Cobra Strike

by J. B. Hadley

  Although the floor was of earth and the prison walls constructed of pine logs and dried mud, they could not tunnel or break their way out because of the constant vigilance of the guards. Boris, who outranked the others as a corporal and was thus their leader, reasoned that if they could not escape the surveillance of their guards, then they must find a way to deceive them. Boris selected Rasool as any easy mark. Rasool had studied in the Soviet city of Tashkent in the Uzbek Republic before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Nine of the eleven Soviet prisoners were from the Uzbek Republic, too, and as Central Asians, they shared more in common with their Afghan enemies than they did with European Russians like Boris. Some could remember their grandparents and even their parents as devout Moslems in spite of Stalin's savage campaigns to' stamp out religion. Even today this was something they did not feel comfortable talking about. They were familiar with the sound of die prayers in Arabic, having heard old people chant them in defiance of the great socialist revolution in towns and villages all over the Uzbek Republic, though the mosques had been closed and the Korans burned. Rasool, who was as devout as he was naive, led the nine Uzbeks in their religious revival and earned a high place for himself in the Garden of Paradise by also converting Boris and the other Russian to the Shining Way. And it was Rasool they disarmed during a spirited discussion of the Prophet's son-in-law Ali. They laughed at the Afghan as they beat and kicked him until he lay silent and unmoving on the mud floor of their prison hut. Rasool wept tears, not tears from the pain of his injuries but tears of shame.

  They crouched in the doorway of the prison hut and looked out, eleven men with one Kalashnikov between them.

  “Once we get clear of this refugee camp, we won't need weapons,” Boris whispered urgently. “But first we must get out of this place.”

  They saw what he meant. The usual dirty children played on the dusty ground, and the usual women, clad from head to toe in burkas, scuttled about as if fearful to be out of their homes-but here the men, as they could not do in occupied zones of Afghanistan, walked around with rifles and bandoliers of ammunition.

  One of the Uzbeks said, “They will take one look at us and…” He imitated the sound of automatic fire.

  They remained where they were, hoping for something to distract the armed men walking around the mud huts and tents of the camp. They could not wait too long, since guards came and went from the prison on an irregular schedule that always baffled the Soviet prisoners. There was no way for them to slip out of the camp unobserved, because they would have to pass at least a dozen people to go anywhere in these congested temporary living quarters, and all it would take was a single shout to raise the alarm.

  They could watch and wait no longer. They had to make their move. Boris saw the solution. A hut slightly larger and of the same construction as their prison hut lay diagonally across the ribbon of bare earth that passed for a street in this refugee camp. They all had noticed the men coming and going to and from this hut constantly, and it was Boris who noticed that the men went in with anone weapon and came out with another or went in with an empty bandolier and came out with one filled with cartridges. This hut was their armory!

  “Look, there's no way we can sneak out of this camp unseen,” Boris whispered to the others. ‘That means we will have to fight our way out. This is how we will do it. I will lead a charge on that hut with this Kalashnikov. I will go in the door first and you come in fast after me. Even if we are seen, we should all be able to get inside before we draw fire. Then we select the best weapons they have inside and come out fighting. If we move fast and do not give them time to organize, we will be out of this camp before they can do much. Use their children and women as shields if you can. They will be reluctant to fire on us even with one or two children as hostages.”

  Boris looked around at their drawn, anxious faces. They had all been prisoners for months now, and not one of them was backing down. He nodded to them with a confidence he did not feel. “We're going to do this.”

  He moved quickly across the street, the ten others right behind him. Boris heard children or women shouting but he paid no heed. He stepped through the open door of the hut and peered into its dim interior. Two, no, three men were inside. He sprayed them with bullets from left to right. All three went down and lay there twitching and groaning.

