Cobra Strike

by J. B. Hadley

  The crowd of horsemen raised a huge plume of dust behind them as they crossed the valley toward the even bigger column of black smoke rising into the clear mountain air above the burning installation. The tribesmen raced one another to get there first, and little more than halfway there—after about three miles—the fiercest young warriors on the finest horses had left the main crowd of horsemen behind. Gul Daoud and two of his lieutenants hung back deliberately to stay with the Americans, for whom breakneck riding over rock rubble and thorn scrub was a new experience. Baker and Winston had quieted down their war cries by this time and were concentrating on staying in the saddle.

  A small group of Russians pulled away from the wreckage in an open jeep-style vehicle. Some of the lead riders branched off to give chase, their horses making slightly better time than the jeep over the rough terrain, so that they slowly gained on the escaping Russians and would catch up with them if their horses did not tire or something else interfere. The other leading riders galloped straight toward the destroyed installation, trying to best one another to see which of them would be first man to ride into it. An explosion snapped the front legs and ripped open the belly of the lead horse. Its rider was thrown, and he was unlucky enough to land headfirst on another mine, which severed his head from his shoulders and rolled it like a wet ball in the dust. When it lay still, grime coated the open eyeballs and unmoving lips.

  The second and third horses were too close behind the first to avoid the mine field, and the two mines detonated by the first horse and rider panicked their two horses beyond the control of their riders. One horse bolted and killed itself and its rider within ten yards. The other threw its rider and was destroyed when it, too, tripped a mine. The thrown rider tiptoed out of the mine field with fear-widened eyes and a prayer to Allah on his lips. He made it out safely, promptly forgot his prayers, and went back to cursing the Russians.

  The other horsemen had time to rein in and circle the installment, looking for a way in through what was probably a nearly closed ring of protective mine fields. The hard, stony ground had tire tracks in several places that appeared to lead into the camp, but the Afghans knew that these tracks would have been deliberately made before the mines were laid down and that only one or two entrances would have been left clear for travel.

  The other group of lead riders were closing in on the jeep. When one Russian tried to operate the machine gun mounted in the rear of the vehicle, he was picked off by a sharpshooter and fell over on top of the weapon. Another Afghan rider drilled the Russian driver in the back of the head, and the jeep slid sideways and its engine stalled. Before the other Russians could pull the dead men off either the steering wheel or the machine gun, the Afghans had the vehicle surrounded and, from horseback, looked down their rifle barrels at the four surviving Russians, three enlisted men, and an officer. The Russians raised their hands and tried to look like decent friendly guys who were there by mistake.

  By the time the advance horseman brought back their four captives and the vehicle, the main body of horsemen, including Gul Daoud and the three Americans, had arrived outside the installation. They were taking sporadic rifle fire from inside, nothing heavy, and were responding and keeping their horses moving to avoid presenting themselves as stationary targets.

  “Officers are more cowardly than regular soldiers,” Daoud said with a sneer. “Sit this Russian captain on the hood of the jeep, tie his ankles to the front fender, free his hands, and let him point out a safe route into their camp.”

  Baker started to protest that this was against the international rules of warfare. Gul Daoud seemed genuinely suprised to hear that any such rules were in existence and ignored Baker, of course. Gul lined the three Soviet enlisted men abreast behind the jeep, in case its four tires missed any mines in its path. The captain did a good job directing the Afghan driver after Gul promised him, in quite good Russian, that he and his men would be handed over to the International Red Cross for transporation to Switzerland after being displayed first to Western reporters. The captain said he wanted to go to Canada.

  “No problem,” Gul told him. “From Switzerland you can go to Paris if you want. Canada. Hollywood. Wherever you like.”

