option. He made course sideways across the scree and slowly downward to the valley. It turned out to be a wise choice.

Downed Soviet airplanes always attracted Pashtun eager to strip the wreck for whatever might be of use or value. The plume of smoke had not yet been spotted by the Soviets, and Simonov’s last transmission had been a final scream on which no one could get a bearing. But the smoke had attracted a small party of muj from another valley. They saw each other a thousand feet about the valley floor. Izmat Khan explained what had happened. The mountain men broke into delighted grins and started slapping the SAS man on the back. He insisted his guide needed help and not just a bowl of tea in some chaikhana in the hills. He needed transportation and a surgical hospital. One of the muj knew a man with a mule, only two valleys away. He went to get him. It took until nightfall. Martin administered a second shot of morphine.

With a fresh guide and Izmat Khan on a mule at last, they marched through the night, just three of them, until in the dawn they came to the southern side of the Spin Gahr and the guide stopped. He pointed ahead. “Jaji,” he said. “Arabs.”

He also wanted his mule back. Martin carried the boy the last two miles. Jaji was a complex of five hundred caves, and the so-called Afghan-Arabs had been working on them for three years, broadening, deepening, excavating and equipping them into a major guerrilla base. Though Martin did not know it, inside the complex were barracks, a mosque, a library of religious texts, kitchens, stores and a fully equipped surgical hospital.

As he approached, Martin was intercepted by the outer ring of guards. It was clear what he was doing: He had a wounded man on his back. The guards discussed among themselves what to do with the pair, and Martin recognized the Arabic of North Africa. They were interrupted by the arrival of a senior man who spoke like a Saudi. Martin understood everything but thought it unwise to utter a word. With sign language, he indicated his friend needed emergency surgery. The Saudi nodded, beckoned and led the way.

Izmat Khan was operated on within an hour. A vicious fragment of cannon casing was extracted from the leg.

Martin waited until the lad woke up. He squatted, local style, in the shadows at the corner of the ward, and no one took him for anything other than a Pashtun mountain man who had brought in his friend.

An hour later, two men entered the ward. One was very tall, youthful, bearded. He wore a camouflage combat jacket over Arab robes and a white headdress. The other was short, tubby, also no more than midthirties, with a button nose and round glasses perched on the end of it. He wore a surgical smock. After examining two of their own number, the pair came to the Afghan. The tall man spoke in Saudi Arabic.

“And how is our young Afghan fighter feeling?”

“lnshallah, I am much better. Sheikh.” Izmat spoke back in Arabic, and gave the older man a title of reverence. The tall man was pleased. “Ah, you speak Arabic, and still so young.” He smiled.

“I was seven years in a madrassah at Peshawar. I returned last year to fight.”

“And who do you fight for, my son?”

“I fight for Afghanistan,” said the boy.

Something like a cloud passed across the features of the Saudi. The Afghan realized he might not have said what was wanted. “And I also fight for Allah, Sheikh,” he added. The cloud cleared, and the gentle smile came back. The Saudi leaned forward and patted the youth on the shoulder.

“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. Now, how is our young friend’s wound healing?” He addressed the question to the Pickwickian doctor.

“Let us see,” said the doctor, and peeled back the dressing. The wound was clean, bruised round the edges but closed by six stitches and not infected. He tutted his satisfaction and redressed the suture. “You will be walking in a week,” said Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri. Then he and Osama bin Laden left the ward. No one took any notice of the sweat-stained muj squatting in the corner with his head on his knees as if asleep.

Martin rose and crossed to the youth on the bed. “I must go,” he said. “The Arabs will look after you. I will seek to find your father and ask for a fresh guide. Go with Allah, my friend.”

“Be careful, Ma-ick,” said the boy. “These Arabs are not like us. You are kafir, unbeliever. They are like the Imam in my madrassah. They hate all infidel.” “Then I would be grateful if you would not tell them who I was,” said the Englishman.

Izmat Khan closed his eyes. He would die under torment rather than betray his new friend. It was the code. When he opened his eyes, the Angleez was gone. He heard later the man had reached Shah Massoud in the Panjshir, but he never saw him again.

After his six months behind the Soviet lines in Afghanistan, Mike Martin made it home via Pakistan, unspotted and with fluent Pashto added to his armory. He was sent on leave, remustered into the Army and, being still in service with the SAS, was posted to Northern Ireland again. But this time it was different. The SAS were the men who really terrified the IRA, and to kill, or, better still, capture alive, torture and kill what they called a Sass-man, was the IRA’s greatest dream. Mike Martin found himself working with the 14^th Intelligence Company, known as “the Detachment,” or “the Det.” These were the watchers, the trackers, the eavesdroppers. Their job was to be so stealthy as never to be seen, but to find out where the IRA killers would strike next. To do this, they performed some remarkable feats. IRA leaders’ houses were penetrated via the roof tiles and bugged from the attic downward. Bugs were placed in dead IRA men’s coffins, for it was the habit of the godfathers to hold conferences while pretending to pay their respects to the casket. Long-range cameras caught images of moving mouths, and lip-readers deciphered the words. Rifle-mikes recorded conversations through closed windows. When the Det had a real gem, they passed it to the hard men. The rules of engagement were strict. The IRA men had to fire first, and they had to fire at the SAS. If they threw down their guns at the challenge, they had to be taken prisoner. Before firing, both SAS and Paras had to be immensely careful. It is a recent tradition of British politicians and lawyers that Britain ’s enemies have civil rights but her soldiers do not. Notwithstanding, in the eighteen months Martin spent as an SAS captain in Ulster he participated in the dark-of-night ambushes. In each, a party of armed IRA men was caught by surprise and challenged. Each time they were foolish enough to draw and point weapons. Each time, it was the Royal Ulster Constabulary that found the bodies in the morning.

But it was in the second shoot-out that Martin took his bullet. He was lucky. It was a flesh wound in the left bicep, but enough to see him flown home and sent for convalescence at Headley Court, Leatherhead. That was where he met the nurse, Lucinda, who was to become his wife after a brief courtship. Reverting to the Paras in the spring of 1990, Mike Martin was posted to the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall, London. Having set up home in a rented cottage near Chobham so that Lucinda could continue her career, Martin found himself for the first time a commuter in a dark suit on the morning train to London. He ranked as a Staff Officer 3, and worked in the office of MOSP, the Military Operations, Special Projects Unit. Once again, it was to be a foreign aggressor who would get him out of there.

