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  “Yessir.”

  “Weird bastards.” Maj. Dolan completed his perusal of the file and closed it. “Parked next door to our west is the British Seventh Armoured Brigade. They call themselves the Desert Rats. Like I said, weird. They call their own soldiers rats.”

  “Actually, it’s a jerboa, sir.”

  “A what?”

  “A jerboa. A desert animal like a meerkat. They got the tag fighting Rommel in the Libyan desert in World War Two. He was the Desert Fox. The jerboa is smaller but elusive.”

  Major Dolan was less than impressed.

  “Don’t get smart with me, Lieutenant. Somehow we have to get along with these Desert Rats. I am proposing General Myatt send you over to them as one of our liaison officers. Dismiss.”

  The Coalition forces had to spend five more months sweltering in that desert while the combined allied air forces achieved the fifty percent “degrading” of the Iraqi army that Commanding General Norman Schwarzkopf demanded before he would attack. For part of that time, after reporting to the British general Patrick Cordingley, commanding the 7th Armoured, Kit Carson liaised between the two forces.

  Very few American soldiers were able to establish either interest in, or empathy with, the native Arab culture of the Saudis. Carson, with his natural curiosity, was an exception. In the ranks of the British, he found two officers who had a smattering of Arabic and from them memorized a handful of phrases. On visits to al-Jubail, he listened to the five daily calls to prayer and watched the robed figures prostrate themselves time and again, forehead to the ground, to complete the ritual.

  He made a point of greeting Saudis he had occasion to meet with the formal “Salaam aleikhem” (Peace be unto you) and learned to respond with the reply “Aleikhem as-salaam” (And unto you be peace). He noted their jolt of surprise that any foreigner should bother and the friendliness that followed.

  After three months, the British brigade was increased to a division, and Gen. Schwarzkopf moved the British farther east, to the chagrin of Gen. Myatt. When the ground forces moved at last, the war was short, sharp and brutal. The Iraqi armor was blown away by British Challenger II tanks and the American Abrams. Domination of the air was total, as it had been for months.

  Saddam’s infantry had been pulverized by carpet bombing in their trenches by U.S. B-52 bombers and threw up their hands in droves. The onslaught for the U.S. Marines was a charge into Kuwait, where they were cheered, and a last run to the Iraqi border, where higher authority ordered that they should stop. The ground war took just five days.

  Lieutenant Kit Carson must have done something right. On his return in the summer of 1991 he received the honor of transfer to the 81mm mortar platoon as the best lieutenant in the battalion. Clearly marked out for higher things, he then did something, for the first time but not the last time in his life, unconventional. He applied for and received an Olmsted Scholarship. When asked why, he replied that he wanted to be sent to the Defense Language Institute, located in the Presidio at Monterey, California. Pressed further, he admitted he wanted to master Arabic. It was a decision that would later change his entire life.

  His somewhat puzzled superiors conceded his request. With the Olmsted under his belt, he spent his year at Monterey and, for his second and third year, was given a two-year internship at the American University in Cairo. Here he found he was the only U.S. Marine and the only serviceman who had ever seen combat. While he was there, on February 26, 1993, a Pakistani named Ramzi Yousef tried to blow up one of the towers of the World Trade Center, Manhattan. He failed, but, ignored by the American establishment, he had fired the first Fort Sumter shot of the Islamic Jihad against the United States.

  There were no electronic newspapers in those days, but Lt. Carson could follow the unfolding investigation across the Atlantic by radio. He was puzzled, intrigued. Eventually, he paid a call upon the wisest man he had come across in Egypt. Professor Khaled Abdulaziz was a don at the al-Azhar University, one of the greatest centers in all Islam for Koranic studies. Occasionally he gave visiting lectures at the American University. He received the young American in his rooms on campus at al-Azhar.

  “Why did they do it?” asked Kit Carson.

  “Because they hate you,” said the old man calmly.

  “But why? What have we ever done to them?”

