The Network

5

For days I’m hoping to continue with life as if nothing’s really happened, feeling all the while like a man condemned. My meeting with Seethrough has stirred up memories I’ve preferred to forget, and now they return to me like ghosts, visiting at unexpected moments. From time to time I wonder whether Seethrough’s proposal is no more than an elaborate hoax, and imagine him jumping out at me one day in his long coat, waving his chequebook from Coutts and declaring the whole thing a joke.

My sleep grows disturbed, and I have strange dreams in which I’m wandering along the secret corridors of Vauxhall Cross. In one I’m walking under a giant portrait of the Duke of Edinburgh that hangs in the main atrium, but the face is Seethrough’s, grinning cynically at me. Recalling our meeting gives me a jittery feeling akin to panic. It’s as if the visible events of ordinary life are now no more than a stage set that ordinary people believe is real, but behind which I alone know what’s going on. I tell myself I’ll get used to keeping things secret, and push thoughts of the future aside. But I know too that a secret can enliven one’s life or poison it, and I’m wondering which way things will eventually turn out.

Seethrough has said he’ll contact me again in a week’s time. But the lack of news makes me anxious, and the evenings fall heavily. My working routine has gone haywire. I drink a bottle and a half of wine every night, and I’m smoking again, a vice I’ve managed to evade for over a year. For most of the week I avoid contact with people, stop shopping and, worst of all, run out of decent red wine. I take to going for long walks alone and driving Gerhardt cross-country on the muddy tank routes over Salisbury Plain, thinking to test my nerve in the event of getting caught and arrested by the Military Police. I shouldn’t, because it would be a bad moment to be arrested. But you do odd things when the craving for adrenalin begins to set in.

Then two things happen. The following Saturday morning, along with a reminder that I haven’t paid my television licence, a postcard arrives from Afghanistan. It’s strangely timely. On the front is a poorly reproduced colour photograph, probably taken in the 1970s, of a turbanned Kuchi tribesman leading a caravan of camels, silhouetted against a background of barren mountains. It’s postmarked Kabul, but I can’t make out the date. Nor do I recognise the hand. It reads,

Be doubly warned that the journey here takes at least thirteen hours, in temperatures of up to forty degrees. We all look forward to seeing you here. Please do keep in touch. Your old friend, Mohammed.

I’ve had the occasional letter and postcard from Afghanistan, but I’m embarrassed not to remember a Mohammed who considers himself to be my old friend. Certainly not one who speaks English well enough to know his prepositions and such an expression as ‘be doubly warned’. I think of the English-speaking people I’ve met in Kabul and on de-mining missions over the years. Most of them are foreigners. I wonder if Mohammed might be a Western-educated Iranian. But my mind’s a blank. I’ve simply forgotten. Odder still, it’s winter now and nowhere in Afghanistan does the temperature reach forty degrees. Perhaps the card was posted months before, and has only just been flown out. The Taliban postal service is hardly famous for its swiftness. I walk into the living room, put the postcard on the mantelpiece and stare at it. It bothers me that I can’t identify the sender. I decide I’ll leave it there until I can.

The second event is a phone call from Seethrough. I’ve yet to get into the habit of calling him Macavity. When the mobile he’s given me begins to ring, I have no idea at first what it is. The tone resembles a two-tone police siren, and makes me think some kind of alarm has gone off in the house, only there aren’t any alarms in the house. After a few moments of bafflement, I find the handset with its blinking green light, disconnect it from the charger lead and press the answer button.

‘This is Macavity,’ says a watery-sounding voice, as the data packets are digitised and encrypted, then reassembled again in the handset. At some point the Firm’s special microchip begins sending out its impenetrable white noise. ‘Confirm please.’

‘This is Plato,’ I say, feeling silly.

‘All well?’

‘Can I change the ring tone on this thing?’ I ask.

‘No, you can’t. Now just listen. I’m going to send you someone.’

‘That’s nice,’ I say. ‘Will she jump out of a cake?’

‘It’s a he. He’s going to help you to get up to speed on a few things. If you get along, I’ll send him with you. He’s ex-Regiment and I want you to do whatever he asks.’

