by Dan Pollock
And it almost was an army, Taras thought. There were elements of the 9th and 11th Afghan Infantry Divisions down there, reinforced by the 37th and 38th Commando Brigades from Kabul and the 31st and 46th Infantry Regiments. The entire parade, heavily armored and perfectly motionless, was spearheaded by two Soviet units—the 191st Motor-Rifle Regiment and 66th Motor-Rifle Brigade.
Which is why he and Marcus and their special operational teams had been called in, along with a brigade of crack Soviet airborne-assault forces. For the past several days heliborne detachments had been deployed along the ridges to develop flank security; but these units were routinely withdrawn at night, whereupon the mujahideen raiders would simply move back in. The Spetsnaz teams were more formidable.
He and Marcus had done this before. They had fought from the southern deserts around Kandahar all the way to mountains of Nuristan and Badakhshan in the north; had led offensives in the Panshjir, in Paktia province, Paghman, Khost, and now the Kunar. They had been among the first to cast off the traditional paratrooper outfit and disguise themselves as mujahideen in turban or pillbox hat, shirt and baggy trousers, concealing their special weaponry. It made eminent sense, and it was no sacrifice to forgo the jaunty blue beret. Lately even motor riflemen with two weeks of air-assault training were permitted them—along with the coveted blue-striped T-shirts under their camouflage overalls. As far as Taras and Marcus were concerned, it took more than a fashion statement to make a man a Spetsnaz fighter.
They had employed their climbing skills to scale steep mountain faces at night—and thus to fall upon totally unsuspecting mujahideen bands. Taras recalled a dawn attack on a bivouac apparently considered so impregnable that the confident rebels had posted no sentry. After several hours of fairly straight-forward class-five climbing, the Spetsnaz team had burst into a clifftop camp to find the entire band kneeling in three rows, facing Mecca for dawn prayers, their sandals and rifles stacked neatly to the side. In a hideous, muted fusillade from silenced AKR submachine guns, twenty-three devout warriors had simultaneously acquired the status of shahids, martyrs.
Other favorite Spetsnaz tactics were to be air-dropped in the rear of a rebel raid, to cut off retreat routes, Or, using night-vision equipment, to ambush night-traveling groups of mujahideen, who had come to rely, with proud contempt, on the fearful Russians withdrawing to the safety of their firebases after dark, where officers would souse themselves in imported vodka and conscripts get stoned on cheap local marijuana or hashish.
It had taken a little while for word of these terrible new enemies—who looked and fought and moved across the land exactly like the mujahideen themselves—to spread among the scattered mountain tribes of the resistance. But eventually it had done so, and had now filtered back to the Soviets by way of rebel POWs. They had attested again and again that the foreign Spetsnaz devils were the only enemy fighters the mujahideen truly feared.
Well, there were similarities, Taras thought. Like the muj, he had become inured to death, and to life. He no longer asked himself why he did the terrible things he did, took such suicidal risks; or why he’d volunteered to remain in Afghanistan beyond his two years. It wasn’t the money, heaven knew—though, at three times normal officer pay, Taras had nearly twenty thousand rubles put by. And it wasn’t the damn combat medals. He had a drawerful now—nearly everything but a Hero of the Soviet Union. Only the crazy Cowboy, who’d been here a year longer, was still hoping to get one of those.
No, Taras fought on because he had somehow lost the vision of any other, more normal kind of life. His ten months in London, for instance, now seemed to him an impossibly distant daydream, the vaguely recalled fantasies of another man. How could he ever go back?
On his sunblasted ledge, he wiped his brow again. He hadn’t really mastered the proper winding of the three-meter-long turban cloth to keep the sweat out of his eyes. He squinted again at the valley below, at the onrushing, silt-clouded Kunar, pearl-gray here in deep cliff shadow, but further downstream flashing and frothing into momentary sunshine, endlessly cutting its fertile swath, a blessed relief in the otherwise barren landscape.
It made for a lovely and tranquil scene—deceptively so, as was proven an instant later, when the morning stillness was shattered by the deafening roar of turbojets. Taras looked up to see four silver streaks across a sky of deep cobalt—a line of Su-25 Frogfoot ground-attack fighters. They went screaming down the valley, probably to shell rebel positions around Asmar before returning to their squadron at Bagram airfield north of Kabul.
