Cobra Strike

by J. B. Hadley

  But they could never expect to survive their Russian hunters for an entire month. Their loss of fast movement through going on horseback would give the Soviets plenty of time to prepare for their arrival in advance. They needed some kind of rapid transport and would have to use the major roads, depending on the Russians not expecting them to provide them with a clear passage.

  Mike had asked the guides to bring them to the main road that led northward from the capital city of Kabul. Kabul, by far the most Westernized city in Afghanistan, was a stronghold of Afghan communists and their Red Army supporters. The team had stayed south of the city and then cut to the north about forty miles west of Kabul. The road north followed the course of the Kunduz River, and Mike planned to join it east of the Shibar Pass. They made their farewells with, the rebels close to the road, gave them the horses, and had them wait in concealment at a distance until the mercs commandeered a vehicle north.

  They watched at a steep uphill grade where trucks traveling north had to climb slowly in low gear. The traffic was sparse, and most of it was military trucks and personnel carriers traveling in small convoys. Then they saw what they wanted—a lone truck, painted green and white, with large Arabic writing on it. Jed grinned but said nothing. Harvey Waller stepped into the roadway in front of the approaching truck and looked along the sights of the RPG2 launcher tube on his right shoulder. There was no escape for the truck toiling uphill. The driver pulled onto the side of the road, and he and his coworker climbed down out of the cab and put their hands in the air, talking together in a frightened squabble in Pushtu to Waller. They were both Westernized Afghans, without turbans or other head covering and in the same T-shirts, jeans, and running shoes Waller would expect to see in Jersey City.

  “I can see these bastards are commies,” Waller snarled. “Why don’t one of youse guys snuff them? Or do you want me to do it?”

  “Harvey, they say they are for the rebels,” Jed said. “They know we’re Americans and they’re pointing out that they work for an American company. This is a Coca-Cola truck that we’ve stopped. Coke had to change its usual red-colored trucks to the Islamic green and white because a lot of backcountry rebels would just assume that a bright red truck was Russian and open fire on it.”

  Waller wasn’t convinced until he saw the crates of Coke in the back of the truck.

  “Let’s move out,” Mike shouted. “We’ve been here long enough. Now that they know we’re Americans, we’ll have to take these two men with us and decide what to do with them at the other end.”

  Joe Nolan drove, Campbell and Crippenby beside him. The rest made room for themselves as best they could among the crates in the back of the truck, and the vehicle resumed its slow uphill pull toward the Shibar Pass.

  Yunis Latifi and his two remaining children huddled in the bomb shelter he had dug with his own hands close to his house. His wife and youngest son had been dead almost a year now, from a bomb dropped on them while they walked in a nearby field. This morning he had heard a plane searching in the nearby valleys, and he had gathered his son of six and daughter of four into his arms and rushed to the hole he had dug with a massive, flat boulder for its roof. This bomb shelter was close neither to the house nor to his crops, both frequent targets for planes sweeping through the valley. At last they heard the plane scream down low overhead, and they put their fingers in their ears to deaden the sound of the bombs. But no explosions came. When it became clear that the aircraft was not returning, Yunis emerged and searched for an unexploded bomb. He found nothing and decided that the plane had not considered the place worth attacking. He called the children up out of the shelter and told them to care for the sheep and lambs while he worked in his fields.

  Many of the people in the area had fled to Pakistan, although the men came back to fight and die for these hills, which belonged to them. Yunis had been one of those who had refused to move his family, preferring to die or live on the soil he and his forefathers had tilled rather than eke out an existence and dwell in a tent in a squalid camp across the border. He had been badly shaken when his wife and youngest child were killed. He blamed himself for not taking them to a refugee camp. But still he did not take his two remaining children to a camp, feeling deep down that they would all be happier defending what was theirs at any cost, rather than scavenge from day to day as refugees.