‘Whose regiment?’

‘The Regiment.’

That’s different. The Regiment is what the SAS calls the SAS. I picture a black-booted figure in body armour and respirator, Heckler amp; Koch MP5 at the ready, swinging through the window of the house as I lie in bed reading the Sunday papers.

‘I hope it’s not Andy McNab,’ I say. ‘He’s far too intellectual for me.’

‘Don’t be facetious. It’s not Andy McNab; it’s the fellow who trained him.’

That shuts me up.

‘Roger that. When?’

‘That’s his business. Just be nice to him. He’ll introduce himself as a friend from London. By the way, he’s a Mirbat vet, so I advise you not to mess him around.’

‘A what?’

‘Mirbat. Look it up. I have to go. Good luck.’

There’s a bleep, and a recording of a severe-sounding woman’s voice repeats, ‘Please hang up, please hang up.’

I’m impressed. Both by the mobile, which seems to do its job, and by a man who seems to do his. A man so busy he has no time for small talk. I’m about to reattach the handset to its cable when looking at it gives me an idea. Hearing Seethrough’s voice has reminded me of the mobile’s other functions, and I wonder now if they really work.

There’s a way, I realise, to test the infrared. I can switch my video camera to ‘nightshot’ mode, when the camera uses its own infrared source to film in total darkness, and then see what the mobile looks like. And it’s easy to test the ultraviolet function. There are dyes that show up under ultraviolet light in all sorts of things.

As soon as it’s dark, I’m thus able to waste several hours. In pitch blackness, viewed through the camera in infrared mode, the little screen on the mobile is, as promised, as bright as a searchlight. It lights up the entire room and is even visible from under a blanket. Handy, as Seethrough has suggested, for landing a helicopter in the garden.

The ultraviolet is equally distracting. It makes my fingernails seem luminous. I wave it over objects that take my fancy, and discover the hidden watermarks and security devices in my chequebook and passport. There are hidden phosphor bands on stamps, and images and tiny flecks of specially dyed paper in banknotes, invisible to the eye in ordinary light. Shining as if white-hot in the darkened room, they seem strangely beautiful. I also look at the postcard with it, and am disappointed to find there’s no hidden message.

It’s Saturday evening. I’m alone, and feel alone. As night falls, the familiar beast of despair begins to creep up on me. I have no tobacco and am too lazy to go and buy any. Worse, there’s virtually nothing to drink but a final bottle of Chateau Batailley, which I’ve promised myself I’ll save for a special occasion. This calls for a difficult decision. It’s either the Batailley or the sole other source of alcohol in the house: roughly half a bottle of Armenian cognac, which a so-called friend has palmed off on me as a gift. It’s so bad I haven’t touched it for six months, having discovered what damage it can do to the untrained nervous system. I retrieve it from the back of a kitchen cupboard, mix a slug with some mineral water and discover to my surprise that it’s quite drinkable. I also find a cigar, which I’ve similarly promised myself to save for a special occasion. I light the cigar, dig out my topographic maps of Afghanistan, and return to the cognac.

At ten o’clock I lurch into the grey morning with a sharp pain in my head where the cognac has etched Category 2 damage in the region of my cerebellum. The house reeks of cigar smoke, so I throw open the windows and put the coffee percolator to work in the kitchen. Taking the first sip, I hear myself whisper, ‘I must not do this again,’ and wonder how often I’ve uttered the same words. My Afghan maps are scattered on the floor by the sofa where I’ve fallen asleep. As I’m gathering them up there’s a triple knock at the door. I flee upstairs, throw on some clothes and return to the door.

The daylight is painfully bright. In front of me stands a clean-shaven middle-aged man with a sheaf of paperwork in his hand, and for a terrible moment I think of all the letters from the Television Licensing Authority which I’ve thrown away unopened.

‘Good morning, sir. I hope I’m not disturbing you.’

I don’t like the ‘sir’ part. It makes him sound like a policeman. But he doesn’t look like one. He’s wearing a black suit like an undertaker’s, for which he’s grown slightly too big, and a tie with green and red diagonals that hurts to look at.

