I Am Pilgrim (17 page)

deeply devout Muslim.

The teenager nodded, and Khan told him that there was a religious scholar, a former
mujahideen

commander who had lost an eye in battle, who was setting up his own elite
madrassah
in the city of Kandahar. His students were all former fighters and, if the Saracen wished to study Islam in all its glory, then Governor Abdul Khan would be happy to meet the cost.

The Saracen, sipping from his steel cup and dragging on one of the governor ’s American cigarettes, had heard of Mullah Omar and his group of Taliban – the Arabic word for a person seeking religious knowledge – and, though he was flattered by the governor ’s offer, he shook his head. ‘I’m going home, to the country where I was born,’ he said.

‘To Jeddah?’ the governor asked, unable to mask his sharp surprise. On other nights, around other

fires, he had heard men tell the story of the execution that had started the youth on his long road to jihad.

‘No, Riyadh,’ he said, and the governor guessed now what he was talking about. Riyadh was the Saudi Arabian capital, the ruling seat of the king and the House of Saud. ‘You’ve heard what they did to my father?’ the young man asked, watching the older man’s deep-set eyes.

‘Men have spoken of it,’ the warlord replied quietly.

‘So you understand – I go to start the work of revenge.’

It was said without rancour or emotion, purely as a matter of fact. Even so, if most young men had said such a thing the governor would have laughed and offered them another one of his fine cigarettes. But most youths had never faced a Soviet Hind helicopter gunship in full rampage, not once, not even in their worst nightmares. Watching the Saracen, the governor wondered, not for the

first time, if he himself could have found the courage – armed with nothing more than a Blowpipe –

to have done it. Like everybody else in Afghanistan, he knew the missile was one of the worst pieces of shit ever invented, almost guaranteed to result in the death of anyone unfortunate enough to use it.

Shoulder-fired, the four-foot missile used a manual-guidance system: in other words, you fired the

missile and then used a joystick on a small radio box to steer it to the target. As if that wasn’t dangerous enough, the missile made such a bright flash at launch that the intended victim, usually a helicopter, invariably saw it coming.

Immediately, the crew on board would turn the craft, bringing their multi-barrelled machine guns

and fifty-calibre cannons to bear. Firing a hailstorm of metal, the pilot would try to annihilate the operator and his joystick before he could steer the missile home.

To be seventeen years old, alone, with no parent to bury you let alone protect you, to stand at sunset on a mountain scree in Afghanistan with only the long shadows to hide you, with shards of rock and

bullets blasting past as hardened airmen unleash the dogs of hell, to stand in the eye of a twister with the world whirling and disintegrating all around, to hear the deafening roar of rotors and engines, the scream of machine gun and cannon as it approaches fast, to hold your ground, never to run or flinch

and to work a joystick in the face of onrushing death, to count the endless seconds for a horse of the apocalypse to turn away in fear, to twist the stick and guide the warhead into the soft underbelly of its engine and feel the heat of the explosion then smell the death and burning flesh and realize suddenly it wasn’t your own, not this time anyway – well, there are not many men who can do that.

Three times the Saracen played one of the deadliest games of chicken ever known, and three times

he won. Lord Abdul Khan would never laugh at anything such a young man said.

‘Stay,’ the warlord told him quietly. ‘The Saudis will arrest you the moment you arrive. With your

name and a history of
jihad
you won’t get past the border.’

‘I know,’ the Saracen replied, pouring them both more tea. ‘When I leave I go to Quetta – a thousand dollars in the arms bazaar there buys a passport in any name you want.’

‘Maybe – but be careful, most Pakistani forgers are shit. What nationality will you take?’

‘I don’t care, anything that’ll get me into Lebanon. There’s a medical school in Beirut that’s one of the best.’

Abdul Khan paused. ‘You’re going to study to be a doctor?’

He nodded. ‘If I’m no longer a Saudi, how else can I return to my country and live there?’ he said.

‘It’s closed to foreigners but not to doctors – a foreign Muslim with a good medical degree is guaranteed a visa. It has one other advantage. The Mabahith won’t spend time monitoring a doctor.

They’re supposed to save lives, aren’t they?’

Abdul Khan smiled but just kept looking at him. ‘It’ll take years,’ he said finally.

‘A lifetime maybe.’ The Saracen smiled back. ‘But I have no choice, I owe it to my father. I think

that’s why God kept me safe on the mountain – to destroy the House of Saud.’

The governor sat in silence for a long while – he had never thought the young fighter could do anything that would impress him more than facing down the Hinds. He had been wrong.

He swirled the tea in his cup and finally raised it in salute – he knew more about revenge than most men. ‘To Saudi Arabia and vengeance then,’ he said. ‘
Insha’Allah
.’

‘
Insha’Allah
,’ the Saracen replied.
God willing
. And for close to fifteen years that was the last word that passed between them; the governor and his escort left at dawn the next morning. Three weeks later, though, after the foreign fighters had struck their camp and were waiting for the last snowstorm of the year to pass, two of the governor ’s young nephews dragged themselves into the village.

They had been forced to turn their mounts loose in the blizzard and, while the horses made their

way down to safer ground, the two youths climbed on through the storm. Unannounced, completely

unexpected, they brought a small oilskin package with them for the Saracen, the legendary mujahideen who was only a little older than they were.

Alone in the kitchen with him, they waited while he signed for its contents. Inside was a Lebanese

passport in a false name – not some bad fake bought in the bazaar in Quetta but a genuine book with

every detail properly registered, traded by a corrupt Lebanese Embassy employee in Islamabad, the

Pakistani capital, for ten thousand US, cash.

