Devil's Guard- The Complete Series Box Set

by Eric Meyer

  “What the hell are we doing?” Rachel asked out of the blue.

  “Doing? We’re eating and drinking.”

  “No, I meant in Afghanistan. Look at the place! It’s a toilet, after all these years.”

  “It’s better than it was under the Taliban. Women couldn’t go outside without a burqa or a male chaperone. Men were forced to pray or they were punished. They had to grow beards and cut their hair according to the religious rules. There was no music. It was banned. No TV, no photographs, of people, anyway. No gambling, for sure, and you know how these people love to bet on bird and dog fights. The poor bastards couldn’t even fly a kite.”

  “So that’s what NATO and ISAF is fighting for. The right to watch TV and bet on a cock fight.”

  I looked at her. “What’s up? You’ve been here for several months, so you know what it’s like.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m just feeling down about it all. You know that stadium we went to, last time we flew into Kabul?”

  “Sure, we watched a soccer match. It ended in a riot, as I recall, and we had to make a run for it.”

  “Right. The Taliban used it for public executions, where they’d behead criminals, including women, and cut off the hands of alleged thieves. The whole place is soaked in blood.”

  I couldn’t think of an answer for that, and just then the food arrived. The waiter put two plates down in front of us. As far as I could make out, it was an orange oil slick of potatoes and meat that turned out to be mostly gristle. Maybe Rachel was right.

  We finished our unappetizing meal in silence and drove back to Kandahar International. The aircraft sat waiting outside the hangar, a de Havilland Twin Otter. She was a 19-passenger short take-off and landing utility aircraft developed by de Havilland, produced by Viking Air. The aircraft's fixed tricycle undercarriage, STOL abilities and high rate of climb had made it a successful cargo and passenger carrying aircraft. She was tough and reliable, and able to take the knocks and bangs in a country like this one where smooth tarmac was just a dream in most places. We finished the walkaround inspection and climbed into the cockpit for the pre-flight checks.

  “I miss Jahandrah. He was a good man,” Rachel murmured as we were checking the flap operation.”

  He’d been our maintenance engineer, a local Afghan, one of those men born with oil running through their veins. He could fix everything, from a kid’s cycle to the turboprop engine of a cargo aircraft. Since he’d been gone, we’d relied on maintaining the aircraft ourselves or calling in someone when we were out of our depth. There was usually someone from the ground crews willing to earn a few extra bucks.

  “What happened to him, did you even find out?” she continued.

  I nodded. “Avizeh told me the whole story. He was a Tajik, and as you know they’re mostly Pashtuns around here. It was a vendetta, something that happened during the Soviet occupation. One of the Tajiks accused a local Pashtun leader of cowardice, and you know what they’re like where their macho pride is concerned. Never forget an insult. He was gunned down going home from work.”

  “Poor bastard,” she said. “I suppose the cops never found out who did it?”

  I shook my head. “They’re mostly Pashtuns around here. They wouldn’t life a finger for a Tajik.”

  “Fucking assholes,” she exclaimed. I’d noticed her swearing more of late. It was a natural reaction to the dismal chaos that surrounded us, a defense mechanism almost like a talisman against the evils of the Afghan conflict.

  We had to wait for clearance, a flight of NATO helicopters came clattering in to land, disgorging scores of weary troops almost the moment they hit the concrete, American Airborne Infantry.

  “They look so young,” Rachel muttered.

  “You’re not so old yourself,” I reminded her with a grin.

  “Yeah, but I’m not spending my time in some FOB, waiting for an enemy contact to start shooting at me.”

  A forward operating base, or FOB, was often nothing more than a flyblown pile of rocks and sandbags with rudimentary protection for its defenders. The troops hated them.

  The headphones came to life. “Helene Air, hold for take-off. We have to clear an obstruction on the runway. There will be a short delay.”

  I looked across at the tower, something about the guy’s voice didn’t sound right. He was nervous, so what wasn’t he telling me? I looked across the expanse of the airfield and saw that halfway along the runway there was a vehicle lumbering in our direction. A BTR-80, an eight wheeled amphibious armored personnel carrier designed in the Soviet Union. They sent thousands of them to Afghanistan in the 1980s, and there were a few around in use by the Afghan National Army, the ANA. During the mujahedeen resistance to the Soviets, the rebels stole hundred of them and put them to use against their former owners. But there was something badly wrong with this one. It was in the middle of a friendly, well-defended airfield. Yet it was battened down, as if it was going into action. In any case, the Afghan Army had no part of the defenses inside the airfield.

