by Dan Pollock
Even more alarming were stories of desertions and defections among Soviet Muslim troops—Tadjiks, Uzbeks, Kirghiz, Turkmens—who constituted several reserve divisions of Sokolov’s 40th Army. The high command was apparently replacing these unreliable Central Asians as rapidly as possible with Slavs—Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians—or Balts.
Taras, with the dark hair and southern complexion from his Georgian mother, had even come in for some good-natured kidding on this score from fellow kursanti.
One barracks prankster went so far as to present him with a gift-wrapped, dog-eared Koran. Inside, on the flyleaf, had been scrawled some Arabic letters and a single line of Russian: “This Most Holy Book Property of Taraz al-Arenskeem.”
Taras laughed heartily, then manhandled the humorist into the adjoining latrine, where he was dangled upside-down and head first into a roaring, flushing toilet—and held there until Taras judged the screams of contrition convincingly sincere and any would-be imitators sufficiently deterred.
In late June, after two weeks of rampant speculation, their orders finally came through—and left them dumbfounded.
Taras and his eager mates would not be heading east to hunt bandits under the scorching sun of Afghanistan. Their desti-nation was farther, and even more remote. They were going all the way up to the Arctic Ocean off the northeastern coast of Siberia for two weeks of simulated combat on icebound Wrangel Island.
In the midst of his keen frustration, Taras was just able to appreciate a certain bleak irony in the matter. Whatever epithets Dokuchayev had heaped on him, Taras concluded, had all been abundantly justified by events. After turning his back on the chance of being in the Summer Olympics, here he was—on the eve of that glorious event, which all the world would be watching—getting ready to play winter war games, for an Arctic audience of ferrets and foxes.
Had he, perhaps, chosen unwisely?
Sixteen
Yet Taras was to enjoy those two weeks scrambling over barren granite and frozen tundra with his ghostly mates in their white camouflage. They had the godforsaken place to themselves—unless you counted a few Arctic mammals and seabirds, a surprising number of ducks and geese, and somewhere on the eighteen-hundred square miles of desolation a tiny colony of Chukchi tribesmen, deposited there by the Soviet government to establish ownership.
The Spetsnaz cadets were broken into teams, sent against one another on raids and ambushes; timed in marathon land-navigation exercises whose coordinates took them up and down over the island’s mountainous interior—and deliberately beyond the limits of physical exhaustion.
Especially did Taras exult in the wild freedom of the long-range survival courses, which afforded total escape from the constraints of barracks life. On his own, with only map, compass and survival gear, he felt the emergence of a more instinctive self from deep within, a self-reliant being who never came forth under officer scrutiny or coercion. It was, Taras thought, the same primitive persona who often possessed him in saber duels, a creature violently and voraciously alive, with atavistic impulses that Taras feared ever to fully unleash. But he enjoyed running and hunting with this other man, stride for stride and hour after hour.
During their second week Wrangel was invaded by an entire Spetsnaz brigade. Taras and his companions watched in fasci-nation as five Il-76 transports took turns coming in low over the drop zone, from its four doors each extruding a hundred and twenty “little falcons” in its wake, turning the gray skies white with blossoming airfoil canopies. Within ten minutes all six hundred men had landed and rolled on the hard permafrost and stood ready as the final Il-76 came in with their supply drop—BMD air-portable combat vehicles, assault guns and field howitzers—strapped to a dozen padded cargo pallets suspended from parachute clusters and cushioned, just before impact, by retro-rockets. In twenty minutes the drop zone was cleared and the brigade fully operational.
The next morning Taras was delighted to discover a familiar face among the new arrivals in camp when Marcus Jolly slapped him on the back and spun him around. Marcus was a senior sergeant now, with barely enough time to exchange a greeting. He had a full schedule that day, running his privates through what he called Spetsnaz “finishing school.”
Taras caught up to his old friend the following afternoon. Marcus was standing on a windscoured ridge of Berry Peak, timing his charges at the midpoint of a twenty-five-kilometer run—a run made all the more challenging by the crippling thirty kilos of gear each man carried on his back.
“I thought they needed you in Afghanistan, Cowboy. No wonder the war isn’t over.”
