Chapter Thirty-four

THE SARACEN DIDN’T see the eight tribesmen who brought the merchandise. It was night and they arrived at the old observation post in silence, the hooves of their horses wrapped in rags to muffle the sound.

It wasn’t just the Saracen who never laid eyes on the strange caravan – in the week preceding their arrival, nobody else had either. For seven days the tribesmen had made camp just before dawn, slept during the daylight hours and travelled as fast as their horses would carry them through the night.

I know this because a long time later – after the events of that grim summer were over – a team of Special Forces and CIA agents secretly crossed the border into Iran, stormed the men’s fortified village and interrogated them with what used to be called ‘extreme prejudice’. I’m sure none of the eight ever fully recovered.

Of course, not even the tribesmen were on Mountain 792 long enough to witness exactly what the Saracen did but, having seen all the secret evidence and, as I mentioned earlier, knowing more about him than anyone on earth, I am probably in the best position to say what happened up in the high mountains – an area which, despite the Saracen’s constant prayer rituals, must have given an entirely new meaning to the term ‘godforsaken’.

Even though the tribesmen had muffled their ponies well, the Saracen knew that they were there. Four days earlier, he had arrived and set up camp in the observation post’s old bunkhouse, blasted deep into the rock, and it was inside the cave that he awoke with a start. It was either his battlefield intuition or the restless movement of his horses that told him that he was no longer alone on the mountain.

Lying motionless, he assumed that by choosing the small hours of a moonless night, their ponies carefully silenced, the kidnappers didn’t want to be seen even by him, so he made no move to go and greet them.

After thirty minutes he thought he heard the slap of reins, as if a horse was being urged into a trot down the mountain, but he couldn’t be sure. He gave it another twenty minutes then scrambled out on to the broad rock shelf.

The tribesmen – halfway down the mountain and pausing to water their ponies – looked back and saw the tiny glow of a hurricane lantern. That was all they saw of the person who, very soon, would become the most hunted man on earth.

The kidnappers had left the three prisoners chained to ringbolts which had once secured a communication mast, and it was there that the Saracen first saw them – bound hand and foot, gagged, the woman half shrouded in the black robe that had been used to disguise her on the wild journey.

Satisfied that they were properly secured, the Saracen approached them and lifted the woman’s robe in order to examine her more closely. Underneath, he saw that her cotton shirt was crumpled and ripped and her jeans had lost the buttons at the fly. He couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to her on the trip – the outlaws who abducted her might have been devout Muslims, but they were also men.

Her tattered shirt barely covered her belly and the Saracen, being a doctor, guessed from the sight of it that she was about four months pregnant. A different man – a less religious and a more humane man – might have been affected by it. But not the Saracen: the prisoners weren’t people to him, they were a gift from God.

He turned and saw, hanging on the steel mount that had once supported a pair of Soviet field binoculars, that a package containing not only the keys to their manacles but their passports and wallets had been left for him.

As the gagged prisoners watched, he opened the documents and learned that the woman was Italian, twenty-eight years old, unmarried, an aid worker with WorldVision. He guessed that she had been grabbed while on one of her field trips, probably betrayed by the people she was trying to help.

He turned to the back of the woman’s passport and looked at the photograph. Though nobody would have known it from her filthy state, it showed she was a pretty woman: long, dark hair, a ready smile, deep-green eyes. Those eyes didn’t leave the Saracen’s face, trying to communicate, pleading, but he ignored them and turned his attention to the men.

The younger of them was Japanese. In his mid-twenties, he sported spiky hair and a barbed-wire tattoo around one muscular forearm. The Saracen had seen enough of popular culture in Lebanon to know that the man would be considered hip or cool. He disliked him instantly. According to his documents, he was a freelance sound-recordist. In light of the dangers in Afghanistan and the voracious demand of the 24-hour news channels, he was probably making a fortune, which would explain the four thousand dollars and the two small foils of cocaine tucked in the back of his wallet.

The guy shackled beside him – the oldest and calmest of them all – was a Dutch engineer. His book said he was forty-six, and the photos in his wallet revealed he was the father of three teenage kids. The visas indicated he had made a career out of hardship postings – Nigeria, Iraq, Bosnia, Kuwait – and survived them all. Not this time, Insha’Allah, the Saracen thought.

He looked at them all again. Though his face didn’t show it, he was delighted: they were physically strong and his medical eye told him they were all in good health. If his home-made virus could kill them, it could kill anyone.

There was one other piece of good news: given their situation, they were relatively calm and he guessed that the tribesmen had told them they were a commodity in a well-worn financial transaction. Apart from opium poppies and hemp plants, kidnappings for ransom had become about the only growth industry in Afghanistan. The outlaws would have told the victims that, as long as they behaved properly and their employers knew how to play the game, no harm would come to them. A couple of weeks of living rough, then they would be back in their air-conditioned compounds, their employers would be a few hundred thousand dollars lighter, and a group of villages with no running water or means of support would have enough to live on for another ten years.

