Cobra Strike (23 page)

The other team members took it in their stride when they heard they were going back to the States by way of Iran. They knew
Mike. If he had said they were going by way of the South Pole, that would have been okay with them. Turner, Winston, and Baker
didn't take the news so well. Baker claimed that going from Afghanistan into Iran was like going from the pan into the fire.
Winston suggested that maybe Campbell hadn't heard that Iran was a disaster for Americans. Turner just said they weren't going
and that was that. They were even less pleased when Crippenby handed each of them papers from the Nanticoke Institute, which
informed them that they now reported to Campbell until further notice.

“We could quit the Institute,” Baker suggested.

“You try to quit and I'll kick your ass,” Turner informed him. “I'm here to bring you turkeys back in one piece, and I'm going
to do it whether you like it or not. I don't agree with Campbell that we should go through Iran, but I still follow orders
even if I think they're cockamamie ones. We got to have a leader. So if I have to choose between you, Baker, and Campbell
here, I gotta go with Campbell—maybe only because I don't know him as well as I know you, Baker.”

“Thanks, Turner, I appreciate that,” Baker snapped back. “I have no ambition to be anyone's leader. I'm quite willing to follow
Mike's orders—when I think they make sense.
Any way you look at it, going through Iran makes no sense.”

“It does if your only alternative is going through the Soviet Union,” Mike put in. “Now, I'm not going to tell you the places
this team has been, but some of them have been at least as hot as Iran. But this is all beside the point, Baker. Like Turner
told you, he'll obey orders even if he doesn't like them. That's the way it has to be on a paramilitary mission. You try to
hold a round-table discussion when you feel you have a point to argue, you're liable to get us all killed. When I tell you
to get your head down, you don't ask why, or the answer may be on its way in the form of an enemy bullet. If I can't depend
on you to do what you're told, I can't be sure that what I think is happening really is happening. We could all get hurt real
bad if you're not doing what you're supposed to be doing at some point because you had a better idea. And I want to say something
else. I came here to bring you three guys out, so you assume. Right? You're being brought out not because you're sweet guys
and everyone misses you in the cafeteria at lunchtime—you're being brought out because you'd be an embarrassment to Washington
if the Reds caught you here, dead or alive. So far as Washington is concerned, I've done my job as long as I erase all presence
of you three in Afghanistan. No matter how I do it. If I have to, I'll shoot any one of you for not obeying orders and burn
the body with gasoline so the Russians can't say it was an American. I'll get paid. No questions will be asked. So all this
discussion is bullshit. You have your orders. You report to me. You make a problem for me, I'll make a bigger one for you.”

Baker was shaken when he realized that Campbell would do exactly what he said he would do. No one had come here to rescue
him personally—only to extricate three Americans from a potentially politically embarrassing situation for Washington, since
everyone would assume that they were CIA agents if they were caught. Baker looked at the team of mercenaries and decided he
had been wrong in his first impression of these men as good guys on a mission of mercy. They were paid assassins, irresponsible
psychopaths
or sociopaths, disturbed violent types who would have to be humored. It would be up to Winston, Turner, and himself to use
them until they were no longer useful, then dump them and strike out on their own.

Gul Daoud gave them all a farewell meal of mutton-and-yogurt dishes washed down with tea. Baker and Winston promised him surface-to-air
weapons as a special priority of the Nanticoke Institute. It was plain, Baker said, that when the Russians lost their total
dominance in the air, this war would become too punishing in casualties for them to fight. Even as it was, they had taken
an estimated ten thousand fatalities. Of course, this was nothing in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of deaths they
had caused, mostly of civilians, and the approximately three million refugees they had made out of a total population of fifteen
million. He said that the estimated one hundred fifteen thousand Soviet servicemen presently in Afghanistan were being used
to prop up the unpopular puppet communist government and that they were totally dependent on their air power to destroy food
supplies and houses in order to starve the population into submission or drive them into exile.

