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  ‘What did you say?’

  Gardener continues. ‘I reply, “I don’t know what you’re talking about but let’s say for argument’s sake I understand . . . what do you want?” The guy laughs, says in his haughty voice, “But I don’t want anything. Ha. Ha. Ha.”

  ‘So I says, “Good. So I can get back to my dinner?”

  ‘“My client instructed me that if ever he was out of contact for more than forty-eight hours I should make this call. Just to let you know that we know.”

  ‘“Well, thanks a bunch for doing your job. Now my dinner’s getting real cold . . . “

  ‘“Lieutenant Colonel. Your table has not yet been served. You would do well to treat me with some courtesy.”

  ‘He was right, of course. We were still on the bread rolls.’ Gardener snorts, a man who doesn’t enjoy being bested. ‘Afterwards I walked the whole damned floor. Don’t have a clue how he knew . . .

  ‘Anyways, he carried on:

  ‘“The general was a leader to many and in his name revenge will come. By your actions, America, you have unleashed a very terrible thing. You have started the clock. Nobody . . . not even if you returned the general to us today . . . not even he can stop this thing. The forces of revenge have been unleashed. They have taken wing. And whatever happens, they cannot be recalled. For they have taken wing . . .”’

  Oh, shit, thinks Lamayette. That really complicates things . . .

  The object of all this intrigue, General Ali Mahmood Khan, is nothing if not a logical man. With complete equanimity, he could see what was going to happen to him: obviously at some point the Americans would take him down. He had long been pulling on the tiger’s tail, joyfully helping himself to hundreds of millions in Washington’s military aid. But worse. Such is the soul-enveloping intensity of his hatred that he’d given over every ounce of his brilliance to help her enemies.

  One day the tiger will bite back. He knew this. Inevitable, he told himself. But my money is safe. My children are young men, raised to be strong, ambitious and crafty. The new Khan dynasty will rise on my death, a martyr’s glorious death, killed by the evil hand of US imperialism. There is nothing to fear in death. For every great South Asian dynasty is born in martyrdom. Nehru. Bhutto. Bandaranaike. And that wretched family in Bangladesh . . .

  And so he communicates the gist of his plans to his two sons in a series of postcards . . .

  The civilian leadership in Islamabad would sell him out in private, while squealing with outrage in public. Fair enough. That meant, as in a game of musical chairs, he would suddenly find himself without a seat. Therefore, when he conceived his plan he took into account two things: he should consider himself dead or as good as dead, and whatever he planned, he should make sure it was unorthodox. Because in his mind, against this enemy, the unorthodox would always triumph.

  Macchar. The Mosquito. The message that his lawyer had delivered to the CIA man in the Washington hotel could not have been more clear . . . The general was a leader to many and in his name revenge will come. By your actions, America, you have unleashed a very terrible thing. You have started the clock . . .

  Khan is an avid, even greedy, student of everything to do with America. His interest more like a ghastly fascination. A pure hatred.

  To a soldier like Khan, America’s time has run out. The heavyweight boxer who lumbers around, punch drunk and arms flailing, a deadly mix of overconfidence and unknowingness. The watching crowd of nations complicit in one awful secret: the next challenger will put this fellow down. Just one shot, the right combination, and a new order will be born. The rest of the world watches through the ropes, willing it to happen . . .

  Khan had a copy of CIA director George Tenet’s We’re At War memo, issued to all his staffers within days of September 11th. ‘There can be no bureaucratic impediments to success. All the rules have changed. We do not have time to hold meetings or fix problems – fix them quickly and smartly.’ Fine words, but almost ten years had passed and all of this systemic weakness has brought America to the verge of collapse. Teetering on the edge.

  The US dollar was finished, drowning in trillions of debt, mostly held by foreign powers or overseas sovereign funds. A decade of stock market growth lost, kaboof, in months. Discredited financial and government institutions. Hundreds of billions in unfunded liabilities in Medicare, pensions and social security about to fall due . . . and still their politicians bicker and fight and drag the country downwards.

