The Network

12

The Firm likes its staff to live nearby. It makes them less dependent on public transport in case of ‘incidents’ that mean they have to get to work in a hurry. North or south of the river doesn’t make much difference these days, and the stigma attached to living near the Firm’s former headquarters at Century House in dreary north Lambeth has been thoroughly exorcised. So Kennington is fine; anywhere near the Oval but south of the gasworks is desirable; Fentiman Road is very nice if you can get it; and the quiet streets off St George’s Drive in Pimlico are rather perfect.

Seethrough, I now discover, lives a little further away, but at under three miles it’s not so far as to refute his claim that he sometimes jogs to work. According to the BT engineer I rely on for the occasional discreet enquiry, he lives a stone’s throw from St Luke’s Church in Chelsea, and it’s here that I wait for him in Gerhardt with some food and a Thermos and enough paracetamol to keep the pain in my leg under control.

His house doesn’t have a garage so he has to walk from his car to the front door, and it’s 9 p.m. when I finally catch sight of him. He’s moving at a pace that makes it painful for me to catch up, and his hand is just moving to the keys in his pocket when he senses the presence of someone behind him. As I reach him, he turns his head slightly but not enough to see my face.

‘Keep your hands by your sides,’ I tell him, ‘and keep walking.’ I’m pointing the antenna of the mobile at him through the pocket of my jacket.

‘Alright,’ he says quietly and very slowly, in the manner of a surgeon on the point of extracting a bullet. Then he realises that it’s me.

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake. You’re supposed to be in Khartoum.’

‘Keep walking, please.’

‘Fuck is going on, Ant?’

‘Did you hear what I said?’

‘Just don’t do anything bloody stupid.’ After a few yards he regains his habitual composure. ‘You’ve got a bit of a suntan, Ant. And you’re limping. Are you sure you’re alright?’

I know he’ll try to work the conversation around so that he’s in charge of it. I’m almost curious to see how he does it. He’s throwing out lines now, to see which one I’ll bite at. We turn into Sydney Street and move south.

‘Who helped you out, Ant? Cheltenham says you made a call to an unlisted number in America.’

‘You were running Hibiscus without telling me,’ I say.

There’s a pause before he replies.

‘Yes.’ He purses his lips like someone who’s deciding from the look of the sky whether it’s going to rain. ‘Course we were.’

‘I need to know why.’

‘Perfectly normal precaution, and none of your business. How’d you find out anyway?’

‘I found out,’ I tell him, ‘because two armed Mokhabarat officers came to take my source away, and that wasn’t in the plan.’

‘Well.’ He muses again. ‘They are very much more efficient than they used to be. Get picked up at her place, did you?’

He’s already figured out the scenario.

‘It wasn’t very nice. One of them tried to stab me too.’

‘Is that why you’re limping? Have you had it looked at? Christ, we would have brought you home.’

‘You were running Hibiscus before I ever got to Khartoum. You set me up.’

‘Rubbish,’ he says dismissively. ‘Don’t be so melodramatic. Keeping an eye on her was just a safety net. Imagine it hadn’t been us. Imagine someone else had got her on their payroll. Ever occur to you? Rate you were going, you might have compromised the entire op. Anyway it’s not unusual. Makes the source feel special, like they’re doing something important. Secondly we get to compare what she says with what you tell us. Like matching up a couple of fingerprints. If there are any discrepancies we know something funny’s going on.’

‘Were there any discrepancies?’

‘As yet, no. I wasn’t expecting any, but that’s how we do things.’ His tone softens, and I recognise the gentle introduction of charm. ‘We also get to see how you handle your first cultivation. I, personally, was impressed with the way you handled Rome. Your meeting there is already bringing us some half-decent CX. I thought you should be given a chance with Hibiscus, but not everybody agreed with me. You haven’t exactly come through the right channels, but you could have a future with the Service, Ant.’

‘I don’t believe a word of what you’re saying.’

‘Excellent.’ He stops and turns to me. There’s a disarming grin on his face. ‘You’re showing the first signs of a competent Intelligence Branch officer. Wouldn’t it be better if I put that on your appraisal form rather than mention that you assaulted me with a weapon while I was on my way home?’

‘It’s not a weapon.’ I pull out the mobile from my pocket. ‘And I didn’t assault you.’

He sighs.