Taras chuckled. Good hunting, comrade pilots, and thank you for rousing a daydreaming Spetsnaz and reminding him of his morning business. He fingered the radio to call for gunships—then froze.
Across the narrow ravine—too close for binoculars, only a few meters below him—a tiny Afghan girl had suddenly appeared on a ledge. She was barefoot, dressed in an embroidered cloth cap and filthy gray smock, and her brown, doll-plump face was canted skyward in the direction of the vanishing thunder. So, there was a cave opening here; a whole village might be hidden away in a network of passages in the fissured limestone. And Taras was right on top of it.
Still he hesitated, watching her, his thumb massaging the radio’s flex antenna. He became aware of a hammering in his chest, an absurd welling panic that the toddler was much too close to the precipice, might fall to her death before his eyes. His teeth bit down on an obscenity. He told himself there was no reason to delay. His job was to call in the coordinates and get the hell out. What was the alternative? Let her go, spare an entire village, so they could go on killing Russians?
It was war. The enemy was woman, too, because mothers made rebel soldiers. A boy was ready to join the jihad by twelve or thirteen; maybe seventy thousand of them came of age each year, in isolated villages like this or infiltrated back from the camps in Pakistan. Could the Red Army kill mujahideen faster than Afghan women could bear them? Probably not, but that was still their soldierly business, the endless business of war, and Taras had been trained to do it well. Killing the other guy. Or, if need be, the other guy’s little girl.
He watched as a breeze ruffled the black bangs under her cloth cap. She was still too tiny to be hidden away forever behind the chadori, the tentlike veil worn by Afghan women. She frowned, clenched soiled, chubby cheeks, bent slightly forward.
He swore silently again. The little girl was waddling reck-lessly toward the brink. She had spotted something just ahead, something that crinkled her eyes and drew her mouth wide in delight. Leaning far out from his own ledge, Taras saw it, too. A little green bird-shape was wedged among rocks along the precipice, its plastic surface burnished by a sudden shaft of sunlight through the ravine.
It was a “toy” mine. Low-flying Soviet helicopters had scattered them by tens of thousands over trails, mountain passes and caravan routes, along with hundreds of thousands of PFM-1 “butterfly” anti-personnel mines. The idea was to interdict rebel supply lines, but the bright plastic objects—diabolically shaped like dolls, trucks, birds, combs, pens, watches—were irresistible to Afghan children, despite incessant warnings. Had this child accidentally stepped on the toy, her foot would have been blown off. If she picked it up, she’d lose a hand, perhaps both, maybe her eyesight. In any case, she was about to be maimed for life—if she didn’t die of infection.
The pressure came boiling up from deep within, bursting out of him:
“Nyet!”
The tiny figure across the gap froze—squinting up at this strange mujahid who had suddenly appeared on the opposite ledge and roared so fiercely at her, a frightening sound that was still reverberating off the rocks.
Knowing the echoing cry could summon mujahideen any instant from the caves, Taras waved his AK-47 at the motionless child, first menacingly, then frantically.
She was frightened, took a faltering step back. But the shiny toy was too close, almost within reach, and the desire to pick it up too powerful. Taras saw her small body bending, her hand reaching. S
he had made her decision.
And he made his—one that went against all his training—and hurled himself forward over the ravine.
Through a midair blur of cliffside he saw a turbaned torso shouldering a rifle—someone thought Taras was attacking the child. Too late now! The rocky ledge below, bright green bird, reaching child, all rushed toward him. He was going to land right on the damn thing, detonate it himself! But his body would take the blast, shielding the girl.
Taras never heard the full-auto racketing of the AK-47, nor felt the swarming hail of steel-core slugs that tore through his turban. There was only exquisite, exploding joy as his sneakered feet landed just beyond the hideous toy and his body crashed down on the tiny, terrified child. Joy—and nothingness.
*
When he dared fire no more for fear of hitting his niece, Nazar Khan also leaped, plunging recklessly ten meters down the sheer cliff face. He landed badly on the narrow ledge, twisting his ankle, but ignoring it in his panic to free the still screaming child. She lay trapped now under the corpse of the madman who had tried to kill her.
