PART ONE
Stingray
CHAPTER ONE
If the young Talib bodyguard had known that making the cellphone call would kill him, he would not have done it. But he did not know, so he did and it did.
On 7 July 2005 four suicide bombers let off their haversack bombs in Central London. They killed fifty-two commuters and injured about seven hundred, leaving at least one hundred crippled for life.
Three of the four were British born and raised but of Pakistani immigrant parentage. The fourth was a Jamaican by birth, British by naturalization and had converted to Islam. He and one other were still teenagers; the third was twenty-two and the group leader thirty. All had been radicalized, or brainwashed into extreme fanaticism, not abroad but right in the heart of England after attending extremist mosques and listening to similar preachers.
Within twenty-four hours of the explosion they had been identified and traced to various residences in and around the northern city of Leeds; indeed all had spoken with varying strengths of Yorkshire accent. The leader was a special-needs teacher called Mohammad Siddique Khan.
During the scouring of their homes and possessions the police discovered a small treasure trove that they chose not to reveal. There were four receipts showing that one of the senior two had bought cellphones of the buy-use-and-throw variety, tri-band versions usable almost anywhere in the world, and each containing a pre-paid SIM card worth about twenty pounds sterling. The phones had all been bought for cash and all were missing. But the police traced their numbers and ‘red-flagged’ them all in case they ever came on stream.
It was also discovered that Siddique Khan and his closest intimate in the group, a young Punjabi called Shehzad Tanweer, had visited Pakistan the previous November and spent three months there. No trace was found of whom they had seen but weeks after the explosions the Arab TV station Al-Jazeera broadcast a defiant video made by Siddique Khan as he planned his death and it was clear this video had been made during that visit to Islamabad.
It was not until September 2006 that it also became clear that one of the bombers took one of the ‘lily-white’ untraceable cellphones with him and presented it to his Al-Qaeda organizer/instructor. (The British police had already established that none of the bombers had the technical skill to create the bombs themselves without instruction and help.)
Whoever this AQ high-up was, he seems to have passed on the gift as a token of respect to a member of the elite inner committee grouped around the person of Osama bin Laden in his invisible hideaway in the bleak mountains of South Waziristan that run along the Pakistani/Afghan border west of Peshawar. It would have been given for emergency purposes only, because all AQ operatives are extremely wary of cellphones, but the donor could not have known at the time that the British fanatic would be stupid enough to leave the receipt lying around his desk in Leeds.
There are four divisions to Bin Laden’s inner committee. They deal with operations, financing, propaganda and doctrine. Each branch has a chieftain and only Bin Laden and his co-leader Ayman al-Zawahiri outrank them. By September 2006 the chief organizer of finance for the entire terror group was Zawahiri’s fellow Egyptian Tewfik al-Qur.
For reasons which became plain later, he was under deep disguise in the Pakistani city of Peshawar on 15 September, no
t departing on an extensive and dangerous tour outside the mountain redoubt, but returning from one. He was waiting for the arrival of the guide who would take him back into the Waziri peaks and into the presence of the Sheikh himself.
To protect him in his brief stay in Peshawar he had been assigned four local zealots belonging to the Taliban movement. As befits men who originate in the North-western Mountains, the chain of fierce tribal districts that runs along this ungovernable frontier, they were technically Pakistanis but tribally Waziris. They spoke Pashto rather than Urdu and their loyalties were to the Pashtun people of whom the Waziris are a sub-branch.
All were raised from the gutter in a madrassah or Koranic boarding school of extreme orientation, adhering to the Wahhabi sect of Islam, the harshest and most intolerant of all. They had no knowledge of, or skill in, anything other than reciting the Koran and were thus, like teeming millions of madrassah-raised youths, virtually unemployable. But given a task to do by their clan chief, they would die for it. That September they had been charged with protecting the middle-aged Egyptian who spoke Nilotic Arabic but had enough Pashto to get by. One of the four youths was Abdelahi and his pride and joy was his cellphone. Unfortunately its battery was flat because he had forgotten to recharge it.
It was after the midday hour. Too dangerous to emerge to go to the local mosque for prayers; Al-Qur had said his orisons along with his bodyguards in their top-floor apartment. Then he had eaten sparingly and retired for a short rest.
Abdelahi’s brother lived several hundred miles to the west in the equally fundamentalist city of Quetta and their mother had been ill. He wished to enquire after her so he tried to get through on his cellphone. Whatever he wished to say would be unremarkable, just a few of the trillions of words of ‘chatter’ that pass through the ether of all five continents every day. But his phone would not work. One of his companions pointed out the absence of black bars in the battery window and explained about charging. Then Abdelahi saw the spare phone lying on the Egyptian’s attaché case in the sitting room.
It was fully charged. Seeing no harm, he dialled his brother’s number and heard the rhythmic ringing tone far away in Quetta. And in an underground rabbit warren of connecting rooms in Islamabad that constitute the listening department of Pakistan’s Counter-Terrorism Centre, a small red light began to pulse.
Many who live in it regard Hampshire as England’s prettiest county. On its south coast, facing the waters of the Channel, it contains the huge maritime port of Southampton and the naval dockyard of Portsmouth. Its administrative centre is the historic city of Winchester, dominated by its cathedral almost a thousand years old.
At the very heart of the county, away from all the motorways and even the main roads, lies the quiet valley of the River Meon, a gentle chalk stream along whose banks lie villages and townlets that date back to the Saxons.
