Abdul Qadeer Khan, nuclear proliferator extraordinaire

An excerpt from my spy thriller 'Let Bhutto Eat Grass' featuring the metallurgist who stole nuclear weapons technology and earned the sobriquet Xerox Khan.

Abdul Qadeer ‘Xerox’ Khan

Serial nuclear weapons proliferator extraordinaire and part-time spy Abdul Qadeer Khan breathed his last yesterday. I thought I’d post an excerpt from my espionage thriller ‘Let Bhutto Eat Grass’ to commemorate the occasion.

Spoiler warning

The scenes in the excerpt below include a minor spoiler and occur roughly halfway through the first novel of the series. Please skip it if you’d rather read the novel without having a minor plot arc spoiled.

Excerpt

December 1975
The Hague (the Netherlands)

‘They have just taken a taxi to Schiphol,’ the voice over the phone whispered urgently. ‘Three suitcases. All of them.’

It was six days since the briefing in Delhi; most of the Netherlands was going on vacation for Christmas. Malathi called someone she knew, a man with contacts within the airport. There was little time to waste, she told him. His instructions were clear: find out the Khan family’s destination and report back before their flight takes off.

She had commandeered the public telephone lines people dialled to enquire about visas to India. While each call went to the regular diplomatic staffer first, those callers that asked a specific question were transferred to her extension immediately. The sheer number of calls made on those lines would, she anticipated, mask the odd ones. Besides, the BVD were unlikely to tap a publicly listed embassy number; they didn’t have the resources to analyse hundreds of random calls each day for each embassy and international institution at The Hague.

An hour later, her agent called back.

‘Can I apply for a visa that would allow me to travel to New Delhi from Karachi? My colleague Mr Khan will be visiting Karachi soon, and I hoped to spend a few days with him there before moving on to New Delhi.’

‘That would needlessly complicate things,’ she replied in the bored drawl of a public servant. ‘Any application for a visa permitting entry from Karachi would be subject to greater scrutiny. Besides, I’m unaware of a suitable flight.’

‘Oh, there is a PIA flight from Schiphol at 5 p.m. that flies to Karachi via a stopover in Istanbul.’

‘I meant a flight from Karachi to New Delhi,’ she lied. ‘In any case, I recommend against it. Good day.’

She retrieved the One-Time Pads that Arora had given her. On a blank paper, she wrote: ‘ABDUL KHAN EN ROUTE TO KARACHI VIA ISTANBUL. FLIGHT FROM SCHIPHOL AT 5 PM LOCAL TIME. ADVISE SURVEILLANCE AT KARACHI AIRPORT AND BEYOND.’ Then she encoded it using the first page of the One-Time Pad: she assigned a number for each letter on her message and each corresponding letter on the Pad, then added the two. The letter that corresponded to the sum became a part of the encrypted message. After feeding the encrypted message and Arora’s teletext address to her machine, and receiving confirmation that the transmission had been received correctly, she tore the first page of the One-Time Pad and burned it along with the sheets she had written her message on.

It was 7 p.m. in New Delhi. Sablok had stepped out for a pack of smokes when Arora decoded and read the message. He rang Almeida’s office and relayed the message, then made the request.

‘I will make the call to Mishra,’ Almeida replied. ‘Let us see if Khan tips his hand in Karachi. Write up a formal request.’

#

Karachi (Pakistan)

The gossip columnist sat at a table next to floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the tarmac, sipping her second cup of black coffee. It was 8 a.m. Karachi airport was slowly coming to life and, in a way, so was she. The previous evening had been busy: after a short stop at Qasre-e-Fatima, she had stayed at a party near CJM in Clifton till after midnight. The phone call at 5:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning had put her in a foul mood, but the coffee was slowly working its magic. Her photographer was outside on the balcony with a telephoto lens longer than her arm, waiting patiently for the flight from Amsterdam to land. He had received a tip-off that George Harrison was travelling to Pakistan for a personal, hush-hush tour of Sufi shrines.