On August 2 that year, Saddam Hussein of Iraq invaded neighboring Kuwait. Once again, Margaret Thatcher would have none of it, and U.S. president George H. W. Bush concurred. Within a week, plans were in furious preparation to create a multinational coalition to counterinvade and free the oil-rich ministate. Even though the MOSP office was at full stretch, the reach and influence of the Secret Intelligence Service was enough to trace him and “suggest” he join a few of the “friends” for lunch.

It was a discreet club on St. James’s Street, and his hosts were two senior men from the Firm. Also at the table was a Jordanian-born, British-naturalized analyst brought in from GCQH at Cheltenham. His job there was to listen to and analyze eavesdropped radio chatter inside the Arab world. But his role at the lunch table was different.

He conversed with Mike Martin in rapid Arabic, and Martin replied. Finally, he nodded at the two spooks from Century House. “I’ve never heard anything like it,” he remarked. “With that face and voice, he can pass.” With that, the man left the table, clearly having performed his function. “We would be so damnably grateful,” said the senior mandarin, “if you would go into Kuwait and see what is going on there.”

“What about the Army?” asked Martin.

“I think they will see our point of view,” murmured the other. The Army grumbled again but let him go. Weeks later, passing himself as a Bedouin camel drover, Martin slipped over the Saudi border into Iraqi-occupied Kuwait. On the plod north to Kuwait City, he passed several Iraqi patrols but they took no notice of the bearded nomad leading two camels to market. The Bedouin are so determinedly nonpolitical that they have for millennia watched the invaders sweep hither and thither through Arabia and never intervened. So the invaders have mostly let them be.

In several weeks inside Kuwait, Martin contacted and assisted the fledgling Kuwaiti resistance, taught them the tricks of the trade, plotted the Iraqi positions, strong points and weaknesses, and then came out again. His second incursion during the Gulf War was into Iraq itself. He went over the Saudi border in the west and simply caught an Iraqi bus heading for Baghdad. His cover was a simple peasant clutching a wicker basket of hens. Back in a city he knew intimately, he took a position as a gardener in a wealthy villa, living in a shack at the end of the garden. His mission was to act as message collector and passer; for this, he had a small, foldable, parabolic dish aerial whose “blitz” messages were un-interceptable by the Iraqi secret police but which could reach Riyadh.

One of the best-kept secrets of that war was that the Firm had a source, an “asset” high in Saddam’s government. Martin never met him; he just picked up the messages at preagreed dead-letter boxes, or “drops,” and sent them to Saudi Arabia, where the American-led Coalition HQ was both appreciative and mystified. Saddam capitulated on 28 February 1991, and Mike Martin came out, only to be Very nearly shot by the French Foreign Legion as he came through the border in the dark.

On the morning of 15 February 1989, General Boris Gromov, commander of the Soviet 40^th Army, the army of occupation in Afghanistan, walked alone back across the Friendship Bridge over the Amu Darya River into Soviet Uzbekistan. His entire army had preceded him. The war was over.

The euphoria did not last long. The USSR ’s own Vietnam had ended in disaster. Her restive European satellites were becoming openly mutinous, and her economy was disintegrating. By November, the Berliners had torn down the wall, and the Soviet empire simply fell apart.

In Afghanistan, the Soviets had left behind a government that most analysts predicted would last no time as the victorious warlords formed a stable government and took over. But the pundits were wrong. The government of President Najibullah, the whiskey-appreciating Afghan the Soviets had abandoned in Kabul, hung on for two reasons. One was that the Afghan Army was simply stronger than any other force in the country, backed as it was by the KHAD secret police, and was able to control the cities and thus the bulk of the population.

More to the point, the warlords simply disintegrated into a patchwork quilt of snarling, grabbing, feuding, self-serving opportunists who, far from uniting to form a stable government, did the reverse: They created a civil war. None of this affected Izmat Khan. With his father still head of the family, although stiff and old before his time, and with the help of neighbors, he helped rebuild the hamlet of Maloko-zai. Stone by stone and rock by rock, they cleared the rubble left by the bombs and rockets and remade the family compound next to the mulberry and pomegranate trees.

With his leg fully healed, he had returned to the war and taken command of his father’s lashkar in all but name, and the men had followed him, for he had been blooded. When peace came, his guerrilla group seized a huge cache of weapons the Soviets could not be bothered to carry home.

These they took over the Spin Gahr to Parachinar in Pakistan, a town that is virtually nothing but an arms bazaar. There they traded the Soviet leftovers for cows, goats and sheep to restart the flocks.

If life had been hard before, starting over was even harder, but he enjoyed the labor, and the sense of triumph that Maloko-zai would live again. A man must have roots, and his were here. At twenty, he both uttered the call and led the prayers at the village mosque on a Friday.

The Kuchi nomads passing through brought grim tales from the plains. The Army of the DRA, loyal to Najibullah, still held the cities, but the warlords infested the countryside and they and their men behaved liked brigands. Tolls were arbitrarily set up on main roads, and travelers were stripped of their money and goods or badly beaten.

Pakistan, in the form of its ISI Directorate, was backing Hekmat-yar to become controller of all Afghanistan, and in areas he ruled utter terror existed. All who had formed the Peshawar 7 to fight the Soviets were now at each other’s throats, and the people groaned. From heroes, the muj were now seen as tyrants. Izmat Khan thanked the merciful Allah that he was spared the misery of the plains.

With the end of the war, the Arabs had almost all gone from the mountains and their precious caves. The one who by the end had become their uncrowned leader, the tall Saudi from the cave hospital was also gone. Some five hundred Arabs had stayed behind, but they were not popular, were scattered far and wide and living like beggars.

