Cobra Strike

by J. B. Hadley

  Cooped up in a dry, dusty cave, with only primitive oil lamps for illumination, Turner, Winston, and Baker succeeded in avoiding arguments with one another, which in a way only served to build up the tension between them and the irritation they all felt with one another. They were prepared to wait the Russians out, if it took them a month, and knew they had the discipline to do so, even if they did take to biting their nails.

  On the morning after their third night in the cave, a local man brought news of a rebel victory close by—they had heard the gunfire—in which ten government soldiers had been captured alive. They had learned by then that government troops deserted to the rebels all the time, bringing their weapons with them or just throwing down their weapons and refusing to fight their fellow countrymen, like those they had seen after the truck was hit by the rifle grenade. But these government troops held captive were different. They had been guilty of atrocities, and the local people were demanding that they be executed.

  “I think he’s come up here to invite us to the execution,” Baker said. “One day they say we can’t step out of this damn cave to take a breath of air, and the next day they’re inviting us, no doubt as guests of honor, to a public execution.”

  “Ask if they can give us six of them alive,” Turner said, sensing an opportunity to break out of their entrapment in the cave. He rapidly explained to Baker and Winston what he wanted. It took Baker a long time to get the Afghans to understand that they needed six of the prisoners, unharmed and blindfold. The local man left, still puzzled and doubtful. Baker persuaded one of their escort to go with him to make sure they got the men. Turner was already adjusting their small radio receiver and stringing an antenna wire out of the cave mouth.

  It was early afternoon before the prisoners began to arrive, brought in one by one, twenty minutes apart, hands bound behind their backs, electrical tape across their eyes. Turner raised a finger to his lips upon the arrival of the first one. He wanted no more English spoken, and within earshot of these prisoners the Afghans knew they were not to mention that Americans were present.

  Turner chose the prisoner with the darkest skin to represent Winston and picked two others with light skin. With a scissor he clipped the hair of all three into brush cuts, although Turner himself was the only American with extra short hair. Then he shaved off the mustaches and beards of all three, although both Winston and Baker had two weeks growth of beard by this time. Then he ripped off their clothes with his Marine Corps combat knife, giving each of them a few minor cuts and scrapes. All three prayed aloud to Allah for mercy. Then he forced on them a spare set of his, Baker’s, and Winston’s clothes. He looked them over critically and nodded with satisfaction in spite of Baker and Winston’s smirks.

  It was late in the afternoon when the six new asses arrived, and Turner paid generously for them from a wad of Pakistan rupees. He examined the long, empty burlap sacks draped over the animals and put Baker and Winston to filling them with dead grass and whatever they could find. The animals were assembled outside the cave entrance, calling to and being answered by those inside the cave, when a group of Afghans arrived with four bound men who were gagged but not blindfolded. Turner was furious.

  “Ask them why they brought them here,” he ordered Baker. “They’ve seen us. I didn’t want that.”

  He watched impatiently as the Afghans gestured to the burlap sacks and Baker waved his arms. “Baker, they can’t put those four assholes in the sacks because they’ll struggle.”

  Baker signaled some more and finally shrugged. “They say they won’t move. Don’t ask me why.”

  One of the Afghans demonstrated why. He pulled a long blade from under his loose tunic and very casually sliced it across the throat of the prisoner next to him. Spurts of blood leapt out over the crimson blade, and a gallon of it ran down the man’s front. His eyes rolled and he fell on his side.

  The Afghan with the knife slit up along the leg of the fallen man’s pants. He swept the blade in a short, sharp arc, hacked twice, and lifted out the man’s penis and testicles in a single blood-dripping lump. This he stuffed in his victim’s mouth.

  Turner heard Winston behind him gag, then vomit. He glanced at Baker, who was as white as a sheet.

  The Afghans carefully inserted the mutilated corpse into a sack, tied the neck, and lifted it onto an ass’s back.

  Turner felt sorry for the other three men who had to stand and see what was in store for them. They were gagged, but their eyes expressed the agony of their terror. The man with the blade went about his work as methodically as a pork butcher, stopping to laugh and light a cigarette and, from time to time, winking at his American friends for whom he was clearly putting on this special show.

  Turner said in a low, nasty voice. “This is a big chance for you students of war to do a little fieldwork.”

  Winston and Baker said nothing.

  When all four prisoners were cut and bagged, Turner led the other six out from inside the cave. Their hands were still bound behind them, and electrical tape covered their eyes. Kalashnikovs hanging from their shoulders, Turner and Winston set out with the Afghans and the six asses. Baker stayed behind to watch over the missiles and their own asses, still safely stashed in the cave. They came to the edge of a broad, low valley after a twenty-minute walk, and one of the Afghans pointed. A group of military vehicles was clustered on the far side of the valley floor.

  Turner studied them through binoculars. “Tents. Armored personnel carriers. And Russians.” He watched some more in silence. “They’re Russkies, all right. No sign of Afghans there. This looks good.”