‘In disguise, of course,’ he had added, ‘and with a lady friend.’

‘I’ll be at the Sky Grill. Come get me when it’s about to land,’ she had replied before crawling into the restaurant under the crushing weight of a monstrous hangover.

Her editor had laughed when she had asked for a raise a few months earlier. ‘Let’s see him laugh later today,’ she murmured to her cup of coffee, the warm china soothing the ache in her temples.

She was about to order a third cup when her photog rushed in and almost dragged her out. The flight was on descent.

‘You go down to the tarmac. I’ll get a better angle from here,’ he told her. And so she rushed down the stairs and got as close to the aeroplane as she could. The excruciating whine of engines bored through her skull, reviving the headache the coffee had nearly drowned. She narrowed her eyes to tame the sunlight reflecting off the aircraft’s windows. The ladder rolled up to the door. Passengers began filing down and walking past her to the terminal. Most were Pakistani: businessmen, the odd cricketer, students, families; there were a few firangs, but none of them resembled the Beatle. Fifteen minutes later, after all the passengers had left, the crew deplaned. She walked up to one of the stewardesses and introduced herself. Seeing a glimmer of recognition in the young woman’s eyes, she warmed up to her at once. Could she please point out George Harrison from among the last of the passengers who were now almost at the terminal building? Who? George Harrison, the musician. Clueless. Very unattractive. The stewardess consulted the passenger manifest.

‘He’s British, isn’t he?’ she asked, scanning the list. ‘No British passengers on today’s flight, I’m afraid.’

‘Could you check again, please?’

After another cursory look the stewardess confirmed that Mr Harrison wasn’t embarking on a Sufi journey of the soul, and walked off to join her curious colleagues who were waiting a few yards beyond. She whispered something to them and the columnist heard laughter. Bitch!

Her photog was apologetic.

‘Next time leave the investigative stuff to me,’ she replied, narrow nostrils flared and delicate chin jutting out.

He took her back to the restaurant and ordered another cup of coffee to soothe her anger. She nursed her coffee mug, making a mental outline for a column about bitchy stewardesses.

‘Later,’ she told herself, paying no heed as the photog extracted the roll from his camera. She didn’t notice him drop it into the ashtray at their table either.

#

New Delhi (India)

The cable arrived on Arora’s desk at 2 p.m., half an hour before the photographs did. At 3 p.m., he rang Almeida’s residence.

‘You wanted hard evidence, sir,’ he said.

It took the old man fourteen minutes to reach his office. Sablok handed three photos to him.

‘Abdul Khan reached Karachi earlier today with his family. You can see him and his firang wife alighting in the first photo. He’s the man with sad, wistful eyes. They were received by a uniformed man and two staff cars. The man can be seen shaking Khan’s hand in the second photo. His name is Imtiaz Ahmed, a Lieutenant Colonel, one of Jilani Khan’s boys. Mrs Khan and the children were driven in one staff car to Khan’s family home in Karachi with all their luggage in the trunk. Lieutenant Colonel Ahmed drove with Khan to a hangar at the rear of the airport from where they hitched a ride in a PAF C-130 tactical transport aircraft,’ he narrated.

‘Islamabad?’

‘That appears to be their destination, sir,’ Arora chimed in. ‘The cable hints at it.’

Almeida allowed himself a smile.

‘Draft a suitable cable to Malathi,’ he instructed. ‘Then cable the Resident at Karachi and tell him to step away from the Khans. We do not want to spook them. Write up an appropriate report for the Secretary (R). And finally, gentlemen, congratulations. You have a real operation on your hands now. Do not cock it up.’

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Let Bhutto Eat Grass is a multi-part spy fiction series set in 1970s and 1980s Europe, India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. It follows a team of Indian intelligence professionals as they track and try to stop Pakistan’s attempts at stealing nuclear weapons technology and developing nuclear weapons.

The final novel in the series will be published towards the end of 2021.