  The six-year-old boy helped his four-year-old sister along the twisting sheep path on the hillside above the field in which their father stooped, weeding between rows of young corn. His sister was the first to see them. She struggled to free herself from her brother’s hand so she could run and pick up one of the treasures that had appeared as if by magic on the lonely hillside. She wanted the small, brightly colored plastic butterfly; he, the toy truck.

  The little girl was left-handed, and she picked up the butterfly an instant before the boy reached for the toy truck. The explosion of the miniature anti-personnel mine disguised as a butterfly blew her hand off at the wrist and burned her body. Her brother lost his right hand a fraction of a second later.

  Yunis jerked upright from his weeding at the sound of the two detonations on the hillside above him. He saw his two small children sagging to the ground, clutching to them the bleeding stumps at the end of their arms. With a hoarse cry to Allah he clambered wildly up the hillside to them.

  Mike saw the turbaned Afghan holding his two blood-soaked children by the side of the road. Jed listened to his story as they were helped into the back of the truck, then rejoined Campbell and Nolan in the cab as the truck set off again. Andre Verdoux was tying tourniquets to stanch the bleeding in the children’s arms and giving them small doses of morphine to deaden their pain.

  “The man says there’s some sort of medical unit off this road farther north,” Jed told Mike. “He says a government hospital will refuse to treat his kids because they only treat pro-communists. One of the truck drivers says he knows the place, that it’s at Zari and he’ll show us where to turn off.”

  Mike nodded grimly. “We Americans say a lot about talking peace with the Russians and having to rely on their word in negotiations, but you can’t talk peace with a nation’s government that is willing to manufacture mines in the shape of children’s toys. It’s not just a matter of differences in political philosophy, it’s a matter of one side observing certain limits of decency and the other side none. We Americans had instances of individual misconduct in Vietnam, but the manufacturing of mines with the aim of crippling children is a government policy, not the act of an individual. If you learn nothing else while you’re with us, Crippenby, I want you to remember what you’ve seen here today.”

  They slowly had to round two landslides that almost blocked the road a few miles before the pass. Nolan barely accelerated out of the way of one of several large boulders that dislodged themselves from the glue of liquid mud and rolled rapidly downhill. The Shibar Pass was at an altitude of ten thousand feet, and there were still large unmelted patches of snow everywhere. On the far side of the pass the corn was just emerging on the bare brown hills. The village of Shibar was a lonely group of windswept houses beneath massive faces of rock. They met frequent convoys of army vehicles and passed through some inactive checkpoints without being challenged. Dugouts and emplacements by the side of the road at first made them hold their breath till they had passed by, but after a while they drove nonchalantly past everything, waved cheerfully back when waved at, or looked ahead stonily if that was the treatment they received.

  All of them, except Turner, had full beards and had freshly dyed them black. Under Campbell’s orders Turner had stopped shaving and dyed his hair, yet somehow he still managed to look like a U.S. Marine no matter how Campbell tried to disguise him. Winston did not have to be told to stay out of sight, since even a quick glance would have given away die black American’s presence to observers. At first the Nanticoke Institute men kept to themselves and even shunned their fellow Institute member, Crippenby. Turner was the first to open up, and a
fter him, Winston. Only Baker still held himself aloof from the mere team; he silently and sulkily obeyed Campbell’s orders to the letter and gave nothing more. Baker had once been spokesman for his group, and now he found himself outclassed in leadership by Campbell and in linguistic knowledge by Crippenby. He had wanted to return a hero, not the object of a rescue mission. None of the three were aware that they were under the close scrutiny of Andre Verdoux. The Frenchman had given up many of his other team duties to keep a close watch on them. Campbell and he had not even discussed it. Andre just automatically took on a thing like this, and Campbell totally, unquestioningly, relied on him.

