Free The Agent Runner by Simon Conway Page B

heat. The whiff of tear gas made his eyes smart.
    He had always known that revealing bin Laden’s location might cause the Americans to react but he had anticipated a drone strike not a full-scale commando assault. And he had expected to receive some kind of prior warning. Even so, he had known exactly what it meant when he woke to the sound of the circling helicopters. Naked, pausing only to snatch his belt from the chair, he had gone straight to the hide and strangled Omar, who was in the act of tapping numbers into his phone, presumably to raise the alarm. He had looped the belt around Omar’s neck and twisted savagely, pulling him down off the stool onto the floor, tightening his grip until eventually he’d stopped struggling.
    Afterwards, he’d dressed quickly to the sound of gunfire and explosions, and then he had gone out into the street.
    There was an armed man in
shalwar kameez
and a flak jacket standing outside bin Laden’s house. He was yelling at the neighbours in Pashto to go back inside their houses and turn off their lights. Behind him in the shadows by the gate there was another larger man, the unmistakable outline of an American with a German Shepherd on a lead.
    ‘I am
Nightingale
,’ he called out as he approached, first in Pashto and then Urdu, and then Punjabi, and finally in English. He felt certain they had been briefed to extract him along with bin Laden at the end of their operation.
    ‘Get back!’ the man in the
shalwar kameez
shouted at him, raising his rifle.
    ‘It’s me,’ he protested. ‘Tariq! Rule Britannia!’
    ‘Get back!’
    The dog lunged with its teeth bared and the man in the
shalwar kameez
swung the rifle around and slammed the butt into the side of Tariq’s head. He fell to the ground.
    He came around as the Americans were leaving. The crashed helicopter was burning and the others were lifting off in a storm of dust. He picked himselfup and staggered away from the house. He wasn’t sure for how long he kept moving or in which direction but at some stage he curled up and slept for several hours.
    He woke up with a raging headache and the certainty that he was being hunted.
    #
    The Peshawar apartment was the remnant of a long defunct intelligence operation run in the late eighties by a British Military Intelligence outfit known as the Afghan Guides. It had served its purpose as a safe location to de-brief Afghan military defectors in the late eighties and then after the Wall came down, it had somehow remained on the books as a final fallback position, only to be used
in extremis
. He’d collected the key from the blind vendor on the corner, who sold stripped and cubed bags of sugar cane, and warily climbed the stairwell of the crumbling concrete building to the apartment on the fourth floor. Inside there was a thick layer of dust covering everything and it looked as if it had been unoccupied for years. There was running water, though, and he was able to wash the blood out of his hair.
    He settled in to wait, alternating between sleeping fitfully on the cot bed and standing at the window.
    Hakimullah came on the afternoon of the second day. Tariq watched him scurry across the courtyard. He brought the news that there were roadblocks the length of the Grand Trunk Road, the border was closed and army patrols were scouring the tribal areas for any sign of him. It wasn’t safe to move. He’d sent the old man out for a second-hand phone and a pay-as-you-go sim card and then scribbled the number on a piece and paper and entrusted it to him.
    ‘Find Ed. He’ll be waiting for me on the other side. Tell him to call me.’
    Hakimullah had accepted the task without complaint. That was more than thirty hours ago and Tariq was getting increasingly desperate. What if Hakimullah had been arrested? He wouldn’t last long under questioning. Perhaps the ISI already knew his location. Perhaps they were even now surrounding the house, Black Stork Commandos climbing the stairs and crawling