ASSASSINS

by Mike Bond

  His breath was wet and hot inside the mask; his beard itched. His goggles fogged, the Red Light danced. Buzzing filled his ears, his stomach was an aching hole. The plane shivered, the ramp cracked open, began to drop. Air sucked past. Beyond was black. A styrofoam cup scuttled down the fuselage and blasted out the ramp. The JM gave the Salute Command: Move to the Rear.

  Jack switched on his bailout oxygen and disconnected from the plane’s oxygen console. This was what happened when you got executed, you numbly stood up and let them put a bullet through you.

  The JM gave the thumbs up Stand By Command and Jack gave it back. He thought of his father in the chopper, his father’s Golden Rule: “Do what you say, and say what you do.” Keep your word, and speak the truth. So when you die you’ve lived the way you should.

  The Green Light flashed on. The JM swung his arm toward the hole and Owen McPhee dropped into the darkness. A second later Neil Gustafson. Then Sean Loxley.

  Jack halted on the ramp. You’re going to die. That’s all. The JM swung down his arm. Jack arched his back and dove into the night.

  Tao of War

  HE SLAMMED into the plane’s wake, spinning wildly, stars flashing past, flung out his arms into the Stable Free Fall Position but the off-balanced Strela made him spin faster. Tumbling in a dizzy spiral he was icing up, had to Maintain Altitude Awareness, couldn’t see his altimeter. Cold bit through his gloves into his fingers and into his elbows and knees where the jumpsuit was tight.

  You drop a thousand feet every five seconds. How long had he fallen? He hunched to balance the pack but that made him spin worse. He shoved the chute left to offset the Strela and combat pack; the tumbling slowed, the huge white-black Hindu Kush rushing up. Grabbing his left wrist he pushed the altimeter button. 29,000: he’d dropped ten thousand already. But in a few seconds, at 25,000, he could deploy the chute.

  Safe now. Thicker air hissed past, the black ridges and white cliffs of the Death Mountains rising fast. To the east, behind him now, Chitral Valley and Pakistan. To the west the snowy peaks, barren slopes and desert valleys of Afghanistan.

  27,500. He couldn’t see the red chemlites on the others’ suits. But no one had broken silence. So they’re fine too. We made it. He felt a warm happiness, the fear receding.

  26,500. He reached for the main ripcord handle.

  25,250. He pulled the ripcord; the pilot chute yanked out the main bag and he lurched into a wide down-pulling arc. Tugging the steering toggles he swung in a circle but still couldn’t see chemlites, only frozen Bandakur mountain rising toward him, the snow-thick valleys eight thousand feet below, dim lights to the east that could be the village of Sang Lech. He lined up to fly northwest across Bandakur so he’d hit the DZ on the mountain’s western flank. The stars above the black dome of his chute were thick as milk. The great peaks climbed past him, entombed in ice. He sucked in oxygen, felt peace.

  A huge force smashed into him collapsing his chute; he somersaulted tangled in another chute, somebody spinning on its lines. “Cutaway!” he screamed. They looped around again, caught in the lines. Jack wrenched an arm free but that spun him the other way, the tangled chutes swung him down and the other man up then the stars were below him so for an instant he thought he was falling into space. He yanked the chute releases and dropped away from the tangled chutes, accelerating in free fall till with a great whoof the reserve chute jerked him up and the tangled chutes whistled past, the man wrapped in them. “Cutaway!” Jack screamed into his radio. “This is Tracker. Cutaway!”

  “This is Domino,” McPhee said. “What’s your situation?”

  “Tracker this is Silver,” Loxley said. “I can’t see you. Over.”

  “Come in, Whiskey!” Jack yelled at Gustafson. “If you’re caught, cut away the main chute and deploy reserve. Maintain Altitude Awareness. Cut away!”

  His hands had frozen. “Whiskey!” he screamed, “what’s your situation?”

  He switched off his oxygen. Below was a tiny chemlite. “Whiskey,” McPhee radioed Gustafson. “Do you read me?”

  Rocky ridges coming up fast. If Gustafson hadn’t deployed his reserve he’d have hit by now. A fierce wind was blowing snow off the peaks; they had to land into it. Short of the DZ, way short. Maybe in the boulders. Bend your knees. Roll with the fall. He snapped off his chemlite.

