It was said that twenty-three hundred years ago Alexander the Great, Iskandar of Macedon, the young god of the world’s morning, had marched through those mountains from his crushing of the Persian empire to his intended conquest of India. But his men were tired, exhausted by his relentless campaigns, and when he marched back from the Indus campaign, they deserted in droves. If they could not return to the hills of Macedon, they would settle in these mountains and valleys, take brides, farm good land and march and fight no more.
The little child who had hidden behind the robe of Mahmud Gul in the village of Qala-e-Zal had bright blue eyes, not brown like the Punjabis. And the missing son?
The tea had not been drunk when the interview ended. He had no idea it would be so abrupt.
“I believe you were accompanied by your son, Colonel, who speaks Pashto?”
The army officer came out of his chair and stood ramrod straight, clearly affronted and deeply so.
“You are mistaken, Mr. Priest, I have no son.”
The Tracker rose also, putting down his cup, apologetic.
“But I was given to understand . . . a young lad named Zulfiqar . . .”
The colonel stalked to the window and stood, staring out, hands behind back. He quivered with suppressed anger, though at whom, visitor or son, Tracker could not tell.
“I repeat, sir, I have no son. And I fear I can help you no more.”
The silence was freezing. The American was clearly being asked to leave. He glanced across at the colonel’s wife.
The jade green eyes were flooded with tears. There was clearly a family trauma going on, and it had been going on for years.
Affecting a few bumbling apologies, the Tracker withdrew toward the door. The wife escorted him. As she held the door open, he whispered: “I am so sorry, lady, so terribly sorry.”
It was clear she spoke no English and probably no Arabic. But the word “sorry” is pretty international, and she might have picked up a smattering. She looked up, brimming-eyed, saw the sympathy and nodded. Then he was gone and the door closed.
He walked half a mile before emerging onto Airport Road and hailing a cab heading into town. At the hotel he called the cultural attaché from his room. If the call was monitored, which it would be, it would not matter.
“Hi, this is Dan Priest. I was just wondering whether you had tracked down that material on the traditional music of the Punjab and the tribal agencies?”
“I surely have,” said the CIA man.
“Great. I can make a good piece out of it. Can you drop it off for me at the Serena? Take tea in the lounge?”
“And why not, Dan. Seven o’clock suit you?”
“Terrific. See you then.”
Over tea that evening, the Tracker explained what he needed for the next day. It was to be Friday, the colonel would be going to the mosque for the prayers on the Muslim holy day. He would not dare miss out. But accompanying wives would not be required. This was not Camp Lejeune.
With the CIA man gone, he used the concierge to reserve himself passage on the Etihad evening departure for Qatar, connecting via British Airways for London.
The car was there the next morning when he settled up and emerged with his single bag. It was the usual nondescript car but with CD plates so it could not be entered or its inhabitants harassed.
At the wheel was a middle-aged white American with gray hair—a veteran embassy servant who had been driving this city long enough to know it intimately. With him was a young and junior State Department staffer who, at a language course back home, had chosen and mastered Pashto as his specialty. The Tracker climbed in the back and gave the address. They came down the ramp from the Serena, and their ISI tail slid in behind them.
At the end of the street containing Col. Ali Shah’s house they parked and waited until every male in the road had left for the mosque and Friday prayers. Only then did the Tracker order that he be dropped at the door.
It was again Mrs. Shah who answered. She at once appeared flustered and explained that her husband was not there. He would return in an hour, maybe more. She spoke in Pashto. The embassy man replied that the colonel had bade them wait for him. Uncertain that she had had no such instructions, she nevertheless let them in and took them to the sitting room. She hovered, embarrassed, but did not sit. Nor did she leave. The Tracker gestured to the armchair opposite his own.
“Please, Mrs. Shah, do not be alarmed to see me again. I came to apologize for yesterday. I did not mean to upset your husband. I brought a little gift to express my regrets.”
He placed the bottle of Black Label on the coffee table. It, too, had been in the car, as requested. She gave a nervous smile, as the translator interpreted, and sat down.
