Night was closing in. In the firelight, Ashe could see pain in Aslan’s eyes. Ashe knelt behind him and loosened his cords.
‘For God’s sake, Dr Ashe, untie it properly! You have your lost scientist. At least you can brag about that to the Americans. I’m not going anywhere. You’ve seen to that.’
‘I’m sorry, Colonel.’
‘Don’t be sorry. Destiny.’
‘Still a few things I don’t understand.’
Aslan laughed. ‘A few things, Dr Ashe! You want to know about the Baba Sheykh. Let’s not beat about the bush. You know the genetic advantage held in the body of the sheykh.’
‘Took some finding.’
‘This was the key inducement to get al-Qasr to quit California. There was also the pressing fact that US and Israeli agents were closing in on his comfort zone. Al-Qasr had become a security risk. He was getting scared. He was even driven to do some very bad things to individuals who stood in his way. Weren’t you, Sami?’
Al-Qasr shrugged his shoulders.
‘But what does death matter to an ambitious scientist? To turn the screw on Sami here, I lured the Baba Sheykh and his trusting protector to Hamburg. A safe house. I checked up on him, pretending my mission was an attempt to arrest Yildiz and Yazar. Ah! How destiny favours the prepared mind! What a stroke of luck, or fate, it was that Yildiz and Yazar were present at the Lodge the night of the bombing. That pair have been so useful. As my cloak!
‘And then, in the fullness of time, our ever-resourceful scientist “kidnaps” the sheykh. You must have thought you were brilliant, eh, Sami?’
Al-Qasr nodded.
‘Yes, he kidnapped him all right. With agents provided by me! Right from under the noses of you and your American colleagues. And then Sami brings him right into my lap. All in one piece. Safe and sound, as you English say. Of course, it’s taken a short while for Sami to adjust his huge mind to dividing the spoils, but he is sensible enough to see the advantages in sharing his discoveries – not with al-Qaeda, but with a country that has a more golden future.’
‘Clever, Colonel. I’ve got to hand it to you.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You obviously get your kicks from humiliating your friends.’
‘On the contrary, Tobbi. Is it humiliating to serve a higher purpose?’
‘And how did this higher purpose include bombing the Kartal Lodge?’
‘The attack on the Lodge at Kartal, Istanbul, was not my accomplishment. In fact, it nearly wrecked my plans!’
‘Who did do it then, Colonel? Who hit the Lodge?’
‘General Koglu, my highly decorated superior.’
‘Why?’
‘It had come to the general’s attention that a problem existed within a Lodge in Istanbul: a little Masonic lecture from the Baba Sheykh promised a lot of trouble. The English Grand Lodge warned of “consequences” if the speech was permitted. While the sheykh appeared all innocence, Koglu suspected devious motives. He naturally feared the speech could be inflammatory in our country. I wonder, Toby Ashe, if you understand just how inflammatory such a speech can be, and how divisive the question of Freemasonry has been in our country!’
‘I do have some idea.’
‘Then I give you another idea. Koglu. Koglu is an idea. He embodies an idea of my country. Koglu and men like him do not want publicity for Freemasonry. Nor do they want the world to know about the Yezidis or any other Kurds. In our country, most people, if they ever think about it at all, think Turkish Kurds who don’t accept they are Turks are, if not necessarily dangerous, a fussy lot. They attract too much attention to themselves, and should accept the facts of life – that being born in Turkey, they are Turks first and foremost. As for the Kurdish Yezidis in Iraq, they have always been seen as a nuisance. They will not conform. It is true that my country has not been kind to the Yezidis. I am not Koglu, Dr Ashe. Koglu hates Freemasonry. He hates Kurds. And he does not have a very high opinion of Jews.’
‘So what did Koglu do?’
‘He arranges a little exercise of his own. To accomplish it, he decides to use my resources. This is how I got to know of his plans.
‘Over the last few years, I have “turned” some of our own, homegrown Islamic militants to serve the state’s purposes. But though I say “turned”, they themselves do not know that their orders come from their enemies. They are still convinced they are fighting for the cause! You see, Ashe, it’s hard to find a traitor when the traitor is unaware that he is a traitor.