  “Rachel, emergency power! Get her off the ground.”

  She hadn’t been a fighter pilot for nothing. She slammed the throttles forward, released the brakes and the aircraft began picking up speed.

  “What’s up?” she asked, concentrating on keeping the aircraft as level as possible as we bumped over the rough taxiway heading for the tarmac, and the onrushing BTR. It seemed huge and deadly, like a prehistoric monster thirsting for blood. Our blood.

  “That APC, there’s something wrong. It’s ANA, yet she’s buttoned up ready for action.”

  “Insurgents?

  “It could be, so I’d prefer to be out of here while the military deal with them.”

  We had picked up speed and then we were on the smoother surface of the main runway. The BTR was still hurtling towards us. A hatch opened, and a turbaned head appeared. We watched as someone passed out an RPG missile launcher to him. He pointed it in our direction, and there was no doubt now about their intentions.

  “Oh Christ!” Rachel exclaimed. “He’s going to launch that thing at us.”

  “I can see that.” She was handling the aircraft well, keeping it on a straight, accelerating path for a take-off; if the BTR hadn’t been about to open fire on us. It was on a path that was slightly converging with us, and I calculated the angles in my head.

  “Turn five degrees to port, now!”

  “But we’ll be heading straight for him,” she objected.

  “It’ll make us a smaller target, head on. Don’t give him the whole of the fuselage to shoot at.”

  “Got it.”

  She touched the rudder bar, and the aircraft moved so that it was head on to the armored vehicle. There was nothing we could do. We had to wait and pray that he missed.

  He missed. The sudden spurt of flame and smoke as he fired, the certainty that we could see the missile speeding the short distance towards us; everything conspired to force Rachel to swerve the aircraft away. Yet it would only have opened up the length of our fuselage as an easy target, and with iron resolve she kept the aircraft on course. The missile zoomed over the top of the cockpit, missing us by only a few feet.

  “Veer away now,” I shouted. “Get her airborne before he takes another shot.”

  I was happy to leave her piloting the aircraft. Her reflexes were honed to a fine level of acuity that I couldn’t hope to match from my experience flying lumbering cargo transports. I watched the enemy and called the shots, and she handled the Twin Otter as if it was a thoroughbred Ferrari racing car. We vectored away from the APC, all the time picking up speed to that crucial factor, V1, when we could rotate off the runway and fly out of trouble. But he’d altered course too.

  “He’s coming towards us, Max.”

  “I see him. Stay on course.”

  “He’ll hit us!”

  “I don’t think so.”

  But there was another danger. From inside the vehicle, someone had passed the missileer another rocket
, which he prepared to fire. I looked down at the ground speed indicator. Almost. I checked the shooter and could see he was having trouble preparing his missile as their vehicle jolted over the rough ground at the side of the tarmac. A convoy of four Humvees with roof mounted fifty caliber machine guns were rushing towards the enemy to intercept, but they would be too late for us. I glanced at the indicator again and calculated the approach of the BTR. Maybe Rachel was right.

  “Rotate! Level off just above the tarmac.”

  If we clawed for height, we’d be a sitting target. She pulled back gently, and the aircraft lifted to fly just above ground effect, slowly gaining altitude as the wings felt the lift from our forward speed. A dark shape appeared in the windshield. The BTR, he’d gone clear underneath us. We both watched the shooter as he in turn looked up at us. The missile was almost ready to fire, and I could swear I could see his finger tighten on the trigger.

  “Ten degrees port, now!”

  She made the adjustment to the rudder, the wing slid around and she chalked up her first kill. The starboard wheel on the aircraft’s fixed undercarriage swung around and smashed against the head that stared up at us. He didn’t see it coming. One moment we could almost count the blackened, rotting teeth fixed in a frozen snarl, and then the wheel caught him, dashing his head against the iron rim of the hatch. His RPG was thrown off the body of the vehicle to tumble uselessly to the ground. Rachel pulled back a little on the stick, and we started to gain height now that the danger from the missile had gone.

