Cobra Strike

by J. B. Hadley

  Mike prided himself on being a hard man to surprise, but when someone did so, he did not begrudge them his admiration. “You paid some Russian soldiers…” He just let it trail off.

  Op nodded his head vigorously. “But we don’t know how to drive it. So we need you along.”

  Mike was tempted to reach for the vodka bottle himself but resisted the urge.

  Privates Valery T. Timofeyev and Sergei V. Prokopchik figured they had enough Stolichnaya to keep them and their friends pickled for the remaining four months they had to serve in this hellhole. The personnel carrier had already been listed as “damaged beyond repair” and “stripped and abandoned,” a casualty of a flash flood with no attendant human casualties. That paperwork alone had cost them thirty-six bottles, and the two privates were becoming appalled at the greed of their fellow servicemen who thought nothing of extorting such heavy payments for a few moments of their time.

  This new problem was more worrying. The pretty blond woman colonel, who was said to be hard as nails, thought the Dutch reporters were the Americans she was hunting. Timofeyev and Prokopchik steered reports her way, at the cost of more bottles, reports that stated things clearly enough, while understandably, they themselves were not in a position to volunteer more personal information because of regulations against trading with the enemy, which, of course, in reality had no application here because the men were Dutch, and vodka was vodka; but a woman could not be expected to understand that, and even if she did, they would end in irons at hard labor, anyway.

  The problem was what to do now so this colonel would realize that these two were not the Americans she was looking for. The privates did not want the Americans to escape while the colonel was distracted by the Dutchmen. Another nagging worry was that the Dutchmen knew their names and might talk if captured. That was the essence of their problem: how they could put the colonel back on the right track after the real Americans, for the good both of Russia and themselves.

  “There’s nothing we can do, Sergei Vladimirovich, except shape up at eighteen hundred hours along with everyone else,” Timofeyev said to Prokopchik. “If something turns up after we move out, we can steer it her way. We stand to lose too much by volunteering information we’re not supposed to know.’’

  Prokopchik nodded. “You know we could be out for days in the field before we come back to town. If both of us were to take a couple of bottles along to help pass the time for us, they’d fit easily in our packs and would be hardly any extra weight to carry.”

  Timofeyev thought this a brilliant solution to all their problems. They still had half an hour before shape-up time at eighteen hundred hours, just enough to go outside the town and take four bottles from one of their numerous stashes.

  Bob Murphy and Lance Hardwick had left the area earlier with two of Masood Haq’s men and moved down the personnel carrier from its hiding place. The Dutchmen were to be picked up at an agreed location precisely at 6:07, giving them five minutes to film the effects of the explosion. They had wanted twenty minutes. Mike gave them five, plus two to move their ass. Whether they were there or not, the mercs were leaving town at 6:07 in the personnel carrier. The Dutchmen sighed and said, “Ya, ya.”

  Nolan was confident of his timer, so the rest of the team was to be picked up outside the town precisely at 5:55. The personnel carrier would remain at that spot until the explosion, at 6:00, and then proceed to the rendezvous with the Dutchmen, which would take them five minutes to reach at most. After that, nothing short of antitank missiles could stop them, and they could depend on the damage and confusion caused by the blast to cripple all serious opposition.

  At 5:50 Prokopchik and Timofeyev, hurrying back to the town barracks with their vodka bottles safety stowed inside their packs, & weight heavily armed Americans waiting in a group outside the town. They got away without being seen, ran to the barracks, and shouted to the colonel. She was sitting in a vehicle next to a driver, and so they piled in the back and shouted directions and explanations as they went.

  “Eight Americans?” the colonel asked guardedly.

  “Yes, Comrade, including the black one. They were all dressed as Afghans, but they are Americans.”

  “Maybe three of them were American and the rest Afghan,” Colonel Matveyeva hinted in a cold voice.

  “No, Colonel. All of them. All Americans.”