‘Of course not,’ I reply with an unconvincing smile.

‘I wonder if I can ask whether you read the Bible?’ he asks. Resting in the crook of his arm like Moses in a basket is a sheaf of denominational literature.

‘I do, as a matter of fact.’

A smile of pleasant surprise spreads across his face, but it’s not a morning to give the enemy too much room for manoeuvre, because I don’t do religion on a hangover.

‘I also read the Qur’an. I have a soft spot for Marcus Aurelius too, and he was a pagan.’

The smile fades. He’s not really expecting this and a slight stutter comes into his voice. ‘But… but do you believe your actions in this life make a difference in the world to come?’

‘If we’re going to be judged on something in an afterlife, I think it’ll probably be our inactions. It’s not difficult to live a pious life, if you think about it, imagining you’ll be saved if you stick to a few rules. But think of all the good things you could have done but didn’t because you were too lazy or complacent. I think we’ll be judged on our potential.’

He’s frowning now.

‘I forget where I first heard the idea, but it does stay with you. I think it’s somewhere in the Qur’an.’

I pluck a copy of the Watchtower from his grasp and thank him warmly, saying I hope I’ll see him again soon. The speed at which he walks away up the drive suggests I won’t.

With a feeling of guilty victory I return to my coffee. Then I close the windows in the sitting room because the light is hurting my eyes, and sit down at the table, taking the postcard from the mantelpiece where I left it. I read it again several times. There’s nothing out of the ordinary about the text. I wonder if the picture, depicting a nomad leading a line of camels, is intended to convey a meaning. It’s the identity of ‘Mohammed’ that bothers me. I wonder if it might be worth looking through my diaries from the period I was last in Kabul, but if the card was sent months earlier, whoever Mohammed is will have given up hearing from me.

I take the card to the kitchen and boil the kettle, hold the card in the steam and gently work a corner of the stamp with the tip of a knife. I’m not sure what to expect – anything strange or out of the ordinary.

As the stamp begins to curl back in the steam, what I see is even stranger. Under the stamp, in the same ink as the writing on the card, is a tiny drawing of a dinosaur with a smiling face.

It’s a stegosaurus.

Cryptography is the science of hiding the true meaning of a message by disguising it; encrypting it by some means known to the recipient but not to others. As long as the sender and the recipient keep their means of encryption secret, the effort needed by the codebreaker is determined by the difficulty of the code. Some codes, like alphabetical substitutions, are easy to crack because the frequencies at which letters appear in words are well known. Others, like one-time pads based on random numbers, can only be cracked by computers, if at all. The most complex codes that use block ciphers and multiple algorithms need both computers and time, and modern computing power means that few codes are truly impossible to crack, given enough of the latter. But the science of hiding a message by disguising it as something which on the surface appears innocent is called steganography.

Strictly speaking, a message written in invisible ink across an ordinary letter is an example of steganography: the visible or cover message is innocuous. It’s an ancient idea. Herodotus describes a king who tattooed a secret message on the shaven head of his slave, whose hair was allowed to grow before he travelled through enemy territory to deliver it. More recent applications allow secret text to be hidden in the data of digitised photographs sent over the Internet. The advantage of a steganographic message is that, unlike a coded message, the secret part doesn’t attract attention to itself. It resembles something ordinary, and hides itself thereby.

My ex-wife, come to think of it, has a steganographic personality: an innocent-looking face concealing a cruel agenda.

I decide it has to be the numbers: thirteen and forty. ‘Degrees’ in the cover message also seems to be an overt clue. I find an atlas and look up the latitude and longitude. Problem. Thirteen degrees north and forty degrees east puts me in the mountains of northern Ethiopia. Forty degrees west is equally challenging – somewhere in the mid-Atlantic trench. Southern readings for the latitude land me in thick rainforest in Mozambique and Brazil. The numbers are not an obvious location.

They’re too short to be a phone number or a postcode. The only other reference I can imagine they might give is a book code, indicating a page and line number in a book known to both sender and recipient. But I haven’t agreed on a book with anyone called Mohammed.

