Cobra Strike

by J. B. Hadley

  “Goddam shithead is using them for bait,” Mike ground out. “I swear, I'll tear his balls off-”

  Gul Daoud came rushing up through the rocks to their position. “Calm down, Mike! You don't know what's going on. Baker and Winston know all about it.”

  “What're you talking about?” Mike growled. “Better talk fast because me and my men are going out there to fetch them.”

  “That won't help anybody,” Gul said pleasantly. “A spy for the Russians had been fed the information that they are crossing here. The Russians could have killed them twice already-your countrymen will tell you that-but want to take them alive. They will see this as their big chance to do that. If you rush out to meet them on the valley floor, the Soviet force will strike at you before you reach them. Leave them to us. We need you to cover us from air attack. Baker and the others know what to do. You'll see. It will work well.”

  “I have my doubts about that,” Mike said.

  They all ducked down as the jet passed over the valley for the fifth time. The plane swooped low over the three men on the camels, now some distance out into the valley.

  “Very good,” Gul said. “They are aiming for this spot. They should be near us before the Russians arrive. I have to go now, I have many things to see to. We can depend on you?”

  “Yeah, yeah, go ahead,” Mike muttered, not pleased to find himself outmaneuvered but, all the same, feeling that he had gotten somewhere by setting eyes on, the three Americans they were looking for. In a little while he said, “Okay, you guys, get set up for visitors.”

  Gul Daoud had made no comments, but his eyes had been sharp: he had recognized the Blowpipe guided missiles in their canister, which the team carried. Each man carried a thirty-pound missile stored in its firing canister. In addition, Mike carried one fifteen-pound aiming unit, and Bob Murphy the other. The team members knew better than to complain to Mike's face about the weapon loads he assigned them to carry on missions. They all realized they owed their lives to the hardware he had forced them to hump over mountains and through jungles, yet that did not stop them hoping for a heavy contact fast so they could use the weapons and be rid of their burden.

  “My back is going to feel different after this mother is gone,” Joe Nolan said, unloading his missile canister. “I'm going to be lifting one foot higher than the other.”

  Mike fitted a canister to each of the two aiming units and handed one to Nolan and the other to Murphy. He set the other five canisters on the ground within easy reach. It took only a few seconds to discard an empty canister after firing and to fit a new one. Then they watched the three men approach across the flat valley floor on their camels.

  “How did Gul persuade them to do this?” Andre asked in wonder.

  “With all due respect to Jed,” Mike said, “you'd have to be an intellectual at some think tank like the Nanticoke Institute before you could think up an argument brilliant enough to convince yourself to do something so dumb.”

  Jed laughed and said nothing. He was remembering how Mike had thrown Gul Daoud on the ground instead of listening to his bullshit as Jed himself did. Jed's only problem with this was that in order to react so strongly himself, he would have to be more certain of his own opinions instead of seeing three or four different points of view to everything.

  “We have action,” Mike yelled. “Gunships coming along the valley. Get your heads down. We don't want them.”

  The choppers sprayed the rocks and small dried-up bushes with bullets from the flex gun mounted in their side door. They were just blindly softening up the terrain for a nearby landing zone. Each of the three gunships fired a rocket at nothing in particular and fortunately did not happen to hit any of the rebels, although two of the rockets came close, detonating with an earth-thumping blast that kicked up a high plume of dust and stones.

  After the gunships left, they heard the drone of engines as the slicks came in, landing out in the valley about seven hundred yards, each chopper dropping down to unload eight men and then lifting up and heading back from where they had come. Four slicks dropped thirty-two men to capture three.

  The three camels were close by. Obviously, if the riders did not obey orders to dismount, the beasts would be shot from beneath them. Before this happened, Gul's men started firing on the Soviet servicemen. Their first burst of fire took the Russians by surprise and exacted a heavy toll. Then the Russians found themselves cover and fired back at their attackers. The three camel riders veered away from the action, forgotten for the moment behind the backs of the Russians.