  “Whiskey,” McPhee radioed. “Do you read me?”

  Bend your knees. Loosen shoulders. Adjust rifle so it doesn’t smash ribs on impact. The ground raced up. He dropped the combat pack and Strela. The mountain slammed into him; he tumbled backward his head smashing boulders. He leaped up and scrambled downhill unbuckling the chute harness and stamping on the chute, dragged it together and knelt on it.

  A steep stony slope, wind screaming, shaly rock clattering down. He snatched off his helmet and clutched his head, blood hot between his fingers, the pain unbearable. He untaped his rifle, checked the safety. “Tracker here,” he whispered, gripping his skull to hold in the agony. He feared his skull was broken, the way the blood poured out. “Touchdown. Over.”

  “Silver here,” Loxley answered. “TD. Over.”

  “Domino here,” McPhee said raggedly. “TD. Over.”

  “Whiskey!” Jack called. Silence, hissing of wind in the radio. “Stow your chutes in your packs and link up,” he told them. “Look for my chemlite. Over.”

  “Domino here,” McPhee said. “Come to me. Over.”

  “I want us uphill.” Jack gritted his teeth. “Get up here.”

  “Hurt,” McPhee grunted. “Not going anywhere.”

  The blood running out Jack’s nose had frozen in his moustache. Clutching his skull he steadily descended the slope, each step jolting new agony into his head. When he reached McPhee, Loxley was already there. “Goddamn rocks,” McPhee groaned. “Goddamn leg.”

  Clamping a light in his teeth Loxley eased off McPhee’s boot. “Tibia and fibula both broken.”

  Behind the wind Jack heard a faint rumble through swirling snow. How could a helicopter be up here at night? “Wrap it,” he snapped. “Chopper!”

  “Can’t see us in this,” Loxley yelled into the wind. “What happened?”

  “Gus hit me from above,” Jack yelled back, making the pain worse. “About eighteen. We tangled. I cut away at the top.”

  “He streamed,” McPhee said, as if stating the worst might prevent it. He gripped his radio. “Whiskey! Do you read me?”

  “Stop sending!” Jack said. “We’ll get the Russians on us.” He stuffed all their jump gear under a boulder and jammed it with snow. Now except for their Spetsnaz watches, Russian field glasses, AKs, pistols, and Strelas, everything they had was Afghani. “Leave the channel open. In fifteen minutes try again.”

  “Gus is our medic,” Loxley yelled. “Owen’s got a broken leg. If we abort, try for Pakistan –”

  “Abortion’s for girls,” McPhee snarled. “We find Gus.”

  Jack thought of Gus falling tangled in his chutes, icy rock racing up. “If his reserve didn’t open his body’s way behind us and there’s nothing we can do. If it opened he’s somewhere on this ridge.”

  The radio buzzed, stuttered. “That’s him!” McPhee said. “Whiskey!” he coaxed. “Come in Whiskey...”

  The radio was silent. One man gone, another injured. Jack’s head pounded like a jackhammer. He’d failed, the mission screwed before it even started. He broke away the chunks of frozen blood clogging his nose and mouth, slung McPhee’s rifle over his own, and pulled McPhee up.

  “You asshole,” McPhee hissed, “you’re bleeding.”

  “Bit my tongue when I landed,” Jack spit a dark streak on the snow. “No big deal.”

  Loxley shouldered McPhee’s combat pack, stumbling under the weight, stood and looped the Strela tube over his other shoulder. “Where to, Boss?”

  “We find a place to stow Owen,” Jack said. “Then we find Gus. Before the Russians do.”

  WITH McPHEE HOBBLING between them they climbed Bandakur’s sout
h ridge through howling snow that froze in their beards and drove icicles through their coats. Every fifteen minutes they tried the radio but there was no sound from Gus.

  It was worse than Jack could have imagined; they might not live, let alone complete the mission. Pakistan seemed the only choice. If they could get McPhee back across the Kush without being caught by the Soviets or Pakis. He saw Ackerman’s taut angry face. You didn’t do what we trained you for.

  “It’s not to put you in shape that we drive you so hard,” Ackerman had told them in Sin City, speaking of the five a.m. runs with full packs, the crawling on hands and toes under machine gun fire, the rappelling down cliffs and buildings. “You men were already hard as steel when you came here.”

