Cobra Strike

by J. B. Hadley

  Baker had an attack of laughter. “I’m going to play this one up in my report on transportation techniques.”

  But as soon as they got out into the open and his animal balked, Baker lost his sense of humor. Looking anxiously up and down the road from time to time, he and Winston half pushed and half carried their ass across the tarred surface and heaved it down the slope of a ravine on the far side, where it had to stumble and find its footing. No more than half a minute after they had gotten the six animals and themselves out of sight in the ravine, they heard the roar of a heavy truck pass by on the road above them. This close call highly amused Mohammed and the Afghans.

  Baker’s sense of humor had totally evaporated by now. “This fucking joker is going to get us wasted, Turner.”

  Turner didn’t bother to respond, being too busy brushing dust off his pant legs.

  Two of the Afghans were walking along the ravine bottom with the asses. When the Americans made to follow them, Mohammed urgently beckoned to them to creep up to the side of the road.

  “You think they’re trying to steal the pack animals?” Baker asked Turner as they went where Mohammed directed, and crouched out of sight of the road behind loose rock.

  He heard the metallic scrape of Turner cocking his AK-47 and took this as an answer that Turner thought this might be what was going on.

  When Baker saw Mohammed load a rifle grenade, he began to change his mind.

  Winston knew it. “It’s an M60 HEAT. You see the slim, streamlined shape, the round-nosed body, and the rounded stabilizing fins? The Yugoslavs make them, and they’re the only weapon of this type that a communist country makes well. The Polish PGN-60 ain’t worth shit. But this baby has a range of a hundred and fifty meters. I think that’s an old M48 rifle he’s using.”

  They waited. Mohammed gestured to them from his hiding place, and Baker, who had a talent for interpreting sign language, explained to the others, “He’s very excited for some reason about that truck or whatever it was that passed. From what I understand it’s only when the Russians are feeling very confident that they allow vehicles to travel singly on this road. He desperately seems to want to show us something, and it’s not just him blowing up a truck. I can’t understand what he’s trying to tell me, though. But I don’t believe they’re keeping us here in order to steal the asses.”

  “I was hoping they were,” Winston muttered.

  They waited for another twenty minutes before they heard anything. A truck came traveling north at high speed. Mohammed waited till it was less than eighty yards away before he fired the rifle grenade, which hit the truck square in the radiator. The antitank grenade blew the engine off its bearings and knocked it into the roadway almost opposite, where the three Americans were concealed. White-hot fragments of metal emerged from the blinding white-and-yellow flash of the explosion and skittered off the rocks around them.

  The engineless truck rolled down the road a way. When it stopped, soldiers poured out of the back of die canvas-covered vehicle. The Americans were about to fire on them as they leapt over the tailgate onto the road, until they noticed that Mohammed and his men were not firing. The soldiers were not ethnic Russians. They appeared to be Afghans but had military-style haircuts and no tribal headdresses. When they walked on the road, they had the unmistakable gait of city dwellers in the countryside.

  The soldiers from the disabled truck began to stack their rifles by the roadside and threw ammunition, pistols, and other gear on the ground beside them. Then they walked back into the middle of the road and shouted slogans and raised their fists in the air. Mohammed and his men chanted back die same slogans and raised their fists. After that, the disarmed soldiers set out on foot along the road.

  Mohammed winked at the Americans and came over to shake their hands. He sent one man with them to bring them along the ravine to the asses while he and the other eight men went to gather the stacked arms before another vehicle came.

  The pathway left the ravine and traveled more or less parallel to the tarred road, sometimes coming very close to it and then veering away again. The ground was bare and dusty from the passage of many feet, and it was obvious that this alternate route was heavily used by people with no wish to meet military vehicles on the road.

  At one place where the path neared the road the Afghan walking beside the lead ass’s head grabbed his bridle and yanked him to a savage stop. The others piled up behind, and gradually the whole line came to a halt. Ahead, over a roadside bank of earth, the camouflaged canvas roof of a military truck was visible. If they continued on the path, any soldiers with the truck could not miss seeing them. And there was no other route for them to take across the rocky hillsides except this path. One Afghan remained behind to keep the animals still, and the other two stealthily advanced toward the bank of earth, rifles at the ready.

  Before Turner could stop them, Winston and Baker had joined the two Afghans in stalking the truck’s occupants. Turner cursed silently. The job he had been sent to do here was to stop Winston and Baker from getting involved in things like this. They were here on an intelligence-gathering mission and not to trade lead with the Russians. But since Turner saw that he was too late this time to stop them without causing a dangerous disturbance that might give their presence away, he decided to join them and thereby increase the chance of their success. He was in time to see two Russian soldiers standing next to the truck, talking and smoking—and these were definitely Russian, with high Slavic cheekbones and fair hair—before the two Afghans riddled them with automatic fire. The soldiers clutched their guts, dropped their cigarettes, and crumpled to the tar, one managing a few steps before he fell.

  They cautiously made their way around to the back of the truck. It was filled with cardboard cartons stamped with lettering in the Russian alphabet.

  Baker looked them over “C rations,” he said, and then mimed putting food in his mouth for the two Afghans.