  They turned off to Zari and found the hospital. It was run by a group called Doctors Without. Borders. A young Belgian doctor was the only M.D. He had three nurses, all young. Like the doctor, one was a Belgian man, and the other two were women, one Belgian and the other French. The strict Moslems would only allow women to give medical attention to women. When the mercs arrived, supplies were so low that they were down to using veterinary anesthetics on humans. Mike donated a large part of the team’s medical supplies. Turner and Nolan had the correct type of blood to give the two children transfusions. The doctor worked on his patients on a ramshackle kitchen table under a camouflage canvas awning.

  Verdoux was ecstatic to meet others who spoke French. They told him that they volunteered for eight months duty and, on their return, would be paid three hundred dollars for each month.

  “Would you treat a Russian?” Andre asked.

  “Certainly,” the doctor said. “Anyone who needs medical attention gets it. But I’m afraid no injured Russians have reached us alive. They always seem to slip off stretchers and take terrible falls before they get here. The Afghans apologize and say they slipped. What can I say? There are so many steep mountains.”

  CHAPTER 12

  The team descended from the highlands into flatter, heavily Soviet-occupied country. The road wound down a sinking green plain covered with prickly clover and tall, bright yellow flowers. Horses and cattle were plentiful, and apparently the Soviets found less need to use their “scorched-earth” policy in this region. The team was aware that, in the event of trouble, they might find it much harder to find friends here than among the remote highlands. They passed through the old, fortified towns of Kunduz and Balkh, whose ancient walls were little more than crumbling mounds in places. All the same, sandbagged barracks and rolls of barbed wire around enclosures told a different story, that not everything was a charming antique. But they met no challenge and drove on their way right through enemy-held territory.

  Nolan sensed that Campbell was becoming very edgy. “What’s wrong, Mike? Think this is too good to last much longer?”

  “Something like that,” Campbell admitted. “So we just keep going until they try to stop us. That’s when the shit hits the fan. I know they promised that word would not get out at the medical center, and I believe the two Afghan drivers who say that they will stay in Zari for three days before they report our seizure of their truck. But this many Americans is very tempting bait to anyone who needs to pick up easy money for information.”

  “I bet it don’t happen that way, Mike,” Nolan said. “You know what I bet will happen? Some joker on the roadside will decide to play the heavy just to do a little power trip on us—not because he’s suspicious of us or anything, but just to give someone a hard time because he didn’t get laid last night or couldn’t get it up.”

  “You think you can handle that, Jed?” Mike asked.

  “I’ll try. This is no longer Pathan or Pushtun country here. The people are mostly Uzbek here. They speak a language that’s close to Turkish, which I speak fairly well, and it’s possible they may take me for one of the other ethnic groups speaking their tongue. I don’t really know, Mike, what their reaction will be.”

  “I think that if anyone tries to stop us,” Nolan said, “we should get Harvey Waller to ‘speak’ to him.”

  “You’re right,” Campbell allowed, and had the truck stopped so Waller could be squeezed into the cab along with them.

  The road crossed and recrossed the Kunduz River at a few points on old brickwork bridges that showed much flood damage. The river itself was about sixty yards wide, filled with turbulent, pinkish, muddy snow water sweeping by at high speed, the banks lined by willows and reedy marshes. They came to one place where a string of more than a hundred loaded camels, many of them ridden by veiled women, crossed the road. Nolan eased to a stop some distance from them. A plump man in a silk cap and a long bright blue robe waved them closer. Nolan pretended not to see him. The man shouted and walked toward the truck.

  “Here we go,” Nolan muttered.

  The plump man in the blue robe was clearly angry at having been made to walk to them. He shouted and gestured at them with an old bolt-action Lee Enfield rifle. Nolan stared straight ahead, as did Waller next to him, while Jed leaned across them both and yelled back at the man in die Uzbek language. The man in blue seemed to be having a good time.

  Jed gave them a quiet voice-over of what he was saying. “We Pathans are a very stupid, backward, belligerent people, and it worries Uzbeks like himself that since we are all Sunni Moslems, we will have to share Paradise together. In his opinion we Pathans will be in the bare, stony parts of Paradise, while Uzbeks will inhabit the river valleys and live beneath fruit trees with dancing girls. He doesn’t seem to be joking.”