Then it hits me like a delayed reaction, as I hear the echo of my very own words: I also read the Qur’an. The ‘old friend’, Mohammed, is the clue. It’s so obvious I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to realise. Now I regret my uncivil behaviour towards my visitor.

For centuries the mas-haf code, virtually unknown in the West, has been used in the Islamic world to encrypt messages using the numbers of the Qur’an’s sacred verses. Being identical in every version of the text, irrespective of country or date of publication, the verses retain the same numbers and provide thereby an unchanging key.

I go to my bookshelf, pull out an English translation and race to the thirteenth chapter, called Thunder. The fortieth verse, or aya, is a short one: ‘Whether We let you glimpse in some measure the scourge with which We threaten them, or cause you to die before we smite them, your mission is only to give warning: it is for Us to do the reckoning.’

There’s no need to look for any more clues. The reference to a warning is confirmation enough of the message. The question now is how to interpret it and, if necessary, respond. It’s strange news to get and I’m annoyed with myself for being hungover and slow. I regret my mind isn’t feeling sharper and that the whole significance of the message isn’t coming to me more quickly. The only thing I know for sure about the message is that it’s been sent by someone who knows enough of my background to be confident that I’ll figure out how to decipher it, and then how to interpret it. Whoever sent it also knows how to find me.

There’s a another sudden knock at the door, which has an effect similar to a powerful electric shock. I yank open the door with a scowl. There’s a different man standing on the doorstep, this time wearing a fake Barbour, jeans and trainers.

‘I’ve told your friend I’m a Muslim,’ I say gruffly.

The man’s eyebrows go up and down and he let outs a gravelly chuckle.

‘Well, in that case, As-salaamu aleikum.’ His voice is low, even and has a rasping quality as if something rough is being continually ground down in his throat. I frown at him. I’ve never met an Arabic-speaking Jehovah’s Witness and wonder if they’ve sent for a specialist to check my theology. He’s going to get a run for his money.

‘Wa aleikum as-salaam.’ I return the greeting out of reflex and look at him more closely. His frame is lighter than the other man’s, and the lines on his cheeks suggest leanness. He has short sandy-coloured hair, a neat moustache like an ex-soldier’s and looks a youthful fifty. His eyes have a watchful and mischievious sparkle. But he has no documents or bag. Before I can think of anything else to say, he speaks again.

‘Ana rafiq min landan.’ I am a friend from London. He speaks Ministry of Defence Arabic. ‘I parked down the road,’ he adds, gesturing with a thumb over his shoulder. Then it sinks in.

It’s Seethrough’s man from the Regiment. The SAS has arrived.

‘Oh, Christ. Sorry. Come in.’

He smiles and his eyes dart watchfully over the hallway as he steps inside. ‘It’s H- by the way. Friends call me H.’ The handshake is firm. ‘Late night?’ he asks with a knowing look.

‘Something like that.’

‘We’d better have some coffee.’

‘I’ve just made some.’

‘Good man.’

He sniffs the air as we go into the kitchen, puts his coat neatly over the back of a chair and sits at the table. The room’s a mess. I’m embarrassed and surreptitiously cover the ashtray in the sink with a plate as I rinse a pair of cups. I ask where he’s driven from this morning.

‘Hereford.’ That figures. Hereford is home to the Regimental HQ of 22 SAS.

I’m about to ask whether he lives there, but he answers first.

‘Settled down after I left the Regiment ten years ago, give or take.’

‘Marry a local girl?’

‘The whole nine yards. Wife, kids, cats, dogs.’

‘What have you been doing since?’

‘The security and protection circuit – rigs and pipelines, mostly. Some BGing once in a while. Sorry – bodyguarding. And the occasional special request.’

‘Isn’t it all a bit dull after the SAS?’

‘Better than sitting around in a damp hole all day.’

This is modest, coming from a member of the most elite special forces regiment in the world.

‘There’s a company that helps the blokes who want to stay active – the ones who don’t become postmen, mostly.’

‘Remind me not to tangle with the postman.’ I sit down opposite him and pour the coffee. His eyes fall on the dark red and blue bands of my watchstrap.