“I had no idea there had been a rift between father and son,” said the Tracker. “Such a tragedy. I had been told your lad—Zulfiqar, is it not?—was so talented, speaking English as well as Urdu and Pashto—which, of course, he must have learned from you.”
She nodded, and again tears welled in her eyes.
“Tell me, do you not somewhere have a picture of Zulfiqar, even when he was your little boy?”
A large drop emerged from each eye and ran down the cheek. No mother of a son quite forgets the once beautiful little boy she held on her lap. She nodded slowly.
“May I see it . . . please?”
She rose and left the room. Somewhere she had a secret hiding place and there she defied her husband by keeping a photo of her long-lost boy. When she came back, she was holding a single photo in a leather frame.
It was a graduation-day picture. There were two teenage boys in the frame, grinning happily at the camera. It was from the days before the conversion to Jihad, the carefree school-end days, a rolled baccalaureate scroll and harmless friendship. There was no need to ask which boy was which. The one on the left had luminous amber eyes. He handed back the photo.
“Joe,” said the Tracker quietly, “use your mobile to ask our driver to come knock on the door.”
“But he’ll be waiting outside.”
“Do as I ask, please.”
The junior staffer made the call. Mrs. Shah did not understand a word. A few seconds later, there was a sharp rap on the front door. Mrs. Shah looked alarmed. Not her husband; too early, and he would simply enter. No other visitors were expected. She rose, looked helplessly around, pulled open a drawer in the credenza by the wall and pushed the photo into it. The door knocker rapped again. She left the room.
The Tracker was across it in two strides. He removed the photo and snapped it twice with his iPhone. By the time Mrs. Shah returned with their puzzled driver, her older visitor was back in his chair, the younger one standing bewildered by him. The Tracker rose with a warm smile.
“Ah, time to go, I see. I have a plane to catch. I am so sorry to have missed your husband. Please give him my best regards and my apologies for upsetting him.”
This was all translated, and they saw themselves out. When they were gone, Mrs. Shah retrieved her precious photo and returned it to her secret place.
In the car to the airport, the Tracker expanded the picture and stared at it. He was not a cruel man and did not want to deceive the once-beautiful woman with the jade green eyes. But how, he mused, do you tell a mother still crying for her lost baby boy that you are going to hunt him down and kill him for the monster he has become?
Twenty hours later, he touched down at Washington Dulles.
• • •
The Tracker crouched in the tiny space available to him in the attic of the small house in Centerville and stared at the screen. Beside him, Ariel sat in front of his keyboard, as a pianist before his concert grand. He was in total control; through the equipment TOSA had donated him, the whole world was his.
His fingers flickered over the keys, and images came and went as he explained what he had done.
“Troll’s Internet traffic is coming out of here,” he said.
The images were from Google Earth, but he had
somehow enhanced them. From space, the watcher plunged downward like aerial daredevil Felix Baumgartner diving to Earth. The Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa filled the screen, then seemed to rush past his ears as the camera roared down and down. Eventually, it halted its insane dive, and he was staring at a roof; square, pale gray. There seemed to be a courtyard and a gate. Two vans were parked in the yard.
“He’s not in Yemen, as you might have thought, he’s in Somalia. This is Kismayo, on the coast at the southern end of the country,” said Ariel.
Tracker stared, fascinated. They had all been wrong—CIA, TOSA, Counter-Terrorism Center—to think their quarry had emigrated from Pakistan to Yemen. He had probably been there but had moved on to seek sanctuary not with the AQAP, the al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, but with the fanatics controlling AQHA. Al-Qaeda in the Horn of Africa, formerly called al-Shabaab, which controlled the southern half of Somalia, among the wildest countries in the world.
There was much to research. So far as he knew, Somalia, outside the guarded enclave surrounding the token capital Mogadishu, was virtually out of bounds since the slaughter of eighteen Rangers in the incident known as Black Hawk Down, which was die-stamped onto the American military memory—and not in a pleasant way.