‘Come on,’ he says. ‘You’re upset. Let’s go to the Phat Phuk. Good Vietnamese scoff. It’s just up here.’ He searches my face for a signal of assent and, as he knows he eventually will, finds it.

True to his apparent concern, Seethrough does have my leg looked at. He arranges for a car to take me the next day to a surgeon in Wimpole Street, who’s unimpressed by my do-it-yourself repairs. A sour look comes over his face as he peers at my attempt at stitches through an illuminated magnifying glass. Then he deadens the leg with an injection and a stout serious-looking Polish girl fastens a surgical mask to his face. My ragged black stitches are pulled gently free from the enclosing skin and replaced with neat loops of biodegradable suture that doesn’t need removing. I lie on my stomach and feel nothing, thinking of the steady eyes of the guardian of the Mahdi’s shrine.

‘It feels much better when it’s done with anaesthetic,’ I tell the surgeon.

An hour later I’m limping to Regent’s Park and marvelling at its greenness. After the dust and desiccation of Khartoum, it’s so much easier to understand why the Islamic vision of paradise is a verdant place with running streams and fountains. I sit for a while on a bench beside the main avenue and watch people passing. They seem extraordinarily preoccupied and utterly unaware of the luxury of their surroundings.

Later I walk along the shady paths by the ponds and through the rose garden and back to the Outer Circle, where I’ve parked Gerhardt. I have not paid attention to the time and there’s a ticket on the windscreen. England is unreal to me again.

At home, nothing seems to have changed, although my private world has gone through indescribable tumult over the past few weeks. I mow the lawn and clear the pond of leaves, and count my fish to see if they’re all there. I write up a long report for Seethrough on everything that’s happened in Khartoum, and send it as an encrypted email via the Firm’s server.

I call Jameela at her home for three days in a row but there’s no answer. Then, on the fourth, she picks up. Her faint voice carries on it a flood of memories. She was released without harm after twelve hours. But I have a burning question.

‘Yes,’ she says, in answer to it, ‘it was real. All of it.’

‘What do we do now?’ I ask.

‘I don’t know.’ She weeps.

I don’t know either. I want to ask when we’ll see each other again, but the question sticks in my throat and the result is a long and agonising silence in which each impulse to speak is superseded by its opposite. Neither of us knows what to say. There is only a silent knowing which we both instinctively feel is undermined by words; it’s the very thing we detected in each other when we first met and which took us both by surprise with its intensity. Even at this distance from each other we are in its grasp again.

I call H too, and he invites me to his home to catch up. I drive there the following day. It’s sunny and H is in his garden on a ladder, picking caterpillars from the leaves on his rear porch.

‘They’re eating my wisteria,’ he says, ‘but I don’t like to kill the little buggers.’ I help him gather them up and put them in a box which he’s planning to empty in a neighbouring field.

He doesn’t like the look of my limp, so a long walk isn’t part of our plans.

‘Thought we could put in an hour’s target practice,’ he says. ‘Good for morale. We’ve got permission to use the drive-in range, so we don’t have to creep around any quarries.’

It’s not far. Eight miles from the bridge at Hereford we reach a village where there’s an ancient church with an illustrious history. I half expect to see a works access only sign of the kind that usually indicates a secret government facility, but there’s nothing of the kind. We turn off the main road opposite the church, and drive almost a mile along a country lane barely wide enough for two cars. At an unremarkable crossroads H turns along the way he knows. We pass a derelict-looking farm and suddenly there are high chain-link fences on both sides of the road, beyond which any view is obscured by thick twenty-foot-high deciduous hedges. Poking above them are some high-frequency antenna arrays resembling rotary washing lines, the kind used for long-range agent communication, but there’s not much else to betray a special forces training camp.

We turn in opposite a cluster of low buildings. H slows the car, puts his window down and waves to the man emerging from the security post, who smiles as he recognises him.

‘Alright, H-?’ calls a thick Scottish voice. ‘Nae seen you fra while.’

‘You know how it is,’ says H, and tells him we’ll be about an hour.

‘Nae grief, mate,’ comes the reply.

