Chapter Thirty-nine

THE SOVIETS HAD started it, and the UN and US troops had followed: all the assault helicopters in Afghanistan were fitted with silenced rotors and engines. It meant you didn’t hear them until they were right on top of you.

At least humans didn’t. The muj, however, had realized the horses were different and, long ago, they had learned to read their ponies’ behaviour as if their lives depended on it.

The Saracen, lifting the bags of lime on to his shoulder, heard two of the ponies snicker and turned to look. It had been years since he had seen horses act in that way, but it might as well have been yesterday. Helicopters were coming!

He dropped the bags, grabbed his AK-47 and a backpack containing his passport, money and medical equipment, untied the horses, whacked them on the rump and sent them bolting into the falling night. He knew they would make their way down to the valleys below, where the villagers who found the eight prized mountain ponies – worth the equivalent of one large Hino truck – wouldn’t jeopardize their good fortune by reporting it to anyone.

Two minutes later, three UN choppers, with twenty Australian troops aboard, landed – alerted by a report from a satellite that was using thermal imaging to scan remote areas for the abductees. Ironically, it was the virus and not the fire which had sent up a red flag. Because of the high fever which accompanies smallpox, the analysts interpreting the satellite images looked at the thermal footprint captured a day previously and did not even consider that it could have been generated by three people. More like eight, which was about the size of the group they were hunting. It never occurred to anyone – not the analysts, nor the CIA agents at Alec Station handling the recovery operation, nor anyone else at the agency – that a single man could be in control of three prisoners. Kidnappings didn’t work like that.

Consequently, when the Australian troops scrambled out of the choppers expecting to find a small group of Taliban or a caravan of drug runners, they had planned for at least five potential hostiles and the possibility of crossfire slowed them down considerably. So did the first improvised explosive device.

When two of the privates, following correct procedure, came to a doorway into a house on the edge of the village, they stepped to either side of it and kicked it open, triggering two large landmines attached to the back of it. That explosion severed a wire disguised to look like an old laundry line stretched across the alleyway, detonating a mortar bomb behind them. The two privates had found their crossfire – they never had a chance.

The officer closest to them – a lieutenant by the name of Pete Keating – didn’t bother consulting with his commanding officer, a captain standing several hundred yards away, a man who most of the squad considered if not downright dangerous, at least a fool. Keating ordered everybody back and flung a cordon round the entire village – something they should have done the moment they set down but which the captain hadn’t thought necessary.

‘What are the towel-heads gonna do – try and walk down the mountain? ’ he had asked. ‘If they’re in there, we’ll give ’em a chance to surrender. Just yell out, “Hey, fellas – it’s washday and we’ve got the machine, ”’ he had said, confirming to his men just what a racist fool he was.

Keating had tried again to convince him to surround the village, was refused and sent the men in cautiously. Now he was trying desperately to pick up the pieces. He dispatched four men to check on the two privates – not that he held out any hope – and the rest he deployed in two sweeping arcs to secure the village finally.

Three hundred yards away, the Saracen was running fast, body-swerving, keeping count of every step – heading for the village well and a steep slope which led to a barely discernible path and, beyond it, the freedom of the mountains.

Had Keating been less decisive and delayed by a minute, the Saracen would have escaped the cordon. But the lieutenant, fine soldier that he was, didn’t hesitate and almost within sight of the path, the Saracen had to throw himself behind the well to avoid four approaching infantrymen.

Now he was trapped inside the iron circle and he knew that the young soldiers were giving the world its best chance of avoiding the catastrophe that had been so long in the making. He crouched and darted for a low rubble wall. He made it unseen and was back in the streets, where one false step, one misremembered wire, would cost him his life.

The soldiers were moving slowly, checking every building, detonating the IEDs as they found them, advancing in ever-tightening circles. The Saracen sprinted down a curving lane, through an old goat shed, and then had to beat a rapid retreat as he almost stumbled on top of more soldiers. He backtracked past the headman’s house and into a rubble-strewn alley.

In his panicked state, it was a bad mistake: the path ahead was blocked by a pile of masonry. There was no way back: the encircling troops were so close behind that he could hear their personal communication devices. He unslung his AK-47 – better to die like a muj than forced to kneel like a dog – and looked to heaven for guidance.

He got it: the rooftops. If he could only get on to them, there were none of his booby traps up there so he would be able to move much faster. He gambled everything on it – racing towards the approaching troops, trying to get to a stone water cistern before they rounded a bend and saw him.

He reached the cistern, springing on to the flat top and using it as a stepping stone to scramble on to the roof of the old mosque. Moments later, as he lay flat, trying to control his gasping breath, the soldiers passed below. Then they stopped, trying to pick up the noise of anyone moving among the houses ahead.

