When he was ordered out at the airfield, the prisoner blinked in the harsh sunlight.
He shook his shaggy head and looked bewildered. As his eyes grew accustomed to the glare, he gazed around and saw the waiting Hercules and a group of American officers staring at him. One of them advanced and beckoned.
Meekly he followed him across the scorching tarmac. Shackled though he was, six armed grunts surrounded him all the way. He turned to have one last look at the place that had held him for five miserable years. Then he shuffled up into the hull of the aircraft.
In a room one flight below the operations deck of the control tower two men stood and watched him.
‘There goes your man,’ said Marek Gumienny.
‘If they ever find out who he really is,’ replied Steve Hill, ‘may Allah have mercy on him.’
PART FOUR
Journey
CHAPTER TEN
It was a long and wearisome flight. there were no in-flight refuelling facilities, which are expensive. This Hercules was just a prison ship, doing a favour for the Afghan government who ought to have picked up their man in Cuba but had no aircraft for the job.
They flew via American bases in the Azores and Ramstein, Germany, and it was late afternoon of the following day that the C-130 dropped towards the great air base of Bagram at the southern edge of the bleak Shomali Plain.
The flight crew had changed twice, but the escort squad had stayed the course, reading, playing cards, catnapping as the four sets of whirling blades outside the portholes drove them east and ever east. The prisoner remained shackled. He too slept as best he could.
As the Hercules taxied on to the apron beside the huge hangars that dominate the American zone within Bagram base, the reception group was waiting. The US Provost Major heading the escort party was gratified to see the Afghans were taking no chances. Apart from the prison van there were twenty Afghan Special Forces soldiers headed by the unit commander Brigadier Yusuf.
The major trotted down the ramp to clear the paperwork before handing over his charge. This took a few seconds. Then he nodded to his colleagues. They unchained the Afghan from the fuselage rib and led him shuffling out into a freezing Afghan winter.
The troops enveloped him, dragged him to the prison van and threw him inside. The door slammed shut. The US major decided he absolutely would not want to change places. He threw up a salute to the brigadier, who responded.
‘You take good care of him, sir,’ said the American, ‘that is one very hard man.’
‘Do not worry, major,’ said the Afghan officer. ‘He is going to Pul-i-Charki jail for the rest of his days.’
Minutes later the prison van drove off, followed
by the truck with the Afghan SF soldiers. It took the road south to Kabul. It was not until the darkness was complete that the van and the truck became separated in what would later be officially described as an unfortunate accident. The van proceeded alone.
Pul-i-Charki is a fearsome, brooding block of a place to the east of Kabul, near the gorge at the eastern end of the Kabul plain. Under the Soviet occupation it was controlled by the Khad secret police and constantly rang with the screams of the tortured.
During the civil war several tens of thousands of prisoners failed to leave alive. Conditions had improved since the creation of the new, elected Republic of Afghanistan, but its stone battlements, corridors and dungeons still seemed to echo with the shrieks of its ghosts. Fortunately the prison van never made it.
Ten miles after losing the military escort a pick-up truck came out of a side road and took up station behind the van. When it flashed its lights, the van driver pulled over at the pre-reconnoitred flat area off the road and behind a clump of stunted trees. There the ‘escape’ took place.
The prisoner had been uncuffed as soon as the van left the last security check at Bagram’s perimeter. Even as the van rolled, he had changed into the warm grey woollen shalwar kameez and boots provided. Just before the pullover he had wound round his head the feared black turban of the Talib.
Brigadier Yusuf, who had descended from the cabin of the truck to be taken on board by the pick-up, now took charge. There were four bodies in the open back of the utility.
All had come fresh from the city mortuary. Two were bearded, and they had been dressed in Talib clothing. They were actually construction workers who had been atop some very insecure scaffolding when it collapsed and killed them both.
The other two derived from separate car accidents. Afghan roads are so potholed that the smoothest place to drive is the crown at the centre. As it is considered rather effeminate to pull over just because someone is coming the other way, the harvest in fatalities is impressive. The two smooth-shaven bodies were in prison service uniform.
The prison officers would be found with handguns drawn, but dead; the bullets were fired into the bodies there and then. The ambushing Taliban were scattered at the roadside, also shot with slugs from the pistols of the guards. The van door was savaged with a pickaxe and left swinging open. That was how the van would be found sometime the next day.
When the theatre had been accomplished Brigadier Yusuf took the front seat of the pick-up beside the driver. The former prisoner climbed in the back with the two Special Forces men he had brought with him. All three wrapped the trailing end of their turbans round their faces to shelter from the cold.
The pick-up skirted Kabul City and cut across country until it intercepted the highway south to Ghazni and Kandahar. There waited, as each night, the long column of what all Asia knows as the ‘jingly’ trucks.
They all seem to have been built about a century ago. They snort and snarl along every road of the Middle and Far East, emitting their columns of choking black smoke. Often they are seen broken down by the roadside, the driver being prepared to trudge many miles to find and buy the needed part.