We pass a small car park with a fleet of scruffy identical vehicles which look as though they’re used for training. A helicopter with no registration markings sits in a neighbouring field. To our left, a quarter of a mile away, rises a wooded slope which H calls Gibbie’s Hill, where he fondly recalls catching wild eels to eat on an E amp; E exercise. We drive towards it across some innocent-looking open land, past some equally innocent-looking buildings, and then some slightly less innocent-looking ones. These, H says, are former ammunition storage facilities, protected by mounded blast-protecting revetment walls and once linked by rail when the site was used as a hideaway for government munitions. The Regiment calls them bunkers. H points out the bunker with the mocked-up interior of a house where he used to practise hostage rescue scenarios. One of the rooms contains a comfy sofa where, despite the bullet holes, H says he used to sleep when it got too late to go home.

At the foot of the hill the road loops around and we pull up at the entrance to what at first looks like a small open-air stadium.

It’s a hundred and fifty feet square, with steep grassy banks on three sides, which rise to about thirty feet. The whole area is fenced off and guarded with a barrier on its open side, which faces south so that no one has to shoot into the sun. Vehicle drills of the kind we’ve earlier practised are carried out within the central enclosure, but H doesn’t want me to risk aggravating my leg, so we work on grouping and then snap shooting with the Brownings. Then, because H can’t resist the opportunity, we practise shooting from a moving vehicle, which is as noisy as it is exhilarating. And as he rightly suggests, good for morale.

We drive back in the afternoon. As we reach the village near his home I offer him a drink at his local. But he seldom goes there any more, he says. He used to when he first moved to the area years ago, he says, but that was before the SAS became such a big deal. He stopped going to the pub not long after the Prince’s Gate hostage rescue, when people who heard he was in the Regiment would treat him disturbingly, like a kind of god.

The thing I like about H is that he prefers to be invisible. I can’t really picture him, after all this is over, going public and giving lectures to the local British Legion in pubs around Hereford and Leominster. Nothing makes him stand out in either habit or appearance, unless you count the small knife that always hangs from the back of his belt or the length of opaque plastic that he carries in his wallet, which can be put to so many different uses.

The few Regiment men I’ve met all share this quality. They are the last ones you would identify as members of the most feared military unit in the world. They are all exceptionally fit, and exertion comes easily to them. They enjoy order and precision in physical tasks, and prefer action to theory, which makes them wary of pretence or self-importance and suspicious of men who wear moleskin trousers. They take solace in beauty of the kind not found in art galleries but in the mist that hovers over a bend in a river at dawn. They rarely smoke, but tend to drink more than most. Much more, in fact. They love the quiet life of the English country village until the next operation in a country that most of us have never heard of. It’s true they keep strange things in their garages, but they get points on their driving licences like anyone else.

So H cooks us an early dinner instead, and afterwards produces a bottle of whisky, which we broach in front of the fire that he lights in his living room. We get on to stories about people H has met who claim to be members of the Regiment. His favourite is the time he gets into conversation with a former soldier who’s just delivered a lecture to a gathering of security experts and claims to have been in the SAS for years. H invites him for a friendly drink, over which the man reveals, confidentially of course, that he’s a former member of the Regiment’s F Squadron. There’s no need, on this occasion, to make a call to the security cell at the Regimental HQ to check on him, because the SAS has never had an F Squadron.

Stories about the more stubborn Walter Mitty types sometimes reach Mars and Minerva, the Regiment’s newsletter. H finds me a copy. It’s mostly titbits of news and reunions. There’s a mention of the sophistication and expense of the security features incorporated in the double fence around the new camp at Credenhill. There are letters from former members and their wives, details of the Regimental Association’s benevolent fund, and obituaries. Members can even buy wine with the Regiment’s insignia on the label. It’s as interesting as a village parish magazine. Nothing could be further from the sensationalism of all the books with flaming daggers on their fronts, which now seem so absurd to me.

‘It’s weird,’ I say.

‘What’s weird?’

‘It’s just that in films when they have to train someone for a special op, they take him off to a huge underground secret base.’

‘You mean one with those doors that swish open like they do in Star Trek?’

‘Exactly. And a thing that X-rays you and scans your eyeball. You don’t see them saving caterpillars or sitting on the floor in somebody’s living room with a dog asleep on a chair.’

H looks affectionately at his terrier Jeffrey, who occupies the largest chair in the room, and tugs on his sleeping chin.

‘Welcome to the real world,’ he says.