“Yeah, I thought so, too, Cossack. I got as far as Termez, right across the fucking river, when the imperial high wizards of the Defense Ministry changed their collective mind. Sent me and my mates all the way back to Kirovograd.” The tactical decision, Marcus said, was to phase out special forces, which had been used so effectively in the coup, and replace them with conventional troops. While at Termez, Marcus had watched construction begin on a mammoth bridge over the Amu Darya, to accommodate tanks and motorized infantry.
“So it’s back to playing games,” he summed up.
“Well, at least they’re dangerous games,” Taras said, and detailed for Marcus some of the mock raids they’d conducted the previous week.
“Nursery school,” Marcus said. He told of going on nonsimulated training assaults, traversing actual minefields to attack fortified border installations manned by KGB troops. “They were shooting real bullets at us, Cossack, and nobody warned them it was all in fun.”
Taras laughed and shook his head. “You win again, Cowboy.
Reminds me of your crazy fencing teacher, what’s his name?”
“Balavadze?”
“That’s the guy, the one who advocates saber practice without a mask. Touché!”
A week later, the two friends made their farewells on the frozen airstrip. Taras was to return to Ryazan, Marcus to Kirovograd.
“One of these days we’ll get there, Cowboy, you and me,” Taras said. “We’ll meet somewhere up in the Khyber Pass, wearing turbans and riding camels.”
“Sounds just like us, doesn’t it? Except if you get your commission, I’ll have to obey your fucking orders.”
And they laughed, and parted.
Taras was back in time to watch the Olympics on television. Krovopuskov, who had won the gold medal in individual saber at Montreal, repeated handily in Moscow; and the Soviet saber team, with three of the four men who had won at Montreal, did likewise. Taras permitted himself no regrets, but could not altogether stifle the thought that, had he not sabotaged his chances, he might have displaced one of the team medalists.
The Games themselves, which of course the Soviets won, were hailed as a monumental triumph in the national press and on TV. But to Taras and his fellow cadets the absence of the Americans tarnished the luster somewhat, especially in such sports as basketball, boxing, swimming and track and field.
This U.S. boycott over events in Afghanistan had, of course, no effect on Soviet policy. Throughout the rest of 1981 Taras read report after official report that the Kabul regime was steadily pacifying the countryside, and that the counter-revolutionary bandits, lacking all popular support, were propped up only by Pakistani and Israeli mercenaries—and, naturally, CIA agents.
The word reaching Ryazan from returning officers and noncoms was, however, quite different. The Afghan Army was hopeless, Taras was told again and again, the Soviets would have to do all the fighting themselves; conventional tactics, with mixed tank-infantry columns moving into the foothills and high valleys, were proving ineffective—and often disastrous—against the hit-and-run ambushes of the mujahideen guerrillas. Something had to be done, and damn fast.
One decision, long overdue, was a switch from motorized infantry to more airmobile operations—using armed helicopters and airborne assault units to patrol for the mujahideen and attack their mountain strongholds. And this meant fewer infantry and mechanized units and more speci
al forces. The word came to Ryazan that two brigades of Spetsnaz were to be sent at once to Afghanistan, based at Jalalabad in the east and Lashkar Gah in the south. And Marcus was among those brigades, Taras was delighted to read several weeks later in the Cowboy’s own hand, in a note hand-carried from Kabul.
“Visit the exotic east,” Marcus had scrawled on the back of a crude propaganda cartoon torn from the Kabul New Times. It showed a sinister mujahid about to shoot two praying mullahs in the back with a pistol emblazoned with a U.S. dollar sign. “Don’t worry, Cossack. I promise to go easy on these filthy beggars till you get here.”
Taras thought he would be joining his friend fairly soon. With four thousand Spetsnaz out of a total of only twenty-five thousand now involved directly in the war, the odds were good of the net dragging him in—perhaps as soon as he received his commission the following summer.
And in June of 1982 many graduates of Ryazan Higher Airborne Academy were shipped straight to Afghanistan, especially those who, like Taras, had been earmarked by the Special Faculty for careers in Spetsnaz. But “freshly baked” Lieutenant Arensky was somehow not among these.
