Cold

by John Sweeney

  ‘Does anyone in Langley suspect that the fraternal forces’ – meaning the Soviets – ‘have an American asset?’

  And Zeke knew he couldn’t last another ten seconds.

  The door burst open and a Soviet general marched in, followed by a sergeant, a Yakut from Siberia by the look of him: raven-black hair, a great barrel of a man, a brother of the Inuit of Alaska. They were followed by five soldiers with AKs, barely out of school.

  ‘Give the American to me,’ said the general in Russian.

  ‘Nyet,’ said the fat man.

  The general issued an order, softly, almost on the edge of hearing, and Zeke heard five Kalashnikov safety catches click off.

  ‘Twenty of my boys are being held by the dukhi’ – he used the Russian for ‘ghosts’, Soviet slang for the mujahedin – ‘and with this American, I can make a trade. That’s of some use to us.’ The general’s voice was extraordinarily deep, vocal cords dragged over gravel and ice by chains of iron. ‘Unlike this sadism.’ He spat on the floor.

  Zeke remained cuffed to the sturdy chair, electrodes clamped to his left index finger and the tip of his penis.

  ‘Move it, Grozhov,’ said the general. ‘I’ve got my boys to look after. The American comes with me. Or do I have to shoot you?’

  ‘You may be a Hero of the Soviet Union, General, but do this and I promise things will not be good for you,’ Grozhov hissed.

  ‘Listen, slimeball. He comes with me. He comes with me and I shoot you in the balls. Or he comes with me and I don’t shoot you in the balls. Which would you prefer?’

  Grozhov’s bulk stepped into the light, blocking it, and Zeke could feel the metal cuffs fixing his arms and feet to the chair being unlocked. Then the electrode crocodile clips were removed. Zeke tried to stand up but his back and leg muscles were still in spasm, knotted in pain. He stumbled, half falling, and grunted ‘Help me’, but became aware of an entirely new source of tension in the room. Blinded by the glare from the spotlight, Zeke had to jerk his head to the side to see what was happening.

  The general had his hands in the air and was walking backwards, one step at a time. A small Afghan boy dressed in a bright purple shalwar kameez, barely ten years old, if that, was moving out of the shadows in the corner of the cell, a Kalashnikov in his hands, finger on trigger, the muzzle aimed directly at the general’s heart. The boy knew how to handle a gun. He had long black eyelashes, kohl around his eyes, and a line of spittle rested on his lips. What he was doing was exciting him.

  Grozhov said something softly in Pashto. Zeke realised that this boy must be Grozhov’s catamite, determined to avenge the honour of the master he loved. The boy licked his thin lips, but there was too much spittle to remove. He lifted his trigger hand to wipe the saliva away with his palm and suddenly he was down on the floor, knocked flat by a heavy steel spanner thrown by the Yakut.

  In a flash, the sergeant had captured the boy in a bear hug, but the boy was spitting and snarling, his legs flailing. He bit the tip of the sergeant’s thumb clean off and the Yakut roared in pain. Now the general was on him and the two men managed to handcuff the boy’s hands behind his back; he sat in the middle of the floor, writhing and wriggling.

  ‘You’re screwing this kid?’ the general asked, revolted.

  Grozhov said nothing, the heavy lids of his eyes masking all emotion. The general’s fist smashed into the side of the fat man’s face, once, twice, until he drew blood. Grozhov, still showing no emotion, brought out a handkerchief and patted himself clean.

  ‘No wonder these people hate us,’ said the general. He motioned for the Yakut to let the boy go. Still handcuffed, he ran up the stairs, hissing something in Pashto.

  The general turned to Grozhov, who had remained silent. ‘The American comes with us. You can tell Moscow he escaped – you can make something up. You Chekists are good at fairy tales. Keep us out of it. If anyone breathes a word about us taking the Yank, then I will tell Moscow about you fucking little boys. And I have six witnesses.’

  The Yakut sergeant got Zeke dressed, put a blanket over his shoulders and helped him stand up. The moment he put weight on his legs, he buckled and collapsed to the floor. The general and the sergeant half carried, half dragged him out of the basement of the villa and into the first of two Soviet jeeps. Zeke was placed in the back, between the general and the Yakut.

  ‘Uygulaan,’ said the general to the sergeant, ‘if you weren’t so fucking ugly, I’d marry you.’