  Turner nodded to the Afghans, and he and Winston concealed themselves behind rocks. The Afghans stripped the tape roughly from the men’s eyes, which made them howl. Then he cut loose their wrists. They put headdresses on the three unshaven prisoners and left the three “Americans” bareheaded. Four of the Afghans held sniper rifles with telescopic sights on them as they marched the six asses across the valley. Turner noticed the bloodstains on four of the sacks. The Russians soon saw the men and animals, and a vehicle came out to meet them.

  Turner said, “Chances are those dumb Russians have never seen a real American in their lives and won’t be able to understand what those six are saying. Maybe they’ll think they’re talking English! We only need a few hours to slip out of here.”

  Back at the cave, they loaded the missiles on the asses while Baker, who spoke Russian, monitored the radio channels to see if that Soviet unit announced its capture of what had been reported to be Americans with missiles. Just a few hours of confusion…

  CHAPTER 4

  When Mike Campbell first went to live in the Arizona desert, he’d hoped to find a deserted rancho in a lonely box canyon which he could fix up. But desert is desert, and he found very little of anything in the scrubby lands. Then he met Tina. Like a sensible, practical woman, she refused to live without electricity and running water and with only coyotes, rattlesnakes, and cactus for company. Mike refused to live in a town. So they made a temporary compromise by buying a mobile home and setting it up in a trailer camp a way out in the desert. Most people there were retired couples who now devoted their lives to growing miniature lawns in the desert and to keeping alive sickly shrubs imported from Michigan or New Jersey or wherever they had spent their working lives. Campbell’s prolonged periods of inactivity and then sudden disappearances for weeks on end led to a lot of talk. The general agreement was that he was a criminal of some sort, with various factions favoring particular activities such as drug smuggler, hitman, seller of Mexican babies. They were lavish in their sympathy for Tina being stuck with such a brute, while trying to pry information from her. Born in Arizona, Tina had cousins and friends all around, and the trailer camp folk’s constant gossip and questions amused her more often than annoyed her.

  The truth was that she had no more idea than they did of where Mike went and what he did there. She knew, of course, that he was a mere and that each time he left he was leavi
ng for war and that she might never see him again. Some of the old Southwest lingered in her attitude in that she did not find it odd that women stayed home and worried while their men did crazy, dangerous things. She knew Mike told her nothing in order to protect her. And it had to be nothing. She never even knew what continent he was leaving for. None of Mike’s associates, even his close friend Andre Verdoux, knew her name or where to find her. A couple of times each day, Mike checked with a phone-answering service in Phoenix for urgent messages, and he picked up his mail there once a week.

  That was plenty of contact for him with the outside world. Increasingly he had come to enjoy near solitude, except for Tina and his nosy neighbors in the trailer camp. They bugged Tina but mostly let him alone. They knew he practiced with automatic weapons out on the desert and still remembered with gratitude the time he single-handedly chased off a marauding biker gang from the trailer camp with a machine gun. The retired folk felt they hadn’t too much to worry about alone out on the desert, so long as Campbell was around, though this did not stop them from bitching about his not earning a decent, straightforward, nine-to-five living.

  When Campbell got back from his week-long cruise on the aircraft carrier, there were a half dozen phone messages from Andre Verdoux at the answering service. Mike drove twenty miles to a tavern, loaded the box with quarters, and phoned England, only to be told that Andre was not in his hotel room at the moment. A few drinks and one hour later, Mike phoned again and this time got him.

  Andre was brief and careful about how he worded things. When he had finished telling Mike what he had been doing and what had happened to him, culminating in the dog attack at the airfield, he mentioned the finances and suggested, “You might consider coming here, Mike, with some of your associates. I can supply the two cameramen from this side. I don’t think any special equipment will be needed, apart from a few standard pieces, which should be fairly easy to obtain in Liverpool. Three men and yourself should be enough. No need to bring the Aussie.”

  “I’m confused, Andre.” Mike’s voice was humorous, yet had an edge to it. “Is this your mission or mine?”

  Andre paused. “Well, if you come in on it, you’re the chief.”

  “Then I’ll be the one who decides how many go and whether or not the Aussie goes, won’t I?” Mike was not going to tolerate the continuing feud between Andre and Australian Bob Murphy.

  “All right, Mike, you call the shots,” the Frenchman said in his accented colloquial English. “I suppose I will have to consider myself lucky if you include me.”

  “I also want to put things together over here, not in England.”

  Andre did not want this, but he could not argue with the logic he knew was behind it. A mere mission was best organized far from the field of operation, so that when the team arrived, they knew what their roles were and more or less what would be expected of them. To bring in an unorganized group of men and to try to set things up in the field of acton was to court disaster. Even though this photography thing would hopefully be a noncombat mission, Andre knew Mike would organize it as if they were going inside the Kremlin. That was how Campbell succeeded where others failed.

  “Mike, I’m in a big hurry with this. It would be much quicker if you and the others could come straight to Liverpool. We could go to the Lake District or the Yorkshire moors, even the Scottish Highlands, to get ourselves in shape—”

  Mike interrupted, “I want a look at everyone before we ship out, not after. You know how it’s done, Andre. Give me a call in three days time, I’ll give you the meeting place, and we’ll be ready to move out one week after that. Ten days. I can’t do better than that and you know it.”

