Read Online The Afghan by Frederick Forsyth - Free Book Online Page B

computer by random selection dubbed it Operation Crowbar.
    If challenged, Mike Martin would never have been able to defend himself. But in all the briefings he later gave them about the Afghan who had once been his friend, there was one detail he kept to himself.
    Perhaps he thought that need-to-know was a two-way street. Perhaps he thought the detail too unimportant. It had to do with a muttered conversation in the shadows of a cave hospital run by Arabs at a place called Jaji.

PART TWO
    Warriors

CHAPTER FOUR
    The decision in the Hampshire orchard led to a blizzard of decision-making from the two spymasters. To start with, sanction and approval had to be sought from both men’s political masters.
    This was easier said than done because Mike Martin’s first condition was that no more than one dozen people should ever know what Operation Crowbar was about. His concern was completely understood.
    If fifty people know anything that interesting, one will eventually spill the beans. Not intentionally, not viciously, not even mischievously; but inevitably.
    Those who have ever been in deep cover in a lethal situation know that to trust in one’s own tradecraft never to make a mistake and be caught is nerve-racking enough. To hope that one will never be given away by some utterly unforeseeable fluke is constantly stressful. But the ultimate nightmare is to know that capture and the long, agonizing death to follow was all caused by some fool in a bar boasting to his girlfriend and being overheard – that is the worst fear of all. So Martin’s condition was acceded to at once.
    In Washington John Negroponte agreed with Marek Gumienny that he alone would be the repository, and gave the go-ahead. Steve Hill dined at his club with one man in the British government and secured the same result. That made four.
    But Gumienny and Hill knew they could not personally be on the case twenty-four hours a day. Each needed an executive officer for the day-to-day running. Marek Gumienny appointed a rising Arabist in the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Division: Michael McDonald dropped everything, explained to his family that he had to work in the UK for a while, and flew east as Marek Gumienny returned home.
    Steve Hill picked his own deputy on the Middle East Desk, Gordon Phillips. Before they parted company the two principals agreed that every aspect of Crowbar would have a plausible cover story so that no one below the top ten would really know that a western agent was going to be slipped inside Al-Qaeda.
    Both Langley and Vauxhall Cross were told that the two men about to go missing were simply on a career-improving sabbatical of academic study and would be away from their desks for about six months.
    Steve Hill introduced the two men who would now be working together and told them what Crowbar was going to try to do. Both McDonald and Phillips went very silent. Hill had installed them both not in offices in the headquarters building by the Thames, but in a safe house, one of several retained by the Firm, out in the countryside.
    When they had unpacked and convened in the drawing room he tossed them both a thick file.
    ‘Finding an ops HQ starts tomorrow,’ he said. ‘You have twenty-four hours to commit this to memory. This is the man who is going to go in. You will work with him until that day, and for him after that. This’ – he tossed on to the coffee table a thinner file – ‘is the man he is going to replace. Clearly we know much less. But that is everything the US interrogators have been able to secure from him in hundreds of hours of interrogations at Gitmo. Learn this also.’
    When he was gone the two younger men asked for a large pot of coffee from the household staff and started to read.
    It was during a visit to the Farnborough Air Show in the summer of 1977 when he was fifteen that the schoolboy Mike Martin fell in love. His father and younger brother were with him, fascinated by the fighters and bombers, aerobatic fliers