One single A-class road runs through from south to north but the rest of the valley is a network of winding lanes edged with overhanging trees, hedges and meadows. This is farm country the way it used to be, with few fields larger than ten acres and even fewer farms larger than five hundred. Most of the farmhouses are of ancient beam, brick and tile and some of these are served by clusters of barns of great size, antiquity and beauty.
The man who perched at the apex of one such barn had a panorama of the Meon valley and a bird’s eye view of his nearest village, Meonstoke, barely a mile away. At the time, several zones to the east, that Abdelahi made the last phone call of his life, the roof-climber wiped some sweat off his forehead and resumed his task of carefully removing the claypeg tiles that had been placed there hundreds of years earlier.
He should have had a team of expert roofers, and they should have clad the whole barn in scaffolding. It would have been faster and safer to do the job that way, but much more expensive. And that was the problem. The man with the claw hammer was an ex-soldier, retired after his twenty-five-year career, and he had used up most of his bounty to buy his dream: a place in the country to call home at last. Hence the barn with ten acres and a track to the nearest lane and then to the village.
But soldiers are not always shrewd with money and the conversion of the medieval barn into a country house and a snug home had produced estimates from professional companies that specialize in such projects that took his breath away. Hence the decision, whatever time it took, to do it himself.
The spot was idyllic enough. In his mind’s eye he could see the roof restored to its former leak-proof glory, with nine-tenths of the original and unbroken tiles retained and the other ten per cent bought from a yard selling the artefacts of old demolished buildings. The rafters of the hammerbeam roof were still as sound as the day they were hacked from the oak tree, but the cross-battens would have to come off to be replaced over good modern roofing felt.
He could imagine the sitting room, kitchen, study and hall he would make far below him where dust now smothered the last old hay bales. He knew he would need professionals for the electrics and the plumbing, but he had already signed on at Southampton Technical College for night courses in bricklaying, plastering, carpentry and glazing.
One day there would be a flagstoned patio and a kitchen garden; the track would be a gravelled drive and sheep would graze the old orchard. Each night, camping in the paddock as nature favoured him with a balmy late summer heat wave, he went over the figures and reckoned that with patience and a lot of hard work he could just survive on his modest budget.
He was forty-four, olive-skinned, black-haired and -eyed, lean and very hard of physique. And he had had enough. Enough of deserts and jungles, enough of malaria and leeches, enough of freezing cold and shivering nights, enough of garbage food and pain-racked limbs. He would get a job locally, find a Labrador or a couple of Jack Russells and maybe even a woman to share his life.
The man on the roof removed another dozen tiles, kept the ten whole ones, threw down the fragments of the broken ones, and in Islamabad the red light pulsed.
Many think that with a pre-paid SIM card in a cellphone all future billing is cancelled out. That is true for the purchaser and user but not for the service provider. Unless the phone is used only within the confines of the transmitting area where it was bought, there is still a settling-up to be accomplished, but between the cellphone companies, and their computers do it.
As Abdelahi’s call was taken by his brother in Quetta, he began to use time on the radio mast situated just outside Peshawar. This belongs to Paktel. So the Paktel computer began to search for the original vendor of the cellphone in England; its intent was to say, electronically, ‘One of your customers is using my time and airspace, so you owe me.’ But the Pakistani CTC had for years required both Paktel and its rival Mobitel to patch through every call emitted or received by their networks to the CTC listening room. And, alerted by the British, the CTC had inserted British software into its eavesdropping computers with an intercept suite for certain numbers. One of these had suddenly gone active.
The young Pashto-speaking Pakistani army sergeant monitoring the console hit a button and his superior officer came on the line. He listened for several seconds, then asked: ‘What is he saying?’
The sergeant listened and replied: ‘Something about the speaker’s mother. He seems to be speaking to his brother.’
‘From where?’
Another check. ‘The Peshawar transmitter.’
There was no need to ask the sergeant any more. The entire call would automatically be recorded for later study. The immediate task was to locate the sender. The CTC major on duty that day had little doubt this would not be possible in one short phone call. Surely the fool would not spend long on the line?
From his desk high above the cellars the major pressed three buttons and by speed-dial a phone trilled in the office of the CTC Head of Station in Peshawar.
Years earlier, and certainly before the event now known as 9/11, the destruction of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, the Pakistani Inter-S
ervices Intelligence Department, always known as the ISI, had been deeply infiltrated by fundamentalist Muslims of the Pakistani army. That was its problem and the reason for its complete unreliability in the struggle against the Taliban and their guests Al-Qaeda.
But Pakistan’s President General Musharraf had had little choice but to listen to the USA’s strongly worded ‘advice’ to clean his house. Part of that programme had been the steady transfer of extremist officers out of ISI and back to normal military duties; the other part had been the creation inside ISI of the elite Counter-Terrorism Centre, staffed by a new breed of young officers who had no truck with Islamist terrorism, no matter how devout they might be. Colonel Abdul Razak, formerly a tank commander, was one such. He commanded the CTC in Peshawar and he took the call at half past two.
He listened attentively to his colleague in the national capital, then asked: ‘How long?’
‘About three minutes, so far.’
Colonel Razak had the good fortune to have an office just eight hundred yards from the Paktel mast, within the radius – a thousand yards or less – normally needed for his direction-finder to work efficiently. With two technicians he raced to the flat roof of the office block to start the D/F sweeps of the city that would seek to pin the source of the signal to a smaller and ever smaller area.