by J. B. Hadley
“Pull over behind the other trucks as if you were going to unload,” Mike shouted forward to Jed. “The rest of you keep down out of sight. You can bet the Russians are watching from that fort. This building is probably living quarters for them. Andre and Bob, sight that mortar tube. Rest of you place blocks on the base plate to hold it steady.”
When Mike had heard from Bob and Lance that they had seen a mortar, he guessed correctly that it was an Ml937 medium one, the mortar popular with all Warsaw Pact countries though it dated back to the year of its model number. It was a simple tube steadied on the ground by a base plate and held at an angle by a bipod. It fired on the Stokes principle, invented during World War I by a British manufacturer of agricultural machinery: a loose-fitting bomb, with propellant contained in a cartridge in its tail, was dropped down the simple tube with a firing pin in its base. In older mortars the loose fit of the bomb within the tube, which, of course, enabled it to be dropped on the pin, allowed propellant gas to escape around the bomb, which caused variations in aim and range. The Ml937 had been modernized, like most other present-day mortars, by adding a plastic driving band that expanded on firing by providing a close fit for the bomb within the tube. Since the tube, base plate, and bipod each weighed more than forty pounds, and the bombs six pounds each, the other team members were a lot less enthusiastic about the M1937 than Campbell.
By now the truck had come to a stop next to the stacked cinder blocks. The workers were looking toward the truck, but none seemed anxious to leave the warmth of the fire. There was no sign of any movement from the fort.
“Keep your heads down,” Mike warned again. “Andre, is she set? I’d say your range is a little more than six hundred yards. You agree? Jed, leave the engine running, open the door, leaving it open behind you. We got to have something from that fort—is it empty or are those bastards ready to blow us into dust? Walk around a bit, Jed, in front of the truck.”
A steel door opened in the side of the fort, and a uniformed Soviet serviceman emerged. He turned his head, and another came out to join him. This one raised binoculars to his eyes.
“They’re wondering where the soldier is who was with the driver,” Mike said. “Okay, Jed, jump back in the truck. Andre, give ‘em a taste.”
Andre dropped a mortar round tail-first into the mouth of the tube, and they heard it rattle down inside for a second, then it whizzed out in an explosive burst and arced across the intervening space to the mud-walled fort. It hit the flat roof of the fort with a growling roar. Flames spat out the doorway behind the two Russians who were observing the truck. One man huddled to the ground, the flesh seared from his bones, his cheeks melted off his skull, while the other ran briefly, waving his arms, in an orange sheet of flame, before he, too, was consumed by the deadly combustion.
Bob had passed another bomb to Andre, who held it at the mouth of the smoking tube waiting for Mike’s signal. Campbell nodded to him, and Andre dropped in the projectile. It, too, landed on what remained of the flat roof of the fort, five or six yards behind the first. This time the explosion was not triggered off until the bomb hit something inside the fort. The upper third of the heavy mud walls folded outward as everything inside collapsed downward. Tall, angry red flames mixed with dense black smoke, and a great cloud of gray dust rose over everything.
“Let’s go!” Mike yelled to Jed, who seemed mesmerized at the sight behind the wheel.
The truck lurched forward and swung back onto the road. Mike knew one thing for sure now: They were not going to be allowed to pass the rocket and machine-gun emplacements that must lie on the exit from the pass. If these were in the same position as those they saw coming into the pass, with steep walls rising on either side of the road, they would find themselves trapped inside, unable to go forward or backward because of the bunkers, and unable to climb the walls of the pass with speed enough to avoid being picked off by sniper fire. But they were in luck. The road opened onto a high flat-topped ridge, which it followed for hundreds of yards before beginning its descent on the other side of the pass.
Mike guessed that the gun emplacements would be immediately below the ridge top. “Don’t go down,” he yelled to Jed. “Stay on this ridge.”
“Goddammit, Mike, I can’t. Look at the rocks.”
“It’s not your father’s car!”
Jed laughed and whooped. He crashed over rocks and ran in and out of gullies, making the flatbed truck pitch like a sailboat deck on a rough sea. The cinder-block walls fell down on them, a whole wall of them burying Harvey Waller beneath them. Harvey took it personally and began heaving and kicking them off the truck. Lance laughed so hard, he fell off the other side of the truck at a sudden, extra-savage bump. Mike yelled for Jed to stop and loaded the mortar and the aluminum box of spare bombs in the cab beside him while the others cleared away the remaining cinder blocks. Then they all got firm handholds on the framework behind the cab, and Mike yelled for Jed to push on, only this time with a bit of speed.
Jed did his best, but the level top of the ridge was narrowing fast, an he came to a stop when he could go no farther.
“What’s wrong?” Mike inquired.
“There’s nowhere to go but down,” Jed said, exasperated.
“So go down.”
Jed looked out the side window at the steeply angled slope and down into a dry riverbed hundreds of feet below. Then he looked back at Mike. Then once more down the slope. Mike could have sworn he saw Jed shut his eyes as he turned the steering wheel hard to the left and eased the truck nose first over the edge and down the side of the ridge.