He tore at the body, fingers slithering in the warm, viscid fluid that gouted from the turban. Blood was everywhere, soaking the patou, half-masking the face of the strange mujahid as Nazar struggled to pull the terrified child free. Finally he held her precious weight safely in his arms.
“My little Aziza, yes, you are safe,” he whispered, caressing her dust-and-tear-grimed cheeks with his calloused fingers. Then, using the toe of his sandal, he prodded the corpse again, studying what he could see—through the gore—of the mustached visage, the bronzed skin now ashen beneath, for a clue as to tribe. The mad fellow had clearly not been a fellow Pushtun. Perhaps a Nuristani, then, or a Tadjik or Kirghiz from even farther north.
Then Nazar saw something else, beneath the man’s kameez—a sun-glint off oxidized metal. It was the radio, dropped by Taras when he’d grabbed for the child. Nazar kicked at the dust again, exposed faded Cyrillic letters, a rubberized antenna, knurled knobs. Badal—vengeance—flamed in his heart. Nazar unslung his AK-47, letting the swinging muzzle impact the dead man’s jawbone. The mujahid prayed there were enough rounds remaining in the clip to shred the despised thing at his feet.
He fitted his finger to the trigger and spat out his curse: “Mordabad Shuravi!” Death to the Soviets!
Then Aziza wailed in his eardrum. He cocked his head, took in her stricken gaze, her tearful, wretched pout, her arm pointing imperiously down. She wanted something.
Nazar looked down and saw the bright green plastic object.
And understood at once what had happened. The Russian had risked—and lost—his life to save the child.
Others now came forth from the caves. Nazar waved them back urgently, turned round on the path to protect his niece, then slowly sidestepped along the narrow ledge away from the mine. When he judged that he had retreated far enough, keeping tiny Aziza well behind him, he took careful aim with his assault rifle and detonated the plastic bird.
Eighteen
It was good to kill Russians, especially one of the feared night raiders. But a Russian with a radio just outside their caves, this was very bad. That meant more of the accursed infidel invaders might be coming soon, and they would surely come in their Village Killers from Jalalabad. These big brown-and-yellow mottled halikoptars could hover for an hour, raining death and destruction with all the fires of hell.
They had witnessed such terrible things, all of them, and there were thirty who now dotted the cliff face in the aftermath of the explosion. Fourteen were mujahideen, who used the caves as their camp. These intrepid young mountaineers scuttled over bare rock and dropped from ledge to ledge with casual aplomb to look upon the dead Russian disguised as a mujahid. The rest were veiled women, children and old men, equally curious, but clinging gingerly to the narrow footways and reluctantly releasing each handhold. They were the pitiful remnant of a once-thriving village farther up the Kunar, a village whose mud-brick homes now lay in rubble and whose terraced wheat fields and fruit orchards were withered and weed-choked. They eked a bare subsistence from a few sheep and goats, and from collecting the spent casings from Soviet BM-21 rockets, packing them on donkeys fifty kilometers across the mountains to the Pakistani border and selling them for scrap, fifty rupees apiece.
As the warriors crowded around the corpse, Nazar described briefly how he’d shot a strange mujahid attacking Aziza, only to discover the man was an enemy soldier trying to stop the child from picking up the toy bomblet. The incredible tale, of course, could not dilute one drop of their cherished hatred of the foreign devils. The Russian, after all, had not come on an errand of mercy, but to destroy them; a fact brought instantly home when a shout from above announced the discovery of Qasim, butchered beside his machine gun.
But there was no time to mourn the martyred boy. The dead Russian must be hidden at once, so he could not be seen from the air. Then they must?abandon the caves forever, taking Qasim’s body for later burial. The holy warriors would find a new hiding place from which to carry on the fight for their valley, while the villagers must flee across the frontier.
At Nazar’s direction, two men bent to lift the Russian. The next instant both yelped and leapt back as if scalded, dropping the corpse onto the ledge, and nearly off the cliff. The thing had groaned—was groaning still!