On the way home, Gerhardt has difficulty pulling away from a crossroads, and I realise I’ve forgotten to top up the transmission fluid. I stop at a garage and it occurs to me, as I burn my hand on the cylinder head in the attempt to remove the transmission fluid dipstick, that it’s time to call in the favour from Gemayel before I leave.

It’s also time to see the Baroness. I arrange it in the usual way, but she’s not at the club and a note is waiting for me instead, indicating that I come to her home. I’m not expecting to be followed but take time for a careful dry-cleaning before reaching her front door. She buzzes me in. I feel my calf aching where the stitches have yet to heal as I walk up the stairs to the second floor.

The curtains are half-drawn as if she hasn’t had the strength to open them fully. She’s visibly more frail and I can’t help thinking that the end of an era is near. She uses a hand to steady herself against the furniture as she walks across the room, but stubbornly insists on preparing a pot of tea on her own and not letting me help.

I tell her about Khartoum, my illegal escape, and about my feelings for Jameela.

‘It does happen sometimes.’ She smiles. Her teacup tilts imperfectly on the saucer as she returns it. Then her expression grows more grave and I can tell she has something on her mind.

‘I have some news,’ she says. ‘It’s not what you would call good.’

I’m imagining it’s something personal, so it’s a shock when she refers to the operation we’re planning in Afghanistan.

‘It is only a whisper, but it’s been suggested that some parties would prefer the operation to fail.’

‘To fail? Who could want it to fail? Is this Macavity’s idea?’

She shakes her head and frowns.

‘Elsewhere. There’s no reason Macavity should know. The contrary.’ She lets out a wistful sigh. ‘Have you considered the possibility of the missiles being allowed to fall into the wrong hands in order to be turned against us? To permit such a catastrophe may even be desirable to some. Imagine,’ she smiles darkly, ‘a new crusade. It would reach across the world and drag on for a generation.’

‘That sounds dangerously like a conspiracy,’ I tell her.

‘What is coherent at a more organised level may be incomprehensible at a lesser one. If it is true, as I fear it may be, we must hope that the plan is uncovered along the way. The Network has always been a counterweight to the abuse of power, but it cannot change the weaknesses of human nature.’ She sighs again, then looks up at me. ‘You must be especially vigilant. When will you leave?’

‘Soon. In a week or so.’

‘Well,’ she sighs, ‘I have passed on what I could.’

I’m not certain what she’s referring to, but I sense that it’s more than simply the news she’s given me. It’s her habit to assign more than one meaning to the things she says, but now it’s as if a mask is dropping from her, and she’s preparing to relinquish the role she’s steadfastly played all these years. I have the feeling she knows that, before long, loneliness and infirmity will rob her of all the worldly authority and guile her character has accumulated over a lifetime, and that now she must relinquish it voluntarily, shedding herself of its burden to allow her life to at last become simple and unencumbered.

‘You will remember,’ she says quietly, ‘that the great art is always to find an activity which serves a practical visible purpose but which serves your hidden purpose as well.’

‘You have taught me that and much more,’ I say.

‘Context…’ she begins, but then coughs harshly. ‘Context is everything. I’m a little under par,’ she says. ‘Will you forgive me if I don’t see you out?’

‘I’ll see you as soon as I’m back from Afghanistan.’

‘When you’re both back.’ She means Manny, which I’m glad for.

‘Yes, both of us will come and see you.’

‘Of course.’

As I cross the road from her front door I look up to see her standing at a window. She’s waving. But it’s not a modern wave, where the hand flaps from side to side like a metronome. Her arm is upheld but remains still, and her hand rotates with only a slight and stately motion about her wrist. Then her gaze rises towards the sky, and it looks as though she’s holding up an antique ornament towards the light, tilting it back and forth experimentally, as if to glimpse across its surface some tarnished hieroglyph which she alone can decipher.

It’s a Sunday when the call comes.

‘Why not come round for tea?’ asks H in his characteristically gritty voice. It sounds an odd request until I remember it’s the expression we’ve agreed on for our order to move. I make sure the letters I’ve prepared are left neatly on my desk, together with instructions for my sister in case she’s the one who ends up having to deliver them.

