Duel of Assassins

by Dan Pollock

  He must have been shot in the head, the part where memory was. What else was gone? He was still too weak to reach up there and feel around, too afraid he find parts of his brain missing.

  He was being asked something. “The radio, Russki, did you use this radio?” The mujahid was waving the portable transceiver at him; it didn’t belong in strange hands. “Did you tell Jalalabad where you were?”

  Again Taras tried to remember, but there was nothing there, an empty room. The man shook the radio angrily. “Did you? Tell me!”

  “I don’t remember,” Taras answered listlessly.

  Something struck his shoulder. He turned too quickly, triggering excruciating pain through his skull. Close behind him a little girl was squatting on the ground. She wore a dirty smock and embroidered cap. Her tiny hands held a soiled turban cloth. Their eyes met, and Taras felt something touch his heart.

  “I told her what you did,” said the voice of the mujahid, momentarily relinquishing its anger. “Her name is Aziza. She is very grateful. She has been keeping the flies away from you.”

  Taras held the child’s luminous gaze. A second later he was rewarded with a cautious, gummy smile. She was missing several baby incisors, top and bottom.

  “I also must thank you for saving her from the little bomb,” the mujahid said, and gave his own name as Nazar. “Aziza is very precious. She is the daughter of my only brother. Ismaiel and his wife and their two sons were all killed by shrapnel when our village was bombed last week.”

  Taras could not evade the man’s eyes. Neither could he answer. He was too weak, and there was nothing to say. Against the wall, one of the young warriors spat and made a low, growling noise. Nazar explained it was the brother of the boy he had killed this morning at the Dashika gun. At once Taras recalled the throttled scream, the bright, arterial gush; but again could offer no reply.

  The mujahid motioned, and a woman, cloaked from head to toe in dark taffeta, came forward, placed a tray of food beside him, then looked at his head. For the first time Taras realized he had been bandaged. He found he was able to sip some sugary green tea, even to swallow bits of goat jerky, but he could not chew the nan, the flat, unleavened Afghan bread. It was hard and stale. Nazar apologized for it. He had permitted the women to boil only a little water for tea, he said, but not to bake fresh nan for fear the smoke would reveal their presence to the Russians. Taras finished the tea and fainted.

  When he woke again, the mountain sky was tinged with evening lilac, and people were moving about. Across the room a teenage warrior was dipping a safety razor into hot tea, then shaving himself while squinting into the tiny metal mirror of his snuffbox. Beside him another mujahid was filling AK-47 magazines with bullets.

  Nazar appeared suddenly, squatted down, explained that the old men, women and children were waiting for darkness to leave for the Pakistani frontier. They are the last, he said. Before the war, the Kunar Valley had “many many thousand” people—Nazar did not know the Russian word for such a high number. There were rich farms—”hundreds and hundreds”—on both sides of the river, and along the hillsides. They grew many, many things. Nazar groped for Russian words to name the wonderful crops—wheat and potatoes; many fruits—abrikos, appelsin, limon; even mindalyi, almonds.

  Then came the war. Many, many thousand Russkis, with Migs, tanks, rockets, helicopters, bombing villages and farms, dropping butterfly mines and yellow gas that burned the eyes and skin. Death was everywhere, whole families and towns full of death—women, babies, old ones. Those who lived ran away as the tanks rolled over the rubble left by the bombs.

  Nazar’s eyes were feverish now, inflicting his story on his captive listener just as the ghastly events had been inflicted on his tribesmen. His words, and the nightmare images they conjured, were in bizarre counterpoint to the Soviet version given Taras by his briefing officer on arrival in Kabul. The Kunar Valley, Captain Arensky had been told, had been targeted for one of the first mechanized sweeps of the war, in the spring and summer of 1980. The purpose, crisply pointed out on the pulldown map, was to interdict guerrilla supply lines—here, here and here—from the northern provinces. As such, it was considered one of the more successful operations of that year.

  But the Afghans would never give up, Nazar stressed. Many had dared to return to their devastated valley, rebuilding their homes from rubble, reclaiming their farms from wasteland. And many had survived, despite occasional shelling. Now, five years later, it was all happening again. The sky rained death every day from gunships and fighter-bombers, and the tank armies were rolling on the river road.

