Osama (13 page)

Osama bin Laden – the Lion, the Sheikh al-Mujahid, the Director – had been in hiding for as long as these three young men had known who he was. And yet Narinder felt a strong bond with him, and he was sure Rakesh and Adi did too. It was a bond that had been forged when, in his early teens, he had looked up to the older kids at the mosque who talked openly about the evils of the Great Satan America, and Little Satan Britain. Who had hinted of their allegiance to, and recruitment by, Islamist cells. And of course there was one Islamist movement that they all wanted to be associated with. When Narinder was nineteen, and doing Islamic Studies at Thames Valley University, he was given the chance to travel to Pakistan. Nobody mentioned the name ‘Al-Qaeda’ until he was actually there, one of twenty men of a similar age, spending a summer at a training camp thirty miles south-west of Quetta where they learned how to strip down an AK-47, how to make a serviceable detonator, and how to hate – really hate – the West. If the War on Terror truly was a war, he learned, then it needed soldiers on both sides. When Narinder returned to the UK he didn’t look or sound any different, but he certainly felt it. On the outside, an unremarkable young man of British-Asian descent. On the inside, a soldier waiting for the chance to fight.

But what now? That was the question these three young Al-Qaeda recruits had been asking each other. The Lion was gone. What did it mean for Al-Qaeda? What did it mean for them? Had they backed the wrong horse? When the young men at the mosque who were affiliated to other groups – the Muslim Brotherhood or the Young Muslim Organization – gave them superior looks the day after the news broke, were they right to do so? Narinder, Rakesh and Adi knew they were waiting here for somebody who was much higher in the Al-Qaeda hierarchy than they were. Surely this Mr Ashe would be able to tell them what the future held.

‘No, I didn’t ask him,’ Narinder muttered. ‘He only just got here. Guy don’t want us—’

‘Ask me what?’

Narinder, Rakesh and Adi looked suddenly round. None of them had heard the door open, nor seen Mr Ashe standing there. He was no longer wearing his raincoat, but an elegant grey suit.

They blinked stupidly at him.

‘We was just, you know, thinking, Mr Ashe,’ said Narinder. ‘With the Director being, you know—’

‘Our struggle,’ Mr Ashe interrupted, ‘continues.’

He looked at each of them in turn. His face, Narinder thought to himself, was much softer than those of the fiery-eyed teachers he’d had in Pakistan. But he had authority. No doubt about that.

Mr Ashe stepped into the room. His gaze fell on the contents of the table, and he nodded appreciatively for a moment. ‘When this’ – he stretched out his arm to indicate the Semtex – ‘comes to fruition, they will understand that they cannot defeat us simply by killing one man.’ He smiled at them and pulled out a book from the pocket of his jacket. It was smaller than an ordinary book, bound in leather and fastened with a strap. Narinder caught sight of the words ‘Holy Koran’ written on the front cover in gold lettering. ‘We shall pray together,’ said Mr Ashe.

Narinder glanced at the other two. The truth was that they were more interested in action than prayer. Back in the training camp, he had knelt towards Mecca because he’d been told to; his trips to the mosque were more social than religious. But he sensed that they were as unwilling as he was to disobey this strange, quiet man. And so all three knelt with him as he read in Arabic from his Koran, before intoning a familiar prayer. And once he had left the room, each went silently about his business, carefully cutting the slabs of Semtex as they had been taught into smaller, flatter rectangles, ready to accept a charge, ready to pack them into whatever housing they were eventually given.

It was an hour later when Narinder suddenly scraped back his chair and got to his feet. Rakesh and Adi both looked up at him.

‘I need a slash, all right?’ he said.

He left the room.

The toilet was separate from the bathroom, and situated next to the locked bedroom. A piece of worn, grey vinyl flooring, curled at the edges, was covered with sticky yellow piss stains around the pan. Rakesh, Narinder had observed, was bastard filthy and couldn’t aim properly. He loosened himself from his fly and was about to empty his bladder when he heard something unusual. It came from his left, from the other side of the wall that separated the toilet from the locked bedroom. Narinder edged towards it, put his ear to the wall and held his breath so that he could hear better. It was white noise, like an untuned old-fashioned TV set. It meant nothing to Narinder, who just shrugged, stepped back to the toilet and pissed noisily into the water. Once he’d flushed, he waited for the cistern to refill before listening against the wall again. The noise was still there.