Instead, two weeks later, wearing brand-new Hungarian shoes and a custom-made suit from a Moscow atelye, Taras was standing in the arrivals lounge at London’s Heathrow Airport, looking for a man with a sign. Once found, he followed the man outside to a curbside Austin and was driven an hour through sheeting rain and on the wrong side of the road to the Soviet Embassy on Kensington Palace Gardens. Here, sharing a smoky basement cubbyhole with two other GRU officers, he was to spend the next ten months nominally as an attaché—and actually as a junior intelligence officer.
It didn’t take him long to decide that he preferred his new posting to Afghanistan, even with the constant drizzle. He was intrigued by his first assignment—investigating the activities of supposedly retired SAS officers, several of whom were suspected of working closely with America’s Delta Force in preparing a commando mission to rescue the U.S. Embassy hostages held in Tehran.
And, perhaps not surprisingly, Taras liked the West. It was a totally different world, one he found vastly stimulating, though bewildering. Even after several months he experienced daily shock at seeing so much random activity—so many cars, colors, signs, fashions, choices; so many things to buy and eat and wear and look at. Not that all these choices were available to him necessarily; he could merely window-shop the West, not really partake of it. His own life was carefully sequestered within the walled embassy compound—and carefully surveilled when he left it. Nevertheless, Taras thought wryly, he had undoubtedly been infected, at least mildly, by what one Party dialectician had branded Veshchism, or “Thingism”—the virulent fungus of Western consumerism.
If so, he was certainly not alone. Most of the men and women of the Soviet mission managed to contrive frequent shopping forays down into Knightsbridge or along Oxford Street, and some of the minister counselors and first secretaries boasted hand-tailored suits from Bond Street or Savile Row, and their wives couture outfits from Harrods or Liberty.
But it wasn’t necessarily glitter and glamor that fascinated Taras about the city and its people. He enjoyed riding the Tube, noisy and filthy compared to Moscow’s showpiece Metro and almost as crowded, with commuters every bit as ethnically colorful and shabbily dressed, but far more animated. He liked eavesdropping in the midst of this human swarm, and attempting to decode the babel of dialects—public school, cockney, Caribbean, Midlands, Home Counties, Scots, Indian, Pakistani and heaven only knew what else. After a few weeks, having drastically updated his slang, he discovered he could converse with nearly everybody, after some fashion. He particularly enjoyed engaging in the prolonged civilities and courtesies that might accompany the simple purchase of a bar of chocolate or roll of film. “How are you, dear? Is that all you’ll be wanting, then? That’s right, 50p for you, dear.” But then, why shouldn’t he enjoy this? His linguistic expertise was English, after all, not Pushtu or Dari-Persian, the principal languages of Afghanistan. London was a logical posting.
And when he got an evening free, he liked strolling with the tourist swarms between Piccadilly and Leicester Square, through the neon gauntlet of movies and discotheques, video arcades and fast-food emporiums, dining on takeaway as he walked—döner kebab or bratwurst on a bun, Scotch egg or Cornish pasty.
To maintain his fitness, he jogged every morning through Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, past the Serpentine, enjoying the equestrians cantering along the bridal paths and the millrace of black cabs swirling around Hyde Park Corner and charging up Park Lane. To keep his hand in, he formed a fencing club and by the end of summer was conducting weekly lessons in foil in the embassy gymnasium.
In December he was promoted to captain and appeared on the 1983 diplomatic list as an assistant military attaché. He had definitely adjusted his career sights when, in early April 1983, the KGB deputy rezident, Colonel Oleg Karamzin, called him into his plush fourth-floor corner office and gave him a generous shot of vodka along with the startling news that his request for transfer to Kabul had finally been approved. He should be ready to leave tomorrow.
Karamzin hoisted his glass. “To your health, Captain!”
Seventeen
The sun came tardily to the little valley, delayed by the limestone peaks that formed its eastern barrier. But on this first day of June, it came mercilessly, angrily ablaze as it vaulted those jagged summits to blast the rock walls and meandering watercourse below. On the valley floor it was soon above eighty degrees Fahrenheit, on its way to a hundred. Along the ridgelines first struck by the sun’s high hammerblows, it was hotter still. And it was there, on a naked spur of rock, that a heap of stones and dust began to stir itself and assume vaguely human shape. A man lying prone, a man who knew his hiding place was now on fire and that he must quickly make his move.