Then I go for a short walk, because it’s the last I’ll see of this damp and peaceful world which my countrymen take so blissfully for granted. As I walk, I hear three sounds. One is the whispering of a light wind in the nearby trees, which at moments seems like a conversation between the leaves. The second is a succession of calls between a pair of wood pigeons. The last is a distant cyclical pealing from a church somewhere. The notes descend in an eight-bell octave, but grow confused as the notes begin to sound out of sequence. Soon they become a sonorous tangle, the last note sounding after the first and the others steadily more disordered, until gradually they begin to rearrange themselves. Then, in the manner of a knot that magically unravels itself, the octave regains its proper sequence and the scale is finally resolved and returns to its original harmony. After which there is only silence.

At dawn H and I fly to London in the Puma and are escorted to our final briefing at Vauxhall Cross. We surrender our mobile phones to security and are met once again by Stella, who leads us wordlessly to an upper floor.

Seethrough is waiting for us with what looks like a pair of shopping bags, which contain our personal hiking boots. We scrutinise them in turn but can’t see where the heels have been opened and resealed to accommodate the tiny satellite transmitters that will keep track of our precise locations. The transmitters are almost identical to the kind covertly installed on ships and aircraft sold to allied forces around the world. Seethrough reminds us that they can also be used to designate a target or any other site that requires attention.

Then we move line by line through our operational plans, basically an actions-on list, or what we’ll do in the event of various mishaps. Seethrough plays the role of ops officer, questioning us like a quizmaster and making sure in the process that we all agree, to the extent that things allow, on what happens and when.

He confirms that H’s kit list, which consists of things that we can’t easily explain to curious immigration officials, has been approved. Some items will be picked up at the British consulate in Peshawar, and the rest in Afghanistan through one of the few remaining foreign embassies that still function in Kabul, the identity of which we undertake never to reveal. The only exotic item we actually carry ourselves is our new codes, which are a more personal matter. They’re stored on stamp-sized memory cards and easily concealed.

Then there’s what Seethrough calls last orders, and we hand over the sealed copies of our wills. Nothing in his manner suggests to me he’s aware that the operation will be deliberately threatened. It’s obvious he doesn’t know of any means by which our plans might be compromised, but is conforming faithfully to a well-established chain of command, the tainted origins of which lie far beyond our mutual reach.

No other place I know smells like Peshawar. The city is wrapped in smells like an Oriental tramp in an old coat from which he can’t be parted. There are three main layers to these smells, and infinite lesser ones, the proportions of which depend on your luck, or lack of it.

The first is the smell of the land itself, an ancient alliance of fragrances that probably hasn’t altered since the Buddha, Alexander, Chengiz Khan, Mahmoud the Great and Marco Polo passed through the city in turn. It’s the one that reaches around you as you step from the featureless atmosphere of the plane. It’s a warm smell, humid, sensual and faintly exotic. It comes from the mixture of dust, eternally recycled by wind and rain, and tropical vegetation, the fragrance of which suggests deep green canopies of untamed foliage on an immense scale.

The second layer rises unstoppably from the narrow open channels that run alongside every city street, carrying the full spectrum of human waste like a peeled-open intestine of infinite length, which you spend a good portion of the day anxiously hopping over or crossing on imperfectly balanced paving stones. The opaque slime contained in these primitive sewers cooks slowly in the heat, generously giving up its perfume of decomposition to the surroundings in a constant reminder of earthly dissolution and decay. It is strangely muted and inoffensive, and after a few days ceases to register.

The third layer is the toxic twentieth-century addition of vehicle fumes, which billow into the air from what seems like every passing vehicle. The main culprits are overworked buses and trucks, all obscenely laden and straining under their loads like ageing weightlifters. Clouds of eye-watering black exhaust follow them. On lesser streets and side roads their junior partners in olfactory crime are everywhere: plagues of three-wheeled rickshaws, trailing spumes of unburned oil from their soot-caked two-stroke engines.

Then, depending on where you find yourself, this basic range of smells is refined by the presence of countless others: the bluish smoke of low-grade wood charcoal burning on a million improvised stoves, betel nut, turmeric, cardamom, mildew, wool, concrete dust, whitewash, freshly skinned animal hides, baking bread, dung and the acrid fumes of burning rubbish.

Mercifully, our accommodation lies in the least polluted part of the city called University Town where, since we’re officially working for them as consultants, we’ll be staying at the official guesthouse of the de-mining trust. It’s the western and most prosperous suburb, where the streets are overhung with dusty eucalyptus trees and sprawling vines, and where the UN and foreign NGOs have made their headquarters in spacious houses with gated compounds and gardens behind high walls. Beyond them, from the car that takes us to the trust’s Peshawar headquarters, we catch glimpses of the villas built for the city’s politicians, high-ranking military and all the dealers and players who’ve made their fortunes from the endless war in Afghanistan, and whose white marble towers and balconies gleam like poisonous wedding cakes.