Back out on the landing he stopped outside Mr Ashe’s door. He could hear the white noise more clearly from here. Again he wanted to knock, but there was something about Mr Ashe that made him feel nervous. His instructors at the camp in Pakistan had been brutal, and Narinder had been scared of them, but Mr Ashe didn’t need to threaten any of them with violence for them to do what he said.

And so Narinder almost surprised himself when he found himself rapping his knuckles against the door.

‘Do come in.’

Narinder opened up, and stepped inside.

He hadn’t really known what to expect, it was true, but the room that had been locked these past three days was disappointingly bland. The curtains were closed and the light switched off. There was a camp bed, just like the ones the three of them had been sleeping on. Mr Ashe was sitting at what looked like an IKEA table. A laptop was open in front of him, and his face was bathed in the glow from its screen. Next to it was a handheld digital radio – it was this that was making the white noise – and his copy of the Koran, open about halfway through, and face downwards.

‘I’m glad you knocked, Narinder.’ Mr Ashe smiled, and Narinder flashed his yellow teeth at him in return.

‘Wicked,’ Narinder said, but his mouth was suddenly dry.

‘Please tell the others to stop work. You are needed elsewhere.’

‘What?’ Narinder shook his head in confusion. ‘But . . .’

‘Please, Narinder. I’ll explain everything when we’re all together.’ He gave him a meaningful look. ‘I can rely on you to organize the others?’

‘Yeah,’ he nodded. ‘Yeah, course. I’ll just . . .’ He jabbed his thumb over his shoulder and stepped backwards out of the room, closing the door as he went. He sniffed, then turned and re-entered the bedroom he shared with the others. They didn’t even look up as he walked in – they were too busy cutting out their rectangles of explosive. ‘OK, you two. On your feet.’

Rakesh and Adi looked at him with scorn.

‘Whatever,’ Narinder shrugged. ‘If you don’t want to do what Mr Ashe says, that’s your bastard decision.’

It was enough. The other two stood up with obvious reluctance. ‘What we doing?’ Rakesh asked.

Narinder gave him what he hoped was an enigmatic smile. ‘Ah, you’ll find out, man,’ he said. ‘Mr Ashe, he’ll tell you what you need to know when you need to know it.’

Before they could ask any more questions, Narinder left the room and stood in the hallway, waiting for the others to join him.

Mr Ashe watched Narinder leave the room, and he continued to stare at the closed door for a full ten seconds after he was alone. Only then did he turn his attention back to the laptop.

He was looking at a black and white image, rather grainy, of an ordinary street. Anybody would be able to tell from a glance that it was in the UK – there was a pillar box on the right, and the blur of a BT van driving out of the shot. Mr Ashe, however, knew a bit more than that. He knew, for example, the name of the road – Lancing Way – and that the street was located in the border town of Hereford. In the bottom-right corner of the screen was a time code. It read ‘10:58’, and indicated that this was the final frame in a stop-motion video lasting ten minutes and fifty-eight seconds. He pressed the laptop’s mouse button with his right thumb and, keeping it down, swiped the trackpad with a long-nailed forefinger. The video restarted and Mr Ashe watched it all through again.

Time code 00:00: nothing but Lancing Way. No cars parked on either side, the pavements lined with temporary barriers indicating that roadworks were to take place soon.

01:20: a man walks towards the camera with a black Labrador on a lead.

05:26: a harassed mother ushers two children along the pavement in the opposite direction.

