Cobra Strike

by J. B. Hadley

  Nolan growled from the bottom of the heap. “Know what broke the bridge, Harvey? The weight of your fat ass.”

  Colonel Yekaterina Matveyeva kicked the shin of her driver to make him stop. She nodded to the two Afghans in the back and said in Uzbek, “Ismael Rasool and one other.”

  The two Afghans ran through the village and came back in ten minutes with two worried men trotting in front of their Kalashnikovs.

  “Which is Rasool?” the colonel asked.

  One of the Afghans nodded to his right.

  She directed her attention to the other man. She asked in Uzbek, “Are you the one who saw these many Americans?”

  “No.”

  She drew her 9mm Makarov pistol, slid a round in the chamber, and drilled a slug into his forehead. He fell stiffly over, like a length of wood. She pointed the smoking muzzle at Rasool.

  Rasool looked her in the eyes and said, “He died honorably, speaking the truth. He did not see the Americans. I saw them. Many of them.”

  “Who else in this village saw them?”

  He spread his hands. “No one. Only me.”

  The pistol spat flame, and the lump of lead stove in his forehead above his right eye. He sprawled across the body of his fellow villager.

  Yekaterina put her gun in its holster and felt better. This was the third of these Afghan rumor-mongers she had silenced, along with one or two others each time in order to test that they were telling her the truth. She intended to stop these unfounded reports of there being more than three Americans. She had assured the general that these stories were nonsense. The Americans were here all right—close to the Soviet border! The Red Army was on full alert on its own side of the border, and in Yekaterina’s considered opinion these three Yankee provocateurs had already crossed onto Soviet soil for their own private vicious purposes. There were three of them. No more.

  Having hid for the rest of the daylight hours in long rushes not far from where they had concealed the toppled truck in the ditch with the same rushes, they walked all night to reach a point on one of Gul’s maps, covered Crippenby while he inquired alone at a shepherd’s hovel for the local rebel leader, and followed the shepherd down a dry ravine in almost total darkness.

  “Tell him he’ll be the first to die if he leads us into a trap,” Mike instructed Jed, “and that we’ll all go back and violate his wife.”

  Jed talked to the man and reported back, “He says he’s not afraid of death and he has no wife. He has nothing in this world except his sheep.”

  Waller said, “Tell him I’ll violate his sheep.”

  Winston and Murphy, the only two who had been badly knocked about in the capsizing of the truck, were being allowed to take it easy, which in Campbell’s unit meant that Mike might be inclined to listen if they claimed they could go no farther. Andre Verdoux added their care to his duties and, on a number of occasions, called a halt when he decided Winston needed a rest.

  “The fucking frog has never once called a break on my account,” Murphy complained.

  “I was afraid that by doing so I would insult your manhood,” Verdoux explained. “We all know how vulnerable Australians are about their manhood.”

  “You rotten eau-de-cologne Paris faggot,” Murphy roared. “Mike only takes you along to do the bookkeeping. You don’t have any right to talk to a fighting man.”

  This was a low blow, touching as it did on Verdoux’s status as an aging warrior, and Bob Murphy regretted saying it as soon as it was out of his mouth.

  “Sorry, Andre,” he said, suddenly subdued. “You know anything awful about Australia you want to say to even us up?”

  “You’d have to give me time to think up something,” Andre replied gallantly, touched that his enemy had such respect for him as a soldier. Then the Frenchman turned to the black American. “How do you feel, Winston? Ready to push on?”

  “I’m okay, Andre.”

  “Great,” Andre said. “All right, Mike, we’re ready to move out.”

  “What about me?” Murphy demanded. “Why not ask me if my leg is rested enough so I can walk?”

  “Australians are good at hopping,” Andre answered.

  Masood Haq was a steely-eyed giant with a big floppy turban and a loose brown pajama suit. “The Russians say there are only three of you,” he said. “They shoot people for saying there are ten of you. What do you want of us? I mean, of course, beyond a place to stay and food to eat. What can we do for you?”

