“An odd request but brief. I could have sent it the usual way, but I figured we probably ought to meet one day anyway so I just cut to the chase.”
“Quite right. And the request?”
“Does your service have a contact or, better still, an asset buried down among the al-Shabaab in Somalia?”
“Wow. That’s an odd one, all right. Not my specialty. We have a desk, of course. I’ll have to ask. May I inquire: Is it the Preacher?”
Armitage was no clairvoyant. He knew who the Tracker was and what he did. Britain had just had its fourth murder committed by a young fanatic inspired by the online sermons of the Preacher, as opposed to America’s six, and both services knew how their governments wanted to put an end to this man.
“Could be,” said the Tracker.
“Well, excellent, then. As you know, we have a presence, as do your friends at Langley, inside Mogadishu, but if they have anyone out in the wild places, I’d be surprised if they haven’t proposed a joint operation. But I’ll have the request in the London office by morning.”
The reply took only two days, but it was the same as that from the CIA. And Armitage was right: If either country was running a source inside South Somalia, it would have been too valuable not to share—both the costs and the “product.”
The reply from Javad inside the ISI was much more helpful. One of those to whom he pretended to report back about his spying on the Americans was a contact in the notorious S Wing, which “covered,” in every sense, myriad groups dedicated to Jihadism and violence that inhabited the border strip from Kashmir to Quetta.
It would have been far too risky for Javad to have asked outright; it would have blown his cover and revealed his true employers. But part of his ISI job was to have authorized access to the Americans and to frequent their company. He pretended he had eavesdropped on a conversation between diplomats at a cocktail party. Out of curiosity, the S Wing officer consulted the archive database, and Javad, standing behind him, noted the file he accessed.
When he had shut down, the S Wing officer ordered that the Yankees be told there was no such trace. Later, by night, Javad reaccessed the database and punched up the file.
There was such a mention but years old. It came from an ISI spy in Ilyas Kashmiri’s 313 Brigade of fanatics and killers. It mentioned a new arrival from Lashkar-e-Taiba, a fanatic for whom the raids against Kashmir had proved too tame. The young recruit spoke Arabic and Pashto, which was what had facilitated his acceptance into 313. The Brigade was composed mainly of Arabs and cooperated closely with the Pashto-speaking Haqqani clan. The report added that this was his usefulness, but he had yet to prove himself as a fighter. He had amber eyes, and styled himself Abu Azzam.
So that was why he had disappeared nine years ago. He had changed his terror group and changed his name.
The U.S.’s Counter-Terrorism Center has a vast database on Jihadist terror groups, and punching in Abu Azzam produced a cornucopia.
Back during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, there were seven great warlords who comprised the Mujahideen, applauded and supported by the West as “patriots,” “partisans” and “freedom fighters.” To them, and them alone, went the huge quantities of money and weapons channeled into the Afghan mountains to defeat the Russians. But the moment the last Soviet tank rolled back into Russia, two of them reverted to the vicious killers they had always been. One was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the other was Jalaluddin Haqqani.
Though a warlord and master of his native province of Paktia, Haqqani switched sides when the Taliban swept the warlords aside and came to power and he became commander of the Taliban forces.
After their defeat by the Americans and Northern Alliance, he moved again, crossing the border and setting himself up in Waziristan, inside the Pakistan border. Succeeded by his three sons, he created the Haqqani network; basically, the Pakistani Taliban.
This became a hub for terror strikes against American and NATO forces over the border and against the Pakistani government of Pervez Musharraf, which became an ally of the U.S. He attracted to his network the remaining al-Qaeda forces not dead or in jail and any other Jihadist fanatic. One of these was Ilyas Kashmiri, who brought with him his 313 Brigade, part of the Shadow Army.
What the Tracker could surmise was that the fanatical and eager-to-rise Zulfiqar Ali Shah, now calling himself Abu Azzam, was among them.
What he could not know was that Abu Azzam, while avoiding going into mortal danger in raids into Afghanistan, developed a taste for killing and became the 313 Brigade’s most enthusiastic executioner.
One by one, the leading figures of Haqqani, Taliban, al-Qaeda and the Brigade were identified by the Americans, located with local
information and targeted for drone strikes. In those mountain fastnesses, they were immune to army attack, as Pakistan discovered with huge losses, but could not hide for long from the UAVs, endlessly patrolling over their heads, soundless, invisible, watching everything, photographing everything and listening to everything.
The HVTs, the high-value targets, were blown to pieces, replaced by others, who were, in turn, blown away, until leadership became virtually a sentence of death.
But the old links with S Wing of Pakistan’s ISI never died. The ISI had created the Taliban in the first place and never lost sight of a single prediction: The Yankees have the clocks, but the Afghans have the time. One day, they calculated, the Americans will pack up and go. The Taliban might well retake Afghanistan, and Pakistan does not want two enemies, India and Afghanistan, on her borders. One will be enough, and that will be India.
There was one more chapter in the mass of data that the Tracker had unleashed. The 313 Brigade, with its leaders, including Kashmiri, blasted into infinity, ebbed away but was replaced by the even more fanatic and sadistic Khorosan, and Abu Azzam was at the heart of it.
Khorosan was no more than two hundred and fifty ultras, mostly Arabs and Uzbeks, targeted at the local natives who were selling information to U.S.-paid agents, particularly the whereabouts of the top targets. Khorosan had no talent for gathering its own intelligence, but a limitless capacity to terrify by public torture.
Whenever a drone-launched missile wiped out a house containing a terror leader, the Khorosan would arrive to snatch a sample of local citizens and inflict so-called courts, preceded by extreme interrogation involving electric shocks, electric drills or red-hot irons. The court would be presided over by an imam or mullah, often self-styled. Confessions were almost guaranteed and sentences other than death exceptional.
The habitual method of death was throat cutting. The merciful procedure involves the knife penetrating from the side, razor edge forward. A quick slice outward will open the jugular vein, carotid artery, trachea and esophagus, bringing instant death.
But a goat is not killed that way because maximum blood loss is needed to tenderize the meat. Then the throat is opened by a hacking, seesawing motion from the front. To make a human prisoner suffer and to demonstrate contempt, the goat method is used.
Having passed sentence, the presiding priest would then sit and watch it carried out. One of them was Abu Azzam.