Our first meeting in Peshawar is at the British consulate. It’s there we’ve arranged to collect a large quantity of cash, to be delivered on behalf of the Cousins. It arrived from Islamabad a few days earlier, the consul tells us. He’s a likeable, gangly and urbane figure in his sixties and probably on his last posting. He doesn’t ask what’s in the padlocked bag, though he probably knows.

‘No end-user certificate required, I presume,’ he mutters charmingly as he hands it over, then asks if we’ll stay for lunch. Over the meal he briefs us informally on the situation in Afghanistan: the Taliban’s steady advance into Massoud’s shrinking stronghold in the north of the country and the stalemate in negotiations between the Americans and the Taliban on the ongoing issue of bin Laden.

‘Poor old Massoud,’ he murmurs, working his fork into a Yorkshire pudding. ‘Never met him, but one feels terribly for him all the same.’

On our way back I ask the driver on impulse to take us to the Qissa Khane bazaar, which I want H to see. For an hour we wander through the clamour and chaos of the narrowing streets of the Old City, where the memories of my first visit with Manny return to me in unexpected flashes. I seem to remember the very places where we drank glasses of greenish iced sugar crushed from the raw cane in front of us, and shared kebabs with wild-looking mujaheddin who told us our first real tales of war, and I remember too how we sensed the magnetic pull of the war just across the border, and both felt immortal.

Time still holds this place less tightly in its grasp than most. On the way back we see a little crowd that has gathered around an elderly Punjabi snake charmer. He wears an orange turban and plays a strange sonorous melody on a reed flute to a jaded cobra, which he taps on the back of its neck when it’s too tired to dance. It’s how the two of them make a living. The sight reminds me how quickly we’ve been transported into a different world with different rules and ways which most Westerners don’t even know exist, let alone really understand. I know, at least, that I don’t.

We call our contact the following day. He agrees to visit us for lunch. I’m not sure what kind of person I expect, but he isn’t it. At midday there’s a banging on the gate and the chowkidar admits a lightly built man pushing a bicycle with dusty woven saddlebags. He wears a flowing white shalwar kameez, waistcoat and a black karakul lambskin hat, beneath which his ears project prominently. It must be Hamid Karzai. I recognise him from the photograph that Grace has shown me in Washington.

‘Ah, Grace.’ He chuckles, propping his bike against the wall. He takes off his hat and sweeps a hand over the perspiring and almost smooth crown of his head. ‘She’s a real cowboy. When she came to Afghanistan they treated her like a man.’

He has a quick mind and a keen sense of humour, and H and I both like him from the start. He talks freely in almost perfect English, and our conversation moves rapidly over the burning issues. The situation, he says, has never been more dangerous. Massoud’s forces are hanging by a thread, and unless more help comes he’ll be unable to withstand the Taliban. With help, he’ll be able to survive until rebellions can be spread among Pashtun groups within the Taliban’s own heartland. It’s an ambitious plan, which prompts H to ask if the Taliban can really be defeated. The answer surprises us.

‘Nobody can defeat the Taliban militarily,’ says Karzai, shaking his head. ‘As long as Afghanistan exists, the Taliban will exist. They are the sons of Afghanistan and they will always have their place. But the Taliban are not one entity. They are like – what is the name of that Greek monster with all those heads? If you cut off one, another will take its place.’

‘A hydra.’

‘A hydra. But the Taliban can’t unify my country. They cannot repeat their earlier success.’

‘Success?’ asks H. ‘Do you call their kind of government a success?’

‘My friend,’ he says, ‘for a scorpion, even hot sand is a relief. We have to start where we are. The Taliban have their place in that. You cannot deny them their achievements. People who have not seen the conditions in the country cannot understand their popularity. But by bringing foreign fighters onto the Afghan earth they have done a thing which Afghans cannot forgive. People can see where they are taking our country. That is why we need friends, real friends, who can help to defeat them politically.’

‘Does that include America?’ I ask.