  “To them personally? To their countries? To their families? Nothing. Except perhaps distribute dollars. But that is not the point. With terrorism, that is never the point. With terrorists, whether al-Fatah or Black September or the new, supposedly religious breed, the rage and the hatred come first. Then the justification. For IRA patriotism, for Red Brigade politics, for Salafist-Jihadist piety. An assumed piety.”

  The professor was preparing tea for two on his small spirit stove.

  “But they claim to follow the teachings of the Holy Koran. They claim that they are obeying the Prophet Muhammad. They claim they are serving Allah.”

  The old scholar smiled as the water boiled. He had noticed the insertion of the word “Holy” in front of Koran. A courtesy, but a pleasing one.

  “Young man, I am what is called hafiz. That is one who has memorized all 6,236 verses of the Holy Koran. Unlike your Bible, which was written by hundreds of authors, our Koran was written—dictated, actually—by one. And yet there are passages that seem to contradict each other.

  “What the Jihadists do is to take one or two phrases out of context, distort them a little more and then pretend they have divine justification. They do not. There is nothing in all our Holy Book that decrees we must slaughter women and children to please the one we call Allah the Merciful, the Compassionate. All extremists do that, including Christian and Jewish ones. Do not let our tea go cold. It should be drunk piping hot.”

  “But, Professor, these contradictions. Have they never been addressed, explained, rationalized?”

  The professor served the American more tea with his own hands. He had servants, but it pleased him to make his tea personally.

  “Constantly. For thirteen hundred years, scholars have studied and composed commentaries on that one single book. Collectively, they are called the hadith. About a hundred thousand of them.”

  “Have you read them?”

  “Not all. It would take ten lifetimes. But many. And I have written two.”

  “One of the bombers, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the one they call the blind cleric, was . . . is . . . a scholar, too.”

  “And a mistaken one. Nothing new in that in any religion.”

  “But I must ask again: Why do they hate?”

  “Because you are not them. They experience deep rage at what is not themselves. Jews, Christians, those we call the kuffars, the unbelievers who will not convert to the one true faith. But also those who are not Muslim enough. In Algeria the Jihadists butcher villages of fellaghas, peasants, including women and children, in their Holy War against Algiers. Always remember this, Lieutenant. First comes the rage and the hatred. Then the justification, the pose of deep piety, all a sham.”

  “And you, Professor?”

  The old man sighed.

  “I loathe and despise them. Because they take the face of my dear Islam and present it to the world twisted with rage and hatred. But communism is dead, the West weak and self-serving, concerned with pleasure and greed. There will be many who will listen to the new message.”

  Kit Carson glanced at his watch. It would soon be time for the professor’s prayers. He rose. The scholar noticed the gesture and smiled. He, too, rose and accompanied his guest to the door. As the American left, he called after him.

  “Lieutenant, I fear my dear Islam is entering a long dark night. You are young, you will see the end of it, inshallah. I pray I shall not be forced to witness what is coming.”

  Three years later, the old scholar died in his bed. But the mass killings had begun with a huge bomb in an apartment block favored by American civilians in Saudi Arabia. A man named Osama bin Laden had quit Sudan and returned to Afg
hanistan as an honored guest of a new regime, the Taliban, which had swept the country. And the West continued to take no measures to defend itself but continued to enjoy the locust years.

  PRESENT DAY

  The little market town of Grangecombe in the English county of Somerset attracted a few tourists in the summer to stroll through its cobbled seventeenth-century streets. Otherwise, being off all main roads to the beaches and coves of the Southwest, it was a quiet enough place. But it had a history and a royal charter and a town council and a mayor. In April of that year, he was His Worship Giles Matravers, a retired clothier, entitled to wear the mayoral chain, fur-fringed robe and tricorn hat.

  And that was what he was wearing as he opened a new Chamber of Commerce building just behind the High Street when a figure rushed out of the small crowd of onlookers, covered the ten yards between them before any of them could react and plunged a butcher’s knife into his chest.

  There were two policemen present, but neither was armed with a handgun. The dying mayor was tended by his town clerk and others, but to no avail. The policemen tackled the killer, who made no attempt to flee but repeatedly shouted something no one understood but which experts later recognized as Allahu-akhbar, or Allah is great.