  “Not McPhee,” Loxley snickered, “he’s never been hard at all.”

  Ackerman ignored him. “It’s so you know you can do them. Once you’ve done them, even in training, you’ll know in Afghanistan you can endure almost anything...”

  “And you’re going to learn everything you can about ordnance,” Captain Perkins added. “From Makarovs to SA-7s, about setting ambushes and nailing a guy in the head at eight hundred yards. How to set Claymores and dig pit traps, how to get the jugular when you cut a throat, how to recognize Soviet infantry units and tell a T-72 tank from the later T-72S, and the RPG-7 from the RPG-16. And no, RPG does not stand for ‘rocket-propelled grenade’. It’s Russian for rocket anti-tank grenade launcher – Reactiviniyi Protivotankovyi Granatomet, and I want you girls to know how to spell that.”

  “We’ve been agitating these damn Afghanis for years,” Ackerman said, “fed them fanatic Islamic stuff till we finally got a fundamentalist government going in Kabul and the Soviets had to come in, for their whole soft Muslim underbelly – Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, and all that oil – was at risk. Now,” he’d added, “We’re going to do to them in Afghanistan what they did to us in Vietnam. We’re going to bleed them dry.”

  Now the peaks blocking the stars and the sheer icy canyons filled Jack with a vast, desolate despair. It was a perfect place to bleed and die.

  “The Special Forces man is the essence,” Ackerman said, “of the Art of War. He’s not where he appears to be, nor what he appears to be. He strikes where and when the enemy’s not ready. He inflicts great harm with few resources because he is the Tao of War.”

  “The SF man,” said Perkins, “makes losing part of the enemy’s fate.”

  Jack smiled, shook his head. “That is such bullshit.”

  “Someday, if you’re good enough,” Levi Ackerman had answered, “it won’t be.”

  Now within two months they had to report to Ackerman in Rawalpindi. Even if Gus was dead, they might still be able to reach Jack’s old village, Edeni, where people would care for McPhee. Then Jack could find his former enemy Wahid al-Din, now a famous warlord fighting the Soviets. They could still start a third front uniting the Afghani opposition...

  He took a breath, bit back the agony in his head, spit a clot of blood snatched by the wind. “Edeni,” he yelled. “Even if we can’t find Gus we’re going to Edeni.”

  Morphine

  WAHID AL-DIN followed his squad of fourteen mujihadeen in darkness from their cave in the hills below Bandakur down the defile of the Varduj River toward the Soviet encampment outside Sang Lech.

  The men moved quietly, just a hiss of footfalls on the hard-packed trail, the rustle of worn leather and padded coats, the clink of a rifle buckle where a tape had worn through.

  After midnight they reached the River valley and the narrow road from Khoran to Ishasshim on the Pakistani border. At the ruins of a bombed farmhouse they dashed across the road and turned north through an overgrown apple orchard then untended fields of oats and barley, stepping single-file behind a man who knew the way between the land mines.

  In a few places where farmers had tried to harvest crops there were pits where mines had exploded. It irritated Wahid that the farmers were such fools – only poppies were worth lives, the lives of orphans sent out to pick the ripened husks.

  Mines had no significance except you avoided some areas or tried to entice the enemy into them. Eventually the crops would come back. That, like everything else, was God’s decision. For the grain that ye sow, do ye cause it to spring forth, or do I?

  He thought of the Soviet soldiers sleeping in their tents along the River outside Sang Lech, their officers billeted in the farms on the edge of town. In a few minutes these farmers would lose their eternal lives, for hadn’t they consorted with the enemies of Islam? They shall have garments of fire fitted on them, and boiling water poured on their heads and their bowels rent asunder, and also their skins, and they shall be beaten with maces of iron. They’d read the Koran. They couldn’t say they didn’t know.

  Bitter wind moaned down from the white cliffs of Bandakur. The River was high and icy. He wanted to fire from here at the Soviet tents on the other bank and then run, but his men had too few bullets. Nine of his seventeen men had old bolt-action .303 Enfields and a handful of cartridges. The rest had Soviet AK-47s but only a hundred twenty-four rounds of 7.62 mm cartridges total, barely half a 30-round magazine each. No, they had to move closer, kill fast and take what arms they could before surviving Soviets could reach their tanks and open up with their machine guns.

