The Afghan (15 page)

The second mis-hit 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 wipe-out 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 and seeking escape across country. Every one was caught by the peasantry – the Hazaras who recalled the Taliban butchery of their people three years before – and lynched.

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 film makers. The seven British preferred anonymity. All wore the shemagh, the cotton wraparound head-dress that keeps out flies, sand, dust and gawpers. By Wednesday it served another purpose, a filter against 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 gave 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 practised and practised by both SAS and SBS until it is second nature. At Hereford the SAS have ‘the death house’ for little else but; 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. Dave 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 above ground 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 below ground but to die under the sky. They staged a suicidal counter-attack which succeeded for a hundred yards, killing a number of unwary Uzbeks of short reaction time. 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 towards 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 icy.

By midnight the remaining men were waist deep. 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 its 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 towards the stairs. Others followed. Defeated at last, Izmat Khan, with the six other Afghans 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 among 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 do not 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 shemagh from his head and wiped the grime-smeared face. Something vaguely familiar.

When he took out his K-Bar, a watching Uzbek grinned. If the foreigner wanted to have some fun, why not? Martin cut into the pants leg of the right thigh.

It was still there, puckered by 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 the sign of the United Nations 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, slowly and groggily, on the floor of a makeshift cell, cold and shackled but just alive, two days after that.

On 14 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 Defence Minister in the new Afghan government.

PART THREE

Crowbar

CHAPTER EIGHT

Operation Crowbar’s first task was to choose its cover story so that even those working inside it would not know anything about Mike Martin or even the concept of infiltrating a ringer inside Al-Qaeda.

The ‘legend’ chosen was that it would be an Anglo-American joint venture against a steadily growing opium threat coming out of the poppy fields of Afghanistan to the refinery/kitchens of the Middle East. Thence the refined heroin was infiltrating the West both to destroy lives and generate funds for further terrorism.

The ‘script’ continued to the effect that western efforts to shut off terrorism’s supply of funds at the level of the world’s banks had driven the fanatics to turn to drugs – a cash-only crime method.

And finally, even though the West already had powerful agencies like the US DEA and British Customs engaged in the fight against narcotics, Crowbar had been agreed by both governments as a specific, one-target operation prepared to use covert forces outside the niceties of diplomatic courtesy to raid and destroy any factories found in any foreign country turning a blind eye to the trade.

The modus operandi, Crowbar staff would be told as they were reassigned, involved using the highest tech known to man, both to listen and to watch, in order to identify high-ranking criminals, routes, stores, refineries, ships and aircraft that might be involved. As it happened, none of the new staff doubted a word of it.

This was just the cover story and it would remain in place until there was simply no further use for it, whenever that would be. But after the Fort Meade conference there was no way western intelligence was going to place all its eggs in the Crowbar basket. Frantic, though ultra-discreet, efforts would continue elsewhere to discover what Al-Isra could possibly refer to.

But the intelligence agencies were in a quandary. Between them they had scores of informants inside the world of Islamic fundamentalism, some willing, some under duress.

The question was: how far can we go before the real leaders realize that we know about Al-Isra? There were clear advantages to letting Al-Qaeda believe that nothing had been harvested from the laptop of the dead banker at Peshawar.

This was confirmed when the first mentions of the phrase in general conversation with Koranic scholars known to be sympathetic to extremism drew only courteous but blank responses.

Whoever knew about the real significance of the phrase, AQ had kept that circle extremely tight and it was quickly clear it did not include any western informants. So the decision was taken to match secrecy with secrecy. The West’s counter-measure would be Crowbar and only Crowbar.

The project’s second chore was to find and establish a new and remote headquarters. Both Marek Gumienny and Steve Hill agreed to get well away from London and Washington. Their second agreement was to base Crowbar somewhere in the British Isles.

After analysis of what would be needed in terms of size, lodgings, space and access the consensus came down firmly on the side of a decommissioned air base. Such places are usually well away from cities, contain mess halls, canteens, kitchens and accommodation in plenty. Add to that hangars for storage and a runway for the landing and departure of covert visitors. Unless the decommissioning had been too long ago, refurbishment back to operational requirements could be quickly accomplished by the property-maintenance division of one of the armed services – in this case the Royal Air Force.

When it came to which base, the choice fell on a former American base of which the Cold War had planted several dozen on British soil. Fifteen were listed and examined, including Chicksands, Alconbury, Lakenheath, Fairford, Molesworth, Bentwaters, Upper Heyford and Greenham Common. All were vetoed.

Some were operational, and service personnel still chatter. Others were in the hands of property developers; some had had their runways ploughed up and returned to agriculture. Two are still used as training sites for the intelligence services. Crowbar wanted a virgin site all to itself. Phillips and McDonald settled upon RAF Edzell and secured the approval of their respective superiors.

Although the sovereign ownership of Edzell base never left the RAF, it was for years leased to the US Navy, even though it is miles from the sea. It is actually situated in the Scottish county of Angus, due north of Brechin and north-west of Montrose, on the southern threshold of the Highlands.

It lies well off the main A90 highway from Forfar to Stonehaven. The village itself is one of a thinly scattered number spread over a large area of forest and heather with the North Esk flowing through it.

The base, when the two executive officers went up to visit it, served all their purposes. It was as remote from prying eyes as one could wish; it contained two good runways with control tower, and all the buildings they required for the resident staff. All they needed to do was add the golf-ball shaped white domes hiding listening antennae that could hear the click of a beetle half a world away and convert the former USN Ops block into the new communications or comms centre.

Into this complex would be diverted links to GCHQ Cheltenham and NSA Maryland; direct and secure lines to Vauxhall Cross and Langley to permit instant access to Marek Gumienny and Steve Hill; and a permanent ‘feed’ from eight more intel-gathering agencies from both nations, prime among them the yield from America’s space satellites, run by the National Reconnaissance Office in Washington.