  One officer took a slash to the hand as he lunged for the knife, then the assailant went down under two blue uniforms. Detectives duly arrived from the county town of Taunton to institute the formal inquiry. The assailant sat dumbly in the police station and refused to answer questions. He was dressed in a full-length dishdash, so an Arabic speaker was summoned from county police HQ, but he had no more success.

  The man was identified as a shelf stacker from the local supermarket, living in a one-room bed-sitter in a boardinghouse. His landlady revealed he was an Iraqi. At first it was thought his action might have stemmed from rage at what was happening in his country. But the Home Office revealed he had arrived as a refugee and been granted asylum. Youngsters from the town came forward to testify that Farouk, known as Freddy, had until three months earlier been a partygoer, drinker and dater of girls. Then he had seemed to change, becoming withdrawn, silent and contemptuous of his earlier lifestyle.

  His bed-sitter revealed little but a laptop, whose contents would have been very familiar to the police of Boise, Idaho. Sermon after sermon by a masked man sitting in front of a sort of backcloth inscribed with Koranic inscriptions urging the devout to destroy the kuffars. Bemused Somerset police officers watched a dozen, for the sermonizer was speaking in virtually accentless English.

  While the killer, still silent, was being arraigned, the file and the laptop were sent to London. The Metropolitan Police passed the details to the Home Office, who consulted the Security Service, MI5. They had already received a report from their man in the British embassy in Washington about an event in Idaho.

  1996

  Back in the U.S., Capt. Kit Carson was assigned to Camp Pendleton for three years, the place where he was born and spent the first four years of his life. During those years, his paternal grandfather, a retired colonel of the Corps who had fought at Iwo Jima, died at his retirement home in North Carolina. His father was promoted to general with two stars, a promotion his own father was puffed with pride to witness just before his death.

  Kit Carson met and married a Navy nurse from the same hospital where he had been brought into the world. For three years, he and Susan tried for a baby, until tests showed she could not conceive. They agreed to adopt one day, but not just yet. Then, in the summer of 1999, he was assigned to the Command and Staff College back at Quantico and in 2000 was promoted to major. Following graduation, he and his wife were posted again, this time to Okinawa, Japan.

  It was there, many time zones west of New York, seeking to catch the late-night newscasts before turning in, that he witnessed, unbelieving, the images that would later simply be designated 9/11 in 2001.

  With others in the officers’ club, he sat out the night watching the slow-motion shots of the two airliners ploughing first into the North Tower and then the South, in silence, over and over again.

  Unlike those around him, he knew Arabic, the Arab world and the complexities of the religion of Islam, subscribed to by over a billion of the planet’s inhabitants.

  He recalled Professor Abdulaziz, gentle, courtly, serving tea and prophesying a long dark night for the world of Islam. And others. He listened to the rising buzz of rage around him as the details came through. Nineteen Arabs, including fifteen Saudis, had done this. He remembered the beaming smiles of the shopkeepers of al-Jubail when he greeted them in their own tongue. The same people?

  At dawn the entire regiment was summoned on parade to listen to the regimental commander. His message was bleak. There was now a war on, and the Corps would, as ever, defend the nation whenever, wherever and however it would be called upon.

  Major Kit Carson thought bitterly of the wasted years, when attack after attack on the U.S. in Africa and the Middle East had led to one-week-long outrage from the politicians but no radical recognition of the sheer size of the onslaught being prepared in a chain of Afghan caves.

  There is simply no way of overestimating the trauma that 9/11 inflicted on the U.S. and her people. Everything changed and would never be the same again. In twenty-four hours, the giant finally woke up.

  There would be retribution, Carson knew, and he wanted to be part of that. But he was stuck on a Japanese island with years of the posting yet to serve.

  But the event that changed America forever also changed the life of Kit Carson. What he could not know was that back in Washington a very senior officer with the CIA, a veteran of the Cold War named Hank Crampton, was scouring the records of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines for a rare type of man. The operation was called the Scrub, and he was searching for serving officers who knew Arabic.

