Elephants can't hide forever Read online

  “Fucking hell” Mike said, trying to catch his breath and assess the damage, “That’s Bin Laden gone, did you see if the others made ground?” he enquired of Jock.

  “Nope” replied Jock, his eyes darting around the surrounding area constantly, “It was too bright and too quick, how the hell did that happen, where did those fuckers come from?” he asked.

  “Fuck knows,” replied Mike, “and at this time I don’t give a shit, but they were waiting and this was an eyes only operation, so someone’s got a big problem back home, but we’ve got a bigger problem right here so let’s stay focused on getting out of these mountains alive” he said.

  “What about the other two?” asked Jock.

  “You know the procedure,” Mike said. “We’re in a hostile land, separated from them with no means of contact, we still have evidence from the house back in Gandamak that we need to get delivered, so if we see them, fine, but our immediate priority is to get somewhere safer. We don’t know how many hostiles are still out there or what fire power they’re holding, so we’re going to crawl out of here the way we came until we can circle around this area and head north on foot.”

  Jock wanted to remonstrate with Mike, but he knew Mike was right; it was every man for himself in a situation as fraught as this. Jesus, it was hardly going to be a walk in the park getting out of these badlands as it was.

  As Mike and Jock began the painfully slow crawl to engineer some distance between themselves and the bad guys, Mike had that uneasy feeling return, but this time with good justification. He motioned to Jock with a closed fist, which was a battlefield gesture to stop.

  “Jock” he said “Where the fuck are the bad guys? They had us bang to rights, even if we made our ground they could have flattened the entire area with the ordinance they’ve got.”

  “I was wondering that myself, Boss” Jock whispered. “But right now I don’t give a toss. If we get out of here I’ll kiss Allah’s arse and answer that question then.”

  “Fair enough” came the reply.

  As the sun rose to the east, Mike and Jock continued to slither between the rocks and grassy knolls, trying to distance themselves from the devastating scene of a few hours earlier; they had covered no more than fifty meters in the three hours since the ambush.

  Standing high above them was the leader of the tribesmen and forty followers. The leader had been observing their progress through his night vision goggles initially, and as dawn had broken, he had reverted to normal vision. His eyes were trained to spot a small animal at fifty meters in this hostile environment, so observing Mike and Jock was no problem.

  “Just as we were instructed,” he said to the man to his immediate left. “Two to escape and two to die.”

  “Allah has looked favourably on us this night” came the reply.

  “Tell the men they will get their Yankee dollars, and then take the jeep back to the border and inform our friends all has gone to plan” instructed the commander, and with that he turned to the rear of ledge he and his men had occupied since the fire fight. Lying semi-conscious, bleeding, bruised and battered, were two members of Britain’s elite Special Forces, the SAS.

  With a malevolent smirk the leader of the guerrillas addressed them in his native tongue: “Two of you go and two of you stay, and you my friends stay, whoever your God is, give him my regards,” and with that he withdrew his pistol and at point blank range discharged a single round into the forehead of each man. Davey and the Badger died, thankfully instantaneously.

  Chapter 18

  Century House, 4 weeks later

  You would think that the clandestine operations involved in the security of the United Kingdom would be housed away from the public at large, and hidden in a remote Scottish Glen or some where else of that ilk, but nothing could be farther from the truth. The Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as M15, or The Firm, occupied the building at 85 Albert Embankment, Vauxhall Cross, London. Just to make sure it was unmissable it was nicknamed Lego Land by those in the know, and to take one look at the building is to understand why. In recent years the building has featured in no less than three James Bond films, and on September 20th 2000 the eight floor was severely damaged by a Russian RPG-22 anti-tank missile launched somewhere behind Westminster Bridge Road. The Real IRA was held accountable.

  It was rumoured that when the building had been constructed, a tunnel under the Thames linking Lego Land with Whitehall was incorporated to allow the comings and goings of senior politicians in times of state emergencies.

  It was on this late February morning that the Prime Minister Tony Blair had availed himself of the rumoured tunnel, and walked under the river and into the cellars of Century House, where he was met by two ex marines who courteously escorted him to the 9th floor.

  The current Chief of Operations, Sir Richard Dearlove, was sitting at the head of a large rosewood table, with four colleagues, two either side.

  “Good Morning, Prime Minister” he said measurably.

  “Morning, Richard” replied the PM with his normal and public chirpiness, “I must say, since I got the news, little else has been on my mind.”

  I bet there hasn’t, thought Sir Richard, if you can take the credit for the end of the greatest terrorist threat to the West in the history of mankind you’ll probably get a statue in Admiralty Gate, but these thoughts he kept to himself, instead he offered introductions of the four people around the table: “To my right is Dr David Davies. David heads up the team at the Home Office Pathology and Forensic laboratories at Porton Down, it’s David who has been assessing the artefacts that came out of the house in Gandamak.” The two men shook hands, the PM still beaming, hoping to put the assembled party at ease. Sir Richard continued: “Next to David is Major Sebastian Morley, who heads up the team down in Hereford. I believe you already know each other.” The PM gave Major Morley a conspiratorial wink, which was a little unsettling for the Major considering the subject matter.