  Well, if she took them all prisoner, they could hardly criticize her because she had been wrong previously. She would establish visual contact with them from this vehicle and wait for the lieutenant to arrive with two platoons in the next few minutes. She knew better than to doubt the account of these two seasoned infantrymen. Later they would have to explain what they had been doing out here, but she#took them at their word. Eight of these rich, grinning Americans! She’d wipe the smiles from their well-fed capitalist faces!

  She did not see the looks of horror that spread over the faces of Timofeyev and Prokopchik behind her when they saw, instead of the eight waiting Americans, the personnel carrier they had sold to the Dutchmen and had listed as damaged beyond repair.

  The carrier lumbered forward at surprising speed and headed straight for their vehicle. The driver could not at first understand why he should flee from a Russian personnel carrier, not comprehending how eight Americans or more could be inside it. This delay nearly cost them their lives as the heavy carrier tried to ram diem. The driver pulled out of the way at the last moment, but not far enough, because the personnel carrier twisted toward them and sideswiped their vehicle. All four occupants were thrown clear as the open-topped vehicle flipped over, its wheels in the air.

  The colonel lay on her side in the dust, gasping for breath and allowing tears of rage to stream down her cheeks as she gazed after the armored vehicle heading slowly toward the town.

  As she watched, the barracks erupted in a blinding light, and she clearly saw bodies and large sections of buildings lifted high into the air as shock waves traveled through the ground beneath her and the deafening blast resounded in her ears.

  CHAPTER 13

  Murphy drove the personnel carrier at high speed westward across Afghanistan, never more than thirty or forty miles below the Soviet border. With the two Dutchmen they now amounted to a force of twelve heavily armed men in a heavily armored all-terrain vehicle, mounted with two heavy machine guns and topped up with fuel. One well-aimed rocket could take care of all that. But at least it beat slogging up and down mountain slopes and throwing themselves facedown on the bare rock every time they thought they heard a jet or a chopper.

  Sheep grazed on rich grasslands here, roses grew in front of houses, jays and squirrels squawked beneath poplar trees. They fitted Op van de Bosch into a Russian uniform discarded inside the carrier, and he spoke rapid Dutch to the local peasants and paid for lamb kebab, milk, yogurt, bread, tea, and other supplies in Afghan currency supplied by Mike. Campbell had always paid the highland rebels in Pakistan currency, for that was where they made their purchases, but this part of the country—Afghan Turkestan—was a very different place populated by very different people. Many of the men were strongly Asiatic in appearance and wore long, striped or flowered robes.

  Fierce mountain warriors they were not! In one town the local government soldiers walked around each with a flower in the muzzle of his Kalashnikov. They refueled the personnel carrier at the base there, letting the Afghan doing the work see Op in his Russian uniform and hear, but not see, Jed Crippenby talk Turki to him in a Russian accent from inside the carrier.

  “Op, all you have to do is sign for the fuel,” Jed said softly in English. “The Russian officer in charge here has been down with dysentery for five days, the Russian sergeant has been drunk for three days, the radio receiver and transmitter have never worked properly but haven’t worked at all in two days, and none of the soldiers have gotten laid in more than a year. Sounds like our kind of town, Mike. You think we should settle down here?”

  She had always warned the slow, rotten son of a bi
tch that he would freeze his nuts off in the Arctic for not catching these Yankee terrorists, and once again he had evaded her by burning to death in the American-engineered explosion. If the lieutenant had obeyed her promptly and followed on the double with two platoons, he and they would have been clear of the barracks when the explosion, took place. But, as always, he had dithered. She was well rid of him. Only now, when the kicks were passed down to her, she had no one to pass them along to.

  “We have work to do,” she snapped to the driver of her damaged, but still operable, vehicle. “Those two privates have given me the slip. To hell with them. And we have no time to bother with what’s happened here. Take me to the main highway.”

  “But, Comrade Colonel, many of these men were in my unit. They were all under your command. Some are still alive. We must help—”

  The driver stopped talking when she pointed her Makarov at him. He started the engine and pulled it onto the road to the highway. The vehicle’s transmitter had been smashed, and the chaos and destruction around the town barracks would make another difficult to locate. On the highway she could commandeer the first suitable transport and communications she saw.