  “Christ, look at them go!”

  I followed Rachel’s gaze to watch the Humvees bracket the BTR with a hail of heavy, steel jacketed rounds from their fifty calibers. The thin armor of the Soviet vehicle was no match for the modern weaponry; the BTR slewed around, went up on four wheels and then overturned. The guns kept firing, and a sheet of flame and smoke leapt up from the beleaguered APC.

  “Yeah, they aced the sucker!” Rachel cheered. Ever the fighter jock, she couldn’t help but gloat over the defeated enemy. “I reckon that was a suicide mission. Those Afghans must be getting desperate.”

  “A suicide mission, for sure. They couldn’t hope to escape from a heavily defended airfield. But not Afghan, they don’t believe in dying in the fight against the foreign infidels, not if they can avoid it. But the foreign fighters, volunteers, they’d offer to carry out that kind of a mission.”

  “Foreign fighters? Who’d be stupid enough to fight for this crazy country?”

  “Islamists have been flocking here for years. Chechens, Bosnian Muslims, even some Americans and Brits.”

  “They should have asked me,” she said with some bitterness. “I could have told them the place is not worth fighting for.”

  “Amen to that.”

  She’d been here for less than six months. She’d spent most of that time working day and night to keep the airline running, flying more hours than safety or sanity would allow; the rest of the time prowling around the aircraft in an old set of my overalls, checking and rechecking that it was not coming apart at the seams. The repairs we had to make would not have cleared a CAA inspection, even if the guy had a white stick and a trained Labrador to guide him.

  The headphones crackled again. “Helene Air, you took off without permission. You must observe proper procedure when using Kandahar International Airport. Your actions could have jeopardized safety, and I will be forced to make a note in the operational log.”

  We exchanged glances, and both of us collapsed into laughter. Before Rachel could make an acid retort that would upset them, I switched to transmit.

  “Our apologies, Kandahar International. It was a misunderstanding. It won’t happen again.”

  There was a hesitation, and then a few seconds later they continued. “Very well. NATO liaison says they were aware of your emergency, so perhaps it will not be entered in the log. Climb to five thousand feet and turn one hundred and eighty degrees to overfly Kabul. Have a good flight.”

  “Thank you, Kabul International. Helene Air, out.”

  “You were pretty good back there, Max. Where did you say you served?”

  “Thai military, nothing special.”

  “Hah! You must tell me about it sometime. You’d make one mean fighter pilot.”

  No, I wouldn’t, not now. At the time, I’d wanted my military career to be something special, and had volunteered for Special Forces. I’d enjoyed the unconventional soldiering that came with special operations, until a joint mission that took us across Cambodia to their border with Vietnam. I’d never know if we’d crossed the border in error, but the Vietnamese Army trooper that had pointed a gun in my face was no error, and I’d shot him, twice. I still woke with nightmares thinking about him. Was he really going to shoot, or was it just a threat? Did he have a family, a wife and kids? Were they now impoverished because of his death? I’d started drinking heavily until I was invalided out. I’d eased off the booze, but the memories had stayed. And when that missileer was aiming at us, I could almost see the face of the man I’d killed superimposed on his face. No, I hadn’t been cool. The truth was I’d been anything but cool. All I’d seen was more kids about to lose a father.

  “Maybe,” I acknowledged with a tight smile. I left Rachel to carry on flying the Twin Otter and closed my eyes to think. But all I saw was a father, a husband, and the wife and kids he left behind. It was no problem for Rachel. She lived for flying. Flying was the only activity that kept her sane through the miseries of Afghanistan, despite the mind-numbing hard work and perpetual danger.

  As we climbed towards our cruising altitude, I looked down at a long line of vehicles kicking up dust along the road. Officially, it was known as a Highway, but the reality was different. A one-lane dirt road that was too dusty in the summer and frequently a quagmire in winter. It looked like a NATO fuel convoy. At least they hadn’t ambushed that one in the mountains.

  “What’s our refueling schedule?” she asked, her memory jogged by the lumbering line of tankers. “I assume you’ve planned where we’re going to stop for gas?”