  Just what General Ali Mahmood Khan wants. To drop America to her knees. To deliver a defeat, like Port Arthur, Dien Bien Phu, or Suez. To forever change America’s destiny. To leave her as the once-mighty imperial powers of Russia, France or Britain had been left. Naked, vulnerable and so very ordinary in the eyes of the rest of the world.

  In his neat postcard penmanship, the general maps out his plans, the timeline his sons must follow. The narrative, he reminds himself fussily, the narrative is so important . . .

  You remember my birth date? March 15th 1954. I was born on the very same day that Charles Piroth committed suicide. By then, he had only one arm and couldn’t kill himself with his sidearm because he needed two hands to cock the weapon. So he mumbled his apologies to all those he had failed, retired to his bunker, clasped a grenade to his chest and pulled the pin. And as he died, on the same continent, almost three thousand miles away, your father came into this world. Perhaps the hand of Destiny. No?

  Tiny, precise strokes, the nib scratching at the card and the Pashto script flowing like Arabic from right to left, his shoulders hunched over the lines, stopping every so often to rub his eyes. The general’s phones, his emails, everything, he knows, is being monitored. But not the mail . . . who would think to monitor the mail?

  Colonel Piroth had been commander of French artillery at Dien Bien Phu. He’d bragged about the 105- and 151mm howitzers, how they would annihilate the ragtag volunteers of Ho Chi Minh, and his General Giap. But for all Piroth’s boasts, his artillery never ‘saw’ Giap’s forces, never could spot his emplacements in the jungle. Instead it was the Vietnamese, an invisible enemy, who rained hell down on to the besieged French forces. Snapped their will to fight.

  Imagine. The French took mobile brothels into battle with them, prostitutes to give them courage. And Piroth’s commander even issued General Giap with a written challenge, as if he were a musketeer. Understand this, my son. America right now is like France at Dien Bien Phu . . . No stomach for the fight, too fat to care.

  The details of Operation Macchar covered a total of forty-eight picture postcards; ninety-six, as there were two sons. A lot of information about General Khan’s extensive Pashtun connections, the almost impenetrable bonds of debt and honour that would spring into action with the correct supplication and coded words . . .

  The American warlords will learn that no amount of push-button technology or military hardware will defeat a multitude of people animated by a righteous cause. We will deliver that cause. We will deliver that righteous anger. We will deliver Operation Macchar . . .

  He personally affixed each of the four-rupee stamps then he took the time to pack the cards carefully into a tatty chamois cloth, bound many times over with elastic band. This unremarkable package he entrusted to his senior housekeeper, who, under pain of dishonour, promised faithfully to post them if the general failed to appear any morning.

  The Why and the When of Operation Macchar are detailed on the back of the postcards. Clues as to the Who, the Where and the How are on the picture side. There are ninety-six, but only three different images.

  One card shows the faithful masses swirling around the vast, cube-shaped Holy Kaaba in Mecca, performing tawaf, the counter-clockwise thronging that lies at the heart of the Haj pilgrimage. This is the Who of the plan, a representation of Muslim innocents, those that are to be sacrificed, and whose fiery death would send up an unyielding shriek of outrage to unite the world.

  The How is elegant, simple and totally unorthodox. A profile-shot of
a twin-engine Boeing 777 in the colours of Pakistan International Airlines, on final approach, flaps and landing gear extended. The pride of the PIA fleet.

  And the Where is a view of New York. An aerial shot with the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island in the foreground and in the skies above Manhattan vast plumes of red, white and blue, coloured smoke from the tailpipes of a half-dozen fighter jets. A postcard to celebrate the recent fiftieth anniversary of NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command.

  . . . And by his hand, we shall trap the US president into ordering the deaths of Muslim innocents. By his hand, we shall trap his country, and the world shall see the Truth.

  Tristie Merritt had spent a lifetime defying the odds.