  She halted a small Afghan army provisions truck traveling east, and the driver told her he had seen a lone Red Army personnel carrier traveling against him at high speed not long ago. She sent the truck into the town to help out at the destroyed barracks. The next vehicles were a convoy of eight Afghan army trucks going west. They had not seen a personnel carrier on the road, so it went west. The lead truck had a powerful transmitter, on which she called in first the data on the eight plus Americans in the carrier, arranging to be picked up in a slick at her present location, and then put in a call for emergency medical assistance for the destroyed barracks. She placed a warning that the medical evacuation efforts must not be allowed to interfere with the ongoing military effort to apprehend the American provocateurs and enemies of free workers. She ordered the eight trucks to the barracks.

  Despite his pleas to be allowed to return to help rescue his buddies, she kept her driver and vehicle with her in case the chopper didn’t arrive. Yekaterina paced up and down, deep in thought. When the chopper arrived, she would have three to four times the speed of the land vehicle at the very least, with the added ability to take shortcuts. The personnel carrier could leave the road, too, but where could it go? Head for Russia? Or the high mountains of Afghanistan’s interior? No. It was plain now to her where they had been headed all along and that this was a carefully staged wild goose chase. First three Americans. Now eight Americans. Maybe even more. This was an elaborate morale-boosting tour, which was just the kind of thing she had read that Americans believed in. They thought that they could rush around Afghanistan and stir up trouble, like they had in Poland and Hungary and Czechoslovakia, trying to make simple working people discontent through their elaborate lies and false promises. No wonder the Moscow authorities wanted to capture them so desperately. And she herself would have failed the cause of world communism if she did not cut out this cancer that was threatening the healthy tissue of Marxist society, which was in the process of being grafted onto Afghanistan. She knew now where they were headed. Herat. That hotbed of revisionist superstition and banditry, where brave Soviet lads gave their lives every day to bring the class revolution to these backward, ungrateful people.

  “Sure we’re going to drive this tin can into Herat,” Campbell said, “unless someone comes at us with a can opener.”

  “Or unless we don’t find more fuel real soon,” Murphy added, who was still driving the personnel carrier, his injured leg long forgotten.

  “Don’t forget your promise to drop us off at our assignment,” Op said. “We don’t take one inch of tape on you. That shows we keep our part of the bargain.”

  “That shows you know you’ll get a bullet up your ass if you do,” Waller commented.

  “Ya, I think that is a possibility too,” Op admitted with a grin. “Harvey does not like us because he thinks he is a brave man to spend days in Afghanistan with his guns. Then he sees us, with no guns, and we spend weeks here. He won’t admit I am a braver man than he is.”

  “You fucking tulip-sucking cream puff!” Waller bellowed. “You’re some kind of fellow-traveling half-assed leftist from a welfare state that the Russians can’t arrest or kill in case it shocks all your pinko friends back home.”

  Op howled with laughter. “I’ll tell them that, Harvey, if they catch me.”

  “You’re even crazier than! am,” Waller muttered.

  “We’ll stop with your rebel friends tonight, Op, provided we reach them,” Campbell told him. “We can’t travel by night in this carrier, since we could be ambushed at any point by unseen enemies, either communists or rebels.”

  “Mike, problem ahead!” Murphy snapped. “Two personnel carriers, same model as this, at roadside ahead. Too late to turn off.”

  “Pull in alongside them,” Mike told him calmly. He fetched one of the Stolichnaya bottles he had confiscated from the Dutchmen, “so there would be no misunderstand- ings,” and unscrewed its cap. He undid some buttons on the Red Army tunic Op was wearing, mussed his hair, and handed him the bottle. “Drink,” he said. “Lance, you and Joe take that clear plastic tubing.” When the carrier eased to a stop next to one of the others, two young Russians left to guard the carriers while the others ate in a tea house came around to see who had arrived.