  His fellow prisoners crowded in the doorway behind him, pushing him forward. They rushed past him to grab weapons from the stacks all over the place, climbing over half-filled wood crates of ammo and grenades to get at them. One man grabbed a light machine gun. Boris saw the fine wire attached to its trigger guard, saw the wire stretch off into the wood crates, saw it tauten as the Uzbek hauled the weapon along with him. Boris rushed to him, yelling at him to keep still, it was booby-trapped. The Uzbek jerked sideways, pulling the line taut.

  Boris felt himself ride in the air and saw the inside of the hut turn yellow, white, then black.

  “One of the things we've been discussing a lot recently at the Institute,” Jedediah Crippenby was saying to Mike Campbell as they walked through the Afghan refugee camp, 4'is how we ourselves create make-believe data about things we don't know. The Afghan refugees were high on our list. Every time they see us Americans coming, they think to themselves, ‘Ah, numbers. They will want numbers, and if we don't give them numbers, they say they cannot help us.' So now, when we ask them how much of the refugee population has dysentery, they say thirty-seven percent without batting an eye. Theyknow that no one knows how many people are refugees, let alone how many people have dysentery. But Americans want numbers and facts. So we are given numbers and facts, and very serious people compare these numbers and facts with the numbers and facts from one month ago and from this time last year, and they make graphs and pronouncements and are amazed when things don't turn out like they predicted.

  “The plain truth, Mike, is that we don't know anything— or at least very little. The Afghans themselves don't know. The Russians don't care. The Pakistanis are overwhelmed with their own problems. And we Americans feel we have to have all the facts before we can act. Those three men from our Institute came out here to gather facts, which is why we are now here. You see what I mean? We send three men out to find out what the reality is here. The three men we sent out are the only reality we truly understand. Now we are here, not to ask questions about reality, but to try to find the people we sent to ask questions about reality, and so we become facts too. Meanwhile nothing is getting much clearer. Are you following me?”

  “I take a more practical view of things, Jed,” Mike said, amused. “All I want to know is, from the conversations we've had through Naseeb Amin and from what Aga Akbar has told us, how much can we believe?”

  “We can take as authentic that up until last week, at least, Turner, Baker, and Winston were the three mysterious Americans wreaking havoc with the Russians, that they are not straying too far from Gul Daoud's territory, judging from the locations of the incidents reported-they're probably trying to keep him from direct reprisals—and that all their escape routes back here are cut off. That was the status a week ago, the amount of time it takes word-of-mouth information to travel from there to here. Everything else we've been told is unreliable—about their capture, about their being seen at Karachi Airport, and so forth.”

  “So we have a solid wall of Soviet and Afghan communist troops between us and them,” Mike muttered to himself. “We'll have to breach their line once on the way there and once more on the way back. Now that you're in the soldier-of-fortune business, Jed, you're going to find yourself in situations where passive brainwork isn't enough. You have to walk deliberately into the unknown and depend on your brain to act in teamwork with the rest of your body. It's not the kind of thinking that gets done much in libraries, but don't expect it to be any easier.”

  Crippenby wanted desperately to say something, but he was learning fast that this was going to be no academic project, that his opinions would not be worth a damn in the mountain
s, and that keeping his mouth shut now and then seemed to be something everyone on the team except himself enjoyed.

  Mike was treading very cautiously while in Pakistan. It was rumored that a blast in the Zangali refugee camp had killed eleven Soviet prisoners of war. The Afghans denied this, saying that they would never embarrass Pakistan by keeping Soviet prisoners on their soil. The Pakistanis denied all knowledge of the event and warned all Afghan refugees that Pakistan's neutrality must not be abused. Of course, the Pakistanis were a bit uncomfortable about the fact that the Zangali refugee camp, where the eleven Soviets were said to have died, was just a little way down a rutted road in a hilly area near Badabir Pakistani Air Force base. It was from Badabir that Francis Gary Powers took off in the U-2 spy plane that was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960. The Pakistanis had claimed that they hadn't known anything about that, either.