  The gunships came back, clearly summoned by radio. One rebel hit one with an SAM-7 missile. The craft exploded in midair, and the burning bits crashed to the ground in a conflagration of destruction. The two other gunships backed off, dodged a couple more SAM-7 missiles, and left.

  “Bob, Joe,” Mike warned, “keep a watch out.”

  Both men readied their Blowpipes by placing on their right shoulder the missile-containing canister that projected backward from the aiming unit. Their left hands propped up the muzzle of the canister in front of the aiming unit. They peered through the optical sight and held the grip of the aiming unit with their right hands. No one had to warn them of the approach of a jet-the aircraft's noise did that.

  “She's mine,” Nolan told Murphy.

  He picked up the streaking, low-flying aircraft in the Blowpipe's monocular sight and tracked its flight for a moment before his right finger pulled the trigger mounted on the grip of the aiming unit. His right thumb hovered over the control button. The missile's first-stage motor kicked it out of the launching tube, and after it was safely clear of the tube, the more powerful second motor ignited and accelerated the missile to supersonic speed.

  As it dived down to rocket or bomb the rebel positions, Nolan continued to track the jet through the sight. The aiming unit sent radio signals to the missile to keep it homed on whatever was visible in the monocular sight. He used his thumb on the control button to guide the missile, which was an easier task than it sounded because he did not have to keep the plane on a set of cross hairs to hit it: so long as the aircraft remained visible in the viewer, the missile would hit it.

  All this took place in seconds. Nolan fired, and the missile struck the midsection of the plane's fuselage. The pilot had no chance to eject from the fast-traveling jet at low altitude, and in a few seconds it buried itself at six hundred miles an hour into the valley floor. The gas tanks inside its wings exploded, a boiling orange ball of flame billowed and trembled for a moment, then shrank into licking, dancing flames and thick black smoke.

  Nolan threw away the empty canister and was handed a full one by Hardwick.

  “Nice shooting, Joe,” Mike said real easy, just like someone might say to Nolan after he had hit a good shot on the pool table back in the Bunch o' Shamrock in Youngstown. Nolan almost felt like reaching over for his bottle of beer. For Joe, Ohio was real. His only reaction to hearing that they were going to Afghanistan was, “We could have gone somewhere easier to spell.”

  Mike had said, “Joe, you're not going to be writing to anyone about it, anyway.”

  “He's thinking about his memoirs,” Andre had put in, sarcastic as usual.

  To Joe, nothing about these Afghans running around these bleak mountains made any sense, no more than it did for the Russians to try to move in on them. There was more fertile soil in one square yard of Ohio than there was in one square mile here, and Ohio was as flat as a pancake, with no great fucking mountains poking up all over the place, getting in everybody's way. He had no idea why these thoughts were floating through his brain after he had just downed a $20-million or so Soviet aircraft, instead of feelings of heroism and triumph or some such. He guessed that was just the way he was made.

  Maybe the Russians thought the jet's downing was a fluke, being unused to having jet aircraft blasted from the sky by the rebels, whose best ground-to-air weapons up to this point had been the inefficient Soviet-made SAM-7s. In any case, they s
ent in two MIGs on another rocket/bombing run, one plane about five seconds in front of the other.

  “I'll take the left,” Bob Murphy said.

  “You got it,” Joe replied.

  The big Australian squeezed his left eye shut and peered through the viewer with the other eye. He found the lead MIG, triggered his missile, and tracked his target. Nolan followed suit with the second plane half a second later. The two MIGs got it like a brace of pheasant from a double-barreled shotgun-left-right, one-two, big bangs-and the aircraft spun out of control, slammed into the ground at barely subsonic speed, and their tanks of fuel did the rest.