  “We need transportation west,” Campbell said, using Jed as an interpreter.

  “West?” Haq smiled. “I will not ask where you are going. I know someone who will go part of the way with you. This man has excellent transport. But you must remain here for a few days until my present work is completed.”

  Mike said to Jed in English, “I’m not sure we can trust him. We could do with a rest, but I don’t want to stay put here unless I know the reason for it. Be diplomatic, but insist on finding out why we must delay.”

  Jed and the rebel leader fenced verbally for some time before Jed was able to tell Mike, “They’ve dug a tunnel under the local army barracks, and they’re preparing to blow it up. The people we travel west with are part of this plan, and so we have to wait. It sounds to me, Mike, as if it’s going to be one helluva lot harder to get out of here even with their help, after they pull this caper, than it would be to leave right now and forge ahead alone.”

  Mike shook his head. “We’ll be leaving with their people. He said we would be going with people involved in this project. They take care of their own. No matter what goes down, we’re better off sticking with locals. If they’ve survived against the Russians this long, they’ve got to be doing something right. Tell him I want to see this tunnel.”

  “He says that’s not possible,” Jed translated.

  “Hang on to him here while I fetch Nolan.”

  Mike returned with Nolan, who showed Masood Haq some Tovex TR-2, an underground mining explosive, and C-4, the powerful military plastic explosive, along with sophisticated detonators.

  Haq’s attitude changed instantly.

  “They have been using the scrapings from artillery shells and mixtures of artificial fertilizer and sugar,” Jed translated. “Masood Haq hereby appoints you chief fireworks-maker in the kingdom, Nolan.”

  The rebel leader escorted the three Americans across waste lots to a small house at the edge of a town. The four men crawled on their bellies all the way. The tunnel led from the floor of the house in a steep incline down beneath the town. It ran level for about a hundred yards and then angled gently upward for another twenty yards or so. No timbers shored die hard, dry earth in which the tunnel had been constructed. It was barely wide enough for a man’s shoulders to fit without his turning sideways, and it varied in height, without apparent reason, from five to seven feet. The air was stale at the far end of the tunnel. Nolan checked the explosives already in place.

  “Not bad,” Nolan said after he had examined the mixtures and their placement. “What they have here would have caused the buildings above to collapse. When we mix in the C-4 and Tovex TR-2, we’ll blow their asses sky-high. Where’s the wiring?”

  “That has been the holdup,” Jed translated. “They expect it tomorrow or the day after.”

  “Ask him if he knows any communist who lives alone in a nice new house,” Nolan said.

  Masood did, and Mike agreed that they would drop by to visit him. Joe slid the catch of a back window with his knife blade and climbed in. He tiptoed across the unlit back room and peered through a doorway into the front room. A young Afghan in Western-style gray pants and a blue shirt, with heavy-rimmed spectacles, sat cross-legged on the floor, leafing through a pile of documents.

  Nolan walked silently across the carpet toward him. The knife, blade horizontal, point forward, was held at his right side. The Afghan was suddenly startled to see a pair of boots beside his documents on the carpet. He looked up to see who was in them. The knife blade swung in an arc die le
ngth of Nolan’s right arm. The point of the blade penetrated the man’s voice box, and its edges sliced through his trachea. Nolan savagely jerked the blade from side to side to sever the arteries and veins and was immediately rewarded with splashes of blood on himself, the carpet, and the nearest wall. But Nolan had already lost interest and was on his way around the house, warm, sticky weapon in hand, to make sure it was empty before signaling to Masood and Jed to come inside. Mike would stand guard while they worked at stripping the house’s entire electrical wiring from the walls.