  Taras felt the intense hatred kindled around him. Why didn’t they kill him and have done with it? A nod from their leader and they’d all be on him with their knives. If they spared him, he foresaw only a miserable existence. But perhaps he would die soon anyway. His head wounds were probably infected under the filthy bandages. He felt his consciousness ebbing, while the darkness deepened and the mujahid leader ranted on in a futile attempt to exorcise the horrors of war.

  Blessings of Allah be on you all, he thought, for all your sufferings. May your people escape to Pakistan and a new life. I can’t fucking help you. Dizziness was closing in. He fell back, no longer hearing Nazar’s words, staring at tiny points of starlight through the palm ceiling.

  My war is over, he thought, one way or another. And I don’t really care which way it is. He moaned and rolled sideways, curling up into his pain, waiting for unconsciousness.He shut his eyes, opened them again. He had seen something. Outside, silhouetted against the dusk, the top of a head had protruded for a split-second into the doorway at ground level—precisely the way Spetsnaz were trained to look around corners. Then it had vanished.

  Taras felt an adrenalin surge. But before he could react, the room exploded in a blinding-white flash. A stun grenade, Taras realized in the ear-splitting aftermath. Then, through choking smoke, his name was yelled: “Taras, stay down!”

  He was too weak to do anything else as the silenced submachine gun stitched a lethal swath across the room, ripping into flesh and bone, spattering the mud walls.

  The stuttering gunfire ceased, but continued outside. Taras was plucked off the floor and heaved across somebody’s shoulder—a powerful man who ducked low through the doorway and sprinted into the night. Taras, dangling head down, heard Russian shouts, agonized screams, the approaching thrash of rotors. A second later he felt the windblast and sand flurries as a chopper settled near on its retractable landing gear. His carrier rushed toward it, bent low.

  He was deposited into the belly of an Mi-24 Hind. Several others crowded in after them, filling the cabin. Then the voice of Marcus Jolly boomed over the banshee whine of twin turboshafts: “Get all the muj?”

  “Every fucking one!” came the shout.

  “How many?”

  “Maybe thirty, sleeping in paradise!”

  “Allah Akbar!” shouted another Spetsnaz, mocking the Islamic battle cry, “God is great!”

  Then the five-bladed main rotor bit and they were lifting and tilting into the night. Marcus brought his face close. In the faint red glow from the cockpit instruments, Taras could see only the gleam of eyes and teeth in black-mask camouflage. “Hang on, Cossack,” he yelled, “we’re going home. Hell, you knew I’d come and get you, didn’t you?”

  Taras looked at his friend, but his mind was filled with the horror below. The still-bleeding bodies of Nazar and his little band of mujahideen cut down before they could reach their weapons. The pitiful remnant of Kunar villagers, strewn alongside their meager possessions for the final flight to Pakistan.

  And little Aziza, rescued this morning from a cruel fate—but oh, how briefly! If there were a paradise, surely she would be on her way there. But Taras could grapple no more with dreadful things. He slumped against his avenging friend and lapsed into insensibility.

  Nineteen

  “Did you have to take my damn beret off?” Taras asked.

  “Yeah, I couldn’
t resist it.” Marcus horse-laughed and gunned the Soviet UAZ-469 “jeep” through an opening in the frenetic warp and weave of downtown Kabul’s afternoon traffic. “Come on, did you see her face when she saw that scar? The señorita damn near choked on her champagne. Up until then, I think she was really taking a liking to you, Cossack.”

  “Mandavoshka!”

  “Careful who you’re calling a cunt-louse. Remember, I’m the guy who saved your life.”

  “So you keep reminding me.”

  The incident had occurred at a striptease joint they’d just left—the Blue Club—where Marcus had taken his friend for a drink directly upon discharge from the sweltering and overcrowded confines of the Soviet military hospital. The “señorita” was a vivacious cocoa-skinned Cuban girl who could kick higher than her head, among other talents. She had been perched in Taras’ lap when Marcus had reached over and unceremoniously lifted his friend’s blue Spetsnaz beret, revealing the freshly unbandaged scar. It was not an edifying sight—a saucer-sized circle of angry pink skin cross-hatched with rows of black-threaded sutures, forty-nine in all.