‘Regimental flash?’

‘Scots Guards.’

‘Alright for some.’ He grins. ‘When did you pack it in?

‘After the Gulf. Granby, wasn’t it? Stupid name for a war,’ I say. I know that military code names are chosen by computer and run alphabetically, but still.

‘Stupid war, if you think about it.’ He blows thoughtfully on his coffee. I like his irreverence.

‘Regiment did well out of it,’ I say.

‘The usual balls-up,’ he says, dismissing this. ‘Typical Regiment story. A lot of guys spread out all over the world in different theatres, and then up comes a deployment like the Gulf.’ His fingers trace a phantom squadron gathering across the tabletop. ‘All of a sudden every one of them wants a piece of the action, and a lot of jostling goes on. You get guys who’ve been training for something else doing the wrong job, and the right guys getting bumped down the line.’

‘What did London tell you?’ I ask.

‘I only get a phone call from the liaison officer with the where and when. Sounds like they’re going to leave the details to us. We’ve got a month. Should be plenty of time.’

This is a very low-key approach, and unlike anything I’ve encountered in the military. I also find it hard to reconcile the softly spoken almost boyish manner of the man in front of me with the more sensational tales told popularly about the Regiment.

‘I don’t suppose you were on the balcony at Prince’s Gate, were you?’ I’m joking, but every soldier knows how many thousands of men have claimed they were part of the spectacular hostage rescue at the Iranian embassy in London twenty years earlier.

‘No, not on the balcony,’ he says in a thoughtful tone. ‘Anyway, the blokes on the balcony were only there for the TV cameras.’

Good answer. I ask how long he’s been in the Regiment.

‘I’m a twenty-fourer.’ He chuckles. ‘Boy soldier.’ He’s served in every major theatre where the SAS has deployed. Aden, Borneo, Oman, Northern Ireland, the Falklands, Iraq, Bosnia and, between training some other military units in far-off places and what he calls ‘extra-curricular stuff’, a dozen other countries.

‘I’m surprised you haven’t thought of a literary career,’ I say. ‘Wasn’t it your CO who started the trend?’

He shrugs cynically. ‘DLB was a good soldier. Anyway, it’s his memoirs they’ll be reading in ten years, not the other bloke’s.’

He’s loyal too, I’m thinking to myself, to his former Regimental commanding officer, Peter de la Billiere. By the sound of it he doesn’t care much for the celebrity authors the Regiment has also produced over the past few years. Then I remember what Seethrough told me the day before.

‘What’s a Mirbat vet?’ I ask.

‘I am, for starters,’ he says.

‘Then what’s a Mirbat?’

‘Mirbat? That’s the name of the town. On the Omani coast. Operation Storm.’ His eyes light up. ‘The Regiment’s golden hour. Have you got an atlas?’

A vet, it now dawns on me, is obviously a veteran, but I’ve been thinking a Mirbat is some kind of animal, not the site of a battle. Feeling very ignorant, I fetch the atlas from the sitting room, where I’ve left it. We push our cups aside and a few moments later our fingers are trailing southwards across the Arabian peninsula. I’ve forgotten how strategically placed Oman is, with its north-eastern tip pointing into Iran across the narrowest stretch of the Persian Gulf. H’s finger comes to rest on the coastline not far east of the border with Yemen.

‘We were down south, here, in Salalah. And there,’ he says, pointing to a long mountainous shadow running east to west, ‘was where the Adoo were, up on the Jebel.’

‘What were you doing there?’

‘We weren’t. Officially. Too secret at the time. No one back home knew we were out there. But look.’ He points to the map again. ‘Everything coming in and out of the Gulf has to run through the Straits of Hormuz. Imagine if we’d lost it.’ He smiles and then does a comic caricature of an officer. ‘We couldn’t very well let them have our oil, could we?’ Then as if he regrets making light of the subject, adds, ‘That wasn’t the point at the time. We were British. We knew we’d win.’