He tried everything to slow the vehicle, but its momentum built and soon it was hurtling downhill at an ever-increasing speed. When he locked the wheels with the brakes or put it in reverse gear, the rear end of the truck fishtailed viciously, and the whole vehicle threatened to swing sideways, which, of course, would cause it to topple over and over down the mountainside. Jed wasn’t helped any by the hollers and yells coming from the back of the truck; if he took their word for it, any one of them could manage this with one hand on the wheel and the other around a heavy-titted woman, doing twice the speed he was doing with only half the discomfort. Not for the first time since he had set out, Jed wistfully recalled his days of peace and plenty back at the Nanticoke Institute. But he had no time for regrets, not at the wheel of a truck plummeting down one side of a sizable piece of the Hindu Kush.
As the truck began to skid sideways he turned the front wheels into the skid and straightened it out again, to continue nose first at terrifying speed down the stony slope, accompanied by a miniature landslide of rocks and small stones. Jed pushed hard against the steering wheel to prevent himself from being thrown face first against the windshield. He jerked the wheel to one side to avoid massive rocks or sudden sharp drops when he saw them in time, which was not often. Finally, battered and dazed, he rolled the truck to a stop in the dry riverbed where the boulders were too big to allow further progress. He staggered out of the cab and found satisfaction in seeing that the other team members were in no better shape than he was.
Campbell made them hump the mortar and shells to a hiding place in the rocks almost half a mile away. He would not let Nolan blow up the truck, saying that the column of smoke would tip off Soviet planes to their location.
“Maybe they’ll lift the truck out with a chopper if the rebels don’t get to it first. Saving it may distract them from us, but I doubt it. All right, we stay on the riverbed and keep moving till dark, putting as much distance as we can between us and the pass. After dark we put up our tents and eat C rations. Then sleep.”
That got a cheer.
CHAPTER 10
Mike Campbell thought that Jed Crippenby was raving in his sleep. He was sitting upright in his sleeping bag in the two-man tent in the dry river bottom, his shape outlined in the moonlight from outside the tent. Mike couldn't make out a word he was saying, then realized he was talking—not talking, shouting—in Pushtu.
“Shut up, Jed. Calm down, for chrissake.”
“Mike, they're out there! I'm telling you! I heard them!”
“You're having a nightmare,” Mike said soothingly. “Now wake up.”
“Fuck it, Mike, I wasn't asleep. You were.” Then he went back to talking Pushtu in a loud voice.
Mike sat up in his sleeping bag, alarmed. He picked up the Kalashnikov beside him, but Jed forced it down with his hand.
Jed asked something that sounded like a question and then waited, listening to the silence.
A hoarse, raspy voice came back from somewhere outside, speaking Pushtu.
Jed, sounding relieved, went into what Mike could tell was a long explanation of who, what, and Why. The raspy voice held out for some minutes in reply.
Then Jed called out in English: “You guys awake? Put all weapons down. We're surrounded by people who say they are rebels and friends of Gul Daoud. Come out of your tents with your hands in the air. I'm not sure who they are, but we're in no position to discuss it with only nylon tent walls between us and them. What do you say, Mike?”
Campbell said, “Harvey, put down your gun. I mean it. If they are rebels, we don't want to blow it. Let's go.”
At first they could see nothing. Then a small, tubby man appeared in the moonlight. He was dressed in what looked like white pajamas many sizes too large for him, his white turban half unwound and draped on his shoulders, the usual Kalashnikov banging on its sling against his right hip, the usual finger on the trigger. He went from man to man in the team, peering up into their faces, pronouncing his judgment each time with a single English word: “American!”
After checking the last man he beckoned into the surrounding night. At least thirty men, bristling with weapons, silently crowded in around them. Under Mike's direction Jed explained who they were and that they had come to find Gul Daoud.
The short, tubby man was adamant. They wanted no more Americans here. They wanted American arms, yes, but not American people. They could fight their own war. The team would have to turn around and go back the way they had come. There was no room for more Americans. Their presence made the Russians even worse. There were already three Americans in this region. No more!
“Tell him we've come to take them back,” Mike said.
“I have, but he's not listening to me,” Jed answered.
“Try again.”
Jed explained over and over until he got his point across that the only reason they were looking for Gul Daoud was that he might know where the three Americans were. The tubby man conceded that this was possible. His truculence evaporated only when Jed told him where to find the mortar and the truck. The team had not been spotted by the Soviets while escaping, although they had heard choppers back where they had left the truck. They were given two men who would guide them to Gul Daoud, and the other twenty-eight or so left in a hurry for the mortar and truck.
Gul Daoud was about three inches shorter than Jed Crippenby, and both were tall, skinny, and bearded. The Afghan looked in amusement at the American. “You managed to get through the Russian blockade to come here because the last thing those Russians expected was for more Americans to break into, instead out of, their trap. Local rebels saw you and know why you have come. Communist spies will pass this information to the Russians, and they will behave like crazy persons. It will be a day or two before the Russians hear this information. You must act fast.”
“You'd better tell that to Mike Campbell. He makes the decisions, not me.”
