The Afghan Quotes
"If the young Talib bodyguard had known that making the cellphone call would kill him, he would not have done it."
"The very word implies 'back to basics'. But the planters of bombs in trains, malls and buses are not going back to the basics of Islam."
"Every word had been recorded. This was, after all, the building known in the trade as 'the Puzzle Palace'."
"If fifty people know anything that interesting, one will eventually spill the beans."
"The young Pashto-speaking Pakistani army sergeant monitoring the console hit a button and his superior officer came on the line."
"It was not until September 2006 that it also became clear that one of the bombers took one of the ‘lily-white’ untraceable cellphones with him and presented it to his Al-Qaeda organizer/instructor."
"He was waiting for the arrival of the guide who would take him back into the Waziri peaks and into the presence of the Sheikh himself."
"There were only another thousand tiles to go."
"The end of the Cold War in 1991 led to the asinine presumption among politicians on both sides of the Atlantic that peace had come at last and come to stay."
"He would get a job locally, find a Labrador or a couple of Jack Russells and maybe even a woman to share his life."
"‘Test weeks?’ muttered Phillips. ‘What the hell has the rest been?’"
"At the end came the ‘wings parade’ when the wings of a paratrooper were finally pinned on."
"Private Mike Martin had long been earmarked as POM – potential officer material."
"For three years out of every nine, or one tour out of three, each battalion is off parachuting and used as ordinary lorry-born infantry. Paras hate penguin mode."
"The journey south was on the liner Canberra with a first stop at Ascension Island, a bleak button of a place lashed by constant wind."
"It was the first time, as bullets tore through the air around his head and men fell beside him, that Mike Martin experienced that strange, brassy taste on the tongue that is the flavour of fear."
"At dawn Mike Martin stood atop Wireless Ridge, looked east to the town and rising sun, and rediscovered the God of his fathers whom he had neglected for many years."
"Rudyard Kipling, the poet of the old Raj, evoked the deadliness of the mountain men against subalterns expensively educated in England in just four lines."
"The SAS claims they take very fit men and then start to work on them."
"But it was in the second shootout that Martin took his bullet."
"On 2 August that year Saddam Hussein of Iraq invaded neighbouring Kuwait."
"Mike Martin, after a stint in Kosovo, had brought One Para to Freetown where they were based at Waterloo Camp."
"The SAS and the Paras took twelve injured and one SAS man, Brad Tinnion, died of his wounds."
"In the West African hellhole of Sierra Leone, a long period of civil war and barbarism had left the once-rich former British colony a vista of chaos, banditry, filth, disease, poverty and hacked-off limbs."
"Too late he learned there was a dark side to the Taliban."
"The one who tribally controlled the province of Nangarhar where Izmat Khan had been born was the Mullah Maulvi Younis Khalès."
"The problem was, the guilty ones were not about to come forward with their hands up."
"The Taliban army was not a real army; it had no commanding general, no general staff, no officer corps, no ranks and no infrastructure."
"With the end of the war the Arabs had almost all gone from the mountains and their precious caves."
"Up on the surface the United Nations was in charge, surrounded by media, and its instructions were to take prisoners."
"One body interested him; it was still bleeding. Corpses do not bleed."
"He was wearing no turban. It had been used to bind his hands six days earlier and never recovered."
"United Nations records later showed that 514 Al-Qaeda fanatics died at Qala-i-Jangi and eighty-six survived, all injured."
"Colonel Mike Martin returned to London in the spring of 2002 to spend three years as Deputy Chief of Staff, HQ Directorate of Special Forces."
"On 14 January 2002 the first detainees arrived at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, from Kandahar."
"And how can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods?"
"The intelligence agencies were in a quandary."
"The project’s second chore was to find and establish a new and remote headquarters."
"The West’s counter-measure would be Crowbar and only Crowbar."
"By then it was only doing what was already being done by others, but the pretense had to be maintained."
"The Predator’s true genius lies in its bulbous nose: the detachable Skyball avionics pod."
"The Taliban commander was the last one."
"He turned the scarecrow over. The clothing was wrong. This was Pashtun dress."
"If I can die shahid, in the service of His jihad, of course."
"You have no papers, and I cannot provide them. No matter, they have always been a western impertinence."
"They wiped out my family. Most of me died then. How do you punish a man who is dead?"
"It was a gruelling journey, with only catnaps on the aeroplanes."
"Peace be unto you, Yusuf Ibrahim, Butcher of Karbala."
"These are the only three of eight who needed technical knowledge of ships."
"His destination was on the harbour known as the Creek in the heart of Dubai."
"He stared back at the smiling Arab. He recalled the warnings of Tamian Godfrey."
"The day he fired up his oxy-acetylene cutters the Countess of Richmond was passing through the Suez Canal."
"This is not just a hunt, this is a search for a needle in a haystack."
"Six-sevenths of the world’s surface is covered by ocean, giving an area so vast that literally thousands of ships are out of sight of land or any other vessel all the time."
"Eighty per cent of the world’s trade is still carried out by sea, and that means just under six billion tonnes."
"The oceans are a terrorists’ playground."
"Security of ports and harbours has been massively tightened."
"Nobody out there in the shopping malls or the gas stations realizes how the whole of world trade is now geared to just-in-time delivery."
"The fact that Al-Qaeda chose for its first huge spectacular an attack from the air was actually illogical."
"The T-shirt made in China sold in Dallas on Monday probably arrived at the docks the previous Friday."
"You are talking damage in the hundreds of billions of dollars."
"Major merchant-marine shipping lines had agreed to file destination plans, as airliners file flight plans, as a matter of routine."
"The saving grace for the CIA team at the shattered Cabin was that their communications had survived the hit."
"Modern aircrew have a lifejacket with a state-of-the-art beacon, small but powerful, and a transmitter that permits in-voice communication."
"The defence strategy would be based on three stages: aerial surveillance, identification of vessel and ‘check-it-out’."
"The first result was a massive bang from somewhere deep in the guts of the starboard F-100 as the compressor blades, sharp as cleavers and spinning close to the speed of sound, began to shear off."
"Neither Larry Duval nor Nicky Johns actually saw their plane die."
"The President and the other five of the six principals were there."
"The rule of thumb was always ‘fifteen minutes and then shut up’."
"‘I had no idea cargoes that dangerous were being carried around the world on a daily basis,’ marvelled the Secretary of State."
"‘Our advice therefore is that you go ahead to your G8 with an easy mind!’"
"‘Why then, that’s what I shall surely do,’ said the President of the USA."
"David Gundlach reckoned he had the best job in the world."
"The steel hull of the liner simply towered above the waterline, its lowest ports more than fifty feet up."
"The Grand Duplex Apartment set aside for the US President and First Lady was already sealed and guarded by the Secret Service."
"The backgrounds of the 1,200 crew had been vetted and checked and not a shred of evidence had been found against any of them."
"‘We are all sentenced to die, Angleez. But only a warrior blessed of Allah may be allowed to choose how!’"
"At the end of that second both men and ship were consumed in a rose-pink eternity."
"‘Monterey to Queen Mary 2. Divert to port, I say divert to port. We are investigating.’"
"The last blotches of flame upon the sea would be the remnants of the vanished ship’s fuel oil. All the hyper-volatile cargo was gone before the Monterey reached the spot."
"The captain of the Cunarder ordered that the computers resume course for Southampton."