the man. But he was already gone, walking briskly across the square, trying not to break into a run.
The six US Marines had been travelling all night and most of the day, bound, gagged and blindfolded. But now the 4x4 had come to a stop, giving their bruised bodies a brief respite. The vehicle’s suspension was shot through, and they had been driven over poor mountainous tracks. No one, though, was under any illusion about what lay ahead: if they had reached the end of their journey, they were close to the end of their lives.
They had expected to die the night before, when a group of Taleban insurgents had ambushed their radio reconnaissance unit on a notorious stretch of road near Gayan in Paktika, eastern Afghanistan. They should have been in Helmand with the rest of their Marine Expeditionary Force, but had been seconded to Paktika in a push to hunt down the local Pashtun warlord, Sirajuddin Haqqani. After a stand-off, waiting in vain for the air support they had called in, the Marines had stepped out from behind their disabled Hummer with their arms up, exhausted, expecting to be shot. But the Taleban had taken them prisoner. It was a high-risk strategy: the US response would be on an overwhelming scale. The AC-130 gunships, though, never showed, and the Taleban moved out quickly with their captives.
The rear and side doors of the 4x4 opened and two Taleban began to pull the Marines from the vehicle, grabbing the collars of their sweat-soaked fatigues. As their platoon commander, Lieutenant Randall Oaks knew he had to be strong, set an example for the others, but in truth he wished he had been shot the previous night. He thought of the videos of beheadings he had told himself not to watch before coming out to Afghanistan, the stories that had circulated in the camp when they had first flown in from North Carolina. It wasn’t good to be a prisoner of the Taleban.
Oaks could tell through his blindfold that the daylight was dying. It was cooler, too, compared to Gayan, where they had been ambushed, and he had been aware of gaining height during the long drive. If they were being taken to the mountains, maybe they could hope to live for a few more days. They would become bargaining chips, a way to buy some advantage in a war that neither side was ever going to win. But now he sensed another agenda.
None of their Taleban captors said anything as they pushed the Marines along a track. Oaks could hear the others stumbling, like him, on the rocky terrain, but there was one noise that was different. The Taleban were dragging someone along, a Marine who was too weak to walk. Oaks knew it was Lance Corporal Troy Murray. They were a tight-knit unit, had been ever since they had arrived five months earlier, but Murray had stood out for all the wrong reasons from the start. It wasn’t just the word ‘INFIDEL’ that he had had tattooed in big letters across his chest. He was physically the weakest and mentally a mess, unable to go out on patrol unless he had taken too many psychological meds. This was his fourth tour, and he should never have been sent.
One more month and they were due to return to Camp Lejeune. Their families’ banners would soon be up on the fencing that ran along Route 24 outside the base, joining the mile upon mile of ‘Missed you’ and ‘Welcome home’ messages that had become a part of the North Carolina landscape. It was a public patchwork of loss, each banner telling a private story, of missed births, heart-ache, lonely nights, enforced chastity.
Oaks remembered the first time he saw them, returning from his inaugural tour of Iraq. Envious cheers had gone up on the bus when Murray, in happier days, had seen his: ‘Get ready for a long de-briefing, stud muffin.’ And then he had seen his own, written in bright purple felt-tip on a big bedsheet, near the main gate: ‘Welcome Home Lieutenant Daddy. Just in time for the terrible twos.’ He was a family man now.
In recent days, the platoon had begun to brag about what they would do when they got home. Visit the clubs in Wilmington: The Whiskey, The Rox; shoot the breeze on Onslow Beach, listen out for the bell of the man selling snowballs. But there was only one thing now on Oaks’s list: to become a more loving husband, a less absent father. He would attend church every Sunday, every day if necessary. As an adult, he had never been religious, but in the past twenty-four hours he had prayed with a desperate intensity, trying in vain to remember the brief period in his childhood when he had fallen asleep in prayer, risen early to read the Bible at the kitchen table. Within the last hour, as his own elusive faith had slipped through his hands like desert sand, he had even attempted to address other people’s gods, too, explaining, apologising, beseeching.
The group was being herded into what felt like a small farm outbuilding. The few outdoor sounds – faint wind, distant birdsong – were partly muffled, but not entirely. It was as if they were surrounded by walls, but were still outside. Above their heads, Oaks thought he could hear the sound of a canopy flapping. Before he could think any more about their location, he was pushed down to the dry floor, his back up against an uneven wall. The gag in his mouth was peeled up and a bottle of water put to his chafed lips. He drank deeply until the bottle was pulled away, his gag replaced. It was not as tight as it had been, though, and Oaks began at once to work his jaw, keeping it moving.
The removal of his sight had heightened his other senses. He knew there were two Taleban with them. One was administering the water, but what was the other doing? He listened above the delirious moaning of Murray, who sounded barely conscious. There was the click of a case and the sound of something metallic being placed high up on a wall, on a windowsill perhaps. Was it an Improvised Explosive Device, set to be triggered by their movement? There was silence again. The two Taleban were leaving them. There were more muffled moans from the men, sounds of primitive despair as they dug their boot heels deep into the mud.
Oaks heard the 4x4 start up outside. He was expecting some wheelspin, a triumphant circling of the prisoners before it roared off. But the vehicle just drove back down the track, as casually as his father’s station wagon when he used to leave for work, until the sound of its engine was lost in the stillness of the night. That slowness terrified him. It was too calm, too rehearsed, indicative of a bigger plan.
Ten, maybe fifteen minutes later, his thoughts were interrupted by the sound of someone speaking Urdu, coming from close by. Oaks’s tired brain struggled to work out what was happening, whether he was hallucinating. He tried to focus on the name the man had given when he first spoke. It hung in the air above them like a paper kite, nagging at Oaks’s mind as it bobbed in the evening breeze: Salim.
This was the moment Omar Rashid had been trained for, but he had never actually expected it to happen, not to him. But there it was, an unambiguous flashing light on his console. He knew his life would never be the same again. He was just a junior analyst on the SIGINT graveyard shift, always had been, ever since he’d signed up to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade in Maryland. And that was exactly how he liked it. Success happened to the ambitious, to the hungry. Rashid was more than happy to draw his modest salary and listen through the night to the regional traffic, before heading home to his basement apartment in Baltimore. He enjoyed his work, but it wasn’t loyalty to the NSA that drove him.
A few hours earlier, he had tuned in to a pro-Western Pakistani politician and his wife arguing on a phone in Lahore. Later, when the husband had returned to his home in a wealthy suburb, he had listened to them making love, too, thanks to a wire installed in the bedroom by the ISI, Pakistan’s main intelligence agency. The ISI was unaware that its heavily encrypted surveillance frequencies had been breached, but Rashid didn’t concern himself about that. Just as he tried not to dwell on the pleasure he derived from such interceptions, known as ‘vinegar strokes’ among the nightshift analysts. He had feigned indifference when he handed in his transcript to the line manager, but it was a gift, and he hoped she would enjoy it later. Didn’t everyone at SIGINT City?
This, though, was different. The flashing light was an Echelon Level Five alert, triggered by a keyword integral to one of Fort Meade’s biggest-ever manhunts. Rashid’s able mind worked fast. Despite Echelon’s best efforts, it was impossible for the West to monitor more than a fraction of the world’s phone calls and emails in real time. Most of the daily ‘take’ was recorded