  Murphy yelled and crowed with glee; Nolan said nothing. They both reloaded with fresh canisters and waited eagerly, like kids at a fairground stall who have learned the knack of zapping the moving target. The British Blowpipe was fun to fire because of the visual and manual control over the missile and also because the missile went off with a big bang on impact with the target; the operator really got to see his fireworks explode. This was because the missile's HE warhead was basically a blasting device with little armorpiercing capability. The Blowpipe missile worked not by destroying its target but by hitting it with such a wallop that it spun out of its high-speed trajectory and destroyed itself.

  No more jets came in support of the ground forces. The slicks landed behind the protection of a bank of earth and left it to the ground troops to fight their way back to them. Still farther back, the two remaining gunships wavered up and down, shooting off poorly aimed rockets at the rebels and taking no chances of being incinerated themselves. The Russians had given up and were in full retreat back to their slicks. They had started with thirty-two on the ground, eight from each slick, and the way it looked now, they'd be lucky to fill two slicks. And Gul Daoud's rebels hadn't done with them yet, laying down a hail of fire on the crouching, zigzagging men darting from cover to cover and plainly wishing like hell that they were back in Mother Russia.

  The three camels came up at a fast run to the rocky bluff the team held, seeking shelter from the bullets that by now were traveling loosely in every direction.

  Waller looked up malevolently at Winston arriving on the lead camel: “Here comes fucking Lawrence of Arabia.”

  Lance Hardwick and Bob Murphy spent the next two days reconnoitering with Gul's rebel guides. They already knew that all the mountain passes had been sealed in a great arc to the east and south of them. It was still too early in the year to cross most of the mountains themselves because of snow, and those that could be crossed might involve, instead of day through a pass, a week's heavy trekking during which they were almost certain to be spotted by observation aircraft. If they were spotted, the passes in the next range of mountains ahead of them could be guarded, and the whole process would start over. Campbell's idea was for Lance and Bob to find a place where the team could cut a “window” in the Soviet line and go through it to the other side.

  Murphy and Hardwick took care not to engage the enemy. They had some close calls, mostly in detecting ambushes at the last moment.

  “What we need to find,” Murphy said, “is someplace where their troops are strung out in a long line. These mountain passes serve as natural funnels—they narrow our movements to channels they can seal off with a minimum of men.”

  Half a day's horseback ride to the south of Gul Daoud's camp they found a high plateau across which the Soviet troops were stretched thin in two-man units every five hundred yards or so. This looked good, but the more they observed the setup, the clearer it became that units could not be attacked without others seeing it by day or hearing it by night. If the mercs were detected during a struggle, they had no place to run on this high plateau and no cover to protect them from the gunships on regular patrol up and down the line. They tried some other approaches on die way back to Gul's camp, but nothing looked good.

  “Maybe if we moved a day's journey south, we'd find something better,” Murphy told Campbell when they got back.

  “You won't,” Gul said.

  “There's nothing here, Mike,” Murphy concluded. “No way out. Looking is a waste of time.”

  Campbell respected Murphy's experience in the field. He knew it took a hell of a lot to stop the big Australian.

  “Well, the plain fact is that we can't stay here,” Mike said. “If they've cut off our escape into Pakistan to the east and south, then we go some other way. To the north is Russia, so I think we can forget that. To the west is ban. They'll never expect us to go that way.”

  To their surprise, Gul Daoud was supportive of this route. “In spite of what you hear about the power of Khomeini and the mullahs in Iran, they have a huge population of addicts. The poppies are grown in our Afghan mountains, and Afghans smuggle die opium into Iran. It's a big business. I don't know what you will do once you get inside Iran, but crossing the border into it can be done. The Russians will never expect Americans to head for Iran.”

  Gul spread out a map and traced a shallow inverted semicircle across the entire country of Afghanistan. “The Russians hold the roads and the big towns and they control the air. We have the rest. I will mark this map for you with the names and territories of rebel leaders on your way. They will help, but you have to understand that spies will report on your movements and that the Russians and Afghan communists will be after you. When they find that there are ten Americans now instead of three, they won't mind killing a few of you, for something to show before they get live captives. It's going to be a long haul to the Iranian border, Mike, but I still think you've got a better chance of getting yourself and your men there than you have of breaking through the Soviet lines to Pakistan.”