  Crippenby said no more in case the man heard him speak English, but the Uzbek was so preoccupied with his own concerns, he hardly paid any close attention to them. Finally something must have struck him as odd, because he climbed up on the footrest at the base of the cab door so he could peer inside closely at them. His eye immediately went to the Pakistani rupee notes Harvey held in his hand; he took them, stepped down on the road, made the notes vanish inside his blue robe with a gesture a professional magician would have been proud of, waved them on, and mentioned Allah several times. The last of the camels had cleared the road as the truck resumed its journey and began to pick up speed again.

  Nolan said to Campbell, “I think our new boy Jed here is really getting the hang of things.”

  “That was smooth, Jed, real smooth,” Waller allowed.

  Jed grinned and waited for Campbell to compliment him.

  Campbell didn’t.

  They had not much farther to go down the road before they ran into real trouble. This was in the form of a communist government military checkpoint consisting of two machine gun nests about a hundred yards apart, one on each side of the road, and a soldier with a white piece of cloth, which he waved as he stood in the middle of the road at the first machine gun position. These were not dugouts like they had seen before in rebel-infested areas. The soldiers squatted behind a double layer of sandbags, protected from the sun by galvanized zinc sheets resting on metal rods, supported in turn by four-foot pillars of empty metal boxes marked 81 MOR HE.

  “Slow to a rolling stop,” Mike ordered Nolan. “See if you can drift past the first gun before stopping.” As he spoke, he passed a wad of rupee notes to Harvey Waller.

  Nolan braked and let the truck roll. The soldier, used to the varying quality of Afghan brakes, quickly stepped out of the way and trotted alongside as the truck ground to a stop. Nolan took it a couple of lengths past the first gun. The soldier jumped onto the footrest and poked his Kalashnikov inside. He spoke in Uzbek. When Jed replied, the man switched to Pushtu. Jed said in Pushtu, knowing he couldn’t fool this man into believing he was a native speaker, that they were Tajik and changed to Dari, the Afghan dialect of Persian.

  The soldier wasn’t buying this, and he wasn’t taking the cash in Waller’s hand. Unfortunately for him, he had a face that revealed his emotions. The hand that only a second previously had offered him a small fortune in Pakistani rupees now grasped his throat. Nolan tore the Kalashnikov from the soldier’s grasp and lifted his foot off the clutch pedal. The truck lurched forward, fishtailed, and skidded broadside of
f the road so that it knocked the galvanized zinc roof on top of the soldiers in the second gun emplacement. Nolan kept the truck off the road, keeping the roadside bank of earth between him and the first gun.

  Waller was still holding the soldier by the neck in his right hand as the truck went back on the road, but the man was no longer feeling anything, as evidenced by his bulging eyes and protruding tongue.

  “Let him go, Harvey,” Mike said.

  Waller released him unwillingly, like a dog wanting to hang on to a tasty bone, and the soldier’s body flopped on the blacktop road.

  “Those soldiers will have radioed ahead,” Mike said to Nolan. “They’ll be waiting for us along the road and searching for us by air. Joe, turn off the road as soon as you can. See if we can cut across country for a while before they pinpoint us.”

  They were now heading west, no more than thirty miles south of the Soviet border. Nolan pulled the truck onto a dusty pair of tracks heading across the undulating land more or less to the west. They had gone maybe ten miles when they came to a long irrigation ditch and had to travel alongside it till Nolan found a bridge made of poles and turf. The truck’s wheel base barely fitted onto the primitive bridge, and Nolan inched the vehicle across. Equally slowly the bridge sagged under its weight. As Nolan felt it giving way beneath him he accelerated forward. The dry poles snapped like shots, and the bridge collapsed in a rumble of lumber and dust. The truck fell on its side into the ditch.

  “Some fucking driver,” Waller muttered, trying to separate himself from the others and get out of the muddy water flowing into the cab.