They seem to find their way over impossible mountain passes and along the sides of bare hillsides on crumbling tracks. Sometimes the gutted skeleton of one can be seen in the defile below the road. But they are the commercial lifeblood of a continent, carrying an amazing variety of supplies to the tiniest and most isolated settlements and the people who live in them.
The British named them jingly trucks many years ago because of their decorations. They are carefully painted on every available surface with scenes from religion and history. There are representations from Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism and Buddhism, often gloriously mixed up. They are decorated and caparisoned with ribbons, tinsel and even bells. Hence, they jingle.
The line on the highway south of Kabul contained several hundred, their drivers sleeping in their cabs, waiting for the dawn. The pick-up slewed to a halt beside the line. Mike Martin jumped from the back and walked to the cab. The shrouded figure behind the wheel had his face hidden by a shemagh of checked cloth.
On the other side Brigadier Yusuf nodded but said nothing. End of the road. Start of the journey. As he turned away he heard the driver speak.
‘Good luck, boss.’
That term again. Only the SAS called their officers ‘boss’. What the American provost major at Bagram had not known as he made the handover was not only who his prisoner was, but that since the installation of President Hamid Karzai the Afghan Special Forces had been created and trained at his request by the SAS.
Martin turned away and started to walk down the line of trucks. Behind him the tail lights of the pick-up faded as it headed back to Kabul. In the cab the SAS sergeant made a cellphone call to a number in Kabul. It was taken by the Head of Station. The sergeant uttered two words and terminated.
The SIS chief for all Afghanistan also made a call on a secure line. It was three-thirty in the morning in Kabul, eleven at night in Scotland. A one-line message came up on one of the screens. Phillips and McDonald were already in the room, hoping to see what they then saw. ‘Crowbar is running.’
On a freezing, pitted highway Mike Martin permitted himself one last glance behind him. The red lights of the pick-up were gone. He turned and walked on. Within a hundred yards he had become the Afghan.
He knew what he was looking for but he was a hundred trucks down the line until he found it. A licence plate from Karachi, Pakistan. The driver of such a truck would be unlikely to be Pashtun and so would not notice the imperfect command of Pashto. He would be likely to be a Baluchi heading home to Pakistan’s Baluchistan province.
It was too early for the drivers to be rising, and unwise to rouse the driver of the chosen truck; tired men woken suddenly are not in the best of tempers and Martin needed him in a generous mood. For two hours he curled up beneath the truck and shivered.
Around six there was a stirring and a hint of pink in the east. By the roadside someone started a fire and set a billy on it to boil. In central Asia much of life is lived in and around the tea-house, the chai-khana, which can be created even with a fire, a brew of tea and a group of men. Martin rose, walked over to the fire and warmed his hands.
The tea-brewer was Pashtun but taciturn, which suited Martin fine. He had taken off his turban, unwound it and stowed it in the tote-bag hanging from his shoulder. It would be unwise to advertise being Talib until one knew the company was sympathetic. With a fistful of his Afghanis he bought a steaming cup and sipped gratefully. Minutes later the Baluchi clambered sleepily out of his cab and came over for tea.
Dawn rose. Some of the trucks began to kick into life with plumes of black smoke. The Baluchi walked back to his cab. Martin followed.
‘Greetings, my brother.’
The Baluchi responded, but with some suspicion.
‘Do you by any chance head south to the border and Spin Boldak?’
If the man was heading back to Pakistan, the small border town south of Kandahar would be where he would cross. By then Martin knew there would be a price on his head. He would have to skirt the border controls on foot.
‘If it please Allah,’ said the Baluchi.
‘Then in the name of the all-merciful would you let a poor man trying to get home to his family ride with you?’
The Baluchi thought. His cousin normally came with him on these long hauls to Kabul, but he was sick in Karachi. This trip he had driven alone, and it was exhausting.
‘Can you drive one of these?’ he asked.
‘In truth, I am a driver of many years.’
They drove south in companionable silence, listening to the eastern pop music on the old plastic radio propped above the dash. It screeched and whistled but Martin was not sure whether this was just the static or the tune.
The day wore on and they chugged through Ghazni and on towards Kandahar. On the road they paused for tea and food, the usual goat and rice, a
nd filled the tank. Martin helped with the cost from his bundle of Afghanis and the Baluchi became much more friendly.
Though Martin spoke neither Urdu nor the Baluchi dialect and the man from Karachi only a smattering of Pashto, with sign language and some Arabic from the Koran they got along well.
There was a further overnight stop north of Kandahar, for the Baluchi would not drive in the darkness. This was Zabol province, wild country and peopled by wild men. It was safer to drive in the light with hundreds of other lorries in front, behind and yet more heading north. Bandits would prefer the night.
At the northern outskirts of Kandahar Martin claimed he needed a nap and curled up along the bench behind the seats which the Baluchi used as his bed. Kandahar had been the headquarters and stronghold of the Taliban and Martin wanted no reformed Talib to think he saw an old friend in a passing truck.
South of Kandahar he again spelled the Baluchi at the wheel. It was still mid-afternoon when they came to Spin Boldak; Martin claimed he lived in the northern outskirts, bade his host a grateful farewell and dropped off miles before the border checkpoint.