When he was twenty, Izmat Khan was visiting a neighboring valley when he saw a girl washing the family clothes in the stream. She failed to hear his horse because of the sound of the running water, and before she could draw the end of her hejab across her face he had made eye contact. She fled in alarm and embarrassment. But he had seen that she was beautiful. Izmat did what any young man would have. He consulted his mother. She was delighted, and soon two aunts had joined with her in happy conspiracy to find the girl and persuade Nuri Khan to contact the father to arrange a union. Her name was Maryam, and the wedding took place in the late spring of 1993. Of course, it was in the open air, full of blossoms being blown off the walnut trees. There was a feast, and the bride came from her village on a decorated horse. There was playing of the flutes and attan dancing under the trees, but of course only for the men. With his madrassah training, Izmat protested at the singing and dancing, but his father was rejuvenated and overruled him. So for a day, Izmat rejected his strict Wahhabi training, and he, too, danced in the meadow, and the eyes of his bride followed him everywhere. The delay between the first glimpse by the stream and the marriage was necessary, both to arrange the details of the dowry and to build a new house for the newlyweds inside the Khan compound. It was here that he took his bride when night had fallen and the exhausted villagers returned home, and his mother forty yards away nodded in satisfaction when a single girl’s cry in the night told her that her daughter-in-law had become a woman. Three months later, it was clear she would bear a child in the snows of February. As Maryam carried Izmat’s child, the Arabs came back. The tall Saudi who led them was not among them; he was somewhere far away called Sudan. But he sent much money, and by paying tribute to the warlords was able to set up training camps. Here, at Khalid ibn Walid, Al Farouk, Sadeek, Khaldan, Jihad Wai and Darunta, the thousands of new volunteers from across the Arabic-speaking world came to train for war.

But what war? So far as Izmat Khan could see, they took no sides in the civil war among the tribal satraps, so who were they training to fight? He learned that it was all because the tall one, whom his followers called the Emir, had declared jihad against his own government in Saudi Arabia and against the West. But Izmat Khan had no quarrel with the West. The West had helped with arms and money to defeat the Soviets, and the only kafir he had ever met had saved his life. It was not his holy war, not his jihad, he decided. His concern was for his country whose situation was devolving into madness.

CHAPTER 6

The Parachute Regiment accepted him back and asked no questions, because that was what it was told to do, but he was already acquiring a reputation as a bit of an oddity. Two unexplained absences from duty, each for six months, inside four years, causes raised eyebrows over breakfast in any military unit. For 1992, he was sent to the Staff College at Camberley, and thence back to the ministry, but as a major.

This time, it was to the Directorate of Military Operations again, but as a Staff Officer 2 in Department 3, the Balkans. The war was still raging, the Serbs under Milosevic were dominant, and the world was sickened by the massacres known as “ethnic cleansing.” Chafing at the lack of any chance of action, he spent two years commuting in a dark suit from the suburbs to London. Officers who have served in the SAS can return for a second tour, but only by invitation. Mike Martin got his call from Hereford at the end of 1994. It was the Christmas present he had been hoping for. But it did not please Lucinda. There had been no baby; there were two careers heading in different directions. Lucinda had been offered a big promotion. She called it “the chance of a lifetime,” but it meant going to work in the Midlands. The marriage was under strain, and Mike Martin’s orders were to command B Squadron, twenty-two SAS, and take them covertly to Bosnia. Ostensibly, they would be part of the United Nations’ UNPROFOR peacekeeping mission. In fact, they would hunt down and snatch war criminals. He was not allowed to tell Lucinda the details, only that he was leaving again.

It was the last straw. She presumed it was a transfer back to Arabia, and she quite properly put to him an ultimatum: You can have the Paras, the SAS and your bloody desert or you can come to Birmingham and have a marriage. He thought it over and chose the desert.

Outside the seclusion of the high valleys of the White Mountains, his old party leader, Younis Khalis, died, and the Hizb Islami Party was then wholly in the control of Hekmatyar, whose reputation for cruelty Izmat loathed. By the time Izmat’s baby was born in February 1994, President Najibullah had fallen but was alive, confined to a UN guesthouse in Kabul. He had supposedly been succeeded by Professor Rabbani, but he was a Tajik and so not acceptable to the Pashtun. Outside Kabul, only the warlords ruled their domains, but the real master was chaos and anarchy.

But something else was also happening. After the Soviet war, thousands of young Afghans had gone back to the Pakistani madras-sahs to complete their educations. Others, too young to have fought at all, went over the border to achieve an education-any education.

What they got was years of Wahhabi brainwashing. Now they were coming back, but they were different from Izmat Khan.

Because the old Younis Khalis, though ultradevout, had possessed some residual moderation in him, his madrassahs in the refugee camps had taught Islam with a hint of temperance. Others concentrated only on the ultra-aggressive passages from the Sword Verses to be found in holy Koran. And old Nuri Khan, thought devout also, was humane, and saw no harm in singing, dancing, sports and some tolerance of others.

The returnees were ill educated, having been taught by barely literate imams. They knew nothing of life, of women-most lived and died virgins-or even of their own tribal cultures, as Izmat had learned from his father. Apart from the Koran, they knew only one other thing: war. Most came from the deep south, where Islam had always been the most strict in all of Afghanistan. In the summer of 1994, Izmat Khan and a cousin left the upland valley for Jalalabad. It was a short visit, but long enough to witness the savage massacre inflicted by the followers of Hekmatyar on a village that had finally refused to pay him any more tribute money. The two travelers found the menfolk tortured and slain, the women beaten, the village torched. Izmat Khan was disgusted. In Jalalabad, he learned what he had seen was quite commonplace. Then something happened in the deep south. Since the fall of any semblance of a central government, the old official Afghan Army had simply reassigned itself to the local warlord who paid the best. Outside Kandahar, some soldiers took two teenage girls back to their camp and gang-raped them. The local preacher in the village where they came, who also ran his own religious school, went to the Army camp with thirty students and sixteen rifles. Against the odds, they trounced the soldiers, and hanged the commandant from the barrel of a tank gun. The priest was called Mohammad Omar, or Mullah Omar. He had lost his right eye in battle.

The news spread. Others appealed to him for help. He and his group swelled in numbers, and responded to the appeals. They took no money, they raped no women, they stole no crops, they asked no reward. They became local heroes. By December 1994, twelve thousand had joined them, adopting this mullah’s black turban. They called themselves the students. In Pashto, “student” is talib, and the plural is taliban. From village vigilantes, they became a movement, and when they captured the city of Kandahar, an alternative government. Pakistan, through its forever-plotting ISI, had been trying to topple the Tajik in Kabul by backing Hekmatyar, but he had failed repeatedly. As the ISI was deeply infiltrated by ultraorthodox Muslims, Pakistan switched support to the Taliban. With Kandahar, the new movement inherited a huge cache of arms, plus tanks, armored cars, trucks, guns, six MiG-2l ex-Soviet fighters and six heavy helicopters. They began to sweep north. In 1995, Izmat Khan embraced his wife, kissed his baby farewell and then came down from the mountains to join them. Later, on the floor of a cell in Cuba, he would recall that the days on the upland farm with his wife and child had been the happiest days of his life. He was twenty-three.