He was wrapped in an earth-colored patou, the woolen blanket used by the mountain fighters for both warmth and camouflage. Beneath this, a khaki kameez partouk, the baggy Afghan pajama suit, was already encrusted with salt sweat. His feet, blistered and bleeding from a night’s scramble over rocks, were shod in cheap Pakistani sneakers, in preference to chaplis, the traditional Afghan sandals. Slowly he lifted his head, dark eyes showing first beneath his lungi, the rough cotton turban, then a flowing black mustache that tightened over a grim mouth. Binoculars lifted to mask the dark visage, and the concealed man squinted out along the valley, careful not to betray his presence by a blinding sun-flash off the coated lenses. In his every aspect he seemed the epitome of the wild mujahid, the ferocious freedom fighter of Afghanistan.
Except this man was Russian.
Major Taras Arensky knuckled the sweat from his eyes, shifted the binoculars and began to study, meter by square meter, the exfoliated, stratified cliffs that faced him across a narrow ravine. It didn’t take long to find what he was looking for. A transverse ledge just wide enough for a single man showed human tracks in several sandy places, and among the limestone strata were several openings that could be caves—shelters hidden from the Antonov reconnaissance planes and protected against even the five-hundred-pound bombs of the Migs and Sukhois.
He was looking at a mujahideen hideout, Arensky was sure of it. He had followed a band of them—perhaps as many as twenty—hereabouts the previous night after they’d rained their 60mm mortars and 107mm rockets on a tank and infantry column down the valley near the Chagan Sarai firebase. Had he required further confirmation, less than an hour before and a kilometer away he’d surprised a mountaintop sentry leaning against his Chinese-made Dashika 12.7mm heavy machine gun. Only after pulling his combat knife from the ragged corpse had Taras discovered to his disgust that he’d killed a barely bearded boy. Not that this was an oddity among the Afghan rebels; these days they were going to war at ten.
This busy little cliff-dwelling committee of muj, however, was about to be permanently disbanded. Arensky dusted off his R-350M portable radio to call up the Jalalabad air
base thirty kilometers away. In a matter of minutes a couple Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunships would be hovering right outside the rebels’ front door, strafing and rocketing the cliffside into vaporous powder. Taras, meanwhile, would be plucked off the mountain by one of the Mi-9 Hips and evacuated back to Jalalabad, one more mission accomplished.
With any luck, Lieutenant “Markus Zholly” (for the Cowboy had collected a battlefield commission along with numerous combat medals) would be at the base waiting for him. Or Marcus might yet be working one of those ridges across the narrow valley, where an Mi-9 had dropped him as part of a four-man Spetsnaz team, searching for a second mujahideen band that had participated in last night’s raid at Chagan Sarai.
Both groups, Taras was convinced, were key elements of the fierce resistance they had encountered during the preceding week in the Kunar Province, resistance that was preventing this Soviet thrust—the second Kunar Valley offensive of 1985—from relieving the Afghan garrison farther up at Barikot on the Pakistani border. As elsewhere in Afghanistan, the tortuous topography here, with its many side valleys and deep defiles, was perfectly tailored to the mujahideen’s hit-and-disperse mountain warfare. The steep-walled and narrowing river valley twisted its way a hundred kilometers through the Northwest Frontier with Pakistan, all the way from Jalalabad east of Kabul to the Kunar’s headwaters high in the Hindu Kush.
The main combined-arms column was pinned down just beyond Chagan Sarai, unable to move. Taras had flown over it the day before, a long, ocherous, metal-scaled snake basking lazily in the sun—big T-55 and T-62 tanks interspersed with smaller BMDs, and BMP and BTR armored personnel carriers, all strung out along the dusty river road—halted by the threat of grenade and heavy machine-gun fire from the flanking hills.
“Fucking basmachi!” the chopper pilot had sworn. It only took a couple dung-eating bastards hiding in the rocks with a beat-up RPG-7 to stop an army—just like a spoonful of shit in the honey barrel!