Nazar knelt in the bloodied dust, found a feeble pulse in the carotid. The Russian lived—but there was no way to determine the extent of his injuries under the red-drenched turban and blood-matted hair. He might be merely stunned, or in deep coma, his brain dead. Either way, they must leave him in the cave. If he had radioed his position, he might be found in time by his comrades. If he hadn’t radioed, he’d die, like young Qasim.
The Russian moaned again, a child’s plaintive call for comfort. Nazar stood to give his brusque order, heard himself alter the words at the last instant: “We take the feranghi—the foreigner—with us.”
There came the expected cries of outrage, most passionately from Qasim’s cousin, Mirbad, who ached to avenge himself at once with the Russian’s own knife. But Nazar calmly invoked his authority as commander. If the feranghi died of his wounds, so be it; but as a war prisoner he would not be killed. And this, he reminded them, was not decreed not only by Koranic law, but was the express order of the chief of staff of the National Islamic Front of Afghanistan—one of the seven principal resistance groups, and the one which supplied their weapons. If the Russian survived his wounds, he must be turned over to NIFA.
A stretcher was improvised from rifles and blankets, and the refugees moved off single file along the ledge, vanishing one by one into the shadowed ravine.
Fifteen minutes later the cliffside echoed the thunderous vibrato of turbo-driven rotors. Five Mi-24 combat helicopters swept down the valley, their gun blisters flaring in the sun, their huge insectile shadows flitting over the turbid river.
*
His mother was frying up his favorite supper—potatoes and mushrooms. The savory smell was carried along with the woodsmoke through the stark winter woods to where Taras and his big retarded friend, Ulyan, were gleefully destroying an entire German Panzer division with accurately thrown snowballs. Identifying the cooking aroma, the two boys broke off the engagement and raced homeward through the evening-dark slashes of alder and birch boles. Their snowshoes squeaked over the crusted surface; their breath-clouds vapored in the frosty air, eyes watering, woolen underwear sweat-sopped under their coats and scarves. In sight of the cabin and frantic to be first, Taras surged ahead and burst across the threshold...
…And was shoved upright by a strong hand. His head was reeling, a sick, bloated throb, but he was too feeble to care. His pain-sealed eyes recoiled from lancing light. His body contained not a gram of strength, tried to fall back, could not. A steaming cup of tea was held under his nostrils, metal scalded his lower lip. He sipped, braced as sweet medicinal fire cauterized the back of his throat and chest. Finally he o
pened his eyes, saw blue sky filtered through a lattice of palm fronds. Ragged Afghan youths, slung with cartridge belts, hunkered against mud walls, assault rifles propped beside them.
Suddenly a bearded warrior, face thrust close, exhaled hot sour breath, dark eyes probing his.
Taras flung sideways, tearing at his kameez for the cyanide capsule in its pouch. Only the elite battalions had been issued these bite-or-swallow-and-recycle suicide pills, but all Soviet soldiers had been thoroughly dosed with horror stories of what to expect if they were ever captured by, or defected to, the Russian-hating mujahideen. They would be chained up in caves, they were assured, ingeniously tortured, finally executed, their corpses dumped for wolves and vultures. Like his comrades, Taras had no wish to authenticate these lurid tales.
But his fingers fumbled uselessly at the blood-crusted kameez, then his sinewless arms slid to the ground. Sick with fatigue, Taras slumped back, staring skyward as the rubbled room began slowly to wheel around him. He had nearly slipped through the doorway to the void when a strong voice snared him and held him back:
“Russki, Russki, muy nye ubivayem vas.” In rudimentary Russian, he was told he would not be tortured or killed. If he lived, he would be interned in a prisoner-of-war camp run by the National Islamic Front of Afghanistan, visited by the Red Cross. “We are not savage beasts,” the voice insisted. “But to live, first you must eat, drink. You are very weak.”
Again Taras was propped up, fighting waves of dizziness and pulpy sickness in his head. The room was like an oven. The mujahideen leader leaned close, sitting cross-legged. His fierce, twisted face was elongated by a squared-off black beard, which flowed down into a black vest worn over a khaki shirt. Taras tried to assemble his mind, but it was scattered into rubble, strewn all over the vast, bombed-out countryside. Then he remembered a girl, a bright plastic bird, a leap across a ravine. Nothing after. What had happened to him?