Elephants can't hide forever Read Online Free Page A

with the cruel
Afghan winter and cowardly British Officers they never stood a chance, and that was about the sum total of Gandamak’s claim to fame.
    Gandamak lies relatively close to the Tora Bora mountainous region of Afghanistan. The Tora Bora, or White Mountains, lie in the District of Nangarhar, only 50 kilometres west of the Khyber
Pass, which joins Afghanistan to Pakistan.
    The English and American press in the furore of post September 11 th had all claimed that the mountains of Tora Bora contained a hotel -like bunker, where Osama Bin Laden and up to two
thousand followers were holed up. The idea that the perpetrators of the horrific attacks on America were hiding in caves in the middle of Asia embedded itself into the American public. They wanted
retribution, and George W Bush was not silly enough to deny them their bloodlust, indeed it was he who led the rallying cry for the heads of those responsible for the recent attacks. So it
transpired, whether through fact or fiction no one will ever know, that a report from the Secretary of Defence USA was leaked to the American press, stating that immediately post September
11 th (or 9/11 as it was now referred to), Bin Laden had been picked up by a British AWAC (Airborne Early Warning and Control) spy plane, leaving Kabul, on a donkey no less, and heading
for the impenetrable fortress of the Tora Bora mountains.
    Like a recalcitrant child who can’t get his own way and lashes out at the nearest thing, POTUS decided, probably carried along by the American groundswell that Bin Laden must perish in his
mountain hideaway. He ordered a great force of bombers to systematically reduce the Tora Bora mountain range to dust, and those hiding underneath as well; even if Bin Laden wasn’t there the
World would see the full might of American anger when aroused and the good folks of the USA might start to feel good about themselves again.
    Mike Tobin, British SAS Captain and his three comrades sat outside the café, in Sher Poor Square Gandamak.
    They listened to the constant thunder of the B 52s dropping their deadly ordinance payload as they reshaped the landscape of the Tora Bora Mountains. Their mission was to destroy the members of
Al-Qaeda hiding beneath.
    It struck the four SAS troopers with great irony that this entire division of America’s finest airborne was in fact wasting their time, as the quarry they so desperately sought to blast
into eternity was, in fact, holed up in a house fifty metres from where they sat.
    For fifteen days they had been sitting outside the café and at first they had attracted some minor attention. Dressed as Afghan farmers, and fully covered up for protection against the
cold winter, they soon blended in with the indigenous population. Many Afghan farmers now resorted to spending the majority of their days doing likewise, ever since the great Satan, the USA, had
systematically destroyed their crops and income from the poppy fields.
    The four members of the SAS snatch squad had walked into Gandamak from the Pakistan town of Peshawar, crossing the border at nightfall; little attention was paid to them in this remote and
hostile environment. There was a constant stream of human flotsam crossing into and out of Pakistan. Whilst sitting outside the café, whiling away the time, they had kept a constant eye on
the alleyway running off at right angles to the road they sat by. Nothing unusual had been observed; in fact to these highly trained individuals the very fact that nothing moved up or down this
alleyway was in itself an indication that there was something unusual occurring, and that unusual occurrence was the fact that, providing GCHQ had not fucked up, Osama Bin Laden was sitting in the
back room of the fourth house down the alley, safe in the knowledge that the distant rumble of the American bombers indicated no one had a clue where he really was.
    It was the most extraordinary piece of luck that brought these four men into