  One of the tribesmen pointed at Baker, then to the truck, then across the road and down a piece, where there was a steep slope downward for some hundreds of feet. The Afghan twisted an imaginary steering wheel and pointed at himself and the other tribesmen and shook his head. They didn’t drive. Baker was pleased to start the truck, drive it down the road a little, and jump out after steering it toward the slope. It caused a miniature landslide down the slope and banged and rattled but stayed on its four wheels till it came to the bottom, where it flipped on its side and scattered some of the cartons.

  The Afghans were hiding the soldiers’ bodies in the rocks. One remained behind, and the other went back for the asses so they could continue their journey toward the pass.

  Aleksei Rybakovich Ustin was taking a peaceful leak among the rocks, following instructions to be modest and not give offense to the locals by pissing in public. His pleasurable relief was strangled by a burst of gunfire from the roadway. He froze, prick in hand. When he heard nothing else after the first burst of automatic fire, he guessed it might be one of his comrades horsing around. But Aleksei had been long enough in Afghanistan—four months—not to make any assumptions. He eased his head slowly around the rock and saw his two comrades lying still, on the road in front of the truck. Two Afghans were looking into the back of the truck, along with—Aleksei could hardly believe this, but there they were, no more than fifty meters away—two white men and a black man, all clearly American.

  If he could shoot one, he knew he could demand to be sent home as a reward. He would be a hero. He might even be on television, for he had heard that the newspapers and television back home had begun to admit the existence of this war. It was rumored that so many Soviet soldiers had been killed here—some said more than ten thousand—that the Party could no longer hope to keep it quiet. He glanced back at the lifeless bodies of his friends, who had been so full of life and jokes such a short time ago. Some Party committeeman would say at a meeting that they had died fulfilling their internationalist duty on Afghan soil. And that would be that. A few bott
les of vodka and reminiscences among their friends. That was not going to happen to him! He was going home! Back to Natulya in her warm bed…

  And these Americans were how he was going to get home. If only he could shoot one. But he had left his rifle in the truck, which, of course, was against regulations, and he had only a pistol against five men with automatic rifles.

  He watched one of the Americans ditch the truck and the two Afghans drag his friends’ bodies among the rocks. One Afghan stayed behind, and the other left with the Americans. Then he saw a sight that surprised him even further, although he would not have thought it possible. The Americans reappeared with a train of six asses loaded down with camouflage-fabric-covered cylinders that looked very much like some kind of missile to him. This was it! He didn’t need a dead one. His information alone was worth an immediate transfer home.

  Aleksei thoughtfully put his prick back in. It was an easy thing for a Russian soldier to lose in Afghanistan, and he was going to be needing it for Natulya in a few days time.

  Colonel Matveyeva placed the aerial photos on the lieutenant’s desk, walked across the office, and gazed out the window at the bare, stony soil that stretched levelly around the barracks. The lieutenant carefully looked at each shot. There were six separate stills that a low-flying jet had taken on two passes over the target at first light that morning. The other fourteen or fifteen photos were all enlargements of details from these six photos. They showed six asses laden with tubular objects, two Afghans, and three American-looking Westerners—two white, one black—exactly as the private had described everything. The lieutenant was pleased to be vindicated after all the fuss he had raised.

  “How did these pictures come to be taken, Comrade Lieutenant?” the colonel asked. “I heard you were responsible.”

  She had spoken without turning around from the window, and her voice was neutral. Perhaps she was playing a game with him, hoping to make him worry whether he had followed the correct procedure. If this was what she was doing, she was wasting her time. He was an officer, sure, but he was a draftee, just like the private who had started this whole thing, and like him, all he wanted was to be out of this place and out of the army as quickly as he could. So he looked at the way the sunlight from the window outlined the shape of her body, her narrow waist, swelling hips, and long thighs in her military skirt, and he took his time before replying.

  “A private who survived an ambush saw them and realized they were heading for the mountain pass to cross through it during the night. He stayed where he was until a truck convoy arrived with a military escort. They radioed in his report. I was on duty and spotted it. I had him flown in by helicopter so I could personally verify the incident. From there it was easy to estimate how far they could have traveled during the night and to locate them by jet on the other side of the pass at first light this morning.”

  “Has this private ever been abroad before serving in Afghanistan?”

  “Never, Comrade Colonel. He’s from a small town near Rovno, in the Ukraine. He’s never even been to Moscow.”

  “Interesting,” she said, still without turning around. “I asked that because there are some who think this is some kind of deliberate provocation—three very obvious Americans appearing like this in a slow-moving group with weapons. How could they have come this far from the Pakistan border without being observed before this?”

  “I don’t know, Comrade Colonel.”

  “Neither do I,” she said, finally turning around to face him. “Do you think this private told you the truth about what he saw?”

  “Absolutely. He’s very proud of himself and is demanding to be sent home without delay as a reward, along with an honorable discharge.”

  “Offer him a promotion if he stays on here.”

  “I did,” the lieutenant said. “I told him he was sure of making sergeant. He turned that down.”

  She smiled. “See that he’s posted to a barracks near his home. But he has to serve out his time in the army.” She came over and sat on the edge of his desk, her skirt hiked up to bare her knees. “He probably has someone at home he’s anxious to get back to.”

