by Dan Pollock
To Taras, this seemed a futile undertaking, with the mujahideen factions irrevocably split between Sunni and Shia and along regional and tribal lines. NIFA, Jamiat-i-Islami, Hezb-i-Islami and Harakat, for instance, were often at each other’s throats; and each had its own internal rivalries. It was hard to imagine anyone imposing a coordinated command and operational structure on them.
But Raza was undaunted by the challenge, they were assured, and beginning to have some success. Recent rebel offensives in the Helmand Valley and in the Panjshir showed definite evidence of coordinated attacks by several resistance commanders. Altogether a most alarming development.
The colonel turned to Marchenko. “General, do you have something to add?”
Marchenko nodded. “Raza is a hell of a soldier. He says he wants to professionalize the jihad. If anybody can weld that bunch of scrawny bandits and schoolboys into an efficient guerrilla army, he can. He’s a serious threat. But if anybody can neutralize that threat, it’s you two.” Marchenko flashed his stainless-steel grin. “I want you lads to kill the bastard. The colonel will fill you in on the details. Proceed, Colonel.”
Marcus punched Taras in the right biceps while the colonel clicked to the next slide. It showed a rough diagram map of the brigadier’s training compound thirty-five kilometers west of Peshawar in the Tribal Areas, a region also known for its excellent cannabis and opium crops and many heroin refineries. Raza was well guarded, they were told, and never slept in the same place two nights running.
“Kadafi’s technique,” Marcus said.
“And he got it from Castro,” chuckled Marchenko.
The specifics of the plan were to be left up to them—specifically to Major Arensky, who, if he agreed, would be in charge of the operation. He and Lieutenant Jolly would go in disguise to Peshawar, where they would be joined by a highly qualified grade-six officer of the KHAD, who would serve as liaison.
To Taras, this had sounded as if they would be back in baggy pants and turbans, riding double-humped camels over the Khyber Pass—exactly as he and Marcus had joked about doing years before on Wrangel Island. In fact, they were “disguised” in Western clothing as Canadian journalists and flew out of Kabul International Airport with a dozen other passengers in a little Yak-40 of Bakhtar Airlines, the Afghan international carrier.
Arensky, clean-shaven with a Harris tweed cap covering his scar, was supposedly from Edmonton, a recent Ukrainian émigré, Marcus from Vancouver. Both carried passports and supporting credentials forged by the master “shoemakers” in Department D of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate.
They checked into Dean’s, one of Peshawar’s three main tourist hotels, favored by journalists because its gardens and British Colonial-style bungalow rooms permitted unobserved access and egress by mujahideen contacts. In their case, it permitted access that evening to a Captain Fareed Qadir, their KHAD advisor and guide, who had been in Peshawar for several months in the guise of a Pakistani taxi driver. “Azib,” as they were to call him, boasted of having been involved in several “direct actions” during that time, including the bombing of the Shan Hotel, which had killed several mujahideen while wounding a score of others.
This Azib was a disagreeable companion, with a furtive manner, one wandering eye and the constant habit of giggling to himself. Worse luck, considering Peshawar’s hundred-degree heat, his rust-mottled blue Datsun, in which Marcus and Taras were to spend much of the next two days, lacked air-conditioning. Still, it could be worse; they could be back in Afghanistan.
For Peshawar was an absorbing city, crawling with intrigue. If Azib were to be believed, every second person on the swarming streets or chatting over tea in the hotel dining room was some brand of spy. If they were not colleagues—unbeknown to him—from Afghanistan’s twenty-thousand-strong security service, then surely they were Pakistani Special Branch, KGB or CIA.
As for the rest? According to Azib, they were a mixed lot—mercenaries, money-changers, “journalists” like themselves, smugglers, black marketeers, buyers and sellers of weapons and narcotics. He giggled while retailing this shoptalk, all the while engulfed in a vehicular melee that even surpassed Kabul’s. He explained how big the heroin business had become in Peshawar, and how in the weapons bazaars of Darra, forty kilometers away, one could purchase anything from .25-caliber pen pistols to Soviet SA-7 Grail surface-to-air missiles.