  The captain led them safely inside where it soon became apparent that the Afghans had no intention of burdening themselves with more prisoners. They did not waste bullets, either; they simply cut the throats of the uninjured or lightly wounded and left the badly wounded to die where they lay. They circulated rapidly, stuffing undamaged weapons, ammo, and supplies into large sacks, which they tied to their saddles. As time passed, they speeded their already feverish pace. In a little more than twenty minutes Gul Daoud gave die signal to leave. By that time, in Baker’s estimate, at least one hundred and twenty Russians were dead or mortally wounded, perhaps as many as a hundred and eighty, with only four survivors. While the Afghans killed and looted, the three Americans worked to one side on the bulldozing equipment, placing charges of plastic explosive at vulnerable points in the heavy structures. The detonations damaged the equipment beyond repair. They had time to divide their remaining supply of plastique into the relatively small charges needed to explode the fuel tanks of the lightly damaged choppers. They set these off as a farewell fireworks display.

  Nearly all the horsemen made it across the valley floor into the protection of the hills before the first wave of MIG fighters hit. The only riders caught in the open were those escorting the four Soviet servicemen in their jeep. One of the seven planes in the second wave of fighters scored a direct hit on the jeep with a rocket, instantly frying all four of his fellow countrymen. Then the first wave of fighters hit again, scattering the horsemen.

  Not far away, behind the cover of big rocks, Gul Daoud shrugged at the three Americans. “You Yanks’d do anything to free American hostages. Now you see for yourselves that these Russians would sacrifice four of their own to deprive us of a single jeep.”

  CHAPTER 5

  The gun show was on the outskirts of Bakersfield, adding maybe sixty or seventy miles on his trip on Route 5 from Los Angeles to San Francisco. As he drove, Lance Hardwick dialed in a temperature of sixty-eight degrees on the Automatic Climate Control system of the Volvo 760-GLE and then fiddled with the graphic equilizer, which balanced the weaker set of front speakers With the forty-watts-per-channel pair in the back. It was like he had Bruce Springsteen singing in the bucket seat beside him, and the band in die backseat, except for the drums, which were halfway up the rear window. He was also doing ninety in the fast lane, depending on his Whistler Spectrum to detect stationary, moving, trigger, even pulsed police radar from behind hills, around curves, Qr wherever the highway patrol could squeeze into. The Spectrum was his own equipment and not part of the rented Volvo. It flashed a red light when it smelled police radar and clucked like a Geiger counter next to an atomic bomb.

  Lance smiled at the idea of a decent sound system on a mission with Mad Mike Campbell. Campbell would have him in a Chevy or a Honda—something unobtrusive. But this was one of Lance's solo jobs, something he kept up in spite of becoming one of Mike's regulars. Maybe it had something to do with him being an actor, or more accurately, an out-of-work actor. He had been used to scuffling for a living. His only so-called acting jobs had been as a stuntman on TV series and low-budget movies. Mostly he had worked as a bodyguard for L.A. rock musicians. It had not turned out as great as he had once hoped, but at least it was sunshine and palm trees—and he was Lance Hardwick with an apartment in West Hollywood instead of being Miroslav Svoboda from Minneapolis. True, when his mother had named him Miroslav, she had expected the family to return to Czechoslovakia, and how was she to know, anyway, hardly talking any English herself at that time, that you couldn't make it in America with a first name like Miroslav. Lance. That was more like it. The other part of his stage name, now his legal name, was a stuntman's joke. And why not? His whole life in a way was a stuntman's joke. Yet his mother had never been able to accept his new name. She still wrote
him as Miroslav Svoboda c/o Lance Hardwick. Like Mr. Hyde c/o Dr. Jekyll. But imagine calling a kid Miroslav…

  Mike Campbell had been a consultant on a war movie in which Lance and others had filled in for the stars when things got rough. He knew Mad Mike by his rep and bugged him for a chance to go on a real-life mere mission. Then, when Mike finally gave him a chance months later, he had almost literally blown the opportunity with cocaine at the training camp before they left. That wasn't so long ago, yet now he looked back on himself then as just a dumb kid.