  The Yakut chuckled, a gold tooth glinting in the sun, but said nothing and sucked his bleeding thumb. To Zeke’s astonishment, they headed straight to the only international hotel in Kabul, full of Soviet officials but also UN monitors and aid workers from the fraternal countries in the Warsaw Pact. It was the last place that any ordinary Russian officer would want to take an American spy, but then the general was no ordinary officer.

  The jeep shot past the sentry at the hotel gate and headed down to the basement garage. They got out and hurried into a lift, coming out on the tenth floor, the very top of the hotel, where they entered a large suite. It looked out on the mud-coloured drabness of Kabul, and beyond, to the snow-topped mountains of the Hindu Kush.

  This was the first time that Zeke had a proper opportunity to study the general, the closest thing to Palaeolithic man he had ever set eyes on: physically brutish, short, powerful, his forehead low and knitted with muscle. But his eyes were bright blue, vivid and dancing with inner merriment, suggesting a sardonic detachment from the world. A caveman, maybe, but a bright one.

  ‘Listen, American, we have not so much time. My name is General Gennady Semionovich Dozhd of the 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment. My friends call me Genya. And you?’

  ‘General, I’m under no obligation to divulge my name,’ said Zeke.

  The general roared with laughter. ‘Absolutely, Mr Chandler of the Central Intelligence Agency. Or may I call you Ezekiel?’

  Despite himself, Zeke allowed one of his wide-open smiles. ‘You can call me Zeke.’

  ‘Good. One month ago the dukhi captured one of my officers, Kiril. He was a good man, a bard, we say – wrote songs, liked to read Dostoevsky, Tolstoy. Civilised, not like me, not like Uygulaan here, who likes to eat human curry.’

  The Yakut had returned from the bathroom, having bandaged his bloody thumb, and smiled his gold-tooth smile.

  ‘Our agents write fiction much of the time,’ the general continued. ‘But in this case, five of them all tell the same story, that the dukhi castrated Kiril and put a ring through his nose and led him naked through a village our brothers in the air force had just carpet-bombed by mistake. Not for the first time, they’d bombed the wrong village. They didn’t earn their chocolate, as we say. The villagers stoned Kiril to death. For him, a mercy. He hated this fucking war.’

  The general went silent for a few seconds, long enough for Zeke to register his humanity and sense of loss for his officer. Then he came back, more sardonic than before: ‘But I haven’t got time for the ironies of our internationalist fraternal duty right now. Yesterday, the same dukhi gang captured twenty of my men. So, let’s trade. Twenty raw recruits, snot-nosed infants, for a top CIA agent. The deal is, I want my men back with their testicles. We do the handover at the wooden bridge over the river, ten miles south of Jalalabad, in two days’ time, at noon.’

  The general gestured to the hotel phone sitting on the table in front of them.

  ‘Call the American embassy in Islamabad and ask your friends to tell the dukhi to play by the rules. I want all twenty of my men back, whole. If not, it’s not just my balls on the line. It’s yours too.’

  The Yakut sergeant took out a large knife, its blade glinting in the sun.

  ‘Deal?’

  Zeke nodded and picked up the phone. He had things to tell Langley. He got through to the Islamabad embassy, then Jed Crone, officially the cultural attaché, came on the line.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Mr Palmer here. It’s good
news.’

  That was Agency-speak for I’ve been captured – for ‘disaster’.

  ‘What?’ Crone couldn’t hide his dislike for Zeke from his voice. With difficulty, he got back to the code: ‘That’s great to hear, Mr Palmer. We’d love to join the party, but you didn’t send us an invite.’

  That was code for: Why the fuck is this conversation happening on an open line?

  ‘It will be a great party.’

  There’s no choice.

  Zeke set out the deal, that the ‘saints’ (the dukhi) honour the trade: one ‘jack’ (CIA man) for a score of ‘clubs’ (Russians grunts), and they must be intact, unharmed, uncastrated. Crone said he’d phone back in five.

  He never did. After forty minutes of anxiety, the general scowled at Zeke. ‘What are they waiting for? It’s a good deal. They’re getting one clever Yank for twenty grunts? The CIA doesn’t like our exchange rate?’