The neighboring war, of course, was the reason for most of this feverish activity, and the millions of dollars of U.S. aid being funneled through Pakistan—in the form of weapons for the mujahideen, and food, clothing and medical supplies for the millions of Afghans in the refugee camps ringing Peshawar.
“We owe much to the CIA, you see,” Azib added after a giggling fit, “for at least seventy percent of these weapons never reach the end of this pipeline, and much food also vanishes. This makes much business for everyone.” To illustrate this, he took them to what he called the “U.S. Aid Bazaar” in the Old City, where they browsed weapons shops offering Vietnam-issue U.S. Army flak vests, jungle boots and camouflage pants. But other merchants specialized in Soviet military gear, both new and used—and some patently phony, with upside-down hammer-and-sickle shoulder patches.
Afterward they followed a road out to one of the refugee camps, but continued well beyond it, turning onto an unpaved, tread-worn track that wandered off into a void of parched waste and shimmering heatwaves. Twenty minutes of horizon-bouncing, spine-pounding agitation over rocks and ruts brought the groaning Datsun to a merciful halt by a stone-and-mud-brick gatehouse and a rough-timbered barrier across the track. Two turbaned guards emerged from the sentry post with slung binoculars and unslung Kalashnikovs, to which bayonets were fixed. They were both quite young and not particularly friendly-looking. One hung back with his mouth to a hand-held radio, while the other slowly approached the driver’s window.
Taras figured these boys had been studying their dust cloud for some time now. Beyond the gate lay what looked like the downsloping mouth of an eroded canyon. Beyond that, presumably, lay Raza’s “Academy.” The brigadier had sited his campus well. It was a hell of an exposed approach from down here, and farther in was probably bristling with Dashikas and Zigroiat heavy machine guns to discourage any predatory visitors from above. The only sensible solution would be to shell the place from across the Afghan border.
Taras, in the taxi’s passenger seat, and Marcus in back, remained passive, ostensibly leaving it up to Azib. The “journalists” were festooned with cameras, notebooks and audiocassette recorders, but Taras had his 9mm Makarov pistol hidden within reach, and Marcus, apparently sipping from an aluminum canteen, was actually holding, behind the metallic false front, a small, apple-green RGD-5 hand grenade with the pin out and fingers around the safety lever.
The approaching guard beckoned, and Azib jumped out. There was a quick flurry of Dari-Persian, then the guard thrust his bayonet past Azib’s shoulder, pointing back the way they’d come.
Azib overdid the appreciative and explicatory gestures, Taras thought, but at least he wasn’t acting furtive or, praise Allah, giggling. The taxi driver salaam aleikumed the guard a final time, climbed back into the baking Datsun, backing and filling carefully on the narrow track so as not to raise a particle of dust.
As they were pulling away, Azib kept his wandering eye on the rearview mirror and explained: “I told them we were looking for the Munda refugee camp. He said we had taken a wrong turn.”
“And did you thank the man for that?” Marcus asked.
“Oh, my yes!” Azib giggled.
“Well, if it was an easy job, they wouldn’t be needing us, would they, Cossack?”
Taras agreed. It would take time, and he was glad of it. He had things to think about.
But the next day, the brigadier all but fell into their laps.
The gardens and public rooms of the hotel served as a clearinghouse for visiting journalists, a place to meet and compare notes. They were either returning from, embarking on,
or soliciting mujahideen-escorted trips across the border into Afghanistan. To several “colleagues,” Marcus complained of his own difficulties in securing contacts among the Afghan resistance groups, let alone arranging a journey “inside,” because of his lesser status as a freelancer without expense account or definite assignment.
An English documentary filmmaker spoke up. This man had just returned from the Panjshir Valley under the auspices of the charismatic Jamiat guerrilla leader, Commander Ahmad Shah Massoud. For one wildly euphoric moment Marcus had thought he was about to wangle an introduction to Massoud himself, the “Lion of Panjshir”—whose head would be a trophy equaling or surpassing that of Raza. But the documentarian wasn’t offering to help directly, only to introduce him to someone else who might—an ex-mercenary, who also happened to be a contributing editor of an American monthly called Deadly Force. This gung-ho character was supposedly very tight with a key resistance leader, and had just arranged an interview for an Italian woman journalist. Although Signorina DeLuca was admittedly attractive, her journalistic circumstances were similar to Marcus’. She was a stringer for a couple of supplemental European news services.