If Somalia had any fame at all, it was for the pirates who for ten years had been hijacking ships off the coast and ransoming vessels, cargoes and crews for millions of dollars. But the pirates were in the north, in Puntland, a great and desolate wilderness peopled by clans and tribes that the Victorian explorer Sir Richard Burton had once termed “the most savage people in the world.”
Kismayo was in the deep south, two hundred miles north of the Kenyan border; in colonial days a thriving Italian trade center, now a teeming slum ruled by Jihadi fanatics more extreme than any others in Islam.
“Do you know what that building is?” he asked Ariel.
“No. A warehouse, a large shed, I don’t know. But that is where the Troll operates the fan base. That is where his computer is located.”
“Does he know you know?”
The young man smiled quietly.
“Oh, no. He never spotted me. He is still running the fan base. He would have shut down if he knew I was watching him.”
The Tracker backed out of the loft and eased himself down the ladder to the landing below. He would have it all transferred to TOSA. He would have a UAV, a drone, circling silently and invisibly over that shed within days, watching, listening for any cyberspace whisper, sensing body-heat movements, photographing comings and goings. It would transmit everything it saw in real time to screens at Air Force Base Creech, Nevada, or Tampa, Florida, and thence to TOSA. Meanwhile, there was much to do with what he had brought back from Islamabad.
• • •
The Tracker stared for hours at the photograph he had swiped from the picture treasured by Mrs. Ali Shah. He had had the laboratory enhance the quality until it was pin sharp. He looked at the two smiling faces and wondered where they were now. The one on the right was irrelevant. It was the boy with amber eyes whom he studied, as in World War Two General Montgomery had studied the face of Rommel, the German Desert Fox, trying to imagine what he would do next.
The boy in the photograph was seventeen. That was before he converted to ultra-Jihadism, before 9/11, before Quetta, before he walked out on his family and went to live with the killers of Lashkar-e-Taiba and the 313 Brigade and the Haqqani clan.
The experiences, the hatred, the inevitable killings witnessed, the harsh life in the mountains of the Tribal Agencies—all that would have aged the face of the laughing boy.
The Tracker sent a clear picture of the Preacher now, masked though he was, and the left-hand side of the picture from Islamabad to a very specialist unit. At the Criminal Justice Information Services, an FBI facility in Clarksburg, West Virginia, there is a laboratory that is expert in aging faces.
He asked them to give him a face—the face of now. Then he went to see Gray Fox.
The director of TOSA examined the evidence with approval. At last they had a name. They would soon have a face. They had a country, maybe even a city.
“Do you think he lives there, in that warehouse in Kismayo?” he asked.
“I doubt it. He has a paranoia about being elusive. I would bet he resides elsewhere, records his sermons in a single room with a camcorder, backed by a bedsheet-sized backdrop inscribed with the usual Koranic verses as we see on the screen, then lets his assistant, the one we now call the Troll, take it away and transmit it from Kismayo. He’s not in any trap yet, not by a long shot.”
“So what next?”
“I need a UAV over that warehouse on virtually permanent station. I’d ask for a low-flying mission to take side-on pictures of that building to see if there is a company name on it, except for one thing. I believe it would be a waste of time. But I have to identify who owns it.”
Gray Fox stared at the image from space. It was clear enough, but military technology would be able to count the rivets in the roof from 50,000 feet.
“I’ll get on to the drone boys. They have launch facilities in Kenya to the south, Ethiopia to the west, Djibouti to the north, and the CIA has a very covert unit inside the Mogadishu enclave. You’ll get your pictures. Now that you have his face, which he seems so keen to keep covered, and his name, are you going to blow his cover away?”
“Not yet. I have another idea.”
“Your call, Tracker. Go for it.”
“One last thing. I could ask, but the weight of J-SOC behind it would be helpful. Does the CIA or anyone else have a secret agent buried inside South Somalia?”