Too late, he learned there was a dark side to the Taliban. In Kandahar, even though the Pashtun had been devout before, they were subjected to the harshest regimen the world of Islam has ever seen.

All girls’ schools were closed at once. Women were forbidden to leave the house save in company of a male relative. The all-enveloping burqa robe was decreed at all times; the clacking of female sandals on tiles was decreed forbidden as being too sexy.

All singing, dancing, the playing of music, sports and kite flying-a national pastime-was forbidden. Prayers were to be said the required five times a day. Beards on men were compulsory. The enforcers were often teenage fanatics in their black turbans, taught only the Sword Verses, cruelty and war. From liberators they became the new tyrants, but the advance became unstoppable. Their mission was to destroy the rule of the warlords, and as these were well hated by the people, the people acquiesced to the new strictness. At least there was law, order, no more corruption, no more rape, no more crime; just fanatic orthodoxy.

Mullah Omar was a warrior-priest but nothing more. Having started his revolution by hanging a rapist from a gun barrel, he withdrew into seclusion in his southern fortress, Kandahar. His followers were like something out of the Middle Ages, and among the many things they could not recognize was fear. They worshipped the one-eyed mullah behind his walls, and before the Taliban fell eighty thousand would die for him. Far away in Sudan, the tall Saudi who controlled the twenty thousand Arabs now based in Afghanistan watched and waited.

Izmat Khan joined a lashkar of men drawn from his own province, Nangarhar. He was quickly respected because he was mature, had fought the Russians and been wounded.

The Taliban arm was no real army; it had no commanding general, no general staff, no officer corps, no ranks and no infrastructure. Each lashkar was semi-independent under its tribal leader, who often held sway through personality and courage in combat, plus religious devotion. Like the original Muslim warriors of the first caliphates, they swept their enemies aside by fanatical courage, which gave rise to a reputation for invincibility-so much so that opponents often capitulated without a shot fired. When they finally ran into real soldiers, the forces of the charismatic Tajik Shah Massoud, they took unspeakable losses. They had no medical corps, so their wounded just died by the roadside. But still, they came on.

At the gates of Kabul, they negotiated with Massoud, but he refused to accept their terms and withdrew to his own northern mountains, whence he had fought and defied the Russians. So began the next civil war, between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance of Massoud, the Tajik, and Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek. It was 1996. Only Pakistan, who had organized it, and Saudi Arabia, who paid for it, recognized the new, weird government of Afghanistan. For Izmat Khan, the die was cast. His old ally Shah Massoud was now his enemy. Far to the south, an airplane landed. It brought back the tall Saudi who had spoken to him eight years earlier in a cave at Jaji and the chubby doctor who had pulled a chunk of Soviet steel from his leg. Both men paid immediate obeisance to Mullah Omar, paying huge tribute in money and equipment, and thus securing his lifelong loyalty.

After Kabul, there was a pause in the war. Almost the first act of the Taliban in Kabul was to drag the toppled ex-president Najibul-lah from his house arrest, torture, mutilate and execute him, hanging his corpse from a lamppost. That set the tenor of the rule to come. Izmat Khan had no taste for cruelty for its own sake. He had fought hard enough in the conquest of his country to rise from volunteer to commander of his own lashkar, and this, in turn, grew, as word of his leadership spread, until it became one of the four divisions in the Taliban army. Then he asked to be allowed to go back to his native Nangarhar, and was made provincial governor. Based in Jalalabad, he could visit his family, wife and baby.

He had never heard of Nairobi or Dar es Salaam. He had never heard of anyone called William Jefferson Clinton. He had indeed heard much of a group now based in his country called Al Qaeda, and knew that its adherents had declared global jihad against all unbelievers, especially the West, and most of all against a place called America. But it was not his jihad. He was fighting the Northern Alliance to unite his homeland once and for all, and the alliance had been beaten back to two small and obscure enclaves. One was a group of Hazara resistants, bottled up in the mountains of Dara-i-Suf, and the other was Massoud himself, in the impregnable Panjshir Valley and the northeastern corner called Badakhshan.

On August 7, bombs exploded outside the American embassies in two African capitals. He knew nothing of this. Listening to foreign radio was now banned, and he obeyed. On August 21, America launched seventy Tomahawk cruise missiles at Afghanistan. They came from the two missile cruisers Cowpen and Shiloh in the Red Sea, and from the destroyers Briscoe, Elliot, Hayler, Milius and the submarine Columbia, all in the Arabian Gulf south of Pakistan. They were aimed at the training camps of Al Qaeda, and the caves of the Tora Bora. Among those that went astray was one that entered the mouth of an empty, natural cave high in the mountain above Maloko-zai. The detonation deep inside the cave split the mountain, and an entire face peeled away. Ten million tons of rock crashed into the valley below.

When he reached the mountain, there was nothing to recognize. The entire valley had been buried. There was no stream anymore, no farm, no orchards, no stock pens, no stables, no compounds, no mosque. His entire family and all his neighbors were gone. His parents, uncles, aunts, sisters, wife and child were dead beneath millions of tons of granite rubble. There was nowhere to dig and nothing to dig for. He had become a man with no roots, no relatives, no clan. In the dying August sun, he knelt on the shale high above where his dead family lay, turned west toward Mecca, bowed his head to the ground and prayed. But it was a different prayer this time; it was a mighty oath, a sworn vendetta, a personal jihad unto death, and it was against the people who had done this. He declared war on America.

A week later, he had resigned his governorship and gone back to the front. For two years, he fought the Northern Alliance. While he was away, the tactically brilliant Massoud had counterattacked and again caused huge losses to the less competent Taliban. There had been massacres at Mazar-e-Sharif, where first the native Hazara had risen in revolt and killed six hundred Taliban; the avenging Taliban had gone back and butchered over two thousand civilians.

The Dayton Agreement had been signed; technically, the Bosnian war was over. But what had been left behind was nightmarish. Muslim Bosnia had been the main theater of war, even though the Bosnians, Serbs and Croats had all been involved. It had been the bloodiest conflict in Europe since World War II. The Croats and the Serbs, far and away the better armed, had inflicted most of the brutalities. A thoroughly and rightly ashamed Europe set up a war crimes tribunal at The Hague in Holland and waited for the first indictments. The problem was, the guilty ones were not about to come forward with their hands up. Milosevic would offer no help at all; indeed, he was preparing fresh miseries for another Muslim province, Kosovo.

