Uppermost are several maps of Afghanistan printed on silk, of the kind usually issued to special forces. They can be easily concealed without being damaged by crumpling up into a ball, and it doesn’t matter if they get wet because they can still be read and will dry in the open air within a few minutes. There’s a pair of two-way radios with chargers and adaptors for use in vehicles. There’s a modified weapons sight called a Kite which looks like a stubby telescope and will allow us to see in near-total darkness, and a second telephone which like my own switches to satellite frequencies when there’s no cellular signal. There’s a fifty-metre length of black nylon climbing rope, which I idly presume is for H in case he needs to abseil through any embassy windows. There are also two quick-draw plastic holsters and the pair of Brownings that H has been secretly dreaming of, together with several hundred rounds of 9-millimetre ammunition.
‘It’s like an Andy McFuck novel,’ says H with a grin, removing the magazine from one of the pistols and peering along the sights. ‘Not very deniable, though.’
I reach into the bag to see what’s left. In another moulded plastic carrying case there’s a Trimpack military GPS receiver and a metal mounting bracket for use in a vehicle. It’s not new and has seen a few years’ service, though God knows where. Then I find what looks like a man’s black leather belt, which is so unexpectedly heavy I need two hands to pull it free.
‘Feels like it’s full of gold,’ I joke.
‘It is full of gold,’ says H. He takes the belt and pulls open a long zip on the inside face, revealing a line of twenty solid gold sovereigns nestling in a waterproof sleeve. I don’t know the exact value of a sovereign, but each one must be worth several hundred dollars, so there’s roughly ten thousand dollars’ worth of gold in a belt. There are two. ‘Should get us a few kebabs,’ he says.
We hide the equipment in the roof space of the house and I mark it with the ultraviolet pen. Reminded of its usefulness, and as a further precaution, I also mark the handles on our bedroom doors. Even the tiniest variation in their position will be detectable, and tell us if our rooms have been visited in our absence.
The biggest present is yet to come. When we get the message from Mr Raouf’s office that there’s been a delivery H is mystified, but I already know what’s waiting for us. We drive with Mr Raouf in the trust’s pickup to an immense car and truck park in the north-west of the city. In so far as the Taliban have a customs clearance centre, this is it. It’s here that the goods that have survived the long drive from the Pakistani port of Karachi are finally unloaded and spread over an area the size of several football fields.
It’s guarded by two armoured personnel carriers at the gates. We drive past several thousand truck containers and vehicles and are escorted by an armed Talib to a succession of run-down offices. Endless paperwork is endlessly inspected and approved over equally endless pots of tea. But it’s worth the wait. Several hours later, we’re led to a long line of dusty pickup trucks with registration plates from Dubai where an unmistakable shape leaps out at me. The design hasn’t really changed for twenty-five years.
‘Meet son of Gerhardt,’ I say. My hand comes to rest on the bonnet of a Mercedes G400 CDI. It’s the more serious version. It has a four-litre turbocharged diesel V8 engine that generates 250 brake horsepower, which makes it rather more powerful and sophisticated than Gerhardt. It also costs about fifty times more.
‘How the bloody hell did you manage that?’ asks H.
‘Called in a favour.’
‘That’s quite a favour.’
It is. I don’t know how Gemayel has done it. I’m guessing that his friends in the Arab world have friends in the Taliban world, and things have been smoothed over at a high level.
Mr Raouf looks a bit disappointed.
‘Is this it?’ he asks, stroking his beard thoughtfully. I suspect he’s a Land Cruiser sort of man. The G-Wagen is unheard of in Afghanistan, where its talents are unknown, and its boxy profile has yet to become an object of desire. From carjackers and bandits whose idea of heaven is the cab of a Toyota Hilux, at least we’ll be less of a target. They’ll also be unlikely to know about its built-in satellite tracker.
I offer Mr Raouf the key but he defers with a grimace. He’ll drive back in the trust’s pickup, which is more to his taste.
H circles the vehicle and taps the greenish glass of one of the windows.
‘Bloody thing’s armoured.’
He’s right. I didn’t ask Gemayel for the armour, but he’s had it added anyway, which is a thoughtful gesture. All the windows look about half an inch thick, which will be useful if anyone is in the mood to have a snipe at us, because they’ll need a 50-calibre to get past these windows. We climb in. The armour makes the doors feel as though they weigh half a ton each, and the windows don’t come down. The interior smells of leather and dust, but has a luxurious feel, as if we’ve entered the private quarters of a billionaire’s yacht. I recognise and am at home with the basic layout, but there’s more buttons on the steering wheel alone than all the cars I’ve ever owned. For those with sensitive fingers, I notice, the steering wheel itself can be heated. The rear-view mirror darkens automatically in response to glare, and there are sensors to monitor the tyre pressures. My eye is caught by the satellite television and the triple electronic differential locks, which means I can drive it almost anywhere except a vertical rock face and watch a badly dubbed Arab soap opera beamed out of Dubai at the same time.
‘Shall we see how it goes?’ I ask H.
In Afghanistan cars sound as if they’re about to fall apart when you slam their doors. This one sounds as if we’ve just closed the hatch of a nuclear shelter. The engine starts first time and purrs. It’s done less than a thousand kilometres and is good for about another half-million. Mr Raouf drives ahead of us and heads back to the office, but I take the road to Kart-e Parwan and turn west around Aliabad hill. I have my reasons. As we reach the Deh Mazang crossroads by the zoo I turn onto the broad avenue that leads in a straight line to the presidential palace, nearly a mile away. The surface is scarred by shell and rocket blasts and the G weaves between the craters, handling magnificently.
It’s a surreal drive. We see the world through a greenish haze, silenced and deceptively harmless-looking, as if we’ve descended like aliens and are observing the life around us from a protective bubble. Some men on bicycles and the occasional taxi pass us in the opposite direction, but there’s no other traffic. Men haul at overloaded carts of timber and sacks, and ghost-like women in pale-blue burqas float past us as if carried on air.
I’ve never dared to visit this part of the city before because it was so vulnerable to attack and came under rocket fire almost daily when I was last in Kabul. The buildings on either side of the road are in a state of utter ruin. Floors, columns and lintels all sag and droop, held together only by the metal reinforcement inside them. Lesser structures are shattered and split and crumbling into the earth. There’s isn’t a square foot that hasn’t been riddled with gunfire. Sometimes we see the dark scar of a rocket blast that looks as if someone has thrown a bucket of paint against a wall, only it’s been caused by an explosion of white-hot metal.
We are in the centre of a capital city, but it looks more like one of the battlefields of the First World War. In the early 1990s the area was first devastated by Hekmatyar’s rockets, vast stockpiles of which were generously financed by American taxpayers and supplied by the CIA. Later it became the southern front of prolonged battles as the government’s rivals converged on the city from every direction except the north. They were fought off in a series of desperate counter-attacks organised by Massoud, whose exhausted forces were unable to counter the swift advance of the Taliban a year later.