Habib, who wore the mask of a worldly Lebanese, was not as visibly disturbed, though his motives were very similar. These impulses had sent them both to train with the Sheikh, may Allah bring blessings on his head, in the camps in Sudan and at Khalden. But the kid from Wolverhampton was different, and in his wiser moments Jones knew it.
As soon as he found Dean in the Islamic Welfare Centre, Jones knew that he had a significant catch on his hands, and he also knew that it would be difficult to persuade others in the network of this fact. They saw a mixed-up, mixed race youth with only the vaguest knowledge of the Koran. Jones saw the makings of a small political coup. Not only did Dean have a phosphorescent hatred of bourgeois values, and an unconquerable will to undermine the dairy business, supermarkets, and other extensions of what he called the agro-industrial complex. He was also palpably — if anything, excessively — British.
He proved that British society was so corrupt that it engendered the very vipers that now sunk their fangs into its neck. If anyone could persuade the British intelligentsia to a bout of its favourite where-did-we-all-go- wrong-ery, it was surely Dean. Yet there had been times, even before the stressful events of today, when his optimism had been shaken. Last year the small remainder of Dean’s FreshStart endowment had been spent flying him to Lahore, whence it was hoped he would trek to the border with Afghanistan and imbue himself with all that was most inhuman in the terrorist repertory.
Nothing was heard from the trainee operative for weeks. Jones dared to hope. Then he started to receive reverse-charge calls from a plainly dope-brained Dean, who seemed to be in a Peshawar doss-house. He complained vehemently about the Pakistani police who, he said, had impounded his passport. He added that ants were not only coming out of the shower drain but out of his armpits. There was nothing for it. Haroun and Habib were disturbed from their Prussian drill at Khalden. They left the red-rocked tranquillity of their desert camp, slunk down from the mountains, and at times with main force conveyed the tyro to Afghanistan.
It is hard to say which — Dean or the wolf twins — had the lesser affection for their partnership. A bad time was had by all. Haroun and Habib thought first to toughen him up. They yomped all day through vast and trackless systems of unpopulated valleys. Occasionally Dean’s vestigial aesthetic sense allowed him to be penetrated by the beauty of the landscape, the rock turning with the sun from gold to ochre to reddish to purple and then to the blue- black of the night, with the white lamps of the stars shining on their sleeping bags in the very pattern they had shone on Alexander and his army. Mainly, however, he found himself thinking of the anti-smoking videos shown at Wolverhampton Grammar School as he gasped and gagged, through lack of fitness or oxygen, in the wake of the weaving wolves.
Soon the blood started to dry between his toes. Protective calluses formed. The soi-disant vice-captain of the school water polo team finally began to show some of the athleticism one might expect. He even started to look quite authentic, in his dish-dash and turban, and somewhat against their better judgement Haroun and Habib decided it was time to mount an operation. Dean would now prove his worth by striking a blow against the Western society he claimed to reject. The blow was to be all the more significant for being simultaneously vicious and pointless.
It was at a Chaikhana in the Panjshir valley that they came across their target. They were sitting at breakfast, Dean morosely drinking what he took to be fermented asses’ milk, the wolves wolfing their nan, when they heard a voice on the stair. It was a high, camp, Oxonian voice, of a kind Dean had heard most often on TV in the mouths of characters who were meant to be absurd.
‘I’ve got to go, darling, because I’ve just got to have breakfast and then go off and look at the Buddhas. Love you too. Big kiss.
First down the stairs came a pair of sandals so evidently travel-worn that one imagined they must be softer than the inner thigh of the sultan’s favourite houri. Next were the infinitely fashionable baggy Afghan trousers and the Afghan waistcoat and then the long skinny brown arms decorated at the wrist with those epicene string bracelets affected by Prince William; and then six-foot, curly-haired Jamie Davenport emerged and embraced the whitewashed breakfast room with his radiant smile.
