The Afghan by Frederick Forsyth Read Free Book Online Page B

away. The CIA naming process that month was using fish; the computer chose Stingray, so Project Stingray it became.
    The last sheet in the file had been added during Saturday night. It was brief and short. It came from the hand of a man who disliked wasting words, one of the six principals, the Director of National Intelligence. Clearly the file out of Fort Meade had gone straight to the National Security Committee (Steve Hadley), to the DNI and to the White House. Marek Gumienny imagined there would have been lights burning late in the Oval Office.
    The final sheet was on the DNI’s personal headed paper. It said in capital letters:
    WHAT IS AL-ISRA?
    IS IT NUCLEAR, BIOLOGICAL, CHEMICAL, CONVENTIONAL?
    FIND OUT WHAT, WHEN AND WHERE.
    TIMESCALE: NOW
    RESTRAINTS: NONE
    POWERS: ABSOLUTE
    JOHN NEGROPONTE
    There was a scrawled signature. There are nineteen primary intelligence-gathering and archive-storing agencies in the USA. The letter in Marek Gumienny’s hand gave him authority over them all. He ran his eye back to the top of the sheet. It was addressed to him personally. There was a tap on the door.
    A young GS4 stood there with yet another delivery. General Schedule is simply a salary scale, a 4 means a very junior staffer. Gumienny gave the young man an encouraging smile; he had clearly never been this high up the building before. Gumienny held out his hand, signed the clipboard to confirm receipt and waited until he was alone again.
    The new file was a courtesy from the colleagues at Fort Meade. It was a transcript of a conversation held by two of the Koran eggheads in the car on the way back to Washington. One of them was British. It was his last line that someone at Fort Meade had underlined with a brace of question marks in red ink.
    During his time in the Middle East Marek Gumienny had had much to do with the British and, unlike some of his fellow countrymen who had been trying to cope with the hellhole of Iraq for three years, he was not too proud to admit the CIA’s closest allies in what Kipling once called the Great Game were a repository of much arcane knowledge of the badlands between the Jordan River and the Hindu Kush.
    For a century and a half, either as soldiers or administrators of the old empire, or as eccentric explorers, the British had been trudging over desert, mountain range and goat-pen in the zone that had now become the intelligence time bomb of the world. The British code-named the CIA ‘the Cousins’ or ‘the Company’; the Americans called the London-based Secret Intelligence Service ‘the Friends’ or ‘the Firm’. For Marek Gumienny one of those friends was a man he had shared good times, not-so-good times and downright dangerous times with when they were both field agents. Now he was pinned to a desk in Langley and Steve Hill had been pulled out of the field and elevated to Controller Middle East at the Firm’s Vauxhall Cross headquarters.
    Gumienny decided a conference would do no harm and might yield some good. There was no security problem. The Brits, he knew, would have just about everything he had. They too had transmitted the guts of the laptop from Peshawar to their own listening and cryptography HQ at Cheltenham. They too would have printed out its contents. They too would have analysed the strange references to the Koran contained in the coded letters.
    What Marek Gumienny had that was probably not with London was the bizarre remark by a British academic in the back of a car in the middle of Maryland. He punched up a number on the console on his desk. Central switchboards are fine up to a point, but modern technology has meant any senior executive can be connected faster by speed-dial on his personal satphone.
    A number rang in a modest commuter house in Surrey, just outside London. Eight a.m. in Langley, one p.m. in London; the house was about to sit down to a roast beef lunch. A voice answered at the third ring. Steve Hill had enjoyed his golf and was about to enjoy his