He flattens out the sheet gently with his hand, and we lean over it to peer at the names. From the coastal plain around Salalah, several dark lines cut into the looming escarpment that H calls the Jebel, which means mountain in Arabic. The lines split and waver like veins as they travel north. They’re the giant wadis that lead into the hinterland of the enemy, he explains, verdant in the monsoon season and blisteringly barren in the summer.

‘That’s Wadi Arzat,’ he says. He smiles. ‘God, I remember hiking all the way up there with a jimpy.’ Jimpy is army slang for GPMG, the unpleasantly heavy general purpose machine gun. He takes a key ring from his pocket and uses the tip of a key to follow the coastline to the east, until it comes to rest on a town at the foot of the great Jebel.

‘There,’ he says, ‘that’s Mirbat. That’s where I got my first souvenir.’

There isn’t much written about Mirbat or Operation Storm, so I’m pleased to be hearing about it from someone who was actually there, and I fill in the gaps later. Mirbat itself was the most dramatic engagement in a six-year-long campaign spanning the final days of British control in the Gulf. In 1970 the British protectorate of Aden had fallen to a Marxist-oriented government. On its eastern border lay Oman, governed by an ageing and autocratic sultan with the help of a small army run by British officers. When intelligence reports began to suggest that communist-trained guerrillas from Yemen, as well as others from revolutionary Iraq, were infiltrating the country, there was a reappraisal of British interests in the region. The prospect of allowing the country to fall into communist hands was unthinkable.

A coup, discreetly assisted by the British, brought the sultan’s son Qabus to power. But in the meantime the communist-trained rebels, the Adoo, had seized the strategic heights of the Jebel, and the new sultan’s army was losing the war for control. Well trained and supplied by their communist sponsors, the Adoo were brave and tenacious.

Enter the SAS. Unofficially, under the quiet euphemism of British Army Training Teams – BATTs. And operationally, with the threefold task of wooing the local population away from the communist-trained guerrillas and persuading them of the benefits of joining the government’s side, raising local irregular units called firqats to fight the Adoo, and taking the war ever deeper into the Jebel.

Within a couple of years a series of daring raids had pushed the Adoo from much of the Jebel, where the SAS built up lines of control and permanent bases. But the Adoo were planning a decisive comeback, and had decided on an all-out assault supported by mortars and artillery on the small coastal town of Mirbat. Their plan was to capture the stone fort and its local defenders, kill the mayor of the town and score a huge propaganda victory for the rebel cause.

They came on 12 July 1972, at dawn.

At least 250 Adoo fighters walked down unopposed from the Jebel, infiltrating the outskirts of the town and fanning out in the gullies and beyond the perimeter wire protecting the fort. The odds in their favour could not have been much better. In the fort were only a dozen local tribesmen armed with bolt-action rifles. Several hundred yards away, in the local BATT house, were a handful of SAS men looking forward to their return to Hereford at the end of their tour in a few days’ time.

When the first Adoo mortars began to fall, showering the sleeping soldiers with dust from the mud walls of their HQ, no one even thought to radio the support base at Salalah. But as the volume of fire increased, it became obvious that the Adoo had launched a major assault. For a few moments the SAS men stared in disbelief from the parapet of the BATT house at the hundreds of advancing men, then opened up with their own mortar and heavy machine gun. The mist was soon sizzling on their gun barrels, and the incoming fire growing with every minute.

One of the SAS troopers, a Fijian called Labalaba, ran to the gun pit at the base of the fort and began firing a 25-pounder into the Adoo lines as their shells exploded around his position. But things were quickly getting worse. The Adoo were soon too close for the maximum elevation of the SAS mortar in the BATT house, so a desperate pair of troopers lifted it from its mounting, and while one man held it to his chest, the other fed the ammunition into the tube. Then came news over the radio that Labalaba had been wounded. Twenty-three-year-old troop commander Mike Kealey, still wearing his flip-flops, radioed for a helicopter to evacuate him while another Fijian, called Tak by his friends, ran to his countryman’s aid through clouds of dust thrown up by exploding mortar shells and automatic weapons. The helicopter attempted to land nearby, but was forced to withdraw.

