“Mmmm,” I do recognise it. “Yes, I think I’ve seen them before, on TV.”
“They’re very practical,” he says. “Much less hassle than a turban.” He throws it onto the bundle of shirts, and picks another one out of the selection on offer. “It’s a man’s hat. Try this one.”
“And for women?” I ask, as I plop the surprisingly soft material onto the stubble of my buzz-cut.
He waves his arm around indicating that perhaps I should use my eyes. “Pashmenas or Burqas,” he says. “The majority of women still keep their heads covered. Sometimes these are worn.” He reaches toward the back of the stall, and stands up holding up a large pale sheet of beautifully embroidered, lightweight, linen. There is a round hole framed with ornate stitching in the centre. The hole is masked with a spider-silk mesh of filigree handiwork. “It’s called a Chadri... I think?” He looks to the stall-holder. “Chadri?” he asks, gesticulating with the large cloth.
The stall-holder nods respectfully. He is obviously wary of our uniforms, and holstered sidearms, but unable to stop himself from glancing optimistically at the large mound of potential trade building up next to my partner.
“It’s beautiful,” I say, and Jack nods to me and adds it to the pile.
“Do you think we could pick up one or two of the more colourful items too?” I ask carefully.
“Why not,” says Jack.
~~~~~
Tomb of Sultan Agha District, Herat, Afghanistan
Murat Nagpal lifted the plain metal teapot and poured strongly scented green tea into two, small, well worn, teacups. First he honoured his friend, pilot, soldier, comrade, drug smuggler and ally – Gulyar bin Imraan. Then he poured his own.
Bin Imraan watched him from across the table, nodded his appreciation of the gesture, then lifted his cup and sipped at the strong liquid. His lips were barely visible amongst a bushy black beard. “Excellent,” he pronounced.
They sat together on a small wooden veranda, which clung haphazardly to the street-facing wall of a small tea house, near Gulyar’s safe house. To Murat’s right, down past the hotchpotch of dwellings, eating houses, and merchants’ properties, the twin minaret towers and the tip of the gold-covered, onion dome of the Tomb of Sultan Agha rose above the low-lying buildings. But Nagpal was not looking at the tomb. He was deep in thought.
“You are always welcome here, my friend,” said Gulyar bin Imraan carefully. “Do as you will in the house. I have another residence here in Herat, and several others elsewhere. I have no need of it.”
Nagpal looked across at the other man. Bin Imraan was bundled in many layers, with his hair tucked up into a grimy turban. The dark-brown weather beaten skin of his face and hands was the only flesh that was visible, and much of his face was concealed behind his beard. Deep set, permanently shaded, eyes sat sternly above a long straight nose. He was nondescript. Hard to identify. One of many. Perfectly camouflaged to hide in plain sight. “It is good to drink tea with you again, comrade,” said Nagpal.
The beard creased into a small smile. “And you, my friend. So now what?”
Nagpal looked away. “The mission is barely started. I must be patient and rebuild.” He looked back at Bin Imraan. “Of course, when I succeed, the nation state of Khandastan will be eternally grateful to those who assisted us. Most generously grateful.”
“Of course,” said Bin Imraan. “But such matters are of little importance. My wealth is secure, and not the reason for my aid.”
Now it was Murat’s turn to smile. He knew full well that Gulyar made substantial sums from his clandestine drug smuggling operations. Large quantities of opium moved in many directions across these lands. He found it amusing that the infidels did much to finance their own destruction, and that his friend facilitated such activities. He bowed his head in acknowledgement of the other man’s generosity.
Gulyar leaned forward to the table and lifted his teacup again. “Something is troubling you, Murat?” he asked, his breath steaming gently over the surface of the hot liquid.
Nagpal nodded again. “The boy,” he replied. “I am troubled by the boy.”
“You think he might have been turned?”
“No. I think he is loyal. Just naïve. A liability.”
“He can still be useful,” Gulyar sipped at his tea.
“Maybe,” Nagpal said. “I worry that our enemies might still be tracking him somehow.”
Bin Imraan’s eyes narrowed. “Do you have any evidence to suggest that they are?”
