‘How did she die?’ Lord Khan asked. Nobody in the room took their eyes off the visitor.
‘An Israeli rocket – she was a passenger in a car.’
There was a long silence. None of the listeners had anything new to add; everything they felt about the Israelis had been said long ago.
‘She was targeted?’ Lord Khan asked finally.
‘They said she wasn’t – collateral damage. But you know how the Zionists lie.’
Khan nodded his head then spoke reverently. ‘Peace be upon her. What was her name? I will pray for her.’
‘Amina was what most people knew her by. Amina Ebadi,’ the Saracen said. ‘My wife, the mother of my only child.’
Chapter Thirty-three
THAT NIGHT THE Saracen set up his makeshift clinic on the verandah of the guest house, and it was while standing there two days later, tending to a child with a shattered leg, that he saw Lord Khan and his bodyguards ride out.
The story in the fortress and town was that the warlord had decided to visit the far-flung graves of his five younger brothers, all killed in various conflicts, but in truth he was riding hard for the Iranian border.
Three weeks later he returned, exhausted and complaining of a sharp pain down his left arm, which was purely an excuse to rouse the visiting doctor from his bed. They sat alone in the guest house, once more drinking tea, the Saracen listening intently as Lord Khan told him to be ready to leave immediately after dawn prayers.
Pulling out a US Army survey map and tracing the route, Khan said the Saracen had four hundred miles of hard travelling ahead of him. Avoiding villages, sticking to old muj supply trails, he would travel alone through some of the harshest and most remote territory on earth. At eight thousand feet, halfway up a mountain which had never been named, only numbered, he would find a Soviet forward observation post which had been left in ruins years ago.
There, he would rendezvous with a group of men and, in the solitude of the high peaks, far from any form of civilization, his prayers would be answered.
‘Have the prisoners been taken yet?’ the Saracen asked, heart soaring.
‘Tonight. They have been watched and chosen – two men and a woman. The woman is pregnant.’
Chapter Thirty-four
THE SARACEN DIDN’T see the eight tribesmen who brought the merchandise. It was night and they arrived at the old observation post in silence, the hooves of their horses wrapped in rags to muffle the sound.
It wasn’t just the Saracen who never laid eyes on the strange caravan – in the week preceding their arrival, nobody else had either. For seven days the tribesmen had made camp just before dawn, slept during the daylight hours and travelled as fast as their horses would carry them through the night.
I know this because a long time later – after the events of that grim summer were over – a team of Special Forces and CIA agents secretly crossed the border into Iran, stormed the men’s fortified village and interrogated them with what used to be called ‘extreme prejudice’. I’m sure none of the eight ever fully recovered.
Of course, not even the tribesmen were on Mountain 792 long enough to witness exactly what the Saracen did but, having seen all the secret evidence and, as I mentioned earlier, knowing more about him than anyone on earth, I am probably in the best position to say what happened up in the high mountains – an area which, despite the Saracen’s constant prayer rituals, must have given an entirely new meaning to the term ‘godforsaken’.
Even though the tribesmen had muffled their ponies well, the Saracen knew that they were there. Four days earlier, he had arrived and set up camp in the observation post’s old bunkhouse, blasted deep into the rock, and it was inside the cave that he awoke with a start. It was either his battlefield intuition or the restless movement of his horses that told him that he was no longer alone on the mountain.
Lying motionless, he assumed that by choosing the small hours of a moonless night, their ponies carefully silenced, the kidnappers didn’t want to be seen even by him, so he made no move to go and greet them.
After thirty minutes he thought he heard the slap of reins, as if a horse was being urged into a trot down the mountain, but he couldn’t be sure. He gave it another twenty minutes then scrambled out on to the broad rock shelf.
The tribesmen – halfway down the mountain and pausing to water their ponies – looked back and saw the tiny glow of a hurricane lantern. That was all they saw of the person who, very soon, would become the most hunted man on earth.
The kidnappers had left the three prisoners chained to ringbolts which had once secured a communication mast, and it was there that the Saracen first saw them – bound hand and foot, gagged, the woman half shrouded in the black robe that had been used to disguise her on the wild journey.