Crossfire

As we got higher, a few brick and concrete houses jutted out of the hillside. Boys played football with bare feet. Women sat in groups on terraces carved out of the slope. Every hundred metres or so, we hit a hairpin. The cab was just inches from a sheer drop down into the valley. The road must have been built as access to the antennae farms, and these families had piggybacked off it. There was no planning permission needed. It looked like they'd just scraped out a terrace with picks and shovels and used the spoil to build with.

I'd seen rougher and dirtier shanties than this in India and South America. At least some of the kids here were running round in school uniform, the boys in blue shirts, the girls in white headscarves. And the packed mud was swept scrupulously clean. It seemed there was a whole lot more civic pride up here than I'd ever seen down in the valley.

A rusting Soviet hulk, ripped apart by the muj, overshadowed the next bend. It might have been picked clean by the buzzards. We lost sight of the black pickup for a moment, then found it again as we completed a sharp left-hander.

It was parked up alongside a two-storey rectangular house that was set back from the track by about ten metres on higher ground. It had three windows on the upper floor at the front, and one each side of the front door below. All were boarded up. No smoke curled from the chimney. No electricity cables ran in from the road and there was nobody in sight.

The next three hundred metres cost me another ten dollars, but there were no turns, just more dead Russian armour. We crested the hill on the saddle, alongside a group of old guys sitting cross-legged in a huddle round a cooking-pot. They gave us a look and got straight back to the business of cooking up dinner.

The track forked left up to one of the antennae farms, and right to the other. The driver stopped, turned in his seat, and gave me a triumphant but toothless smile. I gave him a final ten. 'I'll get out here, matey.'

As he embarked on a many-point turn behind me, I walked towards the barbed-wire fence round the installation immediately above the target, but not so purposefully that it might rattle the AK-toting guards hanging out by its gate. Both antennae farms were key locations; they needed to be protected. The big green circular ISAF signs told everyone that.

Kabul was so far below me it looked like a map. I walked along the saddle. The Serena and most of the embassies were to the north, down to my right. To my left were the Jock's bar, the Russian embassy and, out on a limb at the southern edge of town, ISAF.

I stopped and admired the view until the taxi was out of sight. Then I went and sat by the wreck of a Russian communications truck, surrounded by artillery-shell casings and ammo boxes like big sardine cans with the tops peeled back.

I pulled out the Yes Man's mobile and looked south, towards the Kabul river. I wasn't going to have any problems with a signal up here. I couldn't move for satellite dishes.

The phone rang twice. The Yes Man came straight on. 'Have you found Condratowicz? Have you got him?'

'I've just housed a possible, that's all.'

'Where is he?'

One of the old guys left the crowd with a can in his hand and went through the motions of washing himself ready for prayer.

'Ali Abad mountain. They call it TV Hill.'

'Where on the hill? Any idea yet if our man's inside?'

'No. Have you got access to anything in the air? I need you to keep a trigger on it and see what happens down there.'

'Nick, I cannot involve any other agency.' His response came with several degrees of frost.

I didn't give a shit. 'Do you want him or not? I need help, and you've got it on tap. I don't know yet if the fucker's in there so find me an airborne Predator. The Americans are bound to have one or two up there. Don't worry about compromise. They do this shit all the time. Just say it's an antiterrorist op, for fuck's sake. You're the boss, aren't you? Think of something.'

One of the guards sauntered out on to the road. He had his weapon over his shoulder but wanted to take a closer look at the local gobbing off on his mobile.

The Yes Man said nothing.

'Just tap into whatever they have up there that covers the north side of the hill. Then get the operator to stand by. When I do a walk-past I can ID the exact building for them. If Dom's in there, this isn't going to be some fucking shoot-'em-up. I want to get in there, try and find him, then get us both out alive — and not get shot by ISAF in the process. And some of their boys are a stone's throw away from me at the top of this poxy hill. So fucking think of something.'

'OK, wait out.'

He cut off and, for the first time in a while, I did what he said. The old guy had finished splashing his face, neck and arms and was now getting down to a serious chat with Allah. I watched him touch his forehead to the ground, then stand and pray over the city.

Another guard joined the first, and they both headed down the road towards me.

They were Turks. Their national flag filled the top half of the arms that were busy waving me away.

70

I moved back towards the saddle, past yet another pile of old artillery casings. Those two hills had been Russian strongholds. If you dominated the high ground there, you dominated Kabul. And that was exactly why a guy in blue body armour was climbing the south side of the hill, probing the ground with what looked like a row of kitchen knives. If you were in the mood to build there, I guessed you decided which bit of slope you wanted to carve out, then got a guy in body armour from the council to come and dig up the mines for you.

The old guys were just dragging whatever they'd been cooking out of the pot. I couldn't see the target. It was down to my left somewhere, but the angle was too steep. What I did see were the scorched remains of a blue burqa. So much for liberation.

The mobile vibrated in my hand.

'You got something up there for me?'

'Yes, we have one tasked. It's overhead.'

I looked up, even though I knew I was wasting my time. The Predator's video cameras and forward-looking infrared (FLIR) thermal imaging would be doing their stuff from fifty thousand feet. The ground crew would be able to see me, big-time. Even through cloud they could read a newspaper at a bus stop. To a Predator, it was always a bright sunny day.

Once they had imagery, it could be bounced anywhere, including to my laptop in the Serena. Down in Helmand and the south, they circled 24/7. They watched and waited for the Taliban to come out of their caves, jump on their flatbeds and scream across the plains. The operator, hundreds of miles north in the ISAF camp, just marked the target with a laser beam and kicked off a couple of the Hellfires strapped to its wings.

'You got coverage?'

'I'm looking at pictures now.'

'Tell the operator to focus on the saddle between the two antennae farms. I'm on my own, facing north.'

I stood there like a dickhead while the Yes Man steered the operator on target.

'They want to confirm it's you.'

'I'll walk down the road on their go. Tell them I'm in local dress and I have a rucksack on my back. Apart from their boys with the guns, I'm the only fucker up here who's standing. The rest of them are sitting and eating.'

'He's ready.'

'I'm walking.' I headed down the track. A couple of the old guys waved at me as I passed. I kept my head down, mobile to my ear. 'That's a hundred and fifty short of the target. White rectangular, two storeys, flat roof.'

'We have you, Nick.'

'Fifty short. On my left, building about ten metres back from the road. There's a black four-by-four parked to the left of the target.'

'I can see a white building ahead of you now, Nick.'

'That's it. I'm about twenty short.'

'There's movement!' His voice shot up an octave. 'Movement from the back. Someone's heading towards the four-by-four.'