For an hour the Adoo poured fire into the fort, by now wreathed in smoke and dust and impossible even to see from the BATT house except when lit up momentarily by the bursts of exploding shells. But the rate of fire of the heavy gun manned by Labalaba was faltering and, unable to reach the gun pit on the radio, Kealey decided to run for it with his medical orderly, Tobin.

They sprinted in bursts, firing in turn and hearing the deadly whisper of enemy bullets all around them. Throwing themselves into the gun pit a few minutes later, they scrambled across piles of shell casings to find Tak propped up in a pool of blood, wounded in the back and head but still firing his weapon. Labalaba, with a field dressing tied around his chin, was struggling to load shells into the 25-pounder. A badly wounded Omani gunner was sprawled among the ripped sandbags and ammunition boxes. Despite sustained fire from the BATT house, the Adoo then breached the perimeter wire, and were close enough to begin throwing grenades into the gun pit. Labalaba, after slamming a final shell into the breech of the gun, fell to an Adoo bullet. Taking his place, Tobin was shot through the jaw. He died later.

Tak and Kealey, now firing point blank into the enemy, were on the point of being overrun when two Strikemaster jets from Salalah, braving the low cloud and storms of bullets from the Adoo guns, raked the enemy positions with machine-gun fire. On a second run a perfectly placed 500-pound bomb decimated the Adoo lines. The rescue helicopter now flew in and the dead and wounded and the body of Labalaba were gathered up. Tak refused all help and walked to the helicopter unaided.

The war dragged on for several more years until the guerrillas were finally pushed back to the border of Yemen, but they were never able to mount such a large-scale operation again. Back in England nothing was heard of this astonishing victory against the odds.

I ask H what his souvenir was. His hands move to the cuff of his shirt, and for a moment it looks as though he’s going to show me an Omani bracelet or a tattoo. But he pulls up the sleeve to his elbow and turns his forearm towards me. There’s a pale oval scar the size of an olive, matched by a slightly larger one on the other side. The bullet, he explains, passed between the bones of his forearm and lodged in the butt of his rifle, but was prevented from entering his chest by the metal base plate.

‘Bet that hurt,’ I say.

‘Didn’t feel a thing till afterwards. Bit messy though.’

‘Where were you?’

‘In the BATT house. Drove up from Taqa two days before, but the jeep behind me hit a mine so we had to overnight in Mirbat. I was supposed to fly out the next day with the injured driver, but the cloud was too low. Hell of a day to get stuck.’ He rolls down his sleeve and sighs. ‘Regiment’s gone downhill since then.’

It’s midday. H throws a restless look around the kitchen and asks if there’s a pub nearby. ‘We can have a walk and a blather,’ he suggests, ‘and make bit of a plan.’ I need the walk and agree. We take our coats, cut across the fields from the house, and walk the mile and a half to the Crown, soaking ourselves up to the knees in the wet grass. At the pub we sit by a smoky fireplace and talk over our beers, learning details of each other’s lives with a friendly complicity to which I’m unaccustomed but which I’m enjoying more than I expect.

H asks about Afghanistan. A few of his Regiment friends paid visits to the country in the 1980s, he says, training Afghan mujaheddin to use the Stinger missile. They even brought a few Afghans to Scotland to train them in guerrilla tactics and advanced communications. From a drab building behind Victoria station one or two others helped to dream up exotic operations to hinder the Soviets. But he doesn’t know much else about the place, he confesses.

I try to convey the fondness, despite all the privations and difficulties of conflict, that I feel for the place and its people. I’ve come to respect the Afghans for their bravery and hardiness, and I’m relieved when H says he felt the same mixture of sympathy and respect for the tribesmen he trained and fought alongside in Oman. From my wallet I pull a photograph taken on my very first trip to Afghanistan, and H points to the bearded Afghan posing next to me with an AK-47 assault rifle held proudly across his chest.

‘Looks like a fellow in my troop,’ he says, grinning.