  If the rumored deaths of Soviet prisoners were not enough to give Pakistanis the jitters about their Soviet neighbors, the arrival of two Soviet-made Mi-24 helicopter gunships next day certainly was. The choppers were ctewed by Afghan government servicemen who all asked for political asylum. The Mi-24, named the Hind by Western military experts, was the most powerful gunship in the Soviet arsenal. This was the first time the craft had fallen into noncommunist hands, and military attach6s from the embassies of various friendly Western nations were insisting that they lend a hand in giving the two choppers a maintenance checkup before they were returned. Moscow was threatening to kick Pakistani ass if they let any degenerate capitalists near their clean machines.

  Mike sensed that now might not be the best time for an expeditionary force of seven armed Americans (one of French and one of Australian origin) to be caught crossing the border into occupied Afghanistan.

  In Peshawar and Hangu and all the other towns along the Pakistan side of the Afghan-Pakistani border, the story was the same. Floods of immigrant refugees had cleaned out what had already been a very spare and hardy existence. It was said that there were three million Afghan refugees in Pakistan, but no one really knew for sure how many. The people on both sides of the border were Pathans, there was a long tradition of smuggling and drug and gunrunning, and violence settled serious arguments. The Red Cross opened hospitals and did what they could for those living in the three hundred camps along the thousand-mile border. Mike Campbell was struck by the number of men, women, and children missing a foot or a hand. A Swiss doctor told him that people with head or body wounds rarely survived the long trek to the border, while those with injuries to their limbs often did and thus were seen more often. Nearly all these injuries were caused by Soviet land mines dropped on the fields where the peasants worked and the children played.

  Before the team gathered to go into action, Campbell and Crippenby visited a number of the camps. Mike found the Institute's intellectual very useful here in neutral Pakistan, and since he was not fully sure how Jed Crippenby would hold up under fire, he decided to put him to work while he could. Criplpenby's fluent Pushtu and his unbureaucratic manner and appearance warmed the tribesmen toward him. During the time they journeyed around, some of the camps— though none of the ones they visited—were hit by rockets and mortars from the other side of the border, and others were strafed or bombed by MIGs. President Reagan announced that he was sending forty F-16 jet fighters so the Pakistanis could use them against these Soviet violations of their airspace.

  But if Mike and Jed were having an interesting time, the rest of the team was going bananas. No booze and no broads was the general complaint.

  “There won't be any in Afghanistan, either,” Mike pointed out.

  “We expect that,” Bob Murphy said, “but at least we'll be doing something there. Here there's nothing to do, and all day and night to do it. Come on, Mike, why are we waiting here? I'm not getting acclimatized, I'm getting crazy.”

  For once Andre Verdoux was in agreement with Bob. “You know what the military dictator General Zia did? He stopped the Pakistan women's team from competing in the Olympic Games because men would be able to see their legs. You want to know his big problem now? Well, he put back in effect the Islamic code of justice—flogging and chopping and so on—but so no one can say that he is a barbarian, he does it with modern technology. The law says a thief gets his hand chopped off. General Zia agrees but says the hand must be surgically removed. Most of the surgeons here are Western-trained, and this goes against their ethics. So what is Zia to do? If he puts the surgeons in jail, there'll be no one to operate on the ruling class. Meanwhile all these thieves are waiting around with their hands still attached—”

  “We'll go, we'll go,” Mike said. “I can see that you guys are going to fall to pieces if I don't get you out of here fast.”

  Mike went alone to find Aga Akbar, who agreed to leave immediately. Together they went to the arms dealer in the market, the one Naseeb Amin introduced him to. They sat on cushions and sipped tea, surrounded by stacks of weapons available to anyone who could pay the price, following the ceremonial civilities before anyone mentioned business. Mike's weapons were ready. The dealer and Aga Akbar spoke rapidly in Pushtu, arranging the details.