  “Next” Sir Richard continued, “is John Smith, Head of Counter Intelligence, and based down at the establishment in Hampshire. John and his team have been chatting with the two troopers that made it out of Pakistan, and brought home the bacon that David has been cooking.” For the first time that morning the PM shook the hand of John Smith, but without his normal familiarity, he knew what John Smith did, he certainly didn’t approve, but he was also pragmatic enough to understand that when it came to the defence of the realm there were occasions that warranted the use of such people and their methods. In bygone times John Smith would have been known as the Witchfinder General, extracting confessions from poor souls before burning them at the stake. He would have been interrogating the troopers mercilessly since they arrived back to the safety of Blighty.

  “And last. But by no means least,” continued Sir Richard, “Sally Dixon. Sally has been seconded from GCHQ to help with translations that may be needed, Sally is one of our Bright Young Stars, and coincidentally, Prime Minister, she was actually the one who was first to pick up the original transmission from Afghanistan.” The PM had his beaming face back on, he was comfortable with Bright Young Things, especially women.

  “I’m delighted to meet you Sally” he said congenially.

  The Prime Minister took a chair at the far end of the table, everyone else followed suit and Sir Richard started procedures. “Right Prime Minister, we will start at the beginning, everyone in this room knows their own piece in this matter, so it will be advantageous that we all have a clear picture of events as they unfolded.”

  “Agreed” said the PM

  Agreed thought Sally, but just sat waiting her turn, expressionless.

  “Right then” said Sir Richard, “Major Morley, if you would be so kind.”

  “You are all aware of the circumstances that bring us together today,” the Major began. “As you know, we inserted a specialised team into Afghanistan, following the information our friends at GCHQ collated.” He smiled at Sally and continued, “It had to be a bl
ack operation on a strictly need to know basis, the potential rewards were the likely collapse of Al-Qaeda as a potential threat to the West for many years to come. I used four of my top tactical mountain cadre, and the mission was led by the most experienced man we have at Hereford, no one in the history of the service has extracted more hostages and prisoners from behind enemy lines than Mike Tobin.” No one spoke; they were all waiting for the Major’s take on what went wrong,

  He continued: “The mission was so secret there were no means of tracking the troop, once they were inserted into Afghanistan they were on their own, and if they had been captured we would have denied their existence, at worst we would have claimed they had gone rogue and turned Bounty Hunters for the twenty five million dollar reward on Bin Laden’s head. There was a prearranged signal that was to be fired off if the mission was successful, this duly occurred five weeks after the insertion, it meant they had the quarry and were inside Pakistan within two hours of a RV point.”

  “Go on,” said the PM, frowning.

  “So our first communication with the troop comes after nothing for over a month, we launch a plane to collect them from a small plateau inside Pakistan but deep in the Mountains, even the Pilot is not given the co-ordinates until he’s airborne, then what happens is nothing, absolutely nothing. We’ve got a Hercules ticking over on the tarmac at Islamabad, air traffic control ready to land the rescue plane right up to the Hercules, a virtual shutdown of the entire airport until we get them in and out, but nothing shows.”

  Major Morley took a long drink of water, then continued: “Of course we can’t ask the Cousins (a colloquial name for American military and secret service) if they’ve picked any thing up, they’re still happily systematically rearranging the landscape of the Tora Bora Mountains, blissfully unaware what we’re up to. So after the deadline has passed, we have to assume the plane has either crash landed in the pick up zone or flown into the side of a mountain, either before or after the pick up. At this point our friends at Cheltenham are able to divert a satellite over the area, plus we get an AWAC airborne, but that’s as much as we can do without alerting the Cousins we’ve got some sort of operation going down in the area. Anyhow the AWAC has picked up the wreckage of the plane, and I mean wreckage, it didn’t take long to realise that the recovery plane had suffered a direct hit from a SAM, we then had the AWAC produce a satellite photograph of the entire area within a five kilometre radius, and we picked up the burnt out shell of a car, plus several bodies, no doubt about what happened the boys were ambushed, and I don’t mean they were unlucky and stumbled on a local posse of bad guys, I mean these people were waiting for them.”

  “What happened next? asked the PM.

  “As far as we are concerned, that’s the end of it,” said Major Morley. “We’ve posted our people Missing in Action and informed the relatives they were lost on a training exercise in Norway. Then after three weeks, right out of the blue, we get a call from British Consulate in Islamabad who informs us two very emaciated vagrants were seeking asylum but refusing to answer any questions until they had spoken to me directly, any where else in the world they would have been chucked out on their ears, but this being Pakistan the consulate thought he had better check with me, and from there it didn’t take long to establish it was indeed Mike Tobin and Jock Wallace. They had walked through the Mountains and into Islamabad, it took them over three weeks and, quite honestly, it was one of the most incredible feats of endurance I’ve come across in all my years in the SAS.”