Gul sighed. “I have spoken with him. I have explained to him that I do not control the movements of the three men you seek. I help them when I can, and that's the only time I'm in contact with them. It was their own idea to go away, because their presence was bringing so much communist military pressure on us. You speak Pushtu. You have a deeper understanding of us than the others. Try to persuade Campbell to move on and search for those men yourselves.”
Jed looked puzzled. “I thought that's what we were going to do. What are you telling me?”
Gul Daoud looked uncomfortable. “When I tried to tell Campbell what I have told you, he knocked me to the ground and told me he would kill me if I didn't find Turner, Baker, and Winston for him. He means it. I can tell when a man decides to kill someone. You might ask him how he can kill me, since I am with my people in my own country. With one word from me they would kill all of you. But what would that look like? Gul Daoud murders his American friends? Impossible. So I have to bear this man's threats and insults, even when he knocks me to the ground. Now I can see that you are an intelligent man. I want you to speak with him for me. Tell him I am hurt and angry to be treated by him like this. Reason with him.”
“I'll ask him what this is about,” Jed volunteered unwillingly, “but you have to understand, what Mike says, goes.”
“Of course. Of course.”
When Jed told Mike of his conversation with Gul Daoud, Mike exploded. “That two-faced son of a bitch is going to get his if he tries to play games with me. We didn't beat our way through a line of Soviet troops just to get the cold shoulder from this mountain character who thinks he's a slick operator. He doesn't want to hand over Baker and the others. He doesn't want us around, but he has some use for them, I don't know what. I guess he picked on you as the softest touch on our team, Jed.”
“Fair enough,” Crippenby admitted. “I'm not a soldier like the rest of you. He's complaining that you knocked him to the ground and said you'd kill him if he didn't find Baker and the others.”
“I knocked him down when he tried to threaten me, telling me he was headman and all he had to do was snap his fingers and I was dead.”
“He didn't tell me that,” Jed said.
“You bet he didn't. He wants us out of here in a hurry, and I told him we ain't moving till we get what we've come for. Go back to him and tell him that he's right to be angry. Tell him you think I'm going to assassinate him if he doesn't start to cooperate. And you won't be telling him any lies neither.”
Joe Nolan was on guard and heard them begin to move out. It was a little after four in the morning, at least two full hours before dawn. Nolan roused the others in their sleeping bags on the dirt floor of the mud-brick house allotted to the team by Gul Daoud. They had slept with their boots and clothes on, guns by their side, ready to go. Mike led them out to where Gul was quietly assembling a group of rebels at one end of the compound that formed his base. Gul ignored their presence and went on with what he was doing. But gradually the rebels stopped talking in whispers and tiptoeing around, since there was no longer any purpose in their doing so. Gul left the compound with about sixty men, and the team tagged along uninvited. A few miles along a path in only faint starlight, they were met by another group of about twenty men on horses and carrying heavy weapons. Campbell and the others kept their places at the rear of the march and spoke to no one.
In the first gray streaks of day they saw Gul Daoud work his way back to them, stopping to talk and march for a while with the men down along the line. When he finally reached Campbell at the head of the team, his attitude was completely changed from that of the previous day. He shook hands and beamed.
“We did not tell you about our operation today,” he said to Mike, “because it will be extremely dangerous and I did not want to risk the lives of you, my guests, in our fight for freedom.”
“That's mighty considerate of you,” Mike told him.
“But now that you insisted on coming along, I think you can be a big help to us.”
“Helping you has to be a secondary objective for us. We can't let anything interfere with our primary objective- recovering those three Americans from your territory. Anything that comes in our way to prevent that- government troops, Soviets, or you-will be eliminated.”
“Mike, I don't want to have differences with you anymore,” Gul said in his cheerful voice. “You will rescue your three fellow countrymen today, you will see. Not tomorrow. Today. I had this attack planned for next week, but
your arrival changed things for us. I changed it to today, even though I would have had more men available to me next week. If you had not joined us today, I would have brought back your fellow countrymen to you as a surprise gift.”
“What's going on?” Mike asked suspiciously.
“You will see,” Gul Daoud said, highly satisfied now with how things were going, and went forward up the line of men again, shouting a slogan or a prayer as he went, which was taken up by the rebel column.
* * *
Gul Daoud placed the team on a rocky bluff overlooking a flat valley lined with irrigation canals and pocked with bomb craters.
“The Soviets tried to destroy our food supply last summer, hoping starvation would drive us into Pakistan during the winter,” Gul explained. “So they used high-explosive bombs on vegetables. But we will grow food here again this summer.”
Despite everything Mike tried, he could get no hard information from Gul. It seemed that Baker, Turner, and Winston could be found not far off and that Gul wanted Campbell and his men's help in exchange for them. At least Gul was admitting today that he knew the whereabouts of the three Americans, which was progress of a sort in Mike's opinion. Just how they were all fitting into Gul's plans remained to be seen.
They had a long wait. Gul's troops were dispersed in the cover at the edge of the valley. On four separate occasions a jet overflew the valley, coming down low. It was past eleven that morning before they spotted movement on the far side of the valley. Mike trained his high-power binoculars on the spot, and what he saw made his fingers grip on the binoculars in rage. Winston, Baker, and Turner were setting out across the valley floor, mounted on the backs of three camels!