  They left Peshawar before dawn in a rented van with a driver. They reached a village in the foothills at first light and examined their weapons and equipment there. Cuthbert Colquitt had proved himself reliable once again—the agreed-upon list had been fully supplied. Mike paid two fighters from the village to cross the border with them. This was more a gesture of goodwill than a necessity, Aga Akbar explained. From here on they would be on foot. They climbed up into the hills, bitching and whining like troops always do when they initially head out. Mike listened to the complaints grow fewer and finally stop altogether as the hills got steeper and they had to save their breath.

  CHAPTER 9

  Bob Murphy had cursed loudest back in Pakistan about dyeing his beard and hair black. On Mike’s instructions, all of them quit shaving as soon as agreeing to go on the mission. Then the night before crossing the border into Afghanistan, Mike had produced black hair dye. Only a few days later Bob was sporting a black beard with bright yellow roots! With the weapons and supplies Naseeb Amin had stored at the village for them were the Afghan ethnic outfits they now wore. They all settled for the flat woolen hats with rolled bottoms rather than the bulky turban of many windings that many Afghans favored. They also skipped the blanketlike capes, long leather tunics, and all the other loose, flapping garments the mountain tribesmen wore. Instead they adopted the obviously new style of dress of the modern fighting Afghan—combat boots, baggy pants, and an assortment of oversize shirts, loose vests, and a Western parka or windproof jacket. After a few days of trekking in the mountains, at first sight they looked just like any of the other guerrilla patrols that infested the mountains.

  They had slipped across the border without incident, and Aga Akbar led them to Sayad Jan’s emplacement. From there they followed in the footsteps of Baker, Winston, and Turner, often using the same guides they had. Not being held up by a train of six burdened asses, they made much faster progress than the three previous Americans had. They were helped, too, by Jed Crippenby’s knowledge of Pushtu, and none of the local tribesmen even considered tangling with this tough-looking bunch.

  Each day they headed out at dawn and made camp at dusk. They bought what food they could along the way in order to conserve their C rations. They met no Soviet or Afghan communist ground troops while they were still being guided by local rebels, although they frequently had to throw themselves to the ground and remain motionless while Soviet jets or choppers passed over their position. If they were seen on any of these occasions, as they assumed they must have been, they were not attacked, perhaps because there were bigger and better targets available elsewhere. But this all ended early one afternoon when the four Afghans acting as their guides stopped, and all began talking volubly together to Jed Crippenby, who kept nodding his head to what they were telling him.

  “This is as far as the
y will take us, Mike,” Jed explained. ‘They claim that the Russians have sealed all the passes.in the range ahead of us, and beyond that range the Russians have more or less cleared away all rebel activity because of their troop concentrations, sweeps, and aerial surveillance. And these are Soviet troops, not Afghan government forces who might be expected to be halfhearted about it. They have heard of attacks launched by these three mysterious Americans, but some of these are obviously just stories. However, since’ the Soviet troops are still in place to cut off their escape back to Pakistan, it is reasonable to assume that the Americans are still alive and on the loose.”

  “Do you know where Gul Daoud is?”

  After another excited conversation with the four Afghans, Crippenby said, “Gul Daoud simply retreats back into the mountains when attacked. The more the communists attack, the higher he goes. Finally the communists give up and go away, and he and his men come down again to resume control. These men say that the Americans are with some of Gul Daoud’s warriors, so presumably they stay in contact or at least know where to find each other.”

  Mike nodded. “Finding Gul Daoud’s main force will be a hell of a lot easier than trying to locate the three crazy bastards we’ve come for. Do these men know anything about the Soviet troop deployments in the mountains ahead?”

  “No,” Crippenby said right off. “They’ve been keeping a safe distance from them.”

  Mike paid off the four rebels in Pakistani rupees, and after much traditional handshaking and embracing they went back the way they had come, leaving the mere team to face the forbidding-looking jagged peaks ahead with their pockets of hidden Soviet soldiers.