The Saracen took the gags out of their mouths and threw them three water bottles. They had barely finished drinking before they started trying to communicate with him. Because English was the only language the three prisoners had in common, they tried it first. The Saracen shrugged, feigning that he had no idea what they were saying. Having had no success, the woman tried the few bits of Urdu, the national language of Pakistan, she had picked up while working there. After that it was Dari, the most common of the Afghan languages, but the three prisoners’ pronunciation was so bad and their vocabulary so limited even they had no idea what they would have said had he replied.

Instead he spoke to them fast in Arabic, and now it was their turn to look confused. With seemingly no hope of communication, the Saracen turned and walked into the bunkhouse. By the time he brought the horses out, the three prisoners were speaking softly to one another in English, their discussion confirming what the Saracen had guessed: they were certain they had been abducted for ransom. The Japanese hipster even suggested they try to drag the chain in order to give the AWAC overflights, or whatever other means were being employed, the best chance of finding them.

The Dutch engineer had been watching the Saracen, and he wasn’t convinced he was just a lowly escort. There was something in his economy of movement, the coiled energy, that made the Dutchman think it wouldn’t be wise to toy with him. He’d seen the same quality in the battle-hardened guerillas in Kosovo, the toughest men he had ever known.

‘I think we should let the negotiators play it out, ’ he advised. ‘We’ve got a saying in Holland: “If the shit is up to your neck – whatever you do, don’t make waves. ”’

Before they could discuss it further, the Saracen yelled at them. Although they couldn’t translate the words, they clearly understood the zipping motion he made across his mouth: he wanted silence and, when he took his prayer mat out of his saddlebag, they understood why. Dawn was breaking and it was time for the first prayer of the day.

As soon as he was finished, the Saracen picked up his AK-47, took the safety off, set it to full automatic and undid their leg manacles. One by one, their hands still cuffed, he bundled them on to the back of the horses, shoving hard on the Japanese guy’s injured arm – wounded when the outlaws did the uptake – being particularly brutal to him. Nobody was going to drag the chain on this excursion.

The first day’s travel was the easiest, but by nightfall the three prisoners were still exhausted and saddle-sore. The Saracen ordered them off the horses, manacled them by lengths of chain attached to a steel spike he had driven into the ground, and set about building a fire while they shuffled behind boulders to pee and crap.

With his back to them, he prepared a pot of tea black and sweet enough to mask the taste of the strong sedative he had added, then poured it into three mugs. Throughout the terrible day he had refused to pass the water canteens around, despite their mimed pleas, and the prisoners drank long and deep of the tea. The Saracen threw blankets down on the ground next to the fire and, within an hour, his charges, still manacled and cuffed, had all slipped into a deep and strange sleep.

The Saracen approached the woman, who was lying on her face, legs apart, one knee cocked up, and knelt beside her. With the two men passed out, there was no risk of him being disturbed, and he reached out and lowered the jeans with the missing buttons until her brief white panties were exposed.

He stared for a moment, then his hand touched her exposed buttock and slid slowly towards the softness of her inner thigh. Only at the last moment did he recall that he was a man of God and a doctor and stop himself. He turned away, breathing hard, and looked up at the starlit night. He murmured a prayer for forgiveness, took several minutes to compose himself and then opened the small roll of medical supplies which he had taken from a packhorse earlier in the night. Inside was a tube of numbing gel, a bi-pronged needle and the two remaining glass vials of smallpox vaccine that he had stolen from the facility in Syria.

During the day’s long ride he had decided that she would be the best candidate to test whether the virus could break through the vaccine and, as a result, he had to immunize her as fast as possible. He had quickly dismissed the idea of vaccinating her in the arm – he didn’t want her to be able to see the site and start asking herself what it meant – and had concluded that the point where her buttocks met would be best. She wouldn’t be able to see it and she would almost certainly believe it was a saddle-sore.

Apart from his brief encounter with temptation, the vaccination went off without difficulty, and the following morning the woman woke with a fever, a searing headache and a swollen sore on her butt. The Saracen listened as the men speculated that something might have bitten her in the night and then watched them turn and mime to him that the woman would have difficulty riding. The Saracen mimed back that it was a saddle-sore, gave them full canteens of water and placed a blanket over the woman’s saddle to cushion it for her. He even helped boost her up into the seat.

For six more days, travelling both by day and night, stopping only when he was too exhausted to carry on, the Saracen rode behind them, using a knotted rope to keep the horses, and sometimes their passengers, awake and moving.

Within twenty-four hours of the inoculation, the woman’s fever had started to diminish and, though he had no way of knowing – short of removing her jeans and seeing if there was a scar – he was confident that the vaccine had taken.

Climbing higher every hour, they took a long, looping route to avoid any human settlement and headed deep into the bleakest part of the Hindu Kush. Despite their overwhelming fatigue, the prisoners weren’t surprised at the pace the Saracen set: everybody in Afghanistan, on both sides of the kidnapping divide, knew that one of the rules of the business was that, immediately after the uptake, the merchandise had to be kept moving.

Nevertheless, understanding the reasons didn’t make the journey any easier, and by the time the Saracen arrived at his final destination, the prisoners were barely conscious from exhaustion. They raised their lolling heads – it was just after midnight – and looked at an abandoned village so remote and hidden that a mountain herdsman would have been hard pressed to find it.

Not the Saracen, though – he knew it as well as any place on earth.