‘Koglu ordered me to release some of these agents of mine for his purposes. I was of course suspicious. Koglu planned to get them to kill the Baba Sheykh, and make a nasty, threatening scene at the Masonic Lodge – all of which he could then manipulate as propaganda. This explains the curious nature of the chaos that occurred that night. The terrorists turned up, could not find the Baba Sheykh – I had ensured he and the doctor quit Turkey of course – got confused, fired a few shots, and then, apparently, blew themselves up! Which was fortunate, as I presume that in their anger and frustration at not finding their target, they were about to exceed their original instructions. Koglu had not fully realised he was playing with fire. Not all of my operatives can be described as “stable”. So, after that, it was even easier to say that this was an amateurish attack and of no concern to other countries. That was the story given to the public, more or less.
‘But even without murdering the sheykh, Koglu got pretty much what he wanted. He’s still pushing his secret and not so secret agenda of intensifying the observation of minority groups. He tried to persuade me to fabricate evidence against those he sees as enemies – putting me, I must say, in a very awkward position. Koglu hates a lot of things. And anything he hates is, by virtue of this, a mortal threat to Turkey’s future. And is that not your Chinook I can hear in the distance?’
Ashe looked up into the blackening skies and listened for the Chinook. Feeling an extraordinary relief, he turned to Aslan.
Aslan shuffled about painfully. ‘Would you mind if I got off my knees now, Dr Ashe?’
‘You can. But al-Qasr stays where he is. I’m afraid you’re staying in custody, Colonel. For all I know, everything you’ve just told me is bullshit.’
Richmond returned to the cave entrance. ‘We’ll have the wounded out in no time, Toby. You can take yourself and your friends back to Mosul in the Chinook, if you like. The rest of us are pulling out and heading back to the RV. We still haven’t located your sheykh.’
Aslan shrugged his shoulders.
The Chinook hovered noisily over the gorge, its twin rotors creating storm-like waves among the bushes and trees along the ridges.
‘There’s something else you need to know, Tobbi. Thanks to my work here, I have some papers. When you know what they contain, you’ll see I have the interests of humanity at heart. And you will trust me.’
‘Don’t count on it.’
Aslan reached for his breast pocket. Ashe pulled out his Browning and pointed it at Aslan’s head. ‘Slow down, Colonel.’
Ashe reached forwards with his left arm and patted Aslan’s breast pocket.
‘Don’t be stupid, Tobbi. Your men have frisked me already. These papers come from our enemies!’
‘One can never be too sure.’ Ashe reached into the pocket and brought out a folded bunch of papers. He replaced the Browning.
A flash… Another flash! An explosion! The whole gorge lit up as the Chinook’s fuel tanks ignited.
‘Hit the floor!’ screamed Richmond as the long shoe of the helicopter separated itself mid-air from the twisted, whirling blades, then tumbled out of the night, crashing with an unbearable roar into the narrow sides of the gorge.
Silhouetted against the rippling night sky, a group of Taliban fighters from Bin Laden’s advance party, holding a Katyusha-bearing SAM rocket launcher, shot several rounds into the night air before disappearing into the blackness.
The quivering Chinook creaked with busting rivets as it hung suspended halfway down the gorge sides. Another explosion ripped apart its body. The remains slipped, groaned, then crashed violently into the riverbed, swiftly followed by wild spinning chopper blades and torn tyres.
Ashe and Richmond kept their hands over their heads, their faces sunk into the earth and their eyes closed, as flaming debris shot everywhere. Burning petrol flowed into the stream, lapping against the sides. When the heat became too much to bear, Ashe looked over to Richmond, then to Aslan and al-Qasr.
They’d gone.
Ashe pulled at Richmond’s jacket and screamed at his friend above the noise. ‘Inside the cave! The cave!’ Richmond nodded. The two men crawled on their bellies, the backs of their legs singed by the heat, towards the cave entrance. They made their way under the twisted metal and, finally, into the foul gloom of the now-stinking interior.
A third explosion: this time from inside the cave complex; then another, followed by a rapid series of smaller detonations that rocked the covert labyrinth. The facility had been booby-trapped: a final, bitter adieu from Aslan and al-Qasr.