Nagpal shook his head. “Nothing. We were undisturbed in Constanta. I cannot even be sure that it was a bug that betrayed Azat. Ebrahimi’s younger brother may have been captured, and given away the Hungarian meeting point, under torture or just questioning. The local thugs we hired might have sold us out. Any number of things could have happened. This is part of what troubles me. The infidel’s bug was not the most modern technology. It’s almost as if they might have wanted us to find it? Perhaps we were bugged in England? Who knows?”
“Have you destroyed everything from there?”
“Everything that might carry such a device.”
“Good.” Gulyar nodded. “Maybe I can help you to settle this.” He smiled across at his friend. “I have a few trips to make, and some unpaid debts owed to me in the camps.” By ‘camps’, Nagpal knew he meant the Afghan Army Bases. “Some of my own countrymen are too foolish not to dabble in my wares. They owe me. I suspect I can get my hands on a decent American counter-surveillance scanner. One of the latest models...”
~~~~~
Suitably attired in our Shalwar Kameez and with charcoal sleeveless waistcoats over the top of the baggy, cream-coloured, linen shirts and trousers, we approach the outskirts of Herat in the Toyota. It is late afternoon and the sunlight has a burning orange tint to it.
The car has behaved admirably and at the moment it’s carrying us across the long concrete Pashtoo Pol bridge. I look down out of the side window as we cross. The river bed is wide, but the river itself has shrunk down to the barest of dirty brown trickles.
“The water flows down from the mountains during the rains,” explains Jack. “It’s as wide as the Thames when it’s in full flow.”
“Hard to believe,” I mutter to the side window.
“Better fire up the laptop,” he says. “We’re nearly there.”
The road runs, as straight as one of Vengeance’s arrows, in front of us. It leads directly into the heart of a ground-hugging cloud of sepia brown dust and smog, which spreads for a considerable distance in both directions along our horizon line. Huge pine trees line the road, creating an unexpected avenue of lush green foliage and cool shade. Simple yet effective, they are an obvious, and strangely welcoming, visual statement that we are leaving the wilderness behind us, and reentering an environment shaped and dominated by human hands.
I lean into the gap between the front seats and reach into the back, roughly pushing a pair of washed-out green parkas to one side, and retrieve the EMT computer. It’s entombed in a dark-grey plastic and carbon fibre casing which bulks it up to the size of a large hardback book. It’s about the same weight too.
Sitting back into the passenger seat, I open the device on my lap.
Jack glances over. “Any updates?” he asks.
“Nothing,” I answer. There are no update messages. I’m busy calling up a map of the city.
Jack knows what I’ll be doing. “Any movement from Ebrahimi?”
I shake my head. “Nope. Well, nothing significant. The tracer is still showing as being in the city.”
“That signal will be a few hours old by now,” says Jack, somewhat pointlessly.
I already know this, and choose not to respond.
We continue up the long straight road. More of the sprawling mass of low-rise buildings become visible as we move into the city’s outskirts. Looking west, past Jack’s concentrating face, I spy an eye-catching tower rising above the rooftops; it’s an elegant modernistic, freestanding, ogee arch, with its two limbs joining at their highest tip, like a pair of huge arms raised into the sky with hands clasped together in prayer.
We need to head in that direction. “Take a left,” I say.
“Does it matter which one?” he asks. “If not, I’ll take one of the wider ones.”
It appears that the trunk roads are reasonably well maintained: some are wide enough to have several carriageways on each side. The contrast with the remaining thoroughfares is stunning in its own right. The main roads split the city roughly into a wide grid, but between these tarmac arteries there are little more than dirt strips: a jumbled maze of confused, unmapped alleyways which exist only as convenient gaps between the mud, brick, and concrete dwellings.
“Your choice,” I say. “But keeping to the main roads seems like a good idea.”
He nods and navigates us around a large green oasis of parkland, before turning us off toward the distant monument. I call up the laptop’s GPS to check exactly which road we’re on, and a new, blue, flashing dot appears on the screen. Ebrahimi’s marker is red, and it’s not flashing.
“Okay,” I say. “We’re a bit too far north. Take a left at those lights up ahead. Should be a cross roads.”
He grunts his acknowledgement and follows my instructions.