  In his office at the No. 2 Building, CIA compound, Langley, Virginia, the records were fed into the computers, which scanned them far faster than the human eye could read or the human brain digest. Names and careers flashed up, most to be discounted, a few retained.

  One name flashed up with a pulsing star in the top corner of the screen. Marine major, Olmsted Scholarship, Monterey Language School, two years Cairo, bilingual in Arabic. Where is he? asked Crampton. Okinawa, said the computer. Well, we need him here, said Crampton.

  It took time and a bit of shouting. The Corps resisted, but the Agency had the edge. The Director of the CIA answers only to the President, and DCI George Tenet had George Bush’s ear. The Oval Office overruled the Marine protests. Maj. Carson was summarily seconded to the CIA. He did not want to swap services, but at least it got him out of Okinawa, and he vowed to return to the Corps when he could.

  On September 20, 2001, a Starlifter rose above Okinawa, heading for California. In the rear sat a Marine major. He knew the Corps would take care of Susan, bring her later to accommodations on the Marine base at Quantico, where he could be near her at Langley.

  From California, Maj. Carson was shipped on to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington and thus presented himself to CIA headquarters, as per orders.

  There were interviews, tests in Arabic, a compulsory change into civilian clothes and finally a small office in No. 2 Building, miles from the senior ranks of the Agency on the top floors of the original No. 1 Building.

  He was given a pile of intercepts of broadcasts in Arabic to peruse and comment. He chafed. This was a job for the National Security Agency over at Fort Meade on the Baltimore road up in Maryland. They were the listeners, the eavesdroppers, the code breakers. He had not joined the Corps to analyze newscasts from Radio Cairo.

  Then a rumor swept the building. Mullah Omar, the weird leader of the Taliban government of Afghanistan, was refusing to give up the culprits of 9/11. Osama bin Laden and his entire al-Qaeda movement would remain safe inside Afghanistan. And the rumor was: We are going to invade.

  The details were sparse but accurate on a few points. The Navy would be offshore in streng
th in the Arabian Gulf, delivering massive air power. Pakistan would cooperate, but grudgingly and with dozens of conditions. The American feet on the ground would be Special Forces only. And their British equivalents would be with them.

  The CIA, apart from its spies, agents and analysts, had one division that involved itself in what in the trade is called active measures, a euphemism for the messy business of killing people.

  Kit Carson made his pitch and he made it strong. He confronted the head of the Special Activities Division and told him bluntly: You need me. Sir. I am no use sitting in a coop like a battery hen. I may not speak Pashto or Dari, but our real enemies are bin Laden’s terrorists—Arabs all. I can listen to them. I can interrogate prisoners, read their written instructions and notes. You need me with you in Afghanistan; no one needs me here.

  He had made an ally. He got his transfer. When President Bush made his announcement of invasion on October 7th, the advance units of the SAD were on their way to meet the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. Kit Carson went with them.

  2

  The battle of Shah-i-Kot started badly and then went downhill. Maj. Kit Carson of the U.S. Marines, attached to the SAD, should have been on his way home when his unit was summoned to help out.

  He had already been at Mazar-e-Sharif when the Taliban prisoners revolted and the Uzbeks and Tajiks of the Northern Alliance mowed them down. He had seen fellow SAD Johnny “Mike” Spann caught by the Talib and beaten to death. From the far side of the vast compound, he had watched the British Special Boat Service men rescue Spann’s partner, Dave Tyson, from a similar fate.

  Then came the storming surge south to overrun the old Soviet air base at Bagram and take Kabul. He had missed the fighting in the Tora Bora massif when the Americans’ paid-for (but not enough) Afghan warlord had betrayed them and let Osama bin Laden and his entourage of guards slip over the border into Pakistan.

  Then, in late February, word came from Afghan sources that there were still a few diehards hanging on in the valley of Shah-i-Kot, up in Paktia Province. Once again, the intel was rubbish. There was not a handful; there were hundreds of them.