  “Oh yeah, the refueling stops. I estimate we’ll be fine to reach Islamabad, so you’ll need to take her up high to clear the Hindu Kush. After Pakistan, we’ll land at Dhaka in Bangladesh and tank up again, that should do us for out final destination.”

  “You looking forward to seeing the sights of the Saigon cesspit?”

  I smiled. She was, like most Americans, and not enamored of the communist regime that had taken over Vietnam in 1975, not that I found much to like about the new rulers of the People’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Despite their corruption and ramshackle lifestyles, the southerners were in general easy going. Not so the northerners, who were from a different race and different culture. Why was it that totalitarian governments always named themselves democratic? Weird.

  “I doubt we’ll have much time for that. We only have time to fly in, unload, and fly out again.”

  “Have you ever been to Saigon?”

  I looked across at her. I’d been there several times before. After all, my family had something of a history in that city.

  “I have, yes.”

  “Like it?”

  “Compared to Afghanistan, it’s not so bad. But it’s not like the old days, or so they tell me. I gather it was once known as the Paris of the east.”

  “I’d like to see it sometime,” she mused.

  “From the flight deck of a B52 bomber?”

  She grinned. “Now you’re talking, buster.”

  A short while later, she asked me a question about Afghanistan. “I mean, what the hell’s their problem? Don’t they want the kinds of things we’re trying to do for them? Schools, roads, industry, and sanitation?”

  I nodded. “Sure they do, some of them. But those things are not their priorities. You have to remember that they’ve successfully repelled a number of invaders, including the British and the Russians, so the people and the warlords think they’re invincible. They hate and distrus
t foreigners. They’re only friendly to their own people, those that are born to the life. And even then, their life is all about fighting. Afghan men learn to fight as soon as they learn to breathe. It’s an automatic reflex with many of them. They fight with dogs, cockerels. You name it, and they fight it. They play polo with the head of a goat. I’ve even seen them pit tiny birds against each other, so small they’d fit in your hand. They’ve fought for centuries, so long that I doubt many of them can even remember what they’re fighting for. Certainly not a new road or village school.”

  “So you don’t think there’s any hope?”

  “There’s always hope. I guess they want to be left alone, to work it out for themselves. No drugs, no foreign armies, no foreign Islamists stirring up trouble, just Afghanistan for the Afghans.”

  “At least they’d only kill each other,” she grunted.

  “That’d be progress, wouldn’t it?”

  She laughed. I liked it when she laughed. I liked it a lot.

  * * *

  The phone was ringing, and for a short time he was tempted not to answer it. He’d only arrived at his folk’s place the night before, and he was on furlough. Second Lieutenant, Class of 2012, United States Military Academy at West Point. He’d made it, after all the hard work, the good grades at school, then college, a real struggle for his parents. He’d worked his ass off too, pumping gas in the local garage, and then off to West Point for the endless series of grueling entrance tests. The biggest moment was when the letter popped into the box. He was admitted. Now all he had to do was work his butt off some more, and he’d been a real, live military officer. He intended to enter the survey branch. He wanted to study archaeology after his military service, and maybe he could take a second career as a college professor. Everyone loved a soldier, well, most people did. The Vietnam days were long gone, and now it was a profession that people admired, as they should. He’d missed the cut for the engineers, and instead had been assigned to infantry. They told him that he’d be posted to Fort Benning. ‘There’s plenty to survey down there, Second Lieutenant. It’s a big place. Keep your head down and your nose clean. If a vacancy comes up in the survey branch, you’ll be the first to know’. That was fine with him. He’d go wherever he was sent. At least he wasn’t sweating his ass off in some foreign hellhole. They were bringing the boys back from those places, since the war was over in Iraq, and Kosovo that was a tiny police action. And they wouldn’t send him to Afghanistan, not a fledgling second lieutenant. They wanted real soldiers over there, not nerds like him. He sometimes wished he was a bit tougher, but maybe it saved him from some of the, let’s face it, more uncomfortable assignments. When they wanted a warrior, they were inclined to overlook him. He remembered that mom and dad had got up early to go to church, as it was Sunday, so he picked up the phone.