Not since the days of Eric Newby had a professional travel writer been through these parts, and come up with so much that was hilarious, fascinating, warm, witty and wise. At the age of twenty-three Davenport had dazzled London with his tale of escape from a shotgun marriage in the Khyber Pass, entitled ‘A quick poke in the Hindu Bush’. Three years later ‘Alph — the search for Kubla’s Sacred River’ had won just about every gong going. Now he was back on the ancient literary trail, in search of the usual farrago of wily Pathans and almond-eyed beauties with lotus-stud noses and peach-like bottoms and truculent, jezzail-wielding tribesmen who move, in the space of five pages, from desiring to cut your throat to desiring you to marry their sisters.
Wherever he went, his aerial was tuned for anything usable: snatches of sufi mumbo-jumbo, religious syncretism, gobbets of recondite fact, and if all else failed there were the charming mis-spellings of the menus. When he came down to breakfast, he was ready for anecdote, colour, quotes, personalities. What he found was Haroun, Habib and Dean, all in a pretty foul mood.
Dean was about to croak a greeting when Haroun kicked him under the table.
‘But how,’ asked Dean, when the team had assembled outside, ‘and, you know, why?’
He stared into the fathomless brown eyes of the Islamofascists.
‘He is a foreign pig,’ said Haroun.
‘He is part of the infidel desecration of this country,’ said Habib.
‘He is a Zionist pig,’ said Haroun. The last was especially unfair, since Jamie Davenport’s sympathies were very much in the opposite direction. Indeed, he had been known to attend parties with a little Arab tea towel at his throat.
‘All right, all right,’ said Dean. ‘But how am I meant to do it?’ In their hearts, the two Arabs were hoping he might be talked into the suicide option. Go off into the hot white noonday with the other irritating Englishman, take him to some deserted wadi, pull the ripcord and boom.
However, they doubted his competence, and whatever they said about sherbet and sloe-eyed virgins, they doubted his appetite for the job. So half an hour later Jamie Davenport found himself being driven in a Daewoo pick-up by two effusive Arabs, who swore they knew the whereabouts of a lost Buddha, and a seeming deaf-mute whose ethnic origins were not at all obvious.
‘Look, is it much further?’ he asked, after Dean had driven them erratically into the desert for several miles.
‘Just five minutes, five minutes,’ said Haroun.
‘And did you say that this Buddha had Hellenistic influences?’
‘Assuredly it is most Hellenistic.’
‘Really? Does it have curly hair?’
Haroun appeared scandalized by the question. ‘It is as curly as mine. Of course it is curly.’
Jamie Davenport settled back in his seat for a second. A syncretic Buddha. Good. Might be worth a couple of paragraphs, especially if he could contrive some kind of colourful incident or exchange with his guides.
‘And you are sure it is syncretic?’ he said absently.
‘It is profoundly syncretic,’ said Habib.
Dean was rehearsing his lines as he drove. In fact he had decided on only one line, the better to conceal his English voice. At a signal from Haroun and Habib he would stop. While the Englishman got out, he would take the automatic from the glove compartment. They would all four walk a little way. Then, when it was obvious that there was no Buddha, he would pull the automatic out, force the man of letters to his knees, hands behind back, head forward in the traditional position of execution, and he would say, with all due fanaticism, ‘Die, foreign dog!’
Or should that be ‘pig’? He was trying the words to himself, hunched over the steering wheel and moving his lips, when he saw an obstruction in the road. In fact, there were several obstructions, a row of boulders, each bigger than a melon.
After that things happened very fast.
Haroun and Habib screamed at him to reverse. Just as Dean was selecting the gear, a hairy face protruded itself through the driver’s window, with dentition that was poor even by English standards, and an AK 47 was jammed beneath his jaw. Fifteen minutes later the team — Haroun, Habib, Dean — were standing by the side of the road. All three appeared to have been rolled in the dust like gingerbread men rolled in flour. They were minus their wallets, their mobiles, their car, and in Habib’s case a tooth and a small amount of blood. They were also minus their shoes and their intended assassinee.