  The lieutenant glanced at the smooth skin of her legs and wondered what she was up to. Why would a colonel bother with him when she could have a general?

  “Who designated this incident as top priority?” she asked softly.

  “I did,” he told her firmly. “I thought the chances of it being true were slim but that it was worth making an effort to check out.”

  She looked at him appraisingly. “Through normal channels this would have taken about three days to get such a decision from career officers. You showed unusual initiative, Comrade Lieutenant.”

  “Do I get a reward?”

  “You want to go home too?”

  He nodded.

  “We could use officers like you in the Red Army. You would go far if you decided to stay with us.” When he said nothing, she sighed and rose from the desk. “I’ll see what I can do for your transfer. If we can take these Infiltrators alive, you’ll be a people’s hero and get a good job and a large apartment, even a car. But first we must capture at least one alive. Orders are being sent out to deploy men behind them to cut off all possible escape routes back to Pakistan. With the Soviet Union to the north of Afghanistan, and Iran to the west, they have to head east or south to return to Pakistan. They seem to be heading northwest now. Any idea where they are going?”

  “They could be bringing those weapons to any of maybe twenty tribal leaders. But there are so few passable routes, they should not be hard to ambush now that we know they exist.”

  She nodded. “I want all villages who help them severely punished.”

  The lieutenant nodded back wearily.

  The sergeant in a Pakistan army listening post across the border from Afghanistan placed a sheaf of intercepted messages on the major’s desk. “More of the same, sir,”

  “Nothing new at all?” the major asked.

  “No, sir. A lot of them have the exact same wording as the ones I brought earlier. All in everyday codes that they know we can crack in less than an hour. The Russians are going all out on this one, sir, and they don’t give a damn who knows.”

  “But it sounds crazy, Sergeant. I think those three men must be a television team, and all that stuff on the asses’ backs is equipment, such as cameras and microphones and so on. You know all the stuff they drag around, making a nuisance of themselves and expecting to be treated like the American ambassador.”

  “I just heard locally that they bought those missiles in Peshawar, sir,” the sergeant said in a respectful voice, as if reluctant to destroy the major’s last illusion.

  “So they are missiles?”

  “Yes, sir. And they are Americans. And they did buy the weapons in Pakistan and transport them across our border.”

  “The Russians will blame die Pakistan army for allowing this to happen,” the major said thoughtfully. “That is why they want to take these Americans alive—so that they can accuse Pakistan.”

  “Maybe they will be more interested in blaming President Reagan,” the sergeant suggested tactfully.

  “Of course, you are right! Pakistan is a mere pawn in the game Moscow and Washington play. Tell Abdullah to telephone the American consulate in Peshawar and connect me to Mr. Dobbs. He will want to hear about this.”

  The six asses were content to lie inside hillside caves all day, out of the glare of the sun, munching on little piles of grass and leaves foraged for them by Baker, Turner, and Winston. They traveled by night—sometimes quite short distances. But according to the local men acting as their guides, they had no other choice. The Russians and government troops were everywhere, questioning people about three Americans, offering rewards, making threats, bombing villages the Americans were thought to have passed through, executing individuals suspected of having helped them. The Russian message was clear—these three Americans were a plague and would bring sorrow and misfortune on everyo
ne who went near them. But it was not the local people they had to worry about, according to Baker’s interpretation of the men’s signs. It was the soldiers lying in wait for them. They no longer traveled by path at all, trudging instead across rocky slopes in pitch blackness, their guides leading the front ass and the others following. They relied more on hearing than on sight and ended each night trek with bruises and cut legs from banging against unseen rocks. While they were preparing to move out at the onset of darkness for the fourth successive night, a local man came to their hiding place and spoke with the other Afghans. They shook their heads and pointed to the asses. They could not travel tonight.

  After a lot of signaling by oil lamp inside the cave, Baker summed it up for the others. “Last night cattle, goats, horses, and asses were shot during the night by helicopters with floodlights. I guess we were lucky they happened not to hit the area we were in at the time. The people hereabouts were warned today to bring in all their livestock tonight. It sounds like the Russians must be using some kind of infrared heat-sensing device and dispatching the gunships to where they pick up signals. The door gunners in the choppers probably just shoot whatever they see for the hell of it. These six asses of ours would give off an awful lot of body heat. If they can pick up a single horse in a field—and that’s what they were doing last night—they can hardly miss us. Our Afghan friends here want to stay put, and I’can’t say I blame them.”

  So they stayed put in the cave all that night and all the next day. Then the next night and day. Then another night. They were all ready to kill one another by this time. Fortunately the cave was large enough for them to put some distance between themselves and the six animals, but they now had the added restriction of the Afghans pleading with them not to leave the cave by day, even to stretch their muscles and breathe some fresh air. The Russians were conducting sweeps through the hills. They were photographing from the air (by now the three Americans realized they had been photographed by the jet that had swooped down twice on them as they left the mountain pass at first light). They would be safe where they were, even if the Russians or government troops came close, because the cave entrance would be found only by someone who knew where to look.