  This mission he had accepted dealt with what he guessed was an even dumber kid, only seventeen. The boy's father was a Los Angeles studio musician Lance had known for years. As a backup and often lead guitarist, he sat in on recording dates with name bands in order to help out on the musical end of things, which was not the strong point of quite a few famous rock bands, and he took instant bucks instead of credit and royalties. Because studio musicians soon lost the drive and desperation to strike out and make a big name for themselves, the work was a treadmill in a way, but a comfortable high-income treadmill with all the perks.

  This guitarist's son had dropped out of high school and then disappeared four months previously. He knew his son had at least six thousand dollars and thought he was in Mexico. He heard nothing until five days previously when the phone rang late at night. It was his son's voice, from an outdoor pay phone with trucks passing in the background. His son talked fast in a frightened voice, then hung up the receiver when he saw someone coming—or so his father figured. The boy admitted he had come to grow marijuana, that the plants were in the ground, that his partners wouldn't let him go till after the fall harvest. They had already killed one kid who had stood up to them. He told his father not to come personally for him—reasonable advice since the guitarist was six foot three and his body weighed no more than his long, bushy hair and beard. His son said to find someone tough who knew how to use a gun and to tell him that he was at Noddy's near Alderpoint. His son interrupted himself after a few more words with “I gotta go” and hung up.

  The guitarist gave Lance $25,000 and asked if he wanted more. Lance said no. He found Alderpoint on the map off Route 101, less than two hundred miles north of San Francisco. He would have flown to San Francisco and hired a car there were it not for this gun show in Bakersfield, where he knew they would have what he was looking for.

  He was in a hurry, having a long way to drive, and so he did not go into the show itself. Three different guys in the parking lot had secondhand MAC-10s for sale. Since they were not new, no government paperwork was involved. Anyway, presumably they had been illegally converted from semi to full automatic; certainly the silencer that came with the one he bought was a homemade job. He also bought a thousand rounds of .45 ACP for the gun and some spare thirty-round detachable box magazines. He was on the road again in less than a half hour and drove north on Route 5 to Oakland, crossed the Bay Bridge to San Francisco, and took the Golden Gate Bridge north again without stopping. It was dusk when he turned west off Route 101 toward Garberville, which was the only sizable town fairly close to Alderpoint. He found himself a motel, ate a meal, and let a local cadge drinks off him in a tavern. He heard about how the federal government had been financing raids on the local pot growers: For the past two summers cops in fatigues and bulletproof vests carrying automatic weapons had been ferried by choppers into the hills to cut and burn the illegal crops.

  “It's too early yet for you to see them,” the man at the bar said, “ ‘cause the plants ain't growed enough yet for them to spot. But even this early in the year we have undercover types floating in and trying to find out what's going on.” He paused and gave Lance a long look, as did a couple of other men in peaked caps along the bar.

  “It's fine with me if you want to talk about baseball,” Lance said.

  “We don't have much ball between Frisco and Seattle,” the man grumbled. “I wouldn't cross the road to see a game.” Lance said nothing, and the man was soon back on his favorite topic. “You see any garden supply stores coming into town?”

  “No. It was near dark when I got in.”

  “When I first arrived here near twenty years ago, there was only one garden supply store. Now there are thirteen. Who do you reckon is doing all this cultivating in' a place like this with nothing but mountains and pine trees? Dang right, it's them that used to be hippies, came up here in rags without a dollar or an acre of land to their name, and now they're driving Cherokee wagons and flying planes while they grow that stuff on public land. You stay away from them if you're planning on staying on here for a spell. Some of them's flower children and wouldn't harm no one, but there's others that'd cut your throat as soon as look at you. They got million-dollar businesses out there on those state and federal lands. They been a whole mess of hikers disappearing in these hills in the past few years. There's some who reckon maybe they saw something they weren't meant to see. Hell, you couldn't get some of those game wardens to set foot near some of those places back in the hills—and it ain't the grizzlies they're afraid of.”

