The Afghan

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Der Afghane (in the English original The Afghan ) is a thriller by the British writer Frederick Forsyth from 2006. The novel was published in the same year in a German translation by Rainer Schmidt by C. Bertelsmann Verlag . In the thriller, the western secret services CIA and SIS try to smuggle an agent into the Islamist terror network Al-Qaeda in order to prevent an attack.

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While digging a small terrorist nest in the Pakistani city of Peshawar , the western secret services, the American CIA and the British SIS , fell into the hands of a laptop. Its owner was the chief financial officer of the terrorist organization Al-Qaeda , who died in the attack. On the laptop, the secret service workers find a reference to Al-Isra , a passage from the Koran, which they interpret as an indication of a major terrorist attack. The CIA calls in its Koran experts, but they cannot help. Even the global search for information on the keyword Al-Isra leads nowhere. The secret services suspect that only the inner circle of al-Qaeda is privy to it.

It would be most skillful, an agent muses, if an undercover agent could be smuggled into this circle. But which Western agent would pass as their equal among the Islamists? Terry Martin, a British Islamic scholar and advisor to the CIA, gives the crucial tip: his brother, Mike Martin, with his dark complexion, can hardly be distinguished from an Arab. Since the brothers grew up temporarily in Iraq and Mike Martin served as an elite soldier very often in Islamic countries, Mike also speaks several languages ​​of the region.

The secret services CIA and SIS decide to impersonate the Taliban fighter Izmat Khan who is incarcerated in the Guantanamo prison camp and to send Mike to Afghanistan as his doppelganger. In several weeks, Mike perfected his language and Koran skills and acquired everything that is known about Izmat Khan. With Khan's family killed in combat in Afghanistan, Mike needn't worry about family members blowing him up as a doppelganger.

The secret services fake Khan's deportation from Guantanamo to Afghanistan: Khan is taken into solitary confinement in the north of the USA, while Mike is flown to Afghanistan in his place. There he also manages to escape from the police custody. He goes underground and seeks connection with Al-Qaeda. He succeeds, and after intensive tests and questioning, he becomes part of the Al-Isra command.

Meanwhile, the terrorists hijacked the Java Star liquefied gas tanker with rubber dinghies , killed the crew and brought the ship to Indonesia. There the ship will be converted so that it looks like the freighter Countess of Richmond . The terrorists had also captured and sunk the real Countess beforehand. The target of the terrorists is an attack with the tanker and its explosive cargo. But Mike only realizes that when he and the other suicide bombers reach the ship.

The western secret services have long since lost track of Mike. Only once does Mike manage to slip a piece of paper to a tourist on the way to the ship with a reference to a ship attack. The secret service apparatus then set in motion to investigate any abnormalities in ship movements worldwide.

However, through diversionary maneuvers and the good camouflage of the Countess, the terrorists manage to steer unrecognized towards their actual destination: the luxury steamer Queen Mary 2 , which meets with US President Bush and other heads of state of the G8 countries on a conference trip from New York to London is located. Shortly before the Countess gets dangerously close to the QM2, Mike manages to blow up the freighter. He sacrifices himself in the process.

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Mike Martin was already the protagonist in The Fist of God .

After the East-West conflict with the fall of the Soviet Union is no longer available for secret service thrillers, literary critics see Der Afghane as an example of a new genre of thriller, the globalization thriller.

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  1. ↑ The inventor of the globalization thriller , in Die Welt, August 23, 2008