  The explosion was set for six that evening, when the soldiers would be eating their meal. Masood Haq insisted that it take place during daylight, and Nolan agreed to humor him. The mercs and Institute men slept late, and most passed the early afternoon listening to an older cousin of Masood’s, Rahim, who spoke good English and had been a career officer in the Afghan army before the Marxists took over. He had been to the United States three times, taking courses at Fort Knox, Kentucky; Fort Benning, Georgia; and Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He told them it was a “real pleasure” for him to speak to Americans again and that he was “mighty pleased” they were here.

  What interested them most was what Rahim had to say about life under the communists in the capital city of Kabul. Unlike Masood, Rahim did not consider himself one of the mujahidin, or holy warriors, fighting a jihad, or sacred war, against the infidels. He had even gone along with the leftist takeover, prior to the Russian invasion, because it promised modernization and new prosperity. The communists had not fully trusted him and transferred him from his active duty post to a desk job in Kabul.

  “The government compound where I worked had three gates. The Khad—the secret police—used two of them, and everyone else used the other one. Even the prime minister, whose office was at the center of the compound, could not use the two Khad gates. One day someone must have observed me looking overly long at the Khad buildings, and I received orders to avert my face from them every time I was entering or leaving the compound. After that I was assigned a new typist, a sixteen-year-old girl who had been trained to type in Persian in Moscow. The typists had a meeting every day from two to four, and she always carefully locked her desk drawer before she left. One afternoon I had a cousin visit me, and he picked the lock while I kept watch. He found that she had a miniature tape recorder and a pistol in the drawer. Then I knew my days were numbered.”

  “She was a member of the Khad?” Verdoux asked.

  “Probably not a member,” Rahim said, “but she certainly worked for them. She was one of the many young people they send, some very young, for training all over the Soviet Union. They come back brainwashed and think they are being patriotic by informing on their less convinced countrymen. I know for a fact that they transport orphan boys to Moslem parts of the Soviet Union. There they teach them that Russia and Afghanistan are just two friendly countries that belong on equal footing to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. They teach them that the mujahidin are heretic Moslems and train them to use the AK-47 and TT 7.62mm pistol so they can come back here, shoot men in the back whom no adult could approach, sneak up to buildings and toss grenades through windows, distribute bombs disguised as toys to rebel children—”

  “We’ve seen the result of that,” Andre said. “They were dropped from a plane on a hillside.”

  Rahim nodded sadly. “You see things in this war that no one has stooped to before. Our Russian brothers have many things to teach mankind if they are given the chance. We know that because we have always lived alongside their empire. I think you Americans know it, too, but can’t really believe it because you want to feel you can make trustworthy friends of the Bolsheviks. Only remember what they say—they say they never change, that the only thing that changes is other people’s opinions of them.”

  Harvey Waller smiled warmly at him. Harvey was getting to love Afghanistan. This mission was working out like a vacation for him. He was meeting interesting people who talked common sense, and there was something new to do every day. He felt no doubt at all that he’d fill his quota for this trip-a dead commie to show for every day he was in the field.

  “You knew your days in the army were numbered?” Andre prompted Rahim.

  “Yes. Influential communists here all belong to what they call the Sazman Iwalia, or First Organization. One by one they appointed each other to all the key posts in the armed forces. Officers who did not belong were not invited to key meetings and in time found themselves transferred, like I was, to paper shuffling and donkey work. I was suspect because my brother Masood was emerging as an active rebel leader. I did not spy for the rebels while I was in government service because that is against my principles. I am a soldier, not a spy. I was loyal too. I did not leave until I saw that they meant to murder me.”

  “That’s always a valid reason for leaving,” Harvey assured him very seriously.

  Colonel Yekaterina Matveyeva did not realize as she sat at a borrowed desk in the town’s military barracks that she was less than fifteen feet from an American whose presence in Afghanistan she had strenuously denied. Almost directly beneath where she sat, in a narrow womb sunk in the hard earth, Joe Nolan jabbed detonators into explosive charges that were planted in a pattern to gain maximum effect. He linked the detonators together with wiring from the slain communist’s house. He worked carefully, neatly, methodically, leaving no room for error, insulating against the rare chance of damp in the desert-dry soil.

