Because the Baluchi spoke no Pashto he had kept his radio tuned to a pop station and never heard the news. At the border the queues were longer even than usual and when he finally rolled to the barrier he was shown a picture. A black-bearded Talib face stared at him.
He was an honest and hard-working man. He wanted to get home to his wife and four children. Life was hard enough. Why spend days, even weeks, in an Afghan jail trying to explain that he had been totally ignorant?
‘By the Prophet, I have never seen him,’ he swore, and they let him go.
Never again, he thought as he trundled south on the Quetta road. He might hail from the most corrupt city in Asia, but at least you knew where you were in your own home town. Afghans were not his people; why get involved? He wondered what the Talib had done.
Martin had been warned the hijack of the prison van, the murder of its two warders and the escape of a returnee from Guantanamo Bay could not be covered up. To start with the American Embassy would make a fuss.
The ‘murder’ scene had been discovered by patrols sent up the Bagram road when the prison van failed to arrive at the jail. The separation of the van from its military escort was put down to incompetence. But the freeing of the prisoner was clearly by a criminal gang of Taliban leftovers. A hunt was put out for them.
Unfortunately the US Embassy offered the Karzai government a photograph, which could not be refused. The CIA and SIS Heads of Station tried to slow things down but there was only so much they could do. By the time all border posts received a faxed photograph, Martin was still north of Spin Boldak.
Though he knew nothing of this, Martin was determined there would be no chances taken at border crossings. In the hills above Spin Boldak he hunkered down and waited for night. From the position he had climbed to, he could see the lie of the land and the route he would take on the night march to come.
The small town was five miles ahead and half a mile below him. He could see the road snaking in and the trucks on it. He could see the massive old fort that had once been a stronghold of the British army.
He knew the capture of that fort in 1919 had been the last time the British army used medieval scaling ladders. They had approached secretly by night and apart from the bellowing of the mules, the clang of ladles on cauldrons and the swearing of the soldiers as they stubbed their toes, were silent as the grave so as not to wake the defenders.
The ladders were ten feet too short so they crashed into the dry moat with a hundred soldiers on them. Happily, the Pashtun defenders, crouching behind the walls, presumed the force attacking them must be enormous, so they quit through the back door and ran for the hills. The fort fell without a shot being fired.
Before midnight Martin stole quietly past its walls, through the town and into Pakistan. Sunrise found him ten miles down the Quetta road. Here he found a chai-khana and waited until a truck that accepted paying passengers came along and gave him passage to Quetta. At last the black Talib turban, instantly recognizable in those parts, became an asset and not a liability. So on it went.
If Peshawar is a fairly extreme Islamist city, Quetta is more so, only exceeded in its ferocity of sympathy for Al-Qaeda by Miram Shah. These are within the North-West Frontier Provinces where local tribal law prevails. Though technically across the border from Afghanistan the Pashtun people still prevail, as does the Pashto language and extreme devotion to ultra-traditional Islam. A Talib turban is the mark of a man to be reckoned with.
Though the main road south from Quetta heads for Karachi, Martin had been advised to take the smaller track of a highway south-west to the wretched port of Gwador.
This lies almost on the Iranian border at the extreme western end of Baluchistan. Once a sleepy and malodorous fishing village, it has developed into a major harbour and entrepôt, contentedly devoted to smuggling, especially opium. Islam may denounce the use of narcotics but that is for Muslims. If the infidels of the West wish to poison themselves and pay handsomely for the privilege, that has nothing to do with true servants and followers of the Prophet.
Thus the poppies are grown in Iran, Pakistan and most of all Afghanistan, refined to base morphine locally and hence smuggled further west to become heroin and death. In this holy trade Gwador plays its part.
In Quetta, seeking to avoid conversation with Pashto speakers who might unmask him, Martin had found another Baluchi truck driver heading for Gwador. It was only in Quetta that he learned there was a five-million Afghani price on his head – but only in Afghanistan.
It was on the third morning after he heard the words ‘good luck, boss’ that he dropped off the truck and settled gratefully for a cup of sweet green tea at a pavement café. He was expected, but not by locals.
The first of the two Predators had taken off from Thumrait twenty-four hours earlier. Flying in rotation, the UAVs would keep up a constant day-and-night patrol over their assigned surveillance area.
A product of General Atomics, the UAV-RQ 1 L Predator is not much to look at. It resembles something that might have come from the aero-modeller’s doodling pad.
It is only twenty-seven feet long and pencil-slim. Its tapered seagull wings have a span of forty-eight feet. Right at the rear a single 113-hp Rotax engine drives the propellers that push it along, and the Rotax just sips petrol from its hundred-gallon fuel tank.
Yet from this puny impulsion it can speed up to 117 knots or loiter along at seventy-three. Its maximum endurance aloft is forty hours, but its more normal mission would be to fly up to a 400-nautical-mile radius from home base, spend twenty-four hours on the job and fly home again.
Being a rear-engined ‘pusher’ device, its directional controls are up front. They can be operated by its controller manually or switched to remote control from a computerized programme to do what is wanted and keep doing it until given fresh instructions.
The Predator’s true genius lies in its bulbous nose: the detachable Skyball avionics pod.
All the communications kit faces upwards to talk to and listen to the satellites up in space. These receive all its photo-images and overheard conversations and pass them back to base.
What faces downwards is the Lynx synthetic-aperture radar and the L-3 Wescam photographic unit. More modern versions, such as the two used over Oman, can overcome night, cloud, rain, hail and snow with the multi-spectral targeting system.
After the invasion of Afghanistan, when the juiciest of targets were spotted but could not be attacked in time, the Predator went back to the makers and a new version emerged. It carried the Hellfire missile, giving the eye-in-the-sky a weaponized variant.
Two years later the head of Al-Qaeda from the Yemen left his compound far in the invisible interior with four chums in a Land Cruiser. He did not know it but several pairs of American eyes were watching him on a screen in Tampa.
On the word of command the Hellfire left the belly of the Predator and seconds later the Land Cruiser and its occupants were simply vaporized. It was all witnessed in full colour on a plasma screen in Florida.
The two Predators out of Thumrait were not weaponized. Their sole task was to patrol at twenty-thousand feet, out of sight, inaudible, radar-immune, and watch the ground and sea below.