Gul Daoud thanked them all for their help. As they were leaving, he asked Baker and Winston, as a special favor, to check
on the status of his loan at Chase Manhattan for his fast-food chicken place in the Bronx.

Campbell saw Baker pointedly consult his compass several times, although the sun was full out and he didn’t need a compass
needle to tell him they were riding north toward Russia instead of west toward Iran. Campbell let him sweat it out. Winston
and Turner were keeping their mouths shut also, leaving it to Baker to do any challenging that was to be done. Campbell waited
for Baker to confront him, but the most Baker was willing to do was to whip out his compass from time to time, look at it
and then at the sun in a puzzled fashion, shake his head as if the sun and his compass must be wrong and Mike Campbell right,
yet keep his tongue quiet on the subject and submit to Campbell as leader. Which was all Campbell wanted. That settled, he
had no wish to be unreasonable by demanding that anyone follow him blindly without hope of an explanation.

Mike rode his horse into a central position so they could all hear him. “Some of you must be wondering where in hell we’re
going. And you got to figure out that if you don’t know, neither will the Russians.” He let that sink in. “We all know the
Russians are going to be able to trace our
movements, and our best hope is to keep a bit ahead of them. They’ll find out from their informants that we’re heading north.
They’ll figure out we’re doing this so we can swing east toward Pakistan, and they’ll respond accordingly, tying up a lot
of their troops on the ground hundreds of miles from where we’re going. Apart from ourselves, only Gul Daoud knows we intend
to swing west toward Iran just short of the Russian border and follow that border, at a safe distance, all the way across
the Iranian border.

“Why do this when there’s a road running west to east across Afghanistan, from Kabul to Herat? Because as soon as we set foot
on it, the Russians would know exactly where we were going and easily head us off. This way we’ll keep them guessing. And
I’m betting on getting a head start during the time it takes them to discover us. They have unlimited power and resources
working for them, against our mobility and the surprise factor. Right now the Russians don’t even know the team exists. They’re
still hunting three trapped Americans. I’d like to keep them believing that as long as we can.”

Winston laughed. “That’s not bad at all, Mike. Maybe the Russians will think we’re on our way north to attack the Soviet Union.”

Andre Verdoux said, “Don’t put thoughts like that in Campbell’s mind. We don’t call him Mad Mike for nothing.”

They all laughed, except Baker, who was resentful of having been put in his place and deserted, as he saw it, by Winston and
Turner.

The three-man rebel escort, provided by Gul Daoud, had ridden ahead and now returned, gesturing to them to slow their horses.
They explained things to Crippenby.

Jed said, “There’s a lone Russian tank ahead, on the other side of the river. They only take us as far as this river, and
we pick up our new guides as arranged on the far side. Instead there’s a Russian tank sitting there. But our guides don’t
think we’ve been betrayed. They say that the river is swollen with water from the melting mountain snows, and judging by the
banks, the flood was higher and is dying down fast. They think that the bridge must have been weakened by the flood and couldn’t
take the tank’s weight,
so it had to leave the main road and come to this ford while the rest of the truck convoy or whatever went on without it.
The river water is still high and very dirty, so the soldiers in the tank can’t find exactly where the ford is and can’t find
anyone to tell them. So they’re just sitting there waiting, which is what we’ll have to do, too, until they go away.”

They hid the horses among a big clump of bushes, where there was grass for them to eat, and then went forward on foot to investigate
the riverbank. From their hiding places they could see the tank dominating the far side. The river was about the width of
a six-lane highway, and its fast-moving brown waters wove in and out in currents and eddies. It was plainly deep enough to
swamp a tank’s engine and probably drown its occupants as well.

While they were keeping watch, one of their rebel guides came back from a reconnoitering trip along the riverbank—Mike wanted
all the non-Afghans to stay out of sight as much as possible. The rebel said that there were local people hidden on the same
bank of the river as they were, wanting to cross but unwilling to reveal the location of the ford to the Soviet tank crew.
He confirmed their earlier guess about why the tank had been left behind. The locals had seen Russians, not Afghans, in the
tank, but there were no other soldiers remaining in the area. Mike was relieved to hear this and said they would wait for
the water to subside and the tank to leave. They made themselves comfortable and opened their C rations.