Part of Bosnia, the exclusively Serbian third, had declared itself the Serb Republic, and most of the war criminals were hiding there. This was the task:

Find them, identify them, snatch them and bring them out to stand trial. Living mainly in the fields and forests, the SAS spent 1997 hunting down what they called the “PIFWICs”-persons indicted for war crimes. By 1998, he was back in the UK, and back in the Paras, a lieutenant colonel and instructor at Camberley Staff College. The following year, he was made commanding officer, First Battalion, known as I Para. The NATO allies had again intervened in the Balkans, this time a little more speedily than before, and again to prevent a massacre big enough to cause the media to use the overemployed term “genocide.”

Intelligence had convinced both the British and American governments that Milosevic intended to “cleanse” the rebellious province of Kosovo, and to do so thoroughly. The medium would be the expulsion of most of its 1.8 million citizens westward into neighboring Albania. Under the NATO banner, the Allies gave Milosevic an ultimatum. He ignored it, and columns of weeping and destitute Kosovans were driven through the mountain passes into Albania. The NATO response was no invasion on the ground but bombing raids instead, which lasted seventy-eight days and wrecked both Kosovo and Serbian Yugoslavia itself. With his country in ruins, Milosevic finally conceded, and NATO moved into Kosovo to try to govern the wreckage. The man in charge was a lifelong Para, General Mike Jackson, and I Para went with him. That would probably have been Mike Martin’s last “action” posting had it not been for the West Side Boys.

On the ninth of September 2001, news flashed through the Taliban army that had the soldiers roaring “Allahu-akhbar,” Allah is great, over and over again. The air above Izmat Khan’s camp outside Bamiyan crackled with the shots fired in a delirium of joy. Someone had assassinated Ahmad Shah Massoud. Their enemy was dead. The man whose charisma had held together the cause of the useless Rab-bani, whose cleverness as a guerrilla fighter had caused the Soviets to revere him and whose generalship had carved Taliban forces to pieces, was no more.

In fact, he had been assassinated by two suicide bombers, ultra-fanatical Moroccans with stolen Belgian passports pretending to be journalists, and sent by Osama bin Laden as a favor to his friend Mullah Omar. The Saudi had not thought of the ploy; it was the far cleverer Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri who realized that if Al Qaeda did this favor for Omar, the one-eyed mullah could never expel them for what was going to happen next. On the eleventh, four airliners were hijacked over the American east coast. Within ninety minutes, two had destroyed the World Trade Center in Manhattan, one had devastated the Pentagon, and the fourth, as its rebellious passengers invaded the flight deck to rip the hijackers from the controls, had crashed in a field.

Within days, the identity and inspiration of the nineteen hijackers had been established; within a few more days, the new American president had given Mullah Omar a flat ultimatum: Yield up the ringleaders or take the consequences. Because of Massoud, Omar could not capitulate. It was the code.

In the West African hellhole of Sierra Leone, years of civil war and barbarism had left the once-rich former British colony a vista of chaos, banditry, filth, disease, poverty and hacked-off limbs. Years earlier, the British had decided to intervene, and the UN had been prevailed upon to ship in fifteen thousand troops, who, broadly, just sat in their barracks in the capital, Freetown. The jungle beyond the city limits was regarded as simply too dangerous. But the UN force included an element of the British Army, and they at least patrolled the backcountry.

In late August, a patrol of eleven men from the Royal Irish Rangers were lured off the main road and down a track to the village which acted as the headquarters of a rebel band calling themselves the West Side Boys. They were, in effect, out-of-control psychopaths-they were relentlessly drunk on pure alcohol native hooch; they rubbed their gums with cocaine, or cut their arms to rub the dope into the cuts to get a faster “hit.” The horrors they had inflicted on the peasantry over a wide range were unspeakable; but there were four hundred of them, and they were armed to the teeth. The rangers were quickly captured and held hostage.

Mike Martin, after a stint in Kosovo, had brought i Para to Freetown, where they were based at Waterloo Camp. After complex negotiations, five of the rangers were ransomed, but the remaining six seemed destined to be chopped up. In London, the chief of Defence staff, Sir Charles Guthrie, gave the word: Go in there and get them out by force.

The task force was forty-eight SAS men, twenty-four from the SBS and ninety from I Para. Ten SAS men in jungle camouflage were dropped in a week before the attack and lived unseen in the jungle round the bandit village, watching, listening and reporting back. Everything the West Side Boys said and did was overheard by the SAS men in the bush a few yards away and transmitted. That was how the British knew there was no further hope of a peaceful exfiltration. Mike Martin went in with the second wave after an unlucky rebel mortar had injured six, including the commander of the first wave, who had to be evacuated without ceremony.

The village-or, in fact, the twin villages of Gberi Bana and Magbeni-straddled a slimy and stinking river called Rokel Creek. The seventy SAS took Gberi Bana, where the hostages were located, rescued them all and fought off a series of manic counterattacks. The ninety Paras took Magbeni. There were, at dawn, about two hundred West Side Boys in each.

Six prisoners were taken, trussed and brought back to Freetown. A few of them escaped into the jungle. No attempt was made to count the bodies, either in the wreckage of the two villages or the surrounding jungle, but no one ever disputed the figure of three hundred dead.

The SAS and the Paras took twelve injured, and one SAS man, Brad Tinnion, died of his wounds. Mike Martin, having lost the CO of his first wave, arrived in the second Chinook, and led the final wipeout of Magbeni. It was old-fashioned fighting, point-blank range and hand-to-hand. On the south side of the Rokel Creek, the Paras had lost their radio to the same mortar blast that hit the attack leader. So the circling helicopters overhead could not report on the fall of their own mortar shells, and the jungle was too thick to see them drop. Eventually, the Paras just charged, blood pumping, screaming and swearing, until the West Side Boys, happy to torture peasants and prisoners, fled, died, fled again and died, until there were none left.

It was six months almost to the day that Martin was back in London when breakfast was interrupted by those unbelievable images on the TV screen of fully loaded and fueled airliners flying straight into the twin towers. A week later, it was plain the USA would have to go into Afghanistan in pursuit of those responsible, with or without the agreement of the Kabul government. London at once agreed that it would provide whatever was needed from its own resources, and the immediate requirements were air-to-air refueling tankers and Special Forces. The SIS head of station in Islamabad said he would also need all the help he could get.

