There were four mosques in Gwador but discreet British enquiries of the Pakistani ISI extracted the information that the fourth and smallest was flagged as a hotbed of fundamentalist agitation. Like most of the smaller mosques in Islam, it was a one-imam place of worship, surviving on donations from the faithful. This one had been created and was run by Imam Abdullah Halabi.
He knew his congregation well and from his raised chair as he led the prayers he could spot a visiting newcomer at a glance. Even at the back, the black Talib turban caught his eye.
Later, before the black-bearded stranger could replace his sandals and lose himself in the crowds of the street, the imam tugged at his sleeve.
‘Greeting of our all-merciful Lord be upon you,’ he murmured. He used the Arabic phrase, not Urdu.
‘And upon you, imam,’ said the stranger. He too spoke Arabic, but the imam noticed the Pashto accent. Suspicion confirmed; the man was from the tribal territories.
‘My friends and I are adjourning to the madafa,’ he said. ‘Would you join us and take tea?’
The Pashtun considered for a second, then gravely inclined his head. Most mosques have a madafa attached, a more relaxed and private social club for prayers, gossip and religious schooling. In the West the indoctrination of teenagers into ultra-extremism is often accomplished there.
‘I am Imam Halabi. Does our new worshipper have a name?’ he asked.
Without hesitation Martin produced the first name of the Afghan President and the second of the Special Forces brigadier.
‘I am Hamid Yusuf,’ he said.
‘Then welcome, Hamid Yusuf,’ said the imam. ‘I notice you dare to wear the turban of the Taliban. Were you one of them?’
‘Since I joined Mullah Omar at Kandahar in nineteen ninety-five.’
There were a dozen in the madafa, a shabby shack behind the mosque. Tea was served. Martin noticed one of the men staring at him. The same man then excitedly drew the imam aside and whispered frantically. He would not, he explained, ever dream of watching television and its filthy images, but he had passed a TV shop and there was a set in the window.
‘I am sure it is the man,’ he hissed. ‘He escaped from Kabul but three days ago.’
Martin did not understand Urdu, least of all in the Baluchi accent, but he knew he was being talked about. The imam may have deplored all things western and modern, but like most he found the cellphone damnably convenient, even if it was made by Nokia of Christian Finland. He asked three friends to engage the stranger in talk and not to let him leave. Then he retired to his own humble quarters and made several calls. He returned much impressed.
To have been a Talib from the start; to have lost his entire family and clan to the Americans; to have commanded half the northern front in the Yankee invasion; to have broken open the armoury at Qala-i-Jangi, to have survived five years in the American hellhole, to have escaped the clutches of the Washington-loving Kabul regime – this man was not a refugee, he was a hero.
Imam Halabi may have been a Pakistani, but he had a passionate loathing of the government of Islamabad for its collaboration with America. His sympathies were wholly with Al-Qaeda. To be fair to him, the five million Afghani reward, which would make him rich for life, did not tempt him in the slightest.
He returned to the hall and beckoned the stranger to him.
‘I know who you are,’ he hissed. ‘You are the one they call the Afghan. You are safe with me but not in Gwador. Agents of the ISI are everywhere and you have a price on your head. Where are your lodgings?’
‘I have none. I have only just arrived from the north,’ said Martin.
‘I know where you have come from; it is all over the news. You must stay here, but not for long. Somehow you must leave Gwador. You will need papers, a new identity, safe passage away from here. Perhaps I know a man.’
He sent a small boy from his madrassah running to the harbour. The boat he sought was not in port. It arrived twenty-four hours later. The boy was still patiently waiting at the berth where it always docked.
Faisal bin Selim was a Qatari by birth. He had been born to poor fisherfolk in a shack on the edge of a muddy creek near a village that eventually became the bustling capital of Doha. But that was after the discovery of oil, the creation of the United Arab Emirates out of the Trucial States, the departure of the British, the arrival of the Americans and long before the money poured in like a roaring tide.
In his boyhood he had known poverty and automatic deference to the lordly white-skinned foreigners. But from his first days Bin Selim had determined he would rise in the world. The path he chose was what he knew: the sea. He became a deck hand on a coastal freighter, and as his ship plied the coast from Masirah Island and Salalah in the Dhofari province of Oman round to the ports of Kuwait and Bahrain at the head of the Persian Gulf, he learned many things with his agile mind.
He learned that there was always someone with something to sell and prepared to sell it cheap. And there was someone else, somewhere, prepared to buy that something and pay more. Between the two stood the institution called the Customs. Faisal bin Selim made himself prosperous by smuggling.
In his travels he saw many things that he came to admire: fine cloths and tapestries, Islamic art, true culture, ancient Korans, precious manuscripts and the beauty of the great mosques. And he saw other things he came to despise: rich westerners, porcine faces lobster-pink in the sun, disgusting women in tiny bikinis, drunken slobs, all that undeserved money.
The fact that the rulers of the Gulf States also benefited from money that simply poured in black streams from the desert sands did not escape him. As they also flaunted their western habits, drank the imported alcohol, slept with the golden whores, he came to despise them too.
By his mid-forties, twenty years before a small Baluchi boy waited for him at the dock in Gwador, two things had happened to Faisal bin Selim.
He had earned and saved enough money to commission, buy and own outright a superb timber trading dhow, constructed by the finest craftsmen at Sur in Oman and called Rasha, the Pearl. And he had become a fervent Wahhabi.
When the new prophets arose to follow the teachings of Maududi and Sayyid Qutb, they declared jihad against the forces of heresy and degeneracy, and he was with them. When young men went to fight the godless Soviets in Afghanistan his prayers went with them; when others flew airliners into the towers of the western god of money he knelt and prayed that they would indeed enter the gardens of Allah.