  “You’re real drunk, Op. Part with the bottle,” Mike said as he pushed the Dutchman out the hatch. Campbell closed the hatch and said softly, “We should all be wondering why we are not having to bust through roadblocks by now, and why we’re not having rockets shot at us by gunships, and why the soldiers that belong to these carriers have not been warned to look out for us.”

  Winston knew the answer to that. “They want to take us alive, Mike, and they know that these guys out in the boonies would fuck up. They’ll have the elite squads stretching steel nets for us where we don’t expect it, but certainly well before Herat.”

  The soldiers were just kids too dumb to demand to know why this drunk had been pushed out the hatch to them and why he was bearded to look like an Afghan, but they were not too young to have developed a taste for high-quality vodka. Op muttered at them and made a futile effort to hide the bottle from them. They grabbed it and pushed him away. He stood with them, grinning foolishly when they gave him an occasional toke from his own bottle.

  While the guards were distracted, Hardwick and Nolan siphoned the fuel from the empty carrier into their own vehicle and got two-thirds of a tankful. Nolan signaled Op with a knock on the steel plate when they had finished, and Op left, unnoticed, to climb back in the hatch. The two young soldiers waved cheerfully after them when they pulled out.

  Colonel Matveyeva rode in the Mi-24 helicopter high and to the east of the road to Herat, which at this point ran due south before swinging to the southwest at Maimena. Here the road left the northern plain and became more difficult to control. It did not make her happy to allow the Americans free passage all this way—and she wouldn’t permit it if she was in full control because they had already shown themselves to be very slippery—yet there was nothing she could do about it except watch them far below her, as a cat watches a bird in a cage.

  She had waited impatiently for this chopper, anxious to climb to an altitude where she could have good direct radio contact with HQ in Kabul, forgetting that once such contact was established, she might be taking orders rather than giving them. That swine Kudimov had maneuvered her into taking full responsibility for the capture of these American adventurers, and now he was ordering her to take them alive without harming a hair on their heads. After they had blown up a barracks and maybe two hundred and fifty men!

  She knew General Kudimov’s game. If he took all of these eight to a dozen Americans alive and put their trial on international television, it could earn him a place in the Moscow power structure, a big apartment, an official car, and a dacha for countr
y weekends. Clearly he was not going to let her stand between him and all that. But she would benefit, too—in a more modest way, of course. No, Viktor Mikhailovich was right: These Americans could not be harmed. These Americans, if handled right, could be her and the general’s tickets to a life of power and prestige in Moscow’s top military circles. If she failed, she could see that the general had it all set up so that she alone would be disgraced. That was the risk she had to take. But she would not fail.

  She would track the personnel carrier unobserved from this height until it crossed the Murghab River, about a hundred miles farther on. Then she would signal the armored column to leave Moghor, to the south, and the Americans would find themselves with an easily guarded barrier behind them in the form of the big river, with wild mountains on all sides, and a Red Army column of tanks eating up the road toward them. This was going to be something the White House would remember with a shudder, and strangers would smile at her in the Moscow streets, near her apartment in a fashionable section, recognizing her as a people’s hero.

  * * *

  Mike Campbell didn’t like the looks of what he was seeing. Something smelled wrong. The other team members seemed happy that things were going so easy for them. Mike sounded out his old friend Verdoux.

  “Are you noticing some of the things I’m noticing, Andre?”

  “You mean how soldiers at the checkpoints along the road conveniently lode the other way when we pass through?”

  “Things like that.”

  “There’s been no general alert put out for us,” Andre said. “Those military transports we pass don’t know us from Adam and don’t care. But I have a feeling that the soldiers at the checkpoints do and have been ordered to let us pass. It’s just not natural that some tight-assed lieutenant or regulations-minded sergeant hasn’t stopped us by now to check that our papers are in order, that we’re in the zone we’re supposed to be in, that our faces are shaved and our boots shined, that we still remember how to stand at attention. No, Mike, it’s just not natural.”