That was a matter for Vauxhall Cross, but the Defence attache in Islamabad also asked for help. Mike Martin was taken from his desk at Para HQ^Aldershot, and found himself on the next flight to Islamabad as Special Forces liaison officer. He arrived two weeks to the day after the destruction of the World Trade Center, and the day the first allied attacks went in.

CHAPTER 7

Izmat Khan was still commanding in the north, on the Badakhshan front, when the bombs rained on Kabul. As the world studied Kabul and diversionary tactics in the south, the U.S. Special Forces slipped into Badakhshan to help General Fahim, who had taken over Massoud’s army. This was where the real fighting would be; the rest was window dressing for the media. The key would be Northern Alliance ground forces and American airpower.

Without ever taking off, Afghanistan ’s puny air force was vaporized. Its tanks and artillery, if they could be spotted, were “taken out.” The Uzbek, Rashid Dostum, who had spent years in safety across the border, was persuaded to come back and open a second front in the northwest to match Fahim’s front in the northeast. And in November, the great breakout began. The key was target marking, the technology that has quietly revolutionized warfare since the first Gulf War of 1991.

Hidden invisible among the allied forces. Special Forces personnel squint through long-range binoculars to identify the enemy’s dug-in positions, guns, tanks, ammunition dumps, reserves, supplies and command bunkers. Each is marked, or “painted,” with an infrared dot from a shoulder-held projector. Via radio, an air strike is called up.

In the destruction of the Taliban army facing the Northern Alliance, these strikes either came from far away in the south, where U.S. Navy carriers hovered off the coast, or with A-io tank busters flying out of well-rewarded Uzbekistan. Unit by unit, with bombs and rockets that could not miss as they followed the infrared beam, the Taliban army was blown away and the Tajiks charged in in triumph.

Izmat Khan retreated and retreated as position after position was devastated and lost. The Taliban army of the north started at over thirty thousand soldiers, but were losing a thousand a day. There was no medication, no evacuation, no doctors. The wounded said their prayers and died like flies. They screamed “Allahu-akhbar” and charged into walls of bullets. The original volunteers for the Taliban army had long been used up. Few were left. Taliban recruiting squads had pressed tens of thousands more into the ranks, but many did not want to fight. The true fanatics were dwindling away. And still Izmat Khan had to pull them back, each time convinced that, being in the front of every combat, he could not last another day. By November 18, they had reached the town of Kunduz.

By a fluke of history, Kunduz is a small enclave of Gilzai southerners, all Pashtun, in a sea of Tajiks and Hazaras. Thus, the Taliban army could take refuge there. And it was there they agreed to surrender. Among Afghans there is nothing dishonorable in a negotiated surrender, and, once agreed, its terms are always honored. The entire Taliban army surrendered to General Fahim, and Fahim accepted.

Inside the Taliban were two non-Afghan groups. There were six hundred Arabs, all devoted to Osama bin Laden, who had sent them there. Well over three thousand Arabs had already died, and the American attitude was that they would not weep salt tears if the rest went to Allah as well.

There were also about two thousand Pakistanis who were clearly going to be a thundering embarrassment to Islamabad if they were discovered. The Pakistani ruler. General Musharraf, had been left in not a shred of doubt after 9/11 that he had a choice: become a dedicated ally of the USA, with billions and billions of dollars in aid; or continue to support, via the ISI, the Taliban, and thus bin Laden, and pay the direct consequences. He chose the USA. But the ISI still had a small army of agents inside Afghanistan, and the Pakistani volunteers fighting with the Taliban would not stint from revealing the encouragement they had once been given to go north. Over three nights, a secret air bridge exfiltrated most of them back to Pakistan. In another covert deal, some four thousand prisoners were sold for varying sums, according to desirability, to the USA and Russia. The Russians wanted any Chechens, and, as a favor to Tashkent, any anti-Tashkent Uzbeks. The original army that surrendered was over fourteen thousand, but their numbers were coming down. Finally, the Northern Alliance announced to the world media, streaming north to cover the real war story, that it had only eight thousand prisoners.

Then it was decided to hand over a further five thousand to the Uzbek commander, General Dostum. He wished to take them far to the west, to Sheberghan, inside his own territory. They were packed into steel freight containers without food or water, and so compressed they could only stand, straining upward for the air pocket.

Qala mgi, west of Mazar.

“Some prisoners appear to have risen in revohiken their guards’ weapons and are putting up a fight. I think I should have a look.“ Sii Marines were chosen, and two Land Rovers allocated and fueled-they were about to leave, Martin asked, “Mind if I tag along. You might be able to use an interpreter.”

CO of the small SBS unit was a Marine captain. Martin was a Colonel. There was no objection. Martin boarded the second vehia.ieside the driver. Behind him, two Marines crouched over the calibre machine gun. They headed north on the six-hour drive trough the Salang Pass, to the northern plains and the city of Mazrind the fort of Qala-i-Jangi.

Tkaact incident that triggered the massacre of the prisoners at Qala angi was disputed at the time, and will remain so. But there are cccpelling clues. The Western media, never shy of getting something completely wrong persistently called the prisoners “Taliban.” They were the oppe-‘i. They were, in fact, with the exception of the six Afghans included by accident, the defeated army of Al Qaeda. As such, they had come to Afghanistan specifically to pursue jihad-to fight and to die. What were trucked west from Kunduz were the six hundred most dangerous men in Asia.

You met them at Qala were one hundred partly trained Uzbeks unde::desperately incompetent commander. Rashid Dostum himself k-away; in charge was his deputy, Sayid Kamel.

Among the six hundred were about sixty of three non-Arab categories. There were Chechens, who, suspecting back at Kunduz that being selected for shipment to the Russians was a recipe for death, avoided the cull. There were anti-Tashkent Uzbeks who had also figured out that only a miserable death awaited them back in Uzbekistan and hid themselves. And there were Pakistanis who wrongly avoided repatriation to Pakistan, where they would have been set free. The rest were Arabs. They were, unlike many of the Taliban left i behind at Kunduz, volunteers, not pressed men. They were all ultra-fanatical. They had all been through the AQ training camps; they knew how to fight with ferocity and skill. And they had little desire to live. All they asked of Allah was the chance to take a few Westerners or friends of Westerners with them and thus die a shahid, a martyr.