There wasn’t a sound, the silence so deep on the mountaintop that Lieutenant Keating – on the outskirts of the village and commanding his men by radio – started to wonder if the village was deserted. Maybe the place had been booby-trapped years ago by the departing muj. But why would they do that? The only people likely to reoccupy the houses were poor Afghan families or itinerant goat herders. No, the more likely explanation was that they had stumbled on some target of high value and the hostiles were lying low, watching. As a consequence, the silence was about the most dangerous thing Keating had heard and he spoke quietly to his squad on the radio. ‘Slowly, ’ he said. ‘Take it slow. ’

The Saracen forced himself to stay frozen for a slow count of seven. He took off his soft leather sandals and, in his thick woollen socks, darted silently across the old mud tiles. He jumped one narrow alley, nearly plunged through a hole where the tiles had collapsed and threw himself behind a low parapet. That was when he saw his chance.

Peering through a small gap in the masonry, invisible to the Australians’ night-vision goggles, he registered soldiers coming down three separate alleys. That was the tightening noose he had to either bend or break if he was going to escape. He put his sandals back on, dug his chin so hard into the masonry it started to bleed, pressed the assault rifle tight into his shoulder and thanked Allah it was fitted with a flash suppressor and a silencer.

A lesser combatant, a man who had never been a guerilla, would have shot to kill. But the Saracen knew his business well – on average it takes seven men to treat and evacuate a badly wounded soldier. The dead need nobody.

He chose one target in each of the three different alleys. If he hadn’t had a silencer, they would hear the first shot and duck for cover; if it hadn’t been for the flash suppressor they would see his position and rip him and the parapet to shreds with automatic fire.

He fired. The troops didn’t even hear the three tiny pops through their static. One got it in the thigh – he was as good as dead unless they got a tourniquet on him. One took it in the throat, and there was probably nothing anyone could do for him. And the last had his forearm shattered, which was good enough for a lot of pain. All three went down screaming, their comrades diving for defensive positions, everybody trying to take each other’s back.

Good troops, disciplined troops – and these were very good troops indeed, despite their captain – will do anything for their wounded. In the chaos of trying to help their downed comrades and locate the enemy, amid the darkness and terror of a firefight, groups of them were forced to scramble from piles of rubble to gaping doorways.

From behind the parapet the Saracen watched the circle bend – and then crack. It wasn’t much and it probably wouldn’t last long but maybe it would be enough. He didn’t crouch – he just rolled down the sloping roof, his backpack and rifle clutched to his chest, and went over the falls. He watched the wall of a building flying by – Allah help him if he broke his leg – twisted in mid-air and crash-landed on his hip. The pain almost swamped him, but he got to his feet and ran. This was no time for an old muj to whimper or limp: he was a veteran of the most cruel war in decades and he wasn’t going to cry like some Christian now.

He sprinted for the one twisting alley that would lead him through the broken cordon, momentarily out of sight of a clutch of soldiers thanks to the leaning facade of a ruined house. If the soldiers moved ten feet either way …

He made it through the noose. He passed a crescent moon he’d scratched on a wooden door, hoped to God he remembered well, and started to count. He ran twenty-five paces forward, took three left, successfully skirted a buried mine and saw the safety of the mountains directly in front.

From behind, he heard a soldier yelling at his comrades to hit the ground. He fully expected to hear the deafening rattle of carbines and lose all control of his legs as the bullets hit his exposed back and severed his spine. Instead, the soldier had found a trip wire leading to two grenades hidden in a pile of old oil drums. As his comrades hunkered down, the soldier jerked the wire.

The grenades exploded and, in their brilliant flash, Lieutenant Keating – running forward to try to reseal the cordon – saw the Saracen outside the noose, sprinting for the safety of a group of tumbled-down walls. Keating fell to one knee, slammed the stock of his carbine into his shoulder and fired. He had been trained by Special Forces, so he knew what he was doing: he bracketed three rounds in each burst and panned left to right and back again fast.

A few inches either way – one lucky shot even – and everything would have been different. But that wasn’t in the stars that night – high-velocity rounds blasted stone and dirt all around the Saracen but none put him down. Keating cursed the night-vision goggles and the inevitable disconnect between eye and trigger. The Saracen, of course, thanked the hand of God.

He rounded a corner of three wrecked walls while in full flight, jagged left, swerved hard right and, still clutching his backpack and rifle, slid and tumbled down a steep slope and into the all-embracing darkness of a rock-strewn gully.

A young Australian officer had glimpsed him in the flash of a grenade for a fraction of a second. That was the only time the Saracen was ever seen by either civilian or military authorities. Until I met him, of course.