Later, I stroll with the Baroness through the grounds, and we walk to the green boathouse on the northern edge of the lake. We sit on a small bench. ‘I thought I should tell you first,’ she says as we look across the water. I feel a momentary sense of dread as she speaks these words, and I remember how at that moment my eyes fall on the dark green calfskin gloves she is wearing, and how her hands are folded in her lap. ‘There’s a rumour,’ she goes on, ‘of an Englishman operating in one of bin Laden’s groups. He’s been in prison in Chechnya for a year, which makes him a bit of a hero. The Americans felt they should share it with us.’ She pauses, then speaks again before I can ask the question. ‘They don’t have a name, but apparently he’s called the Christian commander, based on a military operation he led in the time of the jihad against the Soviets.’ Then she turns to me with a slight smile. ‘They remember that sort of thing, don’t they?’
I hardly dare believe it. Despite periods of numbing doubt I have never fully believed he was dead. It strikes me that the east, where fate put us together like a cosmic matchmaker, is now delivering him back to me.
The Baroness has read my mind again. ‘I know,’ she says with a look that suggests she understands how much the news means to me. ‘We need to get you back there. I shall have to arrange a context.’
My mind’s racing, then comes to a sudden halt at a dark thought. ‘It’s been a long time,’ I say. ‘We don’t know what’s happened to him in the meantime.’
‘He should come in. You either bring him back,’ says the Baroness quietly, looking across the water, ‘or you deal with the situation on the ground as you see fit. You were his best friend, and it must be for you to decide.’
It’s February and I realise I’ve forgotten that the next day is my birthday.
8
It’s now Saturday, five days after my temporary incarceration with Billy, the Face and the charming colonel with the nice green beret. My rib still hurts when I take a deep breath or laugh, and my eye has a purplish corona around it which gives me a slightly menacing look that I enjoy. It’s time for another briefing with Seethrough and, as promised, he’s laid on transport.
At dusk I drive with H to the outskirts of Hereford, where we board a black Puma helicopter fitted with additional fuel tanks and passenger seats around the sides. It’s run by the best specialist pilots from the RAF and is called the Special Duties Flight, part of the Firm’s special operations capability. It’s the limousine of helicopters, says H, and rattles much less than others because it’s maintained more diligently and they actually take the trouble to tighten up all the nuts and bolts. Even the pilot sounds quite posh. It’s the Firm’s preferred means of transport between London, Hereford and Fort Monckton on the coast, where among other things, H now tells me, he occasionally teaches the finer points of MOE – covert methods of entry – to selected aspirants, based on the exceptional talents of his mentor, a Major Freddy Mace.
We belt ourselves in and H gives a thumbs up to the loadmaster, who makes sure everything is properly stowed. The aircraft winds into the air and swoops south-east. I watch the Cotswolds race past beneath us as we roar at spectacularly low altitude towards London and over a carpet of glittering lights to a heliport that I didn’t know existed. It hangs over the Thames not far from Battersea and is marked london in big illuminated white letters. I can’t imagine why anyone who already knows how to fly a helicopter to Battersea might need to be reminded of this, and H is none the wiser.
A squat and pale-faced driver meets us and whisks us along Battersea Park Road in a powerful Vauxhall. A few minutes later the towers of Legoland, bathed in orange light, loom up ahead of us. We draw to a stop alongside the building beneath a security barrier where our IDs are checked, and descend into an underground car park.
I recognise Stella, Seethrough’s secretary, who’s there to meet us. I wonder whether this timid-looking Moneypenny, whose face and manner are so very forgettable and who asks us meekly whether we’ve had a pleasant journey, has perhaps just come up from the subterranean ops room where she’s been assisting the running of some far-off minor war. I’m tempted to make a joke and ask how saving the world has been for her today, but keep silent as she leads us to a row of capsule-like doors, runs her card through the reader and admits us to the lift.
Seethrough is ready for us upstairs with a briefing list of three items. The first is the latest imagery from our Cousins, as he calls the Americans. He unrolls two poster-sized satellite photographs of astonishingly high resolution and clarity, and military topographic maps that cover the same area.
For the first time we have the thrill of studying our target: a huge, medieval-looking fort with four giant turrets, nestling in the mountains north-west of Kandahar. In its cellars are the Stinger missiles that the Cousins have paid their tribal agents so handsomely to gather together. At the going rate, a minimum of $100,000 per missile, there’s over ten million dollars’ worth of them stashed in the fort, according to the TRODPINT reports. Some have been bought from the same commanders to whom they were originally supplied, others from profiteering middlemen, and others from the Taliban themselves. A few have been smuggled into Pakistan and spirited away by the CIA, who maintain a light aircraft at Peshawar airport for this very purpose.
An Afghan TRODPINT member will be assigned to help us reach the target, explains Seethrough. More on that in a few minutes, he says. Our job, he reminds us, is to find a good enough pretext to be in the area, to OP the fort from a distance, get inside and verify the serial numbers of the missiles, and then destroy them. We will receive a notice to move when the weather is clear enough for post-strike analysis and BDA by satellite.
I can’t remember what BDA stands for.
‘Battle damage assessment,’ interjects H.
The maps will travel back to Hereford with H, who will study the terrain and draw up a list of our requirements, while I’m to work on our cover plan.
Secondly, I have a forty-eight-hour visit to the US.
‘Go and see your kids,’ says Seethrough, ‘and in your spare time you can have a chat with the ops chap from CTC, who’ll brief you on the set-up from their point of view and show you how to find the serial number on a Stinger. Your flight’s tonight.’ He hands me my travel documents and a hotel reservation in Washington. ‘They want you there at night for some reason,’ he says. Then he hands the rolled-up photographs and maps to H.
‘Want to look those over while I have a word?’ He gestures to another table. H obliges by moving across the room and Seethrough retrieves a file with multicoloured tabs poking out of it and opens it in front of me.
‘Recognise anybody?’ he asks.
It’s a shock because I had thought him dead. He looks much older in the photograph but I do recognise him. It’s Gemayel, grey-haired now but unmistakable.
‘He’s become a big fish since you last saw him,’ says Seethrough. ‘Must have cut a deal and agreed to act as a source.’ That, he explains, is how these things work. Since I last saw him, nearly ten years earlier, Gemayel has become the chief financial officer of a Middle Eastern organisation with a wide popular influence. The Americans call it a terrorist organisation, but in the British government nobody can decide whether it’s got anything to do with terrorists or not, so we maintain contact. Gemayel is now in charge of its global funding network, and has kept open a channel back to the Firm, making him ‘onside’ in Seethrough’s parlance. He’s evidently been living in South America, where for some reason most of the organisation’s funds are funnelled and then redistributed. A few years ago he resurfaced in Beirut at the highest level of the organisation’s architecture, and since then has survived two assassination attempts by the Israeli intelligence service.