  The other team members took it in their stride when they heard they were going back to the States by way of Iran. They knew Mike. If he had said they were going by way of the South Pole, that would have been okay with them. Turner, Winston, and Baker didn't take the news so well. Baker claimed that going from Afghanistan into Iran was like going from the pan into the fire. Winston suggested that maybe Campbell hadn't heard that Iran was a disaster for Americans. Turner just said they weren't going and that was that. They were even less pleased when Crippenby handed each of them papers from the Nanticoke Institute, which informed them that they now reported to Campbell until further notice.

  “We could quit the Institute,” Baker suggested.

  “You try to quit and I'll kick your ass,” Turner informed him. “I'm here to bring you turkeys back in one piece, and I'm going to do it whether you like it or not. I don't agree with Campbell that we should go through Iran, but I still follow orders even if I think they're cockamamie ones. We got to have a leader. So if I have to choose between you, Baker, and Campbell here, I gotta go with Campbell—maybe only because I don't know him as well as I know you, Baker.”

  “Thanks, Turner, I appreciate that,” Baker snapped back. “I have no ambition to be anyone's leader. I'm quite willing to follow Mike's orders—when I think they make sense. Any way you look at it, going through Iran makes no sense.”

  “It does if your only alternative is going through the Soviet Union,” Mike put in. “Now, I'm not going to tell you the places this team has been, but some of them have been at least as hot as Iran. But this is all beside the point, Baker. Like Turner told you, he'll obey orders even if he doesn't like them. That's the way it has to be on a paramilitary mission. You try to hold a round-table discussion when you feel you have a point to argue, you're liable to get us all killed. When I tell you to get your head down, you don't ask why, or the answer may be on its way in the form of an enemy bullet. If I can't depend on you to do what you're told, I can't be sure that what I think is happening really is happening. We could all get hurt real bad if you're not doing what you're supposed to be doing at some point because you had a better idea. And I want to say something else. I came here to bring you three guys out, so you assume. Right? You're being brought out not because you're sweet guys and everyone misses you in the cafeteria at lunchtime—you're
being brought out because you'd be an embarrassment to Washington if the Reds caught you here, dead or alive. So far as Washington is concerned, I've done my job as long as I erase all presence of you three in Afghanistan. No matter how I do it. If I have to, I'll shoot any one of you for not obeying orders and burn the body with gasoline so the Russians can't say it was an American. I'll get paid. No questions will be asked. So all this discussion is bullshit. You have your orders. You report to me. You make a problem for me, I'll make a bigger one for you.”

  Baker was shaken when he realized that Campbell would do exactly what he said he would do. No one had come here to rescue him personally—only to extricate three Americans from a potentially politically embarrassing situation for Washington, since everyone would assume that they were CIA agents if they were caught. Baker looked at the team of mercenaries and decided he had been wrong in his first impression of these men as good guys on a mission of mercy. They were paid assassins, irresponsible psychopaths or sociopaths, disturbed violent types who would have to be humored. It would be up to Winston, Turner, and himself to use them until they were no longer useful, then dump them and strike out on their own.

  Gul Daoud gave them all a farewell meal of mutton-and-yogurt dishes washed down with tea. Baker and Winston promised him surface-to-air weapons as a special priority of the Nanticoke Institute. It was plain, Baker said, that when the Russians lost their total dominance in the air, this war would become too punishing in casualties for them to fight. Even as it was, they had taken an estimated ten thousand fatalities. Of course, this was nothing in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of deaths they had caused, mostly of civilians, and the approximately three million refugees they had made out of a total population of fifteen million. He said that the estimated one hundred fifteen thousand Soviet servicemen presently in Afghanistan were being used to prop up the unpopular puppet communist government and that they were totally dependent on their air power to destroy food supplies and houses in order to starve the population into submission or drive them into exile.