  It was one of the reasons she proved so good for the British Army, and why the British Army, having taken her in as a private, fast-tracked her from junior soldier to officer. Female officers make up about one per cent of the 100,000-strong army but female officers who started in the ranks are so rare the army doesn’t even keep count. There’d been none like her in Tristie’s intake at Sandhurst, nor the year before, or the year before that. Singularly tough odds. Yet time and time again, she proved herself. When writing up Tristie’s paperwork for the Royal Military Academy, under the section marked Other Comments, her commanding officer had borrowed a line about Katharine Hepburn: ‘I have no doubt you will discover that Merritt is the born decider, dominator, organiser, tactician and mesmeriser’.

  Sandhurst’s instructors – the so-called Directing Staff - read all that Hepburn stuff and couldn’t have been less impressed. Somebody’s Talking Out Their Arse Big Time. First, there was the issue of Tristie herself. By the standards of recent female cadets, Tristie was both likeable and desirable. Uncommonly so. To the army’s wise heads, that was a red flag, especially as she didn’t fall in with the lesbian cadets, of whom there was always a hard core. But more than that, the DS couldn’t help notice her quiet confidence. This didn’t rise to the level of pride or insolence, more a subtle, certain knowledge that the army wasn’t going to fault her or break her. Just wasn’t going to happen. So she became a bit of a challenge, a pet project, and the DS found themselves focusing on Tristie, wanting to push her to the limit above all others.

  They made her student platoon commander on perhaps the most demanding exercise, Marathon Chase, a two-day, 50-mile tactical-advance-to-battle. Let’s see how Barbie girl does with this . . . The tab involved criss-crossing the South Downs Way, every step of the route in sleeting rain and near-zero visibility. Yet her group of thirty passed with flying colours, Tristie leading from the front or, when needed, pushing and pushing from the rear. Cajoling the weakest, swearing at the waverers, imploring her team, and then literally dragging the last two male cadets over the line. The DS platoon commander, an experi enced army captain, was Old School on the subject of female officers and whether they were really up to the job of leading male soldiers. Even he noted, approvingly, in his report, There’s something in her eyes, like she’s saying, I’ve seen it all. I will lead my soldiers and take care of my soldiers. They can trust me because there is nothing in this world that can be done to me that is worse than that which I have already faced.

  What that was, the world that Tristie had emerged from, the instructors only caught in glimpses . . . she was the only cadet to have No Family listed on her forms, therefore nobody came to watch her Passing Out or accompanied her to Father’s Dinner Night . . . but it didn’t really matter.

  Because the truth was best summed up by one of the DS, a barrel-chested warrant officer from Merthyr Tydfil whose first combat was almost twenty years before. Purposefully he’d tabbed every step of the Downs alongside Tristie, watching her, willing her to cock up.

  Back in the sergeant’s mess, everybody crowded around to hear the Welshman’s verdict . . . Aye, lads, You’re Not Wrong There . . . She’s A Pretty One, I’ll Give You That . . . He couldn’t stop himself beaming with something like pride . . . But More Than The Fact She’s Damned Good Looking, Let Me Tell You, She’s Fucking Brutal Too. In the mess that was an astonishingly rare compliment towards a female, let alone a female officer.

  A consequence of this was that you could walk into any guardhouse, barely take twenty paces inside an army base, and there’d be somebody who knew of Captain Tristie Merritt, or knew someone who did. Oh yes. Her, they would say, and there’d be a wry grin, a flash of a smile, and a story to follow.

  This helps explain why Ward 13 came together so quickly. Tristie’s reputation helped because it inspired confidence. But also she had no trouble convincing those she was recruiting that the Ministry of Defence had more than enough money to be doing a better job with the lives and welfare of their ex-servicemen. She knew from her own experience that all non-coms pride themselves on their radar-like ability to detect bullshit; bullshit from their officers, but especially bullshit from the MoD.

  The MoD is awash with cash. But, and even the simplest squaddie knows this, the tray is tipped in the wrong direction . . . not to the serving man or woman, or the injured, bereaved or the recently demobbed. But towards people like Sir Dale Malham.