The fort of Qala is not constructed like a Western fort. It is a huge, ten-acre compound with open spaces, trees and one-story buildings. The whole area is enclosed by a fifty-foot wall, but each side is sloped so that a climber can scramble up the ramp and peer over the parapet at the top. This thick wall plays host to a labyrinth of barracks, stores and passages, with another maze of tunnels and cellars beneath them. The Uzbeks had only captured it ten days earlier and seemed not to know that there was a Taliban armory and magazine stored at the southern end. That was where they shooed the prisoners. At Kunduz, the captives had been relieved of their rifles and RPGs, but no one had done a body search. Had the prisoners been frisked, the captors would have realized almost every man had a grenade or two hidden inside his robes. That was how they arrived in the motorcade at Qala-i-Jangi. The first hint came on the Saturday night of their arrival. Izmat Khan was in the fifth truck, and heard the boom from a hundred yards away. One of the Arabs, gathering several Uzbeks around him, detonated his grenade, blowing himself and five Uzbeks to pemmi-can. Night was coming on. There were no lights. Dostum’s men decided to do body searches the next morning. They herded the prisoners into the compound without food or water and left them, squatting on the ground, surrounded by armed, already-nervous guards.

At dawn, the searches began. The prisoners, still docile in their battle fatigue, allowed their hands to be tied behind them. As there were no ropes, the Uzbeks used the prisoners’ turbans. But turbans are not ropes. One by one the prisoners were hauled upright to be frisked. Out came handguns, grenades-and money. As the money piled up, it was taken away to a side room by Sayid Kamel and his deputy. An Uzbek soldier, peering through the window a little later, saw the two men pocketing the lot. The soldier entered to protest, and was told in no uncertain terms to get lost. But he came back with a rifle. There were two prisoners who saw this and had worked their hands free. They entered the room after the soldier, seized the rifle and used its butt to beat all three Uzbeks to death. As there had been no shooting, nothing was noticed, but the compound was becoming a powder keg.

The Americans from the CIA, Johnny “Mike” Spann and Dave Tyson, had entered the area, and Spann began a series of interrogations right out in the open. He was surrounded by six hundred fanatics whose only ambition before going to Allah was to kill an American. Then some Uzbek guard saw the armed Arab and yelled a warning. The Arab fired and killed him. The powder keg went off. Izmat Khan was squatting on the dirt waiting for his turn. Like the others, he had worked his hands free. As the shot Uzbek soldier fell, others atop the walls opened up with machine guns. The slaughter had begun. Over a hundred prisoners died in the dirt with bound hands, and were found that way when it was finally safe for the UN observers to enter. Others untied their neighbors’ hands so that they could fight. Izmat Khan led a group of others, including his five fellow Afghans, in a dodging, weaving run through the trees to the south wall, where he knew the armory was from a previous visit when the fort was in Taliban hands.

Twenty Arabs nearest to Mike Spann fell on him and beat him to death with fists and feet. Dave Tyson emptied his handgun into the mob, killed three, heard the click of hammer on empty chamber and was lucky to make the main gate just in time.

Within ten minutes, the open compound was empty except for the corpses, or the wounded who cried out until they died. The Uzbeks were now outside the wall, the main gate was slammed and the prisoners were inside. The siege had begun; it would last six days, and no one was even interested in taking prisoners. Each side was convinced the other had broken the terms of surrender, but by then it did not matter anymore.

The armory door was quickly shattered and the treasure trove distributed. There was enough for a small army and masses of re-supply for only five hundred men. They had rifles, grenades, launchers, RPGs and mortars. Taking what they could, they fanned out through the tunnels and passages until they owned the fortress. Every time an Uzbek outside put his head over the parapet, an Arab, firing through a slit from across the compound, took a shot. Dostum’s men had no choice but to call for help, urgently. It came in the form of hundreds more Uzbeks sent by General Dostum, who hurried toward Qala-i-Jangi. Also on their way were American Green Berets, four men from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, one U.S. Air Force man to assist in air coordination and six from the ioth Mountain Division. Basically, their job was to observe, report and call in air strikes to break the resistance.

By midmorning, coming up from Bagram base north of the recently captured capital of Kabul were two long-base Land Rovers bearing six British Special Forces from the Special Boat Squadron (SBS) and an interpreter, Lieutenant Colonel Mike Martin of the SAS.

Tuesday saw the Uzbek counterattack taking shape. Shielded by their simple tank, they reentered the compound and began to pound the rebel positions. Izmat Khan had been recognized as a senior commander and given charge of one wing of the south face. When the tank opened up, he ordered his men into the cellars. When the bombardment stopped, they came back up again. He knew it was only a matter of time. There was no way out, and no chance for mercy. Not that he wanted it. He had finally, at the age of twenty-nine, found the place he was going to die, and it was as good as any other. Tuesday also saw the arrival of the U.S. strike aircraft. The four Green Berets and the airman were lying just outside the parapet at the top of the external ramp, plotting targets for the fighter-bombers. Thirty strikes took place that day, and twenty-eight of them slammed into the masonry inside which the rebels were hiding, killing about a hundred of them, largely by rockfalls. Two bombs were not so good. Mike Martin was down the wall from the Green Berets, about a hundred yards from them, when the first bomb went amiss. It landed right in the middle of the circle formed by the five Americans. If it had been a contact-fused antipersonnel bomb, they would have been shredded. The fact that all survived with shattered eardrums and some bone breaks was in itself a miracle.

The bomb was a J-DAM, a bunker buster, designed to penetrate deep into masonry before exploding. Landing nose down in gravel, it shot forty feet down before going off. The Americans found themselves on top of an earthquake, were hurled around, but survived.

The second mishit was even more unfortunate. It took out the Uzbek tank, and their command post behind it.

By Wednesday, the Western media had arrived and were swarming all over the fort, or at least the outside of it. They may not have realized it, but their presence was the only factor that would eventually inhibit the Uzbeks from achieving a total wipeout of the rebels to the last man.

In the course of the six days, twenty rebels tried to take their chances by escaping under cover of night cross-country. Every one of them was caught by the peasantry and lynched. These were the Hazaras, who recalled the Taliban butchery of their people three years before.

Mike Martin lay on top of the ramp, peering through the parapet and down into the open compound. The bodies from the first days still lay there, and the stench was appalling. The Americans, with their black woolly hats, had uncovered faces and had already been well photographed by cameramen and TV filmmakers. The seven British preferred anonymity. All wore the shemagh, the cotton wraparound headdress that keeps out sand, dust, flies and gawkers. By Wednesday it served another purpose: to filter the stink.