Equally importantly, it contained visas and permits that showed that the bearer had entered from India three years earlier in order to gain his high-school diploma from a respected international school. Tucked in the back was four thousand US dollars in well-used bills. There was no letter or explanation, there didn’t need to be: it was like a properly maintained AK-47, a gift from one warrior whose war had finished to another whose campaign had just begun.

With the spring melt starting, the Saracen started his long trek out of Afghanistan. As he walked the back roads, the signs of the war ’s destruction were everywhere: towns laid to waste, devastated fields, bodies in ditches. But already families were planting the most lucrative of all cash crops – opium poppies. As he neared the Pakistani border he met the first of five million refugees returning to their homes, and from then on he swam against a rising tide of humanity.

At the border all semblance of control had collapsed and, unnoticed, he crossed out of Afghanistan

late on a cloudless afternoon – a young man with a fake past, a false identity and a real passport. No wonder, when the time came, it took me so long to find him. As I said – he was a ghost.

Chapter Seven

THE SARACEN MADE it down to Karachi by the first blast of the monsoon. The huge city sprawls along

the Arabian Sea, and he used a few of his dollars to buy sleeping space on the deck of an old freighter heading out to Dubai. From there, a dozen airlines fly directly to Beirut and, a week later, the passport fulfilled all its expensive promise when he passed unchallenged through Lebanese immigration.

Beirut was a disaster story in itself, half of it in ruins and most of its population wounded or exhausted. But that suited the Saracen – the country was recovering from fifteen years of civil war, and a rootless man had no trouble passing for a native in a city full of shattered lives.

He had always been a good student and, with six months’ hard work, helped by tutors he met at the

city’s most radical and intellectual mosque, he easily passed the next sitting of the college entrance exam. Like most students, the high cost of tuition was a problem, but fortunately he found a State Department scholarship programme which was aimed at rebuilding the nation and fostering

democracy. The staff at the US Embassy even helped him fill in the forms.

Flush with US aid money, the Saracen devoted the long days – interrupted only by prayer and simple meals – to the study of medicine; the nights to terror and revolution. He read all the big ones –

Mao, Che, Lenin – and attended discussions and lectures by wild pan-Arab nationalists, Palestinian warmongers and several men who could best be described as Islamic cave dwellers. One of them, on

a fund-raising visit, was forming an organization which translated as ‘the law’ or ‘the base’ – al-Qaeda in Arabic. The Saracen had heard of this tall sheikh, a fellow Saudi, while he was fighting in Afghanistan but, unlike everybody else in the mosque that day, he made no attempt to impress Osama

bin Laden with fiery rhetoric – proof yet again that the quietest man in the room is usually the most dangerous.

It was at another of these discussion groups, this one so small it was held in a dingy room normally used by the university’s stamp club, that he encountered an idea that would change his life. Ours, too, I’m sad to say. Ironically – because the guest speaker was a woman – he almost didn’t attend. She gave her name as Amina Ebadi – although that was probably an alias – and she was a political organizer in the huge Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza, home to over a hundred and forty thousand Palestinian refugees, one of the most deprived and radical square miles on earth.

The subject of her talk was the humanitarian crisis in the camp, and a grand total of ten people showed up. But she was so accustomed to swimming against the tide of international indifference it

didn’t worry her – one day, somebody would hear her, and that person would change everything.

It was a brutally hot night and, in the midst of her address, she paused and took off her half-veil.

‘There are so few of us, I feel like I’m among family,’ she said, smiling. None of the tiny audience objected and, even if the Saracen had been inclined to do so, it took him long enough to recover from the sight of her face that the opportunity was lost.

With only her serious voice to go by, he had drawn up a mental picture of her that was completely

at variance with her large eyes, expressive mouth and flawless skin. Her tightly pulled-back hair lent her a boyish quality and while, individually, her features were far too irregular to be considered attractive, when she smiled everything seemed to coalesce and nobody could have ever convinced the

Saracen that she wasn’t beautiful.

Although she was about five years his senior, there was something – the shape of her eyes, her hunger for life – that reminded him of the elder of his sisters. He hadn’t had any contact with his

family since the day he had left Bahrain, and a sharp wave of homesickness suddenly hit him.

By the time he had ridden it out, the woman was saying something about ‘the near enemies’.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Could you repeat that?’

She turned her large eyes on the self-possessed young man, the one somebody had told her was a

deeply devout medical student but who she guessed from the weather-beaten face was almost certainly

a returned
jihad
warrior. She knew the type – the Jabalia camp was full of
muj
veterans.

Addressing him with the great respect he deserved, she said that nearly all the Arab world’s problems were caused by what could be called their near enemies: Israel, of course; the ruthless dictatorships scattered throughout the region; the corrupt feudal monarchies like Saudi Arabia who were in the pocket of the West.

‘I hear all the time that if our near enemies are destroyed then most of the problems would be solved. I don’t think it’s possible – the near enemies are too ruthless, too happy to oppress and kill us.

‘But they only survive and prosper because they are supported by the “far enemy”. A few forward

thinkers – wise people – say that if you can defeat the far enemy, all the near enemies will collapse.’

‘That’s what I like about theories,’ the medical student replied, ‘they always work. It’s different if you have to try to implement them. Is it even possible to destroy a country as powerful as America?’

She smiled. ‘As I’m sure you know, the
jihadists
broke the back of an equally powerful nation in Afghanistan.’

The Saracen walked the five miles home in turmoil. He had never had a clear idea of how to bring

down the House of Saud, and he had to admit there was a reason why all Saudi dissidents were based

overseas: those who lived or travelled inside its borders were invariably informed upon and eliminated. Look at what had happened to his father. But never to enter the country and yet force the collapse of the Saudi monarchy by inflicting a grievous wound on the far enemy – well, that was a