  A little bit of background here, so you can understand why it was Tristie felt honour-bound to pick Malham and use him to bankroll Ward 13.

  Tristie had five different files on Malham. A lot from newspapers and the Internet of course, but the glossies too, for as the money started flowing in, the whole arc of his life changed with it. Hello! OK! . . . The old Dale Malham was discarded. The new one thoroughly made over. Ginger beard trimmed back to a chin-tuft goatee. Elegant side whiskers, Richard Branson-style. Angry Socialist wardrobe junked for a range of suiting from morning coats to shooting jackets with hand-sewn edges and horn buttons . . . Country Life. Tatler. North East Life.

  Then, a short burst of bad publicity. Long-suffering wife Maggie and their clutch of children jettisoned for a lithe former gym instructor and swimwear model. His ‘life partner’.

  How?

  Malham was a seventeen-year veteran MP serving up until 1996. Aged just fifty-four, he turned in his safe seat (bagging himself a knighthood, as the exit door banged behind him). Why? He had his eye on something more rewarding. By 2000, he was a multimillionaire.

  The key for Malham was his seat on the Commons Defence Select Committee. It scrutinises the military on behalf of Parliament. He had watched the MoD struggling to come to terms with the end of the Cold War. Quickly it became clear that the three services had a mass of overlapping training, catering, storage and supply, and research facilities; everything from barracks and underground bunkers, to housing, airfields, rifle ranges, victualling and ordnance yards. The combined assets made the MoD the second-largest landholder in the country. Which is well and good when readying for war but, with the collapse of the Iron Curtain, the government wanted a peace dividend: either less public money for the military or more of their spending would have to come from cashing in these overlapping or redundant assets.

  In late 1994, over a long lunch, a lobbyist tugged at Malham’s ear. A syndicate of German pension funds, bursting with cash, was keen to find credible and risk-free investments. Perhaps the MP might be interested in a friendly meeting? In due course he learnt that in Germany the concept of Sale and Leaseback was going great guns. What about the 44,000 homes that were owned by the MoD? If these were sold to, and then leased back from, a company fronting the pension funds’ interests, the MoD would receive a huge injection of cash while retaining both possession and use of the properties.

  It was a perfect bit of timing.

  Malham took eighteen months to nudge and nurdle the deal through the back rooms of Westminster. It was then that he quit his seat, and things started to move quickly. Two months later, to no particular fanfare, he was announced as chairman and chief executive of a new, privately held company called Imphal Holdings. Less than a year before the 1997 election, the deal was finally announced.

  On signature, Imphal paid £1.6 billion to the T
reasury for the ownership of all 44,000 homes and accommodation belonging to the Ministry of Defence. The MoD leased these back for an inflation-adjusted fee of £140 million a year while also accepting sole responsibility for maintenance and refurbishment.

  Note the cunning mismatch. All of the cash from the Imphal deal goes into the Treasury. But the maintenance and refurb costs come from the budget marked Defence. This being the same iron-fist-tight budget that pays for commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pays pensions and compensation for death and injury. Plus a whole generation of new expensive war toys. (The MoD’s twenty largest weapons projects are at a minimum £3 billion overspent and almost forty years late.) With all that stress on just one budget, guess how much of Imphal’s money actually washes back from the Treasury into maintaining and refurbishing houses the MoD doesn’t even own any more? Not enough.

  Within ten years, Imphal had secured another dozen sale and leaseback agreements with various arms of the government. All payments recession-proofed, of course. And Malham had parlayed his success into a vast Georgian mansion set in two thousand wild acres of Northumberland woods and farms, with twenty estate cottages to lord over. And, in London, a Belgravia residence with its own internal lift and indoor swimming pool. Price tag £7 million.

  While Malham was quad-biking across his green acres or tootling up and down in his London lift, Tristie Merritt was serving out her last year in the army. She had been badly injured near Lashkar Gar in Afghanistan, took a long time in rehabilitation, and by December was put out to pasture in a barracks in south Wiltshire, a place called Tidworth, while her high-ups tried to work out what to do with her.