  Andre knew it.

  Mike hung up and dug more quarters from the supply he had brought with him. He had left one other number to call from this public phone because he did not like the sound of it. A Mr. Lowell from the Nanticoke Institute in Washington, D.C.

  Lowell took some time to come to the phone. “Mr. Campbell? Good of you to return my call. Could you spare us one day of your time as a consultant? For a fee, of course.”

  “In about a month’s time I’d be pleased to, Mr. Lowell.”

  “I was thinking about tomorrow.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I forgot to mention the fee, Mr. Campbell. Five thousand dollars. Can any of us turn down that for a single day’s work?”

  “It’s tempting.”

  “You will have to leave this evening in order to join us for breakfast at eight tomorrow. Tonight you will find a room reserved in your name at the Hay-Adams Hotel, across from the White House on Lafayette Square. In the morning a car will be sent to fetch you at seven-fifteen sharp.”

  Mike guessed that everything about Lowell would be sharp. He replaced the receiver. His curiosity was aroused, and five thou was five thou. One thing sure, this Nanticoke Institude, whatever it was, was too much of a big spender to be federal government. He thought for a moment about bringing Tina with him for the trip, then realized that this thing could not be as clean, safe, and aboveboard as Lowell had made it sound. No one paid five thousand dollars for that.

  Campbell buttered his toast and let the distinguished-looking gents at the long table have a good look at him. There were thirteen of them nibbling toast, sipping coffee, and chatting the usual “in” talk of long-familiar colleagues in the workplace. Although there had been no introductions, Campbell recognized two of them from newspaper photos or TV. Plainly they were all “experts” of one sort or another, the kind never elected to anything but who seemed to run the country all the same. Lowell, gaunt, skin like parchment, his hands trembling, sat beside him but never said a word to him. Mike worked on his toast, butter, and grape jelly and left it to them to get things going. He smiled a little to himself at the thought that these egghead professors might think they could intimidate him by ignoring him in the stately surroundings of this breakfast room. The ceiling high above the long table had plaster decorations, marble busts of grim-faced men stood in alcoves, the service was silver, and the waiters were formal, and at one end of the vast room hung a huge painting of someone in a cocked hat on a rearing white horse, holding his sword in the air, leading his troops into battle. Mike thought that the place should have been good for scrambled eggs at least, if not eggs Benedict, but all they were served was this well-done toast and very so-so coffee.

  Lowell began the presentation without warning in the form of a loud, one-sided conversation with Campbell. He referred to the three members of the Nanticoke Institute in Afghanistan as “fine young men who had gone there on a goodwill mission.”

  Lowell concluded his account by saying, “It is simply out of loyalty to these fine young men that the Institute is trying to organize a clandestine rescue party to get them out and, of course, for the good name of America.”

  Mike looked at his coffee cup and said slowly, “This stinks of a government mission gone sour. What’s your relationship with the CIA?”

  “Since this incident we’ve been on very cool terms with the gentlemen at Langley,” Lowell answered in his precise voice. “We did not consult them before sending our three men in, which they now regard as a breach of etiquette.”

  “Is this Institute a CIA front?” Mike asked.

  “Certainly not. No doubt some members of the Institute are also members of the CIA or NSA. I wouldn’t know.”

  “What did you send the three to Afghanistan for?”

  “To study conditions there.”

  Mike smiled at the evasiveness of this answer. “I’ll be frank with you. It sounds to me like you deliberately sent in those people to have them trapped and caught by the Russians. Right now I’m second-guessing you to try to figure out why you did that. And why you want to involve me.”

  Lowell looked angry, but a heavy man on the opposite side of the table laughed and said, “I think it’s reasonable for you to suspect us of some convoluted conspiracy in which things that seem to be one thing turn out to be an
other. Yet you would be surprised at how easy it is for clever men, confident of their own abilities, to do something stupid and irresponsible. But that is what we did, and now we are trying to extricate ourselves with a minimum of damage to the Institute and, of course, to our own precious reputations.”

  Mike was satisfied with the sincerity of this answer. He next asked, “Were your men armed?”

  “They may have smuggled in a few rifles and sidearms in a spirit of youthful irresponsibility,” Lowell said hurriedly at Campbell’s side.

  Mike looked across the table at the heavy man. He said, “They brought in missiles. Not U.S. manufacture, but all the same, we don’t want them caught with them.”

  “The Institute has no official knowledge of this,” Lowell added primly, “and certainly does not condone its members carrying out such activities.”

  “Just as you would not hire mercenaries to rescue them,” Mike suggested.

  “Exactly,” Lowell agreed without a trace of humor. “Mounting a clandestine rescue effort to free these fine young men is an entirely different approach.”

  “Suppose they can be located but not rescued.”

  “Then they will have to be terminated in such a way that their remains cannot be identified,” Lowell said in his stiff voice.

  Mike looked across the table at the heavy man to see if he would disagree, but the man looked away from him.

  Now Mike had the truth of the offer: Rescue them if possible; if not, scorch them into the dirt before the Russians can use fhem. It was not the three men who were to be saved as much as the reputation of the Nanticoke Institute.