08:41: a black Land Rover Discovery trundles slowly along the street towards the camera. It stops about fifty metres away in the middle of the road. The driver climbs out and opens the rear passenger door. A second man appears. He is wearing jeans and a hooded grey top, and has a black North Face bag slung over his right shoulder. He is half a head taller than the driver and has an unkempt black beard. Even with this low-quality footage, Mr Ashe can make out the dark rings around his eyes, and he observes the heavy slump in the man’s gait as he squeezes between two of the roadworks barriers separating the road from the pavement. The driver watches him go. When it becomes clear that he’s not going to get any acknowledgement from his passenger, he shrugs, climbs back into the Discovery and drives off out of view.

08:44: the bearded passenger stops outside one of the houses. It has a neatly trimmed hedge at the front. He stares at the house for a minute before walking up to the front door and ringing the bell. Almost a minute passes.

08:45: the door opens. Mr Ashe cannot see who is there, but he can sense the awkwardness as he or she stands back to let this bearded man enter. The door closes, and now the only thing moving on the screen is the time code, ticking down to the end of the video.

A knock on the door. ‘Do come in,’ he said for the second time.

It was Narinder.

‘They’re ready, Mr Ashe.’

Mr Ashe smiled. ‘Do come in, all of you,’ he said. With a last glance at the screen, he shut the lid of the laptop, then looked up at his three young recruits. They seemed nervous, but eager to do well.

Just the men for the job.

Seven

Hereford, UK. 1008 hours.

The duty driver who drove Joe to Hereford had offered him a seat in the front. Joe had preferred to sit alone in the back of the black Discovery. That way it was easier not to talk.

Bagram one day. Brize Norton the next. It was enough to fuck with anyone’s head. The sun had been rising over the English countryside as they came in to land. After nearly six months of seeing nothing but the yellows and browns of the desert, the green fields were almost blindingly intense. Joe supposed he should welcome them. For some reason, he didn’t. Now, though, clouds had rolled in and there was a chill in the air. A typical English May morning.

He was standing on the ordinary pavement of this ordinary street. An empty street. No Humvees or MRAPS, nor even any Astras or Fiestas, their absence explained by a sign pinned to a lamppost: ‘4–6 May, roadworks, no parking’. Joe stood on the pavement for a full minute, listening to the silence. It was something he had barely heard for months. In the Stan there was always the noise of a vehicle, or an artillery shell, or some squaddie shouting at his mates. He became aware of a tawny cat sitting on the pavement five metres away, staring at him with pale yellow eyes, and he remembered the lame cat that had limped over the minefield the previous day. ‘Fuck’s sake,’ he muttered as he pushed that picture from his mind, hitched his bag further up his shoulder and stepped in the direction of his own front door.

Number 38 Lancing Way was a tiny two-bedroom terraced house, just big enough for Joe, his girlfriend Caitlin and their boy, Conor. Caitlin and Joe had met in Northern Ireland back in 1995, when he was a newbie to the Regiment and she was a local girl serving beers at Daft Eddy’s on Strangford Lough. What they’d both assumed would be a no-strings-attached Sunday-afternoon shag had turned into something more permanent, and Joe had got to know pretty well the route from the Regiment base at Aldergrove to the flat Caitlin shared with two other girls in central Belfast. He’d never told her that he’d run police checks on all three of them before seeing her for a second time. What she didn’t know couldn’t piss her off.

When Joe was recalled to Hereford in the summer of ’97, he’d come clean to Caitlin that he wasn’t really working for British Telecom. She told him she’d politely pretended that she had believed his little deception, and agreed to come with him. They’d shacked up in army accommodation, and while Joe was hoovering up war criminals in the Balkans, or pulling Royal Irish Rangers out of enemy strongholds in Sierra Leone, Caitlin had seemed happy to play house. When she fell pregnant in ’00 – a surprise to both of them – she’d insisted that an army house was no longer good enough. Which was why Joe now found himself here, walking past the neatly maintained front garden, all shrubs and white gravel, and rapping a dirty fist on the red front door.

He saw her approach through the two glass panels: the silhouette of her curly red hair, the gentle slope of her slim shoulders. He saw the way that she hesitated for a few seconds before opening up, doing something to her hair as she prepared to welcome home the man she hadn’t seen for six months.

The door opened. Caitlin’s pretty face was midway between pleasure and nervousness.

‘Hi,’ she whispered.