Perhaps, the English filmmaker went on, this American merc, who was staying at Dean’s, might agree to set Marcus up with the same man, perhaps right in Peshawar.
“And who might this leader be?” Marcus had asked.
“A tough old bird, ex-SAS. Used to run the king’s bodyguard, but now runs a training camp out in the boondocks. Raza, General Jalil Muhammad Raza.”
Marcus let his enthusiasm show. “Thanks for the tip. It’s sure worth a shot.”
He and Taras discussed it later in their bungalow. There were two ways to play it. Marcus could try for the meeting with Raza, kill the old guy face-to-face, and then shoot his way out, with Taras’ attacking from outside. Or they could use Azib’s taxi to track the Italian woman to her meeting with Raza, which was to take place the next day somewhere in Peshawar, and improvise an assault on the spot.
They decided against Plan A. Marcus’ phony journalistic credentials and letters of reference from two Canadian magazine editors might not pass scrutiny. Certainly not if either the ex-merc or Raza went to the trouble of making some phone calls. And that would jeopardize not only the assignment, but their lives.
Plan B would be easier to effect. They’d follow the Italian woman to her rendezvous. The trunk of Azib’s Datsun would hold all their equipment—stun and frag grenades, silenced pistols and submachine guns, Dragunov sniper rifles, rappelling ropes and harnesses, bolt cutters, sledgehammers, explosive charges. They were both skilled in urban assault, and would be wearing soft body armor. If the location wasn’t a goddamned fortress, they’d hit it. Azib would wait outside for the getaway.
That night Taras went for a walk. He returned a little before midnight, found Marcus cleaning his disassembled Makarov pistol.
“Long walk, Cossack. Been thinking?”
“Quite a bit.”
“What about?”
“Migratory genocide. Scorched earth. Whatever you want to call what we’ve been doing to the Afghans. Destroying their country. Driving people out, fragging kids, burning crops, bulldozing villages.”
Marcus gave a puzzled smile. “What’s this all about? You don’t want to do the old bastard, is that it? Getting cold feet?”
“That’s part of it, I guess. But it goes back aways, even before what happened in the Kunar. I finally made up my mind in the hospital. I’m all through here, Cowboy. I’m dead.”
“Oh, fuck, Cossack. What you need is some R & R. I told Marchenko that, but he said the best thing was to send you right out again. Listen, after we pull this job, we’ll take off someplace, you and me. Bangkok, Amsterdam, Pago Pago. You name it, I’ll get Marchenko to pull the strings.”
“That’s a great offer, Marcus. Sorry. It’s too late.”
“I sense you making problems here, Cossack. What are you saying exactly?”
“I’m saying I’m going to do what you did.”
“Which is—what?”
“Defect.”
Marcus stared at him unblinkingly for long seconds. When he spoke, his voice was deeper, and softer. “When is this going to happen? Or has it? Have you already been sending love notes to the CIA?”
“It hasn’t happened yet. I’m ready, though.”
Marcus had assembled the Makarov and dry fired it. Now he screwed on the silencer and slapped an eight-round clip into the grip, then chambered a cartridge, flicked the safety to cocked-and-locked. “And what am I supposed to do? Give you my blessing?”
“Come with me, Cowboy. America will take you back. Finish your trip around the world.”
“Some things are better unfinished. Like our little saber duel. One defection was enough for me, Cossack. I can’t go back. Even if I could, I happen to like it here. And I like what I’m doing.”
“Be straight with me, Marucs.”
“I am. And you can come down from your moral high ground. Are you trying to tell me what we’re doing here is somehow worse than what America did in Vietnam? Come on, Cossack, the only difference I can see is that Afghanistan is actually on the Soviet border, not the other side of the world. And we’ve got a good shot at beating these muj assholes—unless they come up with a real unifying leader like the Viet Cong had in General Giap. Which is why, Cossack, you should get over this idealistic crap about defecting to the wonderful West and just do your fucking job. Help me take out this Raza bastard.”