Just before sundown, the surviving CIA man, Dave Tyson, who had come back after a day in Mazar-e- Sharif, was bold enough to enter the compound with a TV crew desperate for an award-winning movie. Martin watched them creeping along the far wall. Marine J was lying beside him. As they watched, a snatch squad of rebels came out of an unseen door in the wall, seized the four Westerners and dragged them inside.

“Someone ought to get them out of there,” remarked Marine J in a conversational tone. He looked round. Six pairs of eyes were staring at him without a sound. He uttered two intensely sincere words-“Oh, shit”-vaulted the wall, went down the inner ramp and raced across the open space. Three SBS men went with him. The other two and Martin provided sniper cover. The rebels were by now confined to the south wall only. The sheer daftness of what the four Marines had done caught the rebels by surprise. There were no shots until they reached the door in the far wall.

Marine J was first in. Hostage recovery is practiced and practiced by both SAS and SBS until it is second nature. At Hereford, the SAS have “the death house” for little else; at their Poole HQ_ the SBS have the same. The four SBS men came through the door without ceremony, identified the three rebels by their clothes and beards and fired. The procedure is called “double tap”: two bullets straight in the face. The three Arabs did not get off a shot; anyway, they were facing in the wrong direction. David Tyson and the British TV crew agreed then and there never to mention the incident, and they never have. By Wednesday evening. Izmat Khan realized he and his men could not stay aboveground any longer. Artillery had arrived, and down the length of the compound it was beginning to reduce the south face to rubble. The cellars were the last resort. The surviving rebels were down to under three hundred. Some of these decided not to go belowground but to die under the sky. They staged a suicidal counterattack that succeeded for a hundred yards, killing a number of unwary Uzbeks with short reaction times. But then the machine gun on the Uzbeks’ replacement tank opened up and cut the Arabs to pieces. They were mostly Yemenis with some Chechens.

On Thursday, on American advice, the Uzbeks took barrels of diesel fuel brought for their tank and poured it down conduits into the cellars below. Then they set fire to it.

Izmat Khan was not in that section of the cellars, and the stench of the bodies overrode the smell of the diesel, but he heard the whoomf and felt the heat. More died, but the survivors came staggering out of the smoke toward him. They were all choking and gagging. In the last cellar, with about a hundred and fifty men around him, Izmat Khan slammed and bolted the door to keep out the smoke. Beyond the door, the hammering of the dying became fainter and finally stopped.

Above them, the shells slammed into the empty rooms. The last cellar led to a passage and at the far end the men could smell fresh air. They tried to see if there was a way out, but it was only a gutter from above. That night, the new Uzbek commander, Din Muhammad, hit upon the idea of diverting an irrigation ditch into that pipe. After the November rains, the ditch was full and the water in it icy. By midnight, the remaining men were waist-deep in water. Weakened by hunger and exhaustion, they began to slip beneath the surface and drown.

Up on the surface, the United Nations was in charge, surrounded by media, and their instructions were to take prisoners. Through the rubble of the collapsed buildings above them, the last rebels could hear the bullhorn ordering them to come out, unarmed and with hands up. After twenty hours, the first began to stagger toward the stairs. Others followed. Defeated at last, Izmat Khan, the last Afghan left alive, went with them.

Up on the surface, stumbling over the broken stone blocks that had once been the south face, the last eighty-six rebels found themselves facing a forest of pointed guns and rockets. In the daylight of Saturday dawn, they looked like scarecrows from a horror film. Filthy, stinking, black from cordite soot, ragged, matted, bearded and hypothermic, they tottered and some fell. One of these was Izmat Khan.

Coming down a rock pile, he slipped, reached out to steady himself and grabbed a rock. A chunk came away in his hand. Thinking he was being attacked, a nervous young Uzbek fired his RPG.

The fiery grenade went past the Afghan’s ear into a boulder behind him. The stone splintered, and a piece the size of a baseball hit him with devastating force in the back of the head.

He was wearing no turban. It had been used to bind his hands six days earlier and never recovered. The rock would have pulped the skull if it had hit at ninety degrees. But it ricocheted off, slicing the scalp and knocking him into a near coma. He fell in the rubble, blood gushing from the gash. The rest were marched away to trucks waiting outside.

An hour later, the seven British soldiers were moving through the compound, taking notes. Mike Martin, as senior officer, although technically the unit interpreter, would have a long report to make. He was counting the dead, though he knew there were scores-maybe up to two hundred-still underground. One body interested him. It was still bleeding. Corpses don’t bleed. He turned the scarecrow over. The clothing was wrong. This was Pashtun dress. There were not supposed to be any Pashtun present. He took his shebagh from his head and wiped the grime-smeared face. Something vaguely familiar. When he took out his Ka-bar, a watching Uzbek grinned. If the foreigner wanted to have some fun, why not? Martin cut into the pant leg of the right thigh. It was still there, puckered with the six stitches, the scar where the Soviet shell fragment had gone in over thirteen years before. For the second time in his life, he hoisted Izmat Khan over one shoulder in a fireman’s lift and carried him. At the main gate, he found a white Land Rover with a United Nations insignia on it.

“This man is alive but injured,” he said. “He has a bad head wound.”

Duty done, he boarded the SBS Land Rover for the drive back to Bagram. The American trawl team found the Afghan in Mazar Hospital three days later and claimed him for interrogation. They trucked him to Bagram, but to their own side of this vast air base, and there he came to two days after that, slowly and groggily on the floor of a makeshift cell, cold and shackled but just alive. On the fourteenth of January 2002, the first detainees arrived at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, from Kandahar. They were blindfolded, shackled, hungry, thirsty and soiled. Izmat Khan was one of them.

Colonel Mike Martin returned to London in the spring of 2002 to spend three years as deputy chief of staff, HQ_Directorate of Special Forces, Duke of York Barracks, Chelsea. He retired in December 2005 after a party at which a group of friends including Jonathan Shaw, Mark Carleton-Smith, Jim Davidson and Mike Jackson tried and failed-to drink him under the table. In January 2006, he bought a listed barn in the Meon Valley, Hampshire, and started in the late summer to restore it into a country home.

United Nations records later showed that 514 Al Qaeda fanatics died at Qala-i-Jangi and eighty-six survived, all injured. All went to Guantanamo Bay. Sixty Uzbek guards also died. General Rashid Dostum became defense minister in the new Afghan government.