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the lawless region of Eastern Afghanistan, and now as they waited for darkness to envelop the small village, they
readied themselves for the snatch they had been planning which was to occur that evening.

Chapter 5
GCHQ (General Command Headquarters Cheltenham), 4 weeks previously
    GCHQ sits just outside the town of Cheltenham. Local residents are aware of its existence but pay little attention to the comings and goings. Its function is to listen and
monitor the constant chatter of the world at large. It can eavesdrop on every telephone conversation no matter what the contents or classification. GCHQ can filter the millions of phones calls
which are made each second of every day through their massive computers, and discard the normal, but recognise those that may be less ordinary and deal with them accordingly; so if certain known
numbers or words are used, this triggers an automatic segregation whereby these numbers are flashed to one of the waiting monitors manned by the team of trained listeners, who will then track the
call and wait for further developments. The task is both tiresome and tedious for the watchers, as ninety nine percent of suspect calls turn out to be fruitless. It has always irked the British
Security Service that GCHQ has been looked upon by the cousins across the pond at Langley as a somewhat provincial outfit which rarely contributes to world security, and they longed for an
opportunity to prove they were actually the world’s premier spymasters.
    On this particular day in mid December 2001, all was about to change. Sally Dixon, recently recruited from Cambridge after obtaining a First in middle eastern languages, was sitting watching her
screen display various low level chit chat emanating from the area covering the Gulf and north Tajikistan, when her screen went dead, immediately followed by a flashing red warning message which
read ‘incoming encrypted message, maximum status, area North East Afghanistan, delivery via Predator’
    Sally had heard of these messages in the canteen when the staff met and swopped stories, but the truth was the last red flash had occurred 10 years or so earlier when a satellite had spotted 300
tanks with Iraqi markings going hell for leather towards the Kuwait border. Sally’s training kicked in, she hit the panic button next to the monitor which would alert her departmental head
sitting one storey above, and then logged into her two immediate neighbours’ computers, both middle east experts, in case her screen crashed.
    The vehicle that was about to deliver its life changing message to young Sally, was, to give it its full name, the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Predator MQ-1, better known as a drone. Used by the
British and American armed forces and security networks, it was a pilotless aircraft that could fly at altitudes of fifty thousand feet, watching and listening to what was occurring beneath it. It
could observe enemy movements and in real time convey information to the front line soldier; furthermore it was capable of picking up radio and satellite messages no matter how smart the enemy on
the ground thought he was being in evading their monitoring systems.
    On this particular December morning, the Predator had been deployed in the region of Afghanistan known locally as the Safed Koh, or white mountains, otherwise known as the Tora Bora area; indeed
most of the western world’s military resources were focused on this region, for it was here that the American intelligence community were certain Osama Bin Laden had taken refuge following
his departure from Kabul a couple of weeks earlier. The Predator, flying at thirty thousand feet, had just covered its third sweep of the day and was preparing to circle back when an unusually
strong side wind blew it slightly off course. As it automatically readjusted its position, its flight took it over the village of Gandamak, and at that precise moment an encoded, encrypted message,
reduced to a nano second