‘But not until October and November two thousand and one,’ said Al-Khattab.
‘The Americans first came in the autumn of two thousand and one,’ said Martin.
‘True. So you fought for Afghanistan . . . and lost. Now you wish to fight for Allah.’
Martin nodded.
‘As the Sheikh predicted,’ he said.
For the first time Dr Al-Khattab’s urbanity completely forsook him. He stared at the black-bearded face across the table for a full thirty seconds, mouth agape, pen poised but unmoving. Finally he spoke in a whisper: ‘You . . . have actually met the Sheikh?’
In all his weeks in the camp Al-Khattab had never actually met Osama bin Laden. Just once he had seen a black-windowed Land Cruiser passing by but it had not stopped. But he would, quite literally, have taken a meat cleaver and severed his left wrist for the chance of meeting, let alone conversing with, the man he venerated more than any other on earth. Martin met his gaze and nodded. Al-Khattab recovered his poise.
‘You will start at the beginning of this episode and describe exactly what happened. Leave out nothing, no tiny detail.’
So Martin told him. He told him of serving in his father’s lashkar as a teenager freshly back from the madrassah outside Peshawar. He told of the patrol with others and how they had been caught on a mountainside with only a group of boulders to shelter in.
He made no mention of any British officer, nor any Blowpipe missile, nor the destruction of the Hind gunship. He told only of the roaring chain gun in the nose; of the fragments of bullet and rock flying around until the Hind, eternal praise be to Allah, ran out of ammunition and flew away.
He told of feeling a blow like a punch or a hit from a hammer in the thigh, and being carried by his comrades across the valleys until they found a man with a mule and took it from him.
And he told of being carried to a complex of caves at Jaji and being handed over to Saudis who lived and worked there.
‘But the Sheikh, tell me of the Sheikh,’ insisted Al-Khattab. So Martin told him. The Kuwaiti took down the dialogue word for word.
‘Say that again, please.’
‘He said to me: “The day will come when Afghanistan will no longer have need of you, but the all-merciful Allah will always have need of a warrior like you.” ’
‘Then what happened?’
‘He changed the dressing on the leg.’
‘The Sheikh did that?’
‘No, the doctor who was with him. The Egyptian.’
Dr Al-Khattab sat back and let out a long breath. Of course, the doctor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, companion and confidant, the man who had brought Egyptian Islamic Jihad to join the Sheikh to create Al-Qaeda. He began to tidy up his papers.
‘I have to leave you again. It will take a week, maybe more. You will have to stay here. Chained, I am afraid. You have seen too much; you know too much. But if you are indeed a True Believer, and truly the Afghan, you will join us as an honoured recruit. If not . . .’
Martin was back in his cell when the Kuwaiti left. This time Al-Khattab did not return straight to London. He went to the Hilton and wrote steadily and carefully for a day and a night. When he had done he made several calls on a new and lily-white cellphone which then went into the deep-water harbour. In fact he was not being listened to, but even if he had been, his words would have meant little. But Dr Al-Khattab was still free because he was a very careful man.
The calls he made arranged a meeting with Faisal bin Selim, master of the Rasha, which was moored in Dubai. That afternoon he drove his cheap rental car to Dubai and conversed with the elderly captain who took a long personal letter and hid it deep in his robes. And the Predator kept circling at twenty thousand feet.
Islamist terror groups have already lost far too many senior operatives not to have realized that for them, however careful they are, cellphone and satphone calls are dangerous. The West’s interception, eavesdrop and decryption technology is simply too good. Their other weakness is the transferring of sums of money through the normal banking system.
To overcome the latter danger they use the hundi system which, with variations, is as old as the first Caliphate. Hundi is based on the total-trust concept, which any lawyer will advise against. But it works because any money-launderer who cheated his customer would soon be out of business – or worse.
The payer hands over his money in cash to the hundi man in place A and asks that his friend in place B shall receive the equivalent minus the hundi man’s cut.
The hundi man has a trusted partner, usually a relative in place B. He informs his partner, and instructs him to make the money available, all in cash, to the payer’s friend who will identify himself in a described manner.
Given the tens of millions of Muslims who send money back to families in the old home country, and given that there are neither computers nor even checkable dockets; given that it is all in cash and both payers and receivers can use pseudonyms, the money movements are virtually impossible to intercept or trace.
For communications the solution lies in hiding the terrorist messages in three-figure codes which can be e-mailed or texted across the world. Only the recipient with the decipher list of up to three hundred such number-groups can work out the message. This works for brief instructions and warnings. Occasionally a lengthy and exact text must travel halfway across the world.
Only the West is always in a hurry. The East has patience. If it takes so long, then it takes that long. The Rasha sailed that night and made her way back to Gwador. There a loyal emissary alerted in Karachi down the coast by a text message had arrived on his motorcycle. He took the letter and rode north across Pakistan to the small but fanatic town of Miram Shah.