  “You know what you look like with all those shoelaces in your scalp, Cossack? An American football. Damn, it’s almost as ugly as Balavadze’s saber slash.”

  “I’m so glad it amuses you.”

  “Well, it does, I’m sorry. I forgot. I’m not supposed to make you laugh, right? With your head stitched tight like that, it must hurt like hell.”

  “Yeah, it hurts. It hurts to smile, it hurts to talk. It even hurt back there bugging my eyes at all those tits on parade. But you notice I never complained once.”

  “No, I give you that.”

  “You know why, Cowboy? Mostly, it’s real nice just to be alive. And when my hair grows out, if I part it on the other side, no one will notice. Unless you fucking tell them.”

  “Hey, I’m glad you’re alive, too, Cossack. In fact, I’m glad we’re both alive, and I aim to get us the hell out of Kabul and safely back to base and keep it that way.”

  Base was Bagram Airbase, in the Shomali Plain sixty-five kilometers north of Kabul, where they were temporarily stationed. Marcus’ ice-blue eyes flicked ceaselessly side to side as he drove, seeking out possible threats in the kaleidoscopic maze that choked the streets—pedestrians, Soviet and Afghan soldiers, bicycles, motorcycles, taxicabs, military trucks and jeeps like theirs. In five and a half years of war, the population of the Afghan capital had swollen from 750,000 to nearly two million. Some of this influx had come from the Soviet Union and its client states, of course, but most was from internal Afghan refugees. And a high percentage of these, Taras and Marcus were convinced, utterly despised their Slavic “liberators.” Despite the four Soviet divisions garrisoned in the city, with frequent military checkpoints and a strict curfew, danger lurked everywhere.

  Russian civilians had been stabbed in the back while shopping in bazaars. The Soviet Embassy was shelled regularly, and its first secretary gunned down recently in broad daylight. As a consequence, the Russian colony remained mostly within its heavily guarded, sandbagged enclaves, and diplomats in general were restricted to a ten-kilometer radius in the city center. For further security, all the villages ringing Kabul had been leveled to create a cordon sanitaire ten-kilometers wide—beyond the range of the mujahideen’s 107mm rockets.

  So Taras appreciated Marcus’ vigilance, and maintained his own as their jeep was waved through a checkpoint by two Afghan soldiers in tan tunics and pillbox hats. When he had arrived in Afghanistan from his London assignment at the tender age of twenty-four, Arensky had been armored in all the invulnerability of youth. But two years had stripped most of it away, and that last day in the Kunar Valley had pretty much finished the job.

  Taras had been incredibly lucky to survive, and knew it. Had Nazar been a hairbreadth quicker tracking his AK-47 along the arc of Taras’ leap before triggering his fusillade, the steel-core rounds, at a velocity of over seven hundred meters per second, would have burst Taras’ skull like a sledgehammered walnut. As it was, only two bullets had struck him, both tangentially, merely furrowing his scalp and peeling a patch back to the bone. He had escaped with a minor concussion, a slight edema, tiny hemorrhages and a great deal of blood loss.

  But the Army surgeon—a middle-aged and wonderfully droll Jewish woman from Leningrad—assured him there had been no skull fracture, no infection, no damage to the brain case. It was she who had reassured him about the scar, saying if he was determined to let his hair grow out and hide her lovely needlework, he would be as tediously handsome as ever. She also strongly cautioned him against single-handedly storming any rebel strongholds in the future.

  Despite all this good fortune, and his bantering tone with Marcus, Taras knew the experience had not left him unscathed. He was no longer the same soldier, or man, he had been. And the world he saw now, on leaving the hospital and the dingy burlesque club, had also undergone subtle change. As if brightness and contrast knobs had been turned up. Edges were sharper, and Taras seemed a half-step slow and slightly out of registration, impersonating himself for the benefit of this old friend beside him, but not getting it quite right.

  Every once in a while, without warning, his mind would slip its gears, and he’d be back in London, haunting an old bookstore on a drizzly Sunday with black umbrellas passing outside on Charing Cross Road. Or back in Khabarovsk that fateful night, trying to stay sober and awake long enough to save Eva Sorokina from the demented trapper.

  And too often in his reveries he’d find himself again the captive of the mujahideen. Listening to the ranting of Nazar. Waiting for Aziza to smile at him, or the ragged young warriors to leap and carve him into shashlik. Other times he found himself trying to imagine the kind of mind that had thought up the plastic toy-bomb, or put it into production.

