ound by a British major general named David Hook.
The avant-garde thinking among the best brains has long been that Taliban body count alone will never win. As fast as Anglo-American commanders congratulate themselves that one hundred, or two or three hundred, Taliban fighters have been taken out, more just seem to appear.
Some come from the Afghan peasantry, as they always have. Some among these volunteer because relatives—and, in that society, an extended family may number three hundred—have been killed by a misdirected missile, a wrong-target fighter strike or careless artillery; others because they are ordered to fight by their tribal elders. But they are young men, little more than boys.
Also young are the students from Pakistan, arriving in droves from the religious madrassah schools, where for years they study nothing but the Koran and listen to the extremist imams until they are groomed to fight and die.
But the Taliban army is like no other. Its units are extremely local to the area that bred them. And the reverence to the veteran commanders is total. Take out the veterans, reconvert the clan chiefs, bring in the tribal heads, and an entire county-sized area can simply abandon the fighting.
For years, British and American Special Forces have been disguising as mountain men, slipping through the hills to assassinate the middle- and upper-ranking Talib leaders, reckoning that the small fry are not really the problem.
Parallel with the night hunters is the Reintegration Program that seeks to “turn” veterans, to take the olive branch held out by the Kabul government. That day in the hamlet of Qala-e-Zal, General Hook and his Australian assistant, Captain Chris Hawkins, were representing the Force Reintegration Cell. The four wizened Talib chiefs, crouching along the wall, had been coaxed out of the mountains to return to village life.
As with all fishing, there has to be bait. A “reintegrater” has to attend a course in de-indoctrination. In exchange, there is a free house, a flock of sheep to enable a resumption of farming, an amnesty and the Afghani equivalent of a hundred dollars a week. The purpose of the meeting that bright but crisp May day was to attempt to persuade the veterans that the religious propaganda they had all received for years was, in fact, false.
As Pashto speakers they could not read the Koran and, like all non-Arab terrorists, had been converted because of what they had been told by Jihadi instructors, many pretending to be imams or mullahs while being nothing of the sort. So a Pashtun mullah or maulvi was in attendance to explain to the veterans how they had been deceived; how the Koran was, in reality, a book of peace with only a few “kill” passages, which the terrorists deliberately used out of context.
And there was a television set in the corner, an object of fascination to the mountain men. It was not screening live TV but a DVD from a player linked to it. The speaker on the screen was using English, but the mullah had a pause button, enabling him to halt the flow, explain what the preacher had said and then reveal how, according to the Holy Koran, it was all rubbish.
One of the four squatting on the floor was Mahmud Gul, who had been a senior commander as far back as 9/11. He was not yet fifty, but thirteen years in the mountains had aged him; the face beneath the black turban was wrinkled like a walnut, the hands gnarled and aching from incipient arthritis.
He had been indoctrinated as a young man not against the British and Americans, who he knew had helped free his people from the Russians. He knew little of bin Laden and his Arabs, and what he did know he did not like. He had heard of what had happened in downtown Manhattan all those years ago and he did not approve of it. He had joined the Taliban to fight against the Tajiks and Uzbeks of the Northern Alliance.
But the Americans did not understand the law of pashtunwali, the sacred rule between host and guest that absolutely forbade Mullah Omar to hand his al-Qaeda guests over to their tender mercies. So they had invaded Mahmud Gul’s country. He had fought them for that, and he was still fighting them. Until now.
Mahmud Gul felt old and tired. He had seen many men die. He had put some out of their misery with his own gun when the wounds were so bad that they could live, in pain, for only a few more hours or days.
He had killed British and American boys but could not recall how many. His old bones ached and his hands were turning into claws. The shattered hip of many years ago never gave him peace through the long mountain winters. Half his family was dead, and he had not seen his grandchildren except during hurried night visits, before dawn drove him back to the caves.
He wanted out. Thirteen years was enough. Summer was coming. He wanted to sit in the warmth and play with the children. He wanted his daughters to bring him food, as it should be in old age. He had decided to take the government offer of amnesty, a house, sheep, an allowance, even if it meant listening to a fool of a mullah and a masked speaker on television.
As the TV was switched off and the mullah droned on, Mahmud Gul uttered something under his breath in Pashto. Chris Hawkins was sitting next to him and he, too, had a command of the language, but not the Ghazni rural dialect. He thought he had heard correctly but could not be sure. When the lecture was over and the mullah had scurried back to his car and his bodyguards, tea was taken. Strong, black, and the farangi officers had brought sugar, which was good.
Captain Hawkins slid down beside Mahmud Gul and they sipped in companionable silence. Then the Australian asked: “What did you say when the lecture finished?”
Mahmud Gul repeated the phrase. Spoken slowly and not under his breath, it meant only one thing. He had said: “I know that voice.”
Chris Hawkins had two more days to spend in Ghazni and one more reintegration meeting to attend elsewhere. Then back to Kabul. He had a friend at the British embassy who he was pretty certain was there with MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service. He thought he might mention it.
• • •
Ariel was right in his assessment of the Troll. The Iraqi from Manchester was possessed of an overweening arrogance. In cyberspace, he was the best and he knew it. Everything in that world to which he put his hand had the stamp of perfection. He insisted on it. It was his hallmark.
He not only recorded the sermons of the Preacher but he alone sent them out into the world, to be watched on who knew how many screens. And he managed the growing fan base. He vetted aspirant members with intense checking before he would accept a comment or deign to reply. But he still did not notice the mild virus that slipped into his program from a dark little attic in Centerville, Virginia. As designed, it began to have its effect a week later.
Ariel’s malware simply caused the Troll’s website to slow down, periodically and only marginally. But the effect was to cause small pauses in the transmission of the picture as the Preacher spoke. But the Troll noticed at once the tiny aberration from perfection that the pauses made in his work. It was not acceptable. It irritated and finally enraged him.
He tried to correct it, but the flaw remained. He concluded that if website 1 had developed a flaw, he would have to create website 2 and move to it. Which he did. Then he had to transfer the fan base to the new website.
Before he had invented his proxy server to create a false Internet protocol address, he had a real one, the IP that would serve as a sort of mailing address. To move the entire fan base from website 1 to 2, he had to pass back through the true IP. It only took a hundredth of a second, maybe less.
Yet in the move across, the original IP was exposed for that nanosecond. Then it was gone. But Ariel had been waiting for that minuscule window. The IP address gave him a country, but it also had an owner—France Télécom.
If the NASA supercomputers were going to prove no impediment to Gary MacKinnon, the database of France Télécom was not going to hold up Ariel for long. Within a day, he was inside the FT database, unseen and unsuspected. Like a good burglar, he was back out without leaving a trace. He now had a latitude and a longitude—a city.
But he had a message for Col. Jackson. He knew better than send him the news by e-mail. People listen in to that sort of thing.
• • •