  Giving up on Crone, Zeke phoned Dave Weaver in Delhi. He OK’d the deal on the spot.

  They left the hotel in even more of a hurry than they’d entered it. In the back of the jeep, Zeke was blindfolded. Within a few minutes he heard the thwack of rotor blades. They were going up in a ‘bee’ – a troop-carrying helicopter. Zeke was guided into a seat in the fuselage and then heard the general’s basso profundo in his ear: ‘Mr CIA, do you ever worry that you might get blown up by one of your own Stingers?’

  Zeke started to laugh, but then he felt his stomach surge up towards his throat as the bee lurched into the sky. Still blindfolded, he couldn’t see the ground whizz past at one hundred miles an hour, only thirty feet below, but he could hear the echo from it, sickeningly close. They were fifty or so minutes into the flight when the bee started swaying heavily in the sky, soaring left, dipping right.

  Clang-zzzt-clang, clang-zzzt-clang – once you’ve heard the sound of metal biting into spinning metal, you never forget it. Zeke felt the blindfold being ripped from his face. Blinking, his eyes burning with the speed of the wind and the ferocity of the bee’s lurches, this way and that, he was thumped in the chest by the general, who tugged at his arm and led him, running, down to the open ramp at the back of the chopper and pushed him over the edge. They fell fifteen, maybe twenty paces down an almost vertical slope of scree, rolling with the falling stones until they came to rest just short of a sheer drop.

  Eagles moved with stately purpose, circling the mountain. Slow-worms of asphalt wriggled on the valley floor more than a mile below. Above, the whirring blades of the bee bit into hard rock and the rotor engine exploded into a ball of fire, and the entire broken flying machine began to tumble down the mountainside, passing so closely that Zeke could clearly read the engine housing’s safety warnings in Cyrillic script.

  As it thump-thumped past, rotors still jabbing at rock, out of the flaming tail a burning ‘x’ of a thing came at them, following them down the slope, every limb on fire, emitting a high-pitched shriek that still returned to Zeke in nightmares.

  The general pulled out his handgun and shot the x-shape three times. The corpse carried on falling, bouncing hard on the rock and pitching off into the abyss below, still burning. They watched until an outcrop masked the end of his fall.

  ‘The pilot,’ spat the general, and holstered his gun. ‘Viktor. Three kids. Best pilot in the whole 40th Army. Managed to park his bee on the top of a mountain. Saved our skins, but lost his. When this fucking war is over, I will crawl on my knees in front of his woman, his kids . . . This fucking war. Viktor used to talk about becoming a Zinky Boy. I said, “Come on, you’re too good for that. You’re the best.” And now we’ll never find his body.’

  The puzzlement on Zeke’s face was plain.

  ‘Zinky Boys. They put us in sealed coffins made of zinc. The cherry on the cake is that the bosses don’t want anyone to know that Russian lads are being killed in Afghanistan. We’re not fighting, we’re helping with international solidarity. So the Zinky Boys get delivered in the middle of the night. On our graves, they write “Dead”, not “Killed in Action”. Dying for a lie. It gets you down.’

  The heat of the sun was beginning to fade. The washed browns and greys of the mountains, above and below, were turning darker.

  ‘And if we don’t get a move on, the dukhi will have some more Zinky Boys to boast about by sundown.’

  Five of them had made it: the general, Zeke, Uygulaan, and two young recruits who looked as though, if they could convert themselves into jelly, they would do so. Only the general and Uygulaan had weapons – two pistols and one hand grenade. None of them had water.

  It was five o’clock in the afternoon, the air beginning to cool. In the fall, Zeke had cut his lip, badly, and sprained – maybe broken – his weak wrist; the Yakut had a pronounced limp, but made nothing of it; the general and the two soldiers were bloodied but walking.

  The general pointed to a jagged escarpment on the far side of the mountain they had crashed into. ‘The dukhi hit our bee from over there. Heavy machine gun, not one of your Stingers. Otherwise, I’d have to shoot you.’

  Zeke could not be sure he was joking.

  ‘They can’t kill us from over there,’ the general said, ‘but their scouts will probably have seen there are survivors. So, which way down?’

  The drop immediately below them meant death; going back – up to the top and down the other side of the mountain – exposed them to the dukhi machine-gunners. To their left, towards the sun, the mountain soared into the sky, its rock as smooth and unclimbable as marble. The general screwed up his eyes, squinting.