  To her credit, Dr. Lazareva had sensed something troubling him, and on her rounds had tried several times to get him to talk about it. But Taras had kept things light, feeding her straight lines, insisting he was fine. As far as he was concerned, she could stitch the outside of his skull, but he didn’t want her—or anyone else—poking around on the inside.

  But something was indeed going on in there.

  It began to coalesce two weeks later. He and Marcus were summoned from Bagram to the 40th Army’s Operational Command in Kabul for a special briefing. It had nothing to do with the Kunar Valley offensive. That had been going well without them; though mainly, it had to be said, because the mujahideen bands had run out of ammunition, especially 107mm rockets and RPG-7 anti-tank grenades. In any case, the Soviet mechanized thrust had now reached Barikot on the Pakistani border.

  No, the two Spetsnaz officers were being recruited for a special operation.

  The briefing officer was an overfed, heavy-lidded colonel of KHAD, the Afghan state security force. As he rose to speak, his pudgy hands tugged downward on his neatly pressed gray tunic, in a hopeless attempt to stop it flaring over his matronly hips.

  But the attention of Taras and Marcus was drawn elsewhere, to the Soviet officer seated rigidly in the corner. He was a large-boned man of around sixty, with huge, gnarled hands, a lean, craggy face under a bristly crewcut, and the baleful glare of a loitering buzzard.

  In singsong, serviceable Russian, the colonel began to introduce the older officer as the recently appointed deputy commander of the LCSFA, the Limited Contingent of Soviet Forces in Afghanistan. But Taras had already recognized the man—by the unique features, shoulder-board stars and full pectoral of combat ribbons—as Lieutenant General Rodion Marchenko.

  And, of course, Marcus already knew the general. Marchenko, Taras recalled, was the GRU officer who had taken a shine to the Cowboy and gotten him into Spetsnaz. Marchenko was also the man who, two decades earlier, had helped revive the Strategic Rocket Forces from the ignominy of the Cuban missile withdrawal. And, Taras thought, the old man must certainly be the reason why Marcus and he had been summoned to this briefing.

  Taras turned his att
ention to the lumpish colonel and, somewhere along about the second or third sentence of his spiel, knew it was to be a “wet affair”—an assassination. The target, it turned out, was a key Afghan resistance officer who had started a mujahideen combat training school outside Peshawar, Pakistan. Taras felt conflicting reactions—revulsion and excitement—in almost equal intensity.

  “This is Brigadier General Jalil Muhammad Raza,” the Afghan colonel said, pointing to an image rear-projected onto a foldout desktop screen. Taras and Marcus moved closer to the ground-glass viewing area and saw a gaunt, bald-headed old man in a gray pajama shirt. His eyes were sunken, his mustache droopy. Around his scrawny neck hung a sign, hand-lettered in Dari-Persian. It was obviously a prison photograph.

  “Raza commanded the bodyguard of King Zahir Shah, but when Zahir was overthrown by Mohammed Daoud in 1973, Raza was sent to Pul-i-Charki prison for several years. Unfortunately he was released in 1976. Here is an earlier picture.”

  The projector now showed a younger, more vigorous Raza. The eyes were piercing, the mustache sleekly groomed. What struck Taras, however, was his uniform, that of a captain in the Soviet VDV. Then, in the background, Taras recognized the familiar barracks of Ryazan Higher Airborne Academy.

  “Yobany v rot!” exclaimed Marcus beside him. “You’re telling us this guy is Spetsnaz?”

  “No, but he went through a lot of the training.” This from Marchenko.

  The Afghan colonel went on: “That photograph was taken in the late 1950s. Later, he also trained with the British Special Air Service and Green Berets in America, Fort Bragg. We have no pictures from those years.”

  What the colonel did have, Taras and Marcus learned, was reliable information on the brigadier’s current activities, which he regarded as most disturbing. Not only was Raza drilling thousands of young Afghan men from the Pakistani camps in the proper handling of modern weapons and the tactics of mountain warfare. At the same time, according to the colonel, he was attempting to coordinate the various groups of “counter-revolutionary bandits” into a “grand alliance against the DRA”—the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.