• • •
A week later, four things happened. Tracker had spent the time steeping himself in the tragic story of Somalia. Once, it had been three regions. French Somaliland in the far north was now Djibouti, still with a strong French influence, a resident Foreign Legion garrison and a huge American base whose rent was crucial to the economy. Also in the north, former British Somaliland was now just Somaliland, also quiet, peaceful, even democratic, but bizarrely unrecognized as a nation/state.
The bulk was former Italian Somaliland, confiscated after World War Two, administered for a while by the British and then given independence. After a few years of the usual dictatorship, the once thriving and elegant colony where wealthy Italians used to vacation had lapsed into civil war. Clan fought clan, tribe fought tribe, warlord after warlord sought supremacy. Finally, with Mogadishu and Kismayo just seas of rubble, the outside world had given up.
A belated notoriety had returned when the beggared fishermen of the north turned to piracy and the south to Islamic fanaticism. Al-Shabaab had arisen not as an offshoot but an ally of al-Qaeda and conquered all of the south. Mogadishu hovered as a fragile token capital of a corrupt regime living on aid but in an encircled enclave whose border was guarded by a mixed army of Kenyans, Ethiopians, Ugandans and Burundians.
Inside the wall of guns, foreign money poured into aid projects, and various spooks scuttled about pretending to be something else.
As the Tracker read, head in hands, or studied images on the plasma screen in his office, an RQ-4 Global Hawk took up station over Kismayo. It was not weaponized, for that was not the mission. It was known as a HALE version, for high altitude, long endurance.
It came out of the nearby Kenyan facility, where a few American soldiers and technicians sweltered in the tropical heat, resupplied by air and dwelling in air-conditioned housing units like a film crew on location. They had four Global Hawks and two were now airborne.
One had been aloft before the new request arrived. The job was watching the Kenya/Somali border and the offshore waters for raids and incursions over the border. The new order was to circle over a once commercial zone in Kismayo and watch a building. As the Hawks would have to spell each other, that meant all four were now operational.
The Global Hawk has an extraordinary “loiter time” of thirty-five hours. Being close to its base, it cou
ld circle above its target for thirty hours. At 60,000 feet, almost twice the height of an airliner, it could scan up to 40,000 square miles a day. Or it could narrow that beam to four square miles and zoom in for pin-sharp clarity.
The Hawk over Kismayo was equipped with synthetic-aperture radar, electro-optical and infrared for night and day, clear or cloud, operation. It could also “listen” to the tiniest transmission on the lowest possible power and “sniff” changing heat centers as humans moved about below. All intelligence gathered went straight to Nevada in a nanosecond.
The second thing that happened was the return of the pictures from Clarksburg. The technicians there had noticed that on the masked images off the TV, the fabric of the mask seemed to be slightly bulked out from the face beneath. They theorized there could be a full black beard under there. So they sent two alternates, with and without beard.
They had the creases across the forehead and those around the eyes to work on, so the updated face was markedly older. And hard. There was a cruelty about the mouth and jaw. The boy’s softness and merriment was gone.
Hardly had Tracker finished studying the new photos than a message came from Ariel.
“There seems to be a second computer in that building,” he said. “But it is not emitting the sermons. Whoever is on it, and I think it is the Troll, has acknowledged receipt with thanks. No indication of what. But someone else is communicating by e-mail with that building.”
And Gray Fox came back. A total negative. No one has any “asset” living among the al-Shabaab.
“The message seems to be: If you want to go into that hellhole, you’re on your own.”
6
He should have thought of it while he was in Islamabad and mentally kicked himself for the oversight. Javad, the CIA’s mole inside the ISI, had told him the young Zulfiqar Ali Shah had vanished off all radar screens by 2004 after disappearing into Lashkar-e-Taiba, the anti-Kashmir terror group.
Since then—nothing. But nothing under that name. It was only when staring at the face in his office that another line occurred to him. He asked the CIA to recontact Javad with a simple query: Did any of their agents inside the various terror groups along the deadly frontier hear mention of a terrorist with amber eyes?