  “So much so,” said Sir Richard, “that we were not comfortable with their story, to walk out of that hostile environment is in itself damn near impossible, but presumably they were also being hunted by the insurgents that ambushed them and needed to take extra precautions. Furthermore, how did they even walk away from an ambush in an alien environment, one which the attackers lived and breathed in? Surely if the bandits were able to take out a plane, they could have eliminated the squad with considerable ease, it just didn’t fit whichever way we looked at it. They did carry out several documents and maps from the house in Gandamak which David will talk about shortly, but apart from that we were deeply suspicious that somewhere down the piece they had sold out.”

  “So what did you do?” enquired the PM.

  “We kept them out of sight, separated them, got them on the next flight to Brize Norton, and then sent them down to our Training establishment in Hampshire where John, here de-briefed them.”

  The Prime Minister was not looking forward to what John Smith had to say, and hoped he would be spared the details of the “de-brief.”

  As a highly trained counter espionage officer, John Smith was trained to read people’s minds by their body language and general demeanour, and it was right to show some deference towards the Prime Minister of Great Britain.

  “The two soldiers in question,” he began, “Mike Tobin and Jock Wallace, are two highly skilled Special Forces operators; both of them have been on several black missions previously and have always proved their loyalty and commitment beyond reproach. If they have been turned or just gone native it was always going to be exceptionally difficult to get either one to confess, they have both been through all the interrogation techniques, and how to avoid talking, many times in their history with the Unit. However, as much as we train these soldiers to resist the modern art of interrogation, we are aware that there are occasions when the toughest of men will turn renegade, and so we have certain methods, developed and refined over many years, which even our most trusted personnel, be they soldiers or field operators from the security service, do not know how to resist. There is no need for me to explain what we do, only to inform you of the result. The soldier in charge on the ground, Mike Tobin, is a highly skilled operative, he told us of easy passage through the border on the way out, he said it had been nagging him right through the long walk out of Pakistan, he even told us he couldn’t understand how they had managed to evade capture, at the very least, at the ambush. At a certain point in the interview we informed him of the death of his two colleagues, his reaction showed us he suspected they had not made it and that was right, so all in all, gentlemen and lady, we have concluded that Mike Tobin and Jock Wallace have told us the entire truth as they see it, and I would like to say they are two lucky people to be alive today but I can’t.”

  “What do you mean?” enquired the PM.

  “Well, Sir,” continued John Smith “There is nothing conclusive to suggest otherwise but like Tobin, myself and members of my team spend our entire waking hours questioning peoples motives, their actions and their logic. We are continuously looking for the slightest flaw in our subjects that may denote a potential lie or even a half truth, we are suspicious by nature, and by training we have to read hidden meanings into everything we investigate, and if by distrusting everyone we save one life we have done our job. It is without foundation, but nevertheless my belief, that somehow this whole Bin Laden situation has been a set up and we walked right in. In a nutshell I suspect we have a leak”

  There was silence in the room, for several seconds; Sally Dixon went as pale as death, she nearly gagged and if she had been asked to talk next would not have been able to. She looked at John Smith and the thought of having a little chat with him down on the Farm in Hampshire nearly caused her to pass out there and then.

  “So,” Sir Richard said after several long silent moments “Let’s hear what David has to tell us.”

  David Evans was a typical boffin- bespectacled, overweight and with a generally scruffy appearance, sweating profusely in the presence of the number one citizen of the country, but always comfortable on his subject matter. He began:

  “I have examined all the items the soldiers brought out of Afghanistan, and we have traced the paper certain articles were written on, we have traced the DNA that was abundant, and we have taken finger prints. We have translated the writings through Sally, we have tracked the dust particles that were present and we have traced the source of th
e ink that was used in the writings of the documents that were brought back. We have analysed the evidence more extensively than anything we have ever done before, and I can say without a shadow of a doubt the person in that room was Osama Bin Laden”

  Sir Richard and John Smith exchanged glances, and it was Sir Richard, head of the British Secret Service, who spoke.

  David,” he said very slowly “The man in the house in Gandamak was surrounded by all the evidence you have confirmed as belonging to Bin Laden, and no doubt it does, but what evidence do you have that the paperwork that was in the same room was in any way processed by this man, or putting it another way, what direct evidence have you obtained from the man we originally believed to be Bin Laden?”

  David Davies starred into the piecing blue eyes of Sir Richard Dearlove for a very long time, at some point he realised all eyes were on him and he needed to reply to the Boss.

  “None, Sir” was his answer.

  “Thank you David” said Sir Richard “Now have you anything to add Sally?” he enquired.

  Sally Dixon’s day was disintegrating whilst she stood by watching British Intelligence begin to unravel the plot she had been complicit with. She had regained her composure from the initial shock of hearing there was suspicion that it was a hoax. Before the meeting started she was clear in her mind that her job would be to confirm that all the manuscripts found were of course the work of Bin Laden; as a student of Language she knew all written work carried its author’s signature just as significantly as all the finger prints and the DNA David Davies had found. However she quickly needed to change tack.

  “It is my opinion, Sir, that the translations that I was asked to do on the various pieces of work I was given bore a startling resemblance to that of previous works by Mr Bin Laden, and I would say they were almost definitely written by him,” she stated, and very pleased with herself too, she felt a lot better. What she or any one else in the room failed to spot was the lightning quick glance Sir Richard and John Smith exchanged as Sally finished speaking.