‘Of course,’ he says. ‘Why shouldn’t it? I don’t dislike America. But America is like the Taliban. It doesn’t have one head. Listen, my friends. I have talked to American diplomats here and in Islamabad. I have talked to the State Department in Washington. I have talked to the CIA and the military. Every one of them has a different idea about Afghanistan, but only America is powerful enough to help us.’ He sweeps his hand again over his head. ‘Their great weakness is to see the world in black and white. It’s always good guys and bad guys with them.’ He chuckles. ‘In meetings they always ask, “Is he a good guy or a bad guy?” They want it to be black and white. But nothing is black and white in Afghanistan. There are a thousand shades between black and white.’

I ask if he thinks that bin Laden will be handed over.

He sighs deeply. ‘Before, it was possible. Now, I doubt. After they tried to catch him, he is too cautious.’ I didn’t know anyone had tried to catch him, but thinking back to some of the things Grace alluded to back in Washington, it makes sense. Karzai raises an emphatic finger in the air. ‘Osama will bring big trouble to Afghanistan, I guarantee. Even though he himself is not the most powerful one. Make no mistake. This is an international war with international players.’

We move on from this dark thought to more immediate things. Karzai doesn’t know, or want to know, the operational details of our onward journey. But he sits with us over our maps and tells us in detail about the Taliban’s deployments and what we can expect in different places. He agrees that to drive to the south via Kandahar will invite too much attention and that our planned approach from the north will be safer.

‘Whatever you think of them,’ he says, ‘the Taliban are Afghans, and unless you do something very foolish they will treat you as their guests. But al-Qaeda is a different matter. They are trained to think that Westerners are the cause of all evil. If they suspect something, you will have difficulties.’

‘When you say difficulties,’ asks H, ‘what do you mean?’

‘I mean they will shoot you and your bodies will never be found. Fortunately for you the majority are in the south of the country and you are unlikely to meet them. God forbid it should be so.’

He agrees to send a message to our contact in Kabul to alert him to our arrival and advises caution in the matter of who we trust. When it’s time to give him the money that we have promised to deliver on Grace’s behalf, we hand over the shrink-wrapped bundles of cash, each one of which contains a hundred thousand dollars. He picks them up, stuffs them cheerfully into the saddlebags of his bicycle, wishes us good luck and pedals away.

‘He’s pretty switched on for a bike messenger,’ says H as we go back indoors.

Not many foreigners take the overland route into Afghanistan. We haven’t actually got permission to enter the tribal territories between Peshawar and the border, but it can take weeks to arrange and H wants to see the Khyber Pass, which is actually a dramatic series of switchbacks on the Pakistani side of the frontier. It’s an unforgettable way to get to Afghanistan and there isn’t anywhere quite like it. So at dawn two days later, after our visas come through with the help of the trust, we change into local clothes and head for the border with our driver.

From the tribal point of view, we’re already in Afghanistan. The British drew the frontier a hundred years ago, but it was never recognised by the Pashtuns who live along both sides of its thousand-mile length, and Afghans still like to joke that they in fact own much of Pakistan. It’s wild territory. There are Pakistani police checkpoints along the way, but you get the sense their power doesn’t reach much further than the distance they can swing their long bamboo truncheons. As we leave Peshawar behind, the mountains swell and the road begins to sway between their steepening flanks as we approach the pass that officially connects the two countries. Everything looks more dilapidated except the mountains, which rise steadily higher and magnify the feeling that you’re entering a different world, with different and harsher but simpler rules. Even the sky begins to clear as the dust of the plains falls away, and the air cools as it thins.

The border post at Torkham is a chaotic place. There’s a scruffy collection of buildings and a pair of wide gates flanked by fence posts that are no longer vertical, beyond which an Afghan flag flutters in the wind. Hovering near the gates are about a dozen Pakistani policemen in khaki uniforms, picking at random on individuals from the flow of men and women approaching the crossing point.

As long as we are not recognised as foreigners, there is nothing to stop us from entering Afghanistan here, and I sense that H is enjoying the idea of reliving the Great Game for a day and slipping unnoticed into the country. So a hundred yards from the gates we get out of the car and our driver agrees to wait until he sees us cross before he leaves. I catch the attention of an Afghan boy pushing a dusty cart laden with sacks and boxes, to which I add our bags and pay him a small sum to meet us on the far side of the gates. Then we say goodbye to our driver and merge into the flow.