“Wow,” I mutter. The jumble of buildings on my side of the road have opened up into a huge pristine quadrangle of beautifully tended gardens. At the end of the quadrangle stands a magnificently powerful frontage. Three huge stone squares, enclosing three elegant equilateral pointed arches. Every inch of the stonework is delicately tiled in a myriad shades of blue, gold, orange, green, yellow...
“The Friday Mosque,” says Jack. “Masjid Jami.”
From the smaller arches on either side of the main entrance, two cylindrical minarets rise toward the heavens, like narrow lighthouses, topped with their own shiny cobalt-blue crested domes. Beyond the usual cacophony of car horns and engine noise, the haunting call to prayer begins to ring out from the spires. The timing couldn’t be more perfect.
I’m transfixed as my senses are pounded by the sights and sounds of this magnificent building, standing there, majestic in its plush gardens, bathing serenely in eerie orange-yellow evening sunlight...
“This isn’t some fucking
tourist trip
!” Jack sensitively nudges my attention back to the laptop by carefully reminding me of the task at hand. “There’s a bloody great-big castle behind us, up the road,” he expostulates, jerking one thumb backwards over his shoulder. “One that the medieval kings and queens of England would have shit themselves to get their hands on! All big fucking walls, and round towers, and crap like that. Want us to turn around and go...,” he glances over at me.
Fortunately for him, given the remarkably low levels of intellectual empathy he’s just been demonstrating, he doesn’t need to be Einstein to interpret my much-less-than friendly expression.
He shuts up.
“Not far now,” I growl. “Turn right at the end.”
We navigate the junction without further word. The call to prayer rings around us and the hum of the city seems to fade slightly in response to it. Dusty, diesel-fumed, air gusts through the car’s open windows as we turn back to a westerly direction.
“Across the next junction,” I instruct.
Another major building stands further along the road. It also looks impressive. A similar architectural structure to the Friday Mosque, and only fractionally less ornate. It isn’t so well tended though. There is, what looks like, a mess of construction work scattered in a wide radius around its perimeter. I check the map.
“That must be the Tomb of Sultan Agha,” I say. “We can park up somewhere near here.”
“Some tomb,” says Jack. “It looks like it’s standing in the middle of a sodding building site.”
Looking at the narrow dusty streets, leading off into the mind-numbing jumble of buildings ahead of us, I suspect it’s not going to be the least attractive sight we’ll see today. Ebrahimi’s little red light says he’s somewhere in the middle of that maze of backstreets. Only a few hundred metres away from us.
~~~~~
London
“Their EMT’s GPS has gone dark again,” Ellard reported calmly.
Greere span his chair so he could see the terminal in the corner of the office. The satellite-photo-overlaid map of Constanta had been replaced by one of Herat. The blue dot on the screen had indeed vanished.
Ellard continued sanctimoniously. “Let’s hope the morons are being careful this time, and not just planning to walk up to Ebrahimi in plain daylight and tap him on the shoulder.”
Greere sneered but kept his thoughts to himself.
~~~~~
Herat
Even in our civilian clothing, flat round Pakol hats, and the bulky faded knee-length parka coats – and despite us both sporting several weeks worth of Mediterranean-spring suntan – it still feels like we’re standing out as if there are flashing signs over our heads.
“We need to grow our beards,” mutters Jack from beside me. “You especially.”
I snort despite, or perhaps because of, the tension and gently tease the parka’s material to ensure that the profile of my holstered Browning isn’t showing. We’re carrying our sidearms but the rest of our kit is hidden away in the car. It would appear that Jack has a nifty way of adapting rear bench seats amongst his wide portfolio of talents.
He heads off down another alleyway and I follow.
Unpointed, rough stone walls press in from either side. These walls are punctuated by random window holes – sometimes glazed – or plain boarded doors – sometimes wide open. It is becoming surprisingly quiet as we move deeper into this rabbit warren of narrow twisting pathways. Only occasional engine noise, or raised voices, manage to percolate the cram of dwellings.
There are few people visible, away from the main streets, but my skin crawls as if we’re being watched from every dark opening. Washing lines strung into the narrow gap between the upper floors of the buildings are bowed by the weight of drying Kurta shirts and they look like lines of cartoon ghosts, drifting gently back and forth, in the shaded evening glow.