He asks about politics too. I say the present conflict there can be traced back to the Soviet occupation of the country throughout the 1980s. The Soviets had hoped to establish a loyal communist regime in Afghanistan, calculating that the poorest people in all Asia would be quickly subdued. Things went badly from the start. There was widespread armed resistance to the Soviet presence, and their total failure to win popular support from the rural population was equalled by their poor strategy. Pinned down in their bases and controlling only the cities and main roads, Soviet soldiers were rarely able to move freely about the country, relying on airpower and heavily armoured operations to bludgeon their enemies into submission. There was no attempt to win the hearts and minds of a deeply traditional and religious people, who had been fighting – and beating – invaders since the beginning of time.

‘Mindset,’ says H quietly, nodding. ‘You can’t win a war without understanding the mindset.’

For ten years the Soviets fought an increasingly brutal and unsuccessful conflict, killing as many as a million Afghans in the process. They withdrew in 1989, leaving an ailing communist government in a shattered nation, which further disintegrated as rival mujaheddin factions fought each other for control. American support for the Afghans evaporated in the wake of the Soviet exodus, and in the lawless provinces of the south the Taliban were born a few years later, supported increasingly by extremists from abroad. They took Kabul in 1996 and soon imposed their cruelly medieval outlook on almost the entire country. Only a shrinking province in the north controlled by Massoud continued to resist their rule.

The counter-insurgency campaign in Oman, though on a much smaller scale, made an instructive contrast. The Regiment had made it a priority to understand the local culture, realising from the outset that without local support they could never hope to defeat the enemy. The strategic emphasis was on winning allies rather than killing the enemy, and on avoiding the death of civilians at any cost. When Adoo defectors surrendered to the government side they were neither imprisoned nor even interrogated, but gently persuaded to see the logic of fighting for a progressive sultan rather than the brutal hierarchy of their communist sponsors.

‘When we found a village we wanted to keep the Adoo out of,’ says H, ‘we’d build a well and a clinic, and a school if they needed it. And we’d never have any trouble from it again. Simple, but it worked.’

‘Imagine we’d done the same thing in Afghanistan in the 90s,’ I say. ‘The Taliban would never have got the platform they have now.’

‘Probably some accountant in the Foreign Office said it was too expensive,’ he replies.

H asks how soon I can come to Hereford. As soon as he wants, I say. He suggests we meet in two days’ time, and I stay with him until the end of the week. He gives me his phone number and directions to his home, and advises me to memorise them rather than write them down. I’ll need boots, he says, outdoor gear, and a Bergen. He doesn’t use the word rucksack.

‘We’ll go for some nice tabs, and work on some security SOPs,’ he says. It’s strange to hear army-speak again. A tab is a tactical advance to battle. Basically a long walk. SOP means standard operating procedure.

‘The SOPs are common sense mostly, but we’ll need to get them in our system,’ says H. ‘What sort of weapons do they use out there?’

‘Anyone who’s anyone has an AK-47,’ I say, half surprised he doesn’t already know. ‘Russian, Egyptian and Chinese versions mostly. There’s a few AK-74s around, but you don’t see many.’ The AK-74 is the smaller-calibre short-barrelled version of the AK-47, a prestige weapon carried by a number of distinguished commanders. There is no point in mentioning the endless variety of heavier weapons in use in the country.

‘Surprise, surprise. What about shorts?’

‘Makarov, I suppose.’ This is the Soviet-designed 9-millimetre pistol most often seen in Afghanistan. I’d nearly bought one for myself when I’d been there, but was dissuaded by my Afghan friend and driver, who said a pistol was ineffective. He carried a grenade with an extra-short fuse in his pocket instead.

‘Alright. We’ll brush up on weapons,’ says H, ‘and you can teach me about mines. I’ll see what other kit I can get out of the Kremlin. Are you fit?’

‘Been fitter.’

‘Try five K a day in under half an hour and we’ll take it from there.’ That sounds ominous. I can’t remember the last time I ran five kilometres, but all of a sudden I’m looking forward to the discipline.

‘Right,’ says H, glancing at his watch. ‘Got to get back to the memsahib.’

We walk back to the house. It starts to rain. H won’t come in again, he says. He puts up his collar, wishes me luck and walks to the end of the driveway and out towards his car. I head back inside and change into my running gear.

Then I stretch out on the sofa and fall asleep.