  Wahid waved his men down the gravelly bank into the fast-moving water. I was nothing, he reminded himself, until this war. Now he might control the Panjshir when the Soviets left. I must be careful not to die before then.

  The River rocks were cold and slippery, but moving carefully behind his men he did not founder. He reached the far bank two hundred yards from the nearest Soviet tents, his men moving forward through the willows.

  He let them go ahead – he was needed back here in case anything went wrong. Someone yelled and he dove into the grass. Gunfire rang out, the Soviets shouting. A grenade exploded and his heart congealed. A bullet snapped past his ear and he squirmed lower into the grass clawing the dirt.

  A man scrambled from the first tent. Wahid sprayed rounds at him, afraid he might miss and the man would kill him. Amid the horrid thunder of guns, voices in Russian and Kazakh, Wahid crawled forward to grab the man’s pistol and the man fired, the bullet searing Wahid’s side. Moaning he bellied back through the willows toward the River.

  Tanks rumbled, rifles chattered, machine guns snarled, flares flashed shadows and bullets whacked past. He fell down the cutbank losing his rifle. Fearing to cross the open water he ran splashing downriver till the rumble of guns and tanks faded behind him.

  The Russian’s bullet had burnt a crease along his waist. It stung terribly but there was no blood. Morphine. Back at the cave there was morphine.

  At a bend in the River he crawled across, soaking his coat that froze as he climbed the canyon above the trail. Below in the starlight he saw the dark shapes of his men cross the River and jog up the trail. Eleven – only six lost, though several seemed wounded. He would wait then come up behind them saying You left me behind to fight alone.

  Far away a whack-whack-whack nearing fast. Three helicopters thundered around the mountain; their white-red flares caught out his men like puppets on a string, their machine guns stitching them to earth. So faraway, a game really, how they fell.

  Wahid squirmed tighter into the rocks. The helicopters drifted down and settled among his men, monstrous wasps in the flares’ flickering gleam. Now and again the wind carried up to him the bang of a pistol as the Soviets finished off a wounded man. Then like sated vultures the helicopters flew away.

  Shaking with fear and cold he huddled there a long time then descended timidly and searched the dead till he found a new AK and trotted back up the trail toward the cave. At the cave he could get morphine. To kill this awful pain. Then he’d tell everyone how his men had deserted him and were annihilated by the helicopters because they’d run from battle.

  There had to be a way to kill the helicopters.

  Or he would fail and neve
r control the Panjshir.

  How could God want that?

  IN THE KABUL CLINIC of Médecins Sans Frontières, Sophie Dassault knelt beside a shepherd boy with lovely eyes and a gray pinched face, his golden hair sweaty with agony, both legs and one arm gone, shards of metal jutting from his belly and chest. Why was it always children who stepped on mines? And not the men who planted them?

  A voice called her, Didier the nurse. “Man named Ahmad for you, Doctor.”

  “Tell him wait.” She touched the boy’s face. “Au revoir, mon cher tout petit Prince –”

  The boy’s eyes caught hers and she saw he knew no miracle would save him. It didn’t matter she spoke French for now he understood all language, knew like the Little Prince that words are the source of all misunderstandings. She tightened the tourniquet around his one arm, held up the syringe with its five milligrams of morphine, flicked it to clear it of air that could cause an embolism, tried to find a vein, waited just a second for the strength to do it and pushed the plunger home.

  “Wait a little, just under a star,” she whispered, words she’d heard so often as a little girl, “If a child comes, if he laughs, if he has golden hair...” She recapped the needle and softly tousled his hair, thinking his last human touch, held his hand as if he were her only son, felt the pulse soften as his breathing slowed and stilled, waited for the pulse to stop.

  “He’s yours,” she said to the crippled old man who with his retarded nephew was responsible for dragging corpses from their cots and carrying them to Kabul’s graveyard of wrecked cars where an artillery shell had made a hole big enough to shove in the bodies. She stepped out of the tent’s stench of kerosene, hydrogen peroxide, bile, and blood, and looked up at the stars. “If You existed, and I could get my hands on You, I’d kill You!”

  She seemed to float from the ground and looking down saw herself in her dirty gown, long-limbed and thin, with her tangled auburn hair and long face. Didier called her again. “This man Ahmad says it’s urgent.”