Taras had heard his friend often speak with equal vehemence, but never with more conviction. There was only one thing left to say:
“I’m sorry, Marcus. You’ll have to call off the hit. Get out tonight.”
“Now, why will I have to do that? Are you going to tell the CIA everything?”
“An hour ago I passed Signorina DeLuca’s door. There was a light under it. I heard her talking inside on the phone. I pushed an anonymous note inside, warning her and Raza of unspecified danger tomorrow, or at any time in the near future in Peshawar. And no, I didn’t leave my room number.”
Marcus’ face contorted. Before Taras could react, his friend pointed the silenced Makarov at him and fired twice.
Taras felt the ballistic shockwaves, heard the suppressed coughs of the pistol and a rending cry behind him. He whirled. A meter away, just inside the French doors, Azib was gaping in surprise and letting fall a thin-bladed boot knife in order to clutch his stomach. Marcus crossed the room in a leap, put two more rounds into the bowing head. Azib—Captain Fareed Qadir of the Afghan security service—completed his mortal obeisance and collapsed face-down on the carpet.
“Little bastard was spying from the garden. Guess he didn’t like your drift. Guess he thought I’d be happy to sit here and watch him slit your traitorous throat. Maybe I should have let him. Better get the hell out of here, Cossack.”
Instants before the shot Taras had caught a scent, failed to identify it. He realized now it had been jasmine from the courtyard gardens outside, which should have warned him the door was ajar. Now the fragrance was annihilated by gunsmoke, blood, sphincteral discharge. He looked down at the blood, spreading and sheening like strawberry syrup on the tile around Azib’s body.
“Marcus, what will you do?”
“I appreciate the concern, Cossack, I really do. Hell of a friendship we had there for a while.”
“Marcus, I’m sorry. You know how I feel.”
“I’m all choked up about it. Just don’t worry about me, okay? I’ll think of something. Probably a couple ways I can sell this to Marchenko, as long as I don’t know what you’re up to.” Marcus forced a grin. “Hey, if I could survive a twenty-foot wipeout in Waimea Bay, I can hack this. What are you waiting for? Like the man said, Go west, young man.”
Taras hesitated at the open French door. In his self-absorption it had never occurred to him that Marcus would be hurt and angry at his defection. Now it seemed obvious, but there was nothing he could do about
it.
“You saved my life again, Cowboy.”
“Guess I did. Makes a couple of ’em, doesn’t it? Let’s just hope they don’t make me even the score by coming after you someday.”
Years later Taras was to recall those peculiar parting words, and find them incredibly ironic. But at the moment he only nodded a last time at his friend, then stepped out into the dark garden.
Twenty
Taras laced together the pasteboard covers of Marcus’ dossier, replaced it on the trolley beside the desk. Across the room, droplets chased each other down the window glass in spermatic, quicksilver trails. Outside in Dzerzhinsky Square a slanting drizzle halated the headlights orbiting Iron Feliks’ bronze statue. But here and there through the shredding battle smoke of nimbostratus, Taras could see vivid patches of cerulean. At Moscow’s northern latitude—nearly the same as Copenhagen’s—the early summer twilight had a while yet to linger, though Arensky’s watch showed eight-forty. He had worked through dinner. Scattered around him on the baize blotter were the remains of his lunch—a rind of black bread on a plate, an empty bowl slivered with cucumber from the cold okroshka, a well-crumpled Pepsi can—victim of a visceral spasm during the Afghan section of his reading.
He leaned back in the chair, rubbed his eyes, let out a deep sigh of deskbound weariness. What had he gleaned? Probably nothing affecting this assignment. But in the past hours of page-turning it seemed his entire adult existence as well as Marcus’ had trooped before the reviewing stand of his mind’s eye, in all its disarray. It was a disquieting experience, witnessing—and judging—one’s life as parade rather than as cross-sectional experience, as lived. There was the added dimension of direction. Where the hell was he going? Or Marcus?