  Lance played the dumb tourist a while longer, left before he attracted attention, and got a good night's rest. He drove back toward Route 101 shortly after seven the next morning, and then he took the small, winding blacktop road east off the main highway. Alderpoint was in about twenty miles, on the Eel River, deep in what was known locally as the Green Triangle. The road wound around the mountainsides, and Lance got some nice views down hundreds of feet over the edge. Valleys filled with redwood and pines nestled between jagged peaks. Alderpoint itself was no more than a general store and a tavern named the Bum Steer, along with a few cabins. Lance kept driving till he saw a bearded man in a work shirt and jeans standing by the road, doing nothing in particular. Lance braked. “Noddy's?” The man pointed down the road. Lance waved.

  Since hardly anyone lived around this area, it took him some time to inquire and finally get to Noddy's, down a pair of wheel tracks to a cabin deep in the woods. He stayed in the car with the engine running, and after a while, when nobody showed, he tapped the horn lightly a few times. A barrel-chested man with a long mustache came out on the veranda, a shotgun cradled in his right arm.

  Lance called out the window, “You Noddy?”

  “Could be.”

  “I'm up from L.A. I'm looking for an opportunity to invest.”

  “We don't need no investors up here, mister.”

  Lance smiled. “Tell Tony Wood that an L.A. investor is here.”

  “Does this Tony Wood know you?”

  “Tell Tony the guitar man sent me.” Lance took a chance with this, figuring that if Tony was mad at his father, he would not have mentioned him much to anybody. “Where you staying?”

  “I spent last night in Garberville. Some nosy people there. I don't think I'll go back.”

  Noddy twirled his mustache. “How come you came to me?”

  “Man, you're famous.”

  Noddy could barely repress a pleased smile. “Drive around, then come back in an hour.”

  Lance drove back along the tire tracks a ways until he saw a stand of heavy brush where he could hide the car. He beat the ground with a branch to hide his new tire tracks cutting away from the old. Taking the MAC-10 from the trunk, he pushed a loaded magazine into the magazine well in the pistol-grip handle of the .submachine gun. After that he screwed on the silencer and slipped three other full magazines into his pockets. Then he headed back through the trees toward the cabin, keeping off the car tracks.

  Before he was near enough to see anything, he heard someone yelling and pleading. Lance quickened his pace through the trees. Noddy sat on the veranda steps, his shotgun across his knees, placidly watching a squat, burly man beat and kick a skinny youth who was shouting that he didn't tell anyone to come to this place and didn't know any guitar man. Lance recognized him from photos he'd seen.

  Noddy didn't stir when Lance walked into the clearing with the MAC-10 ready to go. The squat man quit beat
ing the kid and waited to see what was going to happen now. Lance saw the heavy revolver stuck in his waistband, and he guessed that Noddy might be carrying slugs instead of bird shot in that shotgun. They probably had other men in calling distance, and that was a long, dangerous walk back to his car through the trees. Lance thought about killing them but decided it would be dumb to do so with the kid as a witness, in case he decided later, for some reason, to turn on his rescuer.

  Lance said to the kid, “You and I are getting outta this place and we're both going to forget we've ever been here.”

  “They have my money.” The kid was getting snotty now that he saw the respectful attention Noddy and other man were giving this dude with the submachine gun. “Make them pay me back before we leave.”

  “Forget your money, kid,” Lance said. “Write it off to experience. You don't remember a thing about this place. Anything that goes wrong here, they will blame you for it, and you may not be as hard to find as you think.” Lance said this loud enough for Noddy and the other man to hear. He wanted them to understand that he intended to make this kid keep his mouth shut so there was no need for them to pull some kind of dumb attack to prevent them from leaving. “You learned you shouldn't deal with folks like Noddy, and he learned you got connections and can't hold you here against your will. Both of you are damn fools if you don't let things rest like that.”

  Noddy didn't move a muscle or say a thing.

  But the kid was furious. He said in an undertone to Lance, “Three weeks ago Noddy had an argument with a twenty-year-old guy from Cleveland. We were out in a growing area at the time, putting in seeds. Noddy knocked him down and beat him to death with a stone. One side of his head was all stove in. They left him out in that field till we had finished planting it, as a warning to the rest of us. The body was out there four days, and each morning we'd see more of it gnawed away by animals during the night.