  ‘Uygulaan, can you make out a ridge over there?’

  The Yakut grunted, ‘It’s as narrow as my little finger.’

  ‘Big enough for all of us, then.’

  It was, just.

  Zeke, the smallest and the lightest of the five, had to edge along the sliver of rock that stood out from the face, his fingertips clamped to what holds he could scramble for. How Uygulaan had made it with his round Buddha belly, Zeke never understood. The ridge widened out onto a bluff and the way down to the road, although severely difficult, was not impossible. It meant sliding and slipping down a ravine. But they weren’t going to beat the sun.

  ‘We can’t get down that at night,’ said the general. ‘Best wait up here until sunrise. Then we go down to the road and hide and wait for a convoy.’

  They walked and slipped for another hour, until they found a half-cave made by a great slab of rock, protecting them from being seen by the dukhi. In this lee, they fell to rest. Only when they had slumped down did Uygulaan take out two small oranges from his pocket, like a magician producing a white rabbit. With his murderer’s knife he sliced the oranges neatly into six slices, and the sixth slice he cut in half. The general, Zeke and Uygulaan got one slice each, the two conscripts one and a half. His lips cracking with thirst, Zeke savoured the burst of orange juice as if it were the finest champagne.

  The general had a thumb of dried meat, which Uygulaan cut into five with mathematical precision; one of the conscripts had four mints. Zeke said he didn’t like mints, which amused the general.

  ‘Not bad for an American,’ he said. ‘I want to show you something.’

  He pulled out a scrap of paper from his wallet, and Zeke found himself staring at a crumpled postcard of an oil painting of a lone British officer from the nineteenth century, more dead than alive, astride a dying horse, a fort in the background.

  ‘Remnants of an Army by Elizabeth Butler,’ said the general, admiringly. ‘I have the real thing in my office in Jalalabad. I borrowed it from the British embassy in Kabul.’

  ‘Borrowed?’ asked Zeke.

  ‘Traded. They got twelve goats. The British had long gone and the janitor got the better part of the deal. The officer on the pony is Assistant Surgeon William Brydon, the only one of some sixteen thousand British and Indian troops and camp followers who made it back from Kabul in 1842. As if what happened to the British then wasn’t warning enough,’ the general continued, �
�we Russians have stepped on the same rake. We don’t belong here. Nor do you Americans. No one from outside does.’

  ‘Tell me, why do you admire this painting?’ asked Zeke.

  ‘It haunts me. Do we ever learn from the mistakes of others? My grandmother told me how the Nazis behaved in Ukraine, and in western Russia. Treated people worse than dogs. People hated the Soviets, but they hated the Nazis even more. In Afghanistan, it’s not so easy. You see what happened to Viktor? But I’m determined not to repeat these mistakes. I’ve ordered my men to respect people. If they don’t, I put them in the slammer. We dig wells. We build schools, not just for boys but for girls too. And the other side – your friends, the dukhi? They drop dead mules down the wells we build. The school we opened in one of the villages? They broke the arms and legs of four of the children who dared to attend. In the centre of Jalalabad, they threw acid in the face of the headmistress of the big girls school. So it’s closed. That there are no girls schools in Jalalabad or in the countryside is not our fault. It is the fault of your friends, the people you are supplying with your fancy surface-to-air missiles. Mr Chandler, we Russians are in the wrong place. But be careful what you wish for. One day, you too may care to worry about these men who live in caves and throw acid into the eyes of a headmistress.’

  Zeke kept his own counsel for a while and then spoke.

  ‘One of my colleagues’ – it was Crone, but he didn’t say so – ‘says that if you’re fighting the Soviet Union, what matters is who fights the hardest. The exiled Afghan king in Rome, the less-extreme dukhi commanders, they’re no good against the Sovs. The phrase my colleague uses is: “The CIA can’t have its anti-Soviet jihad run by some liberal arts jerkoff.”’

  The general laughed genuinely, deeply amused. ‘Maybe they’re right. Maybe we’re so wrong to be here that you must have no worries about your bold allies. But what happens if’ – the general surveyed the miserable, cold rock under which they were hiding from the dukhi – ‘or maybe when we lose? What do you do when the jihad turns against you, Mr CIA?’