‘You look good in an Afghan hat,’ I say to H.

‘See you in Afghanistan,’ he says.

We walk past the police as nonchalantly as possible and meet gratefully on the other side of the gates. It’s an anticlimax. There doesn’t seem to be any passport control. We wander into the courtyard of what looks like a customs post, where an armed Talib is dozing under a tree with an AK-47 across his lap. We rouse an official and are invited to sit, and a few minutes later a boy brings us tea. Then from the building someone waves us inside to a run-down office with a dusty desk beneath a bare bulb and a ceiling fan that doesn’t work. He smiles and stamps our passports without much interest, then points us in the direction of some decrepit cars waiting to ferry passengers to Kabul. We’re officially in Afghanistan.

Nothing has escaped the years of war here. For almost the entire route, the surface of the road has long since disappeared. For lengthy stretches even the road itself has simply been torn away by flooding or collapsed. Even on the best sections we weave between craters and gullies gouged out by years of neglect. The telephone poles and pylons beside the road have been stripped of their wires. There is no building, wall or human structure that is intact. Everything seems on the verge of collapse or to have been reduced to its most elemental parts. All along the way we see the vestiges of conflict: destroyed and rusting armoured vehicles, stripped of every salvageable part, crouching silently beyond the shoulders of the road or in the surrounding fields.

‘That’s not a tank,’ says H, when I point out the first of them ‘It’s a BTR-70. Armoured personnel carrier. That one over there’s a BMP combat vehicle.’ He knows his Soviet armour from the days when the West feared the might of the Red Army, which fought its last engagement not in Europe but in the valleys and passes of Afghanistan.

The landscape is beautiful none the less. Perhaps it’s even more beautiful because the evidence of destruction is never far away and makes us think of the fragility of life. It’s also as if we’ve gone back in time. The surrounding villages, clinging to hillsides as if they’ve grown out of the ground itself, are made from timber and adobe and have a biblical look. White-bearded men in turbans and flowing gowns lead camels by the roadside or guide wooden ploughs behind oxen. We return briefly to the twentieth century as we enter Jalalabad, where the streets are paved again, and we stop to eat kebabs and freshly baked bread at a tiny stall. The owner jokes with us and asks if we are looking for Osama.

The capital bears all the scars of war. We drive in from the east, about six hours after leaving the border, and pass the shattered suburb of Microrayon, where every building is half-ruined by gunfire and rocket blasts.

‘Bloody hell,’ says H gloomily as he looks over the destruction. ‘They really went to work here.’

Even on the outskirts of Kabul there are hollowed-out carcasses of Soviet-made tanks, whose turrets have been blown from their housings by anti-tank mines and lie upside down a few yards away. I wonder how many wars some of them saw before they ended up here. Some date from the era of the Soviet occupation that ended twelve years earlier, others from the long civil war that saw the city torn apart by rival factions. Some may have even seen action in the Gulf War, after which the CIA had the bright idea of gathering them up from Iraqi battlefields and bases and sending them on to Afghanistan.

Kabul seems half-deserted since I was last here, probably because the Tajik population championed by Massoud, the Taliban’s arch-rival, has largely fled. Nor is there any sign of the pakoul, the flat woollen hat worn all over the north of the country. On the advice of our taxi driver, we’ve already hidden ours. There are few cars other than taxis and the occasional pickup truck with tinted windows, the preferred means of travel for Taliban commanders and their bodyguards. It’s as if the place is on holiday and every normal activity has shut down. There are no kites in the sky. The Taliban have seized a ghost town.

Our guest house is in the least-destroyed residential part of the city called Wazir Akbar Khan, where a grid of homes for Kabul’s most prosperous families was built in the 1970s. The trust provides a housekeeper and a chowkidar, who welcome us warmly and fuss over our every request. The windows on the ground floor are heavily sandbagged, and upstairs the panes have anti-shatter tape across them in case of nearby explosions. We install ourselves gratefully in big rooms with marble-floored bathrooms where the taps don’t work because there’s no electricity to pump the water. But we’ve made it to Kabul and we’re happy to be here.

From the upstairs room we can just see a snow-covered ridge, miles away in the high mountains to the north. The final moments of sunlight are just settling along it with a bright pink glow, and it looks almost as if a luminous flamingo feather has gently fallen to rest there from the beyond.