Spider Shepherd 11 - White Lies by Stephen Leather Read Free Book Online Page A

Muhammad was his prophet. Hammad knew the Qur’an by heart and his favourite verse was ‘I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them’.
    Hammad fervently believed that Muslims who didn’t join the fight against the infidel were hypocrites that Allah would surely send to Hell. He had joined the Taliban as a teenager and six years later had cheered and praised Allah when the Twin Towers had been attacked and destroyed. Like many of his compatriots he had gone to ground when the Americans had invaded Afghanistan, dumping his weapons and passing as a struggling farmer until the Americans had decided to rebuild the Afghan army. Hammad had joined using a false name and had been trained by the Third Special Forces Group in a Soviet-built camp on the eastern side of Kabul. In 2004 he was promoted to captain and three months later he left his barracks with an M-16 and half a dozen grenades and killed three Americans and twenty-three Afghan soldiers before disappearing over the border into the badlands of Pakistan.
    He was a short, stocky man, his skin dark brown and leathery from a lifetime lived mainly outdoors. There was a jagged scar on his left cheek, a hearing aid in his left ear and he was missing two fingers on his left hand, the result of an improvised IED exploding prematurely. He was wearing a grey salwar kameez – a long shirt over baggy trousers that flapped in the wind and stirred up the dust around his sandals. On the table in front of him was a ground-to-air missile and standing around him were six men, all in their twenties, who were hanging on his every word. They had been up since dawn. After a breakfast of circular sweet flatbreads, dried apricots, yogurt and green tea flavoured with cardamom, the men had been taken for a two-kilometre run followed by an hour of physical exercises and unarmed combat training.
    Three of them were wearing salwar kameez and one was wearing an ankle-length thawb of rough cotton. The other two wore combat trousers, T-shirts and Nike trainers. There was no dress code at the training camp, it was the quality of the men that mattered, not their clothing. At just before midday they had all retreated to a goatherd’s cottage. An American spy satellite was due to pass overhead and would be photographing the area for at least twenty minutes before it passed out of range. Hammad had a notebook that contained the dates and times that satellites passed overhead and several times each day training had to be interrupted. There was now a five-hour window before the next satellite was due and Hammad planned to use the time to introduce the young jihadists to the ground-to-air-missile that was central to al-Qaeda’s plan to unleash havoc in the United Kingdom.
    The missile had been delivered in the back of an old pick-up truck, packed in a wooden crate. Now it sat on a wooden trestle table. It was a practice model, coloured blue. The live version was green, but it would be some time before the jihadists would be shown the real thing. It was a little over five feet long, the firing unit at the front with most of the barrel behind it. Hammad let the jihadists stare at the weapon for more than a minute. One of them, overweight and dark skinned, said something to the man on his left. The other man laughed and replied but Hammad had no idea what they were saying. They both had Bangladeshi parents but had been born in Glasgow and had accents so impenetrable that whenever possible he tried to avoid talking to them. They were both wearing ill-fitting salwar kameez. The fat one – his name was Sami – had a knitted Muslim cap on his head, and his chest strained at the material of his shirt. The other, Labib, was always pulling up his trousers as if he feared they were about to drop around his knees.
    Labib reached out to touch the missile but then pulled his hand back as if he feared it would somehow hurt him. Hammad