  Above him, the colonel carefully sifted through her information inputs. She yelled for the lieutenant. When he poked his head in the doorway, she said, “They’re right here. In this town. I know it.” She waved one hand toward the reports. “All independent sources, and they all say the same thing.”

  The lieutenant approached her cautiously. “Certainly they all agree, Comrade. All the reports say that two non-English-speaking Westerners with camera and sound equipment—”

  “I can read for myself, Lieutenant! Why are you so dull? So totally unimaginative! Let me answer all your objections. First of all, there are two, not three, men. Why? Because they have to keep the black one hidden since he would immediately identify them as the group with Red Army priority notification status. The local people think they do not speak English because they are used to the British-sounding English of Pakistanis and Indians; they are unfamiliar with American accents. You know what their television cameras and sound equipment are? A shoulder-mounted ground-to-air or antitank rocket launcher plus wire-guided missile gadgetry. These peasants here are too stupid to tell the difference. You see? This shows I was right about only three Americans being involved, and not ten or eleven as some idiots have been claiming. I admit I was wrong about one thing—they have not yet crossed the border into the Soviet Union. We have to get to them before they can do so. This town is their staging area for the run across the border.

  “Now listen carefully, Comrade Lieutenant, this is what I am going to do. Under the special authority extended to me by General Kudimov, I am countermanding all other orders issued to local troops and canceling all leaves for officers and men. I want all available regular forces to fan out between here and the border. Have all units assemble here in the barracks in four hours time, at eighteen hundred hours precisely.”

  Beneath her, in his clay womb, Joe Nolan was setting the automatic timer before connecting up the electrical circuit powered by four heavy-duty car batteries.

  Op van de Bosch hefted the video camera on his right shoulder, and Jan Prijt moved his mike around while he checked dials on a leather case suspended against his left hip. Mike Campbell looked at them and cursed Masood Haq first as a deceitful bastard and then himself as a credulous loon.

  Campbell said to Crippenby, “Tell Masood I thought he meant he would be leaving with his men since he said they would be involved in the tunnel explosion.”

  Jed talked with the rebel leader and told Mike, “Masood says the Dutch TV crew is here specially for the explosion, which is why it has to be
done by daylight. He says you must talk with the Dutchmen yourself about leaving town. Masood says you will be pleased with the arrangements.”

  Campbell glared at the cameraman and soundman, who were halfway through a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka, regardless of the anti-alcohol feelings of Masood and his rebels. He walked over to them and picked up the vodka bottle. “If we go with you, don’t touch any more of this.” He replaced the open bottle on the table between them.

  “Ya, ya, no more today,” Op van de Bosch agreed cheerfully. “We must see straight.”

  “And hear straight,” the slightly drunk soundman put in.

  Mike looked from one to the other of the half-sloshed reporters and asked, “You really need us along with you? We don’t have the protection of international press passes.”

  “The present Afghan government does not recognize press passes,” Op responded. “If we get caught, they’ll either shoot us to get rid of us quietly since we are free-lance and not with a network, or they will sentence us to twenty years as spies if they want to annoy our government. Either way, it does not work out as much of a choice for us. You are going west from here, ya? Jan and I have spent weeks shooting many meters of tape out that way. Masood will tell you that I know more of the rebel headmen in these regions than he does. You know how we escape from here after the big bang, nay?”

  “No.”

  “I will tell you.” The Dutchman was about to reach for the vodka bottle, but he saw Mike’s look and stopped. “All right, then, I tell you. Two weeks ago, up near the border, some rebels ambushed a Soviet tank convoy. All they got was one truck, and they, being good Moslems, were disappointed to find that all it contained was vodka and not ammunition or guns. Big disappointment! Jan and I were there and filmed everything, including the look on the rebels’ faces when they saw all the vodka. Jan and I, we hid the vodka and bought an armored personnel carrier with it from Russian soldiers here in this town.”