could easily be checked but there were more substantial benefits. Bolton was confident that even the most dedicated journalist would find those special bank accounts hard to trace.
CHAPTER 8
K halid Kadeer’s forward scout caught the movement down the track again. He quietly clicked his safety catch to the ‘off’ position and rested his gloved hand lightly on the trigger of his Kalashnikov and waited, scanning the ground below. If he revealed himself to the infidel the forward scout knew from bitter experience that the servants of the Great Satan would retreat but in their place the B52 bombers would appear overhead, their vapour trails reflected in the moonlight. A whistling sound would herald a rain of death, tons of high explosive shattering the peace and beauty of the Hindu Kush. At first light the helicopter gunships would appear like a swarm of angry wasps combing the hillsides for any sign of life. Suddenly three pinpricks of light appeared in quick succession. It was the simple pre-arranged signal from a Taliban sentry. Kadeer’s scout reached for his pencil torch to reply.
Khalid Kadeer stood up and stretched as his protective party moved silently back onto the snow-covered track to resume the move down the mountain. The Khyber Pass was faintly visible in the distance as they prepared to be escorted through the last of the Taliban-controlled areas.
A small scout party pressed on towards Peshawar tasked with ensuring that neither the infidel nor the Pakistani authorities were waiting for them and that the al-Qaeda safe house was indeed safe. Not that there was likely to be a problem, Kadeer thought. The Taliban and al-Qaeda had long ago made the North-West Frontier Province their own and the American infidel was so bogged down in Iraq that Afghanistan was slowly being reclaimed. Occasionally the Pakistani government would make a token gesture and deploy the military into the border area so that the Pakistani President could claim they were doing their utmost to support the war on terror, but Khalid Kadeer and the rest of al-Qaeda and the Taliban always had ample warning. Just the same, Kadeer had vowed that the Pakistani government would pay the ultimate price for their treachery.
With the soft pink of the pre-dawn sky appearing, the shrill exhausts of the first of the tuk tuks, the three- wheeled, two-stroke rickshaws of Peshawar, began to echo through ancient bazaars that were stirring to life. The first of the tongas, horse carts with big rubber tyres and impossible loads, were making their way onto the streets, as were Peshawar’s garishly coloured buses, belching clouds of thick, black exhaust. Emerging from beneath dirty cardboard shelters, dozens of beggars, many of them deformed, prepared to face another day of abject poverty. Suddenly the pall of smoke and gathering exhausts that enveloped the old city was shattered by the call to prayer by first one muezzin and then the echo of others, their messages to the faithful blaring discordantly into the surrounding hills. Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allah is Greatest, Allah is Greatest Allah ash hadu allaa ilaaha ill Allah I bear witness that there is nothing worthy of worship but Allah. As salaatu khairun minan maum. Prayer is better than sleep.
Dr Khalid Kadeer moved a little away from his bodyguards who were reaching for their prayer mats. He laid his own prayer mat on a patch of rocky ground and pressed his forehead on the mat, then rose to the sitting position.
At the end of Salat al Fajr, the dawn prayer, one of the first of the five prayers of the day, Kadeer looked first over his right shoulder, towards the angel recording his good deeds. As Salaamu ‘alaikum wa rahmatulaah. Peace and blessings of God be upon you.
Then he looked over his left shoulder towards the angel recording his wrongful deeds, of which he strived to ensure there were none. The three warning missions against the infidel and the final mission were not considered wrongful. They were after all ordained by Allah. As Salaamu ’alaikum wa rahmatulaah. Peace and blessings of God be upon you.
His prayers completed, Kadeer rolled up his prayer mat and settled down to wait for his scouting party to return. He smiled his thanks as one of his protective party appeared with a battered tin mug of steaming green tea, and he turned his mind to the discussions he would have with al-Falid. Hopefully the preparations for all of the warning attacks were well advanced. He already knew from the coded messages he and al-Falid had exchanged in anonymous internet chat rooms that the ocean-going tugs had maintained schedule and several of their precious cargos had been delivered safely. He allowed himself a grim smile. Beneath Eternity where the windmill has been stolen. It would be driving the infidel mad.
CHAPTER 9
‘G ood to see you again, Chuck,’ Richard Halliwell said without any depth of meaning, as he showed Bolton to one of the leather couches at one end of his vast office. ‘Meeting go well?’ he asked as he pressed a button on a remote and crossed the thick-piled carpet to where a well-stocked liquor cabinet was slowly rotating from behind the far wall.
‘Very well,’ Vice President Bolton replied in his southern drawl. ‘At least the fucking National Rifle Association is on side, which is more than I can say for some of the treacherous bastards who inhabit the beltway around Washington,’ he added, still furious at O’Connor disagreeing with him over the Khalid Kadeer threats.
Halliwell nodded as he handed the Vice President a crystal tumbler of Elijah Craig bourbon and ice. ‘Our problem, Chuck, is that we’re too honest and open in this country. If we’re not careful Americans are going to pay a very heavy price. It’s not the terrorists I’m worried about. It’s the fucking Chinese. Did you read my report?’
The Vice President nodded as he savoured the eighteen-year-old bourbon. They were two of the most influential men in the United States, both driven by a lust for power and an unshakeable belief that the United States of America set the standard for the rest of the world. As the Presidential primaries to decide the next Republican candidate for the White House drew closer, their intense rivalry would surface, but for the moment, the Chinese threat to US dominance had them singing from the same deadly sheet of music.
‘I agree with you. The Muslims are a backward and fragmented lot with a false religion.’ Vice President Chuck Bolton wasn’t the least bit religious but where the war on terror was concerned he played to the ordinary Americans’ strong sense of the Almighty in their country’s destiny and it suited him to denigrate Islam at every turn. ‘But the Chinese are not constrained by religion, and that makes them more dangerous still.’
‘You won’t get any disagreement from me on that score,’ Halliwell said, taking a hefty swig from his glass.
‘Your report corresponds with other reports that have passed over my desk, and as of last week,’ the Vice President continued, ‘our gross domestic product stood at just over $10 trillion a year. That still puts us where we should be with the biggest share of the world’s total of $36 trillion, but the damn Chinese are catching up and catching up fast. $1.5 trillion might put them in seventh place but unless we find a way to reign these little slopes in, they’re going to overtake us within the next fifteen years, maybe ten.’
‘It’s worse than that, Chuck. That figure of $1.5 trillion is grossly misleading,’ Halliwell said, his eyes steely. ‘You can’t take it in isolation. Provincial governments in China routinely file very low productivity figures so they can continue to be classified as poverty zones and remain eligible for large Central Government funding injections. The internal regional productivity figures I’ve seen are much higher. On the poverty correction factor alone, the Chinese GDP is closer to $2 trillion. Our economy is growing at somewhere between 2 and 4 per cent, and the Fed thinks that’s healthy? For fuck’s sake, Chuck, China is growing at three times that!’ Dr Halliwell’s passionate dislike of the Chinese was on full display.
‘Last year,’ Halliwell went on, ‘we bought $150 billion more in goods from China than they bought from us. While the deficit here is going through the roof, our dollars are pouring into the Chinese treasury faster than they can count them. Believe me, Chuck, the Chinese GDP is closer to $7 trillion a year.’
Both men were incensed that dumb-arsed Americans and millions of other people around the globe were