A man arrived on a black horse at the far bank of the river, about three hundred yards upstream from the tank, which he ignored.
They could see he wore a long brown robe, had a pointed black beard and a very large white turban, and carried a black lamb
before him on the saddle. Behind his horse, on foot, a boy drove a black mother sheep and her second lamb. The boy waited
with these two animals while his father rode his horse into the river. By keeping the horse’s head upstream against the current,
he walked the animal slowly across the ford. As he went, the mother sheep left behind answered the calls of the lamb midway
across the river and ran back and forth between the water’s edge and the other lamb she had with her on dry
land, the conflict of both their calls driving her hysterically back and forth.

The man on horseback dropped the lamb close to where the team was hidden and then returned slowly across the river. His son
caught the second lamb and handed it up to him. This time the ewe did not hesitate; she plunged into the water after the horse
but, being a much weaker swimmer, was washed downriver a distance before gaining the opposite bank. The man on horseback dropped
the second lamb and went back across the river for his son. While he did so, the ewe ran up die bank to have a loud, bleating
reunion with her offspring. The son put his foot on his father’s left boot, and together they forded the river on horseback.
The whole thing was like something from an ancient era, were it not for the presence of the silent tank. The Russians waited
for the man and his son to leave before they started the engine and eased the tank slowly into the water at the ford.

When it came clanking out of the water and onto the bank only fifty yards or so from where the mercs were hidden, a small
boy, perhaps twelve at most, appeared from behind some rocks and stood directly in front of the tank, shouting something.
This was not the same boy they had just seen cross the river with his father and the sheep. The mercs could not hear what
the boy was shouting until the tank stopped six feet in front of him and idled its engine.

“
Allahu akbar!
” he was yelling over and over. God is great.

The standoff between the small boy and the tank lasted almost two minutes. Then they heard the tank grind into gear and inch
forward. The boy did not give way, so the tank stopped again, less than four feet from him. The tank driver, obviously having
to obey an order from his superior, lurched the tank forward. With a final “
Allahu akbar!
” the boy did not give way and went under the tank.

Campbell had to restrain Harvey Waller. “The rotten fucking commie whoresons!” he roared. “I don’t believe it, Mike! I don’t
believe you’re going toilet them cold-blooded child murderers go so they can go on doing it.”

Mike took his hand away from Waller’s shoulder. “Okay, Harvey, waste them.”

Lance lifted the shoulder strap of his RPG2 over his head and handed the Soviet-made missile launcher to Harvey. Waller pushed
a six-pound fin-stabilized round into the muzzle of the tube. The tube had an awkward pistol grip near its muzzle end and
was encased in wood so it could be safety placed on the right shoulder but not on the left, since there was a gas-ejection
port on the right side of the tube. Harvey raised the large rear sight and selected the fifty-meter graduation. He operated
the firing pin and bolt, then squeezed the trigger, releasing the HEAT round, capable of penetrating 180mm of armor plate.

Having ground the Afghan child into a boneless pulp in the dirt, the tank rumbled away from the river. The RPG2 round caught
it at the base of the turret, ruptured the steel plates with its impact blast, and, inside the tank, melted the plastic insulation
from the cables and the flesh from the bones of the crew. The tank went off to the right at a sharp angle until it came up
against a big rock, could move no farther forward, and its engine stalled.

Harvey patted the RPG2 launcher tube affectionately. “It’s not such a bad little weapon, even if it is Russian-made.”

Colonel Yekaterina Matveyeva smoothed back her blond hair, crossed her legs in her military skirt, and whispered into the
telephone receiver, “Lieutenant, if you don’t find them for me, you’re going to be guarding ice fields inside the Arctic Circle
from American attack. And not only that, Lieutenant, but I’ll be your superior officer up there, and I won’t let you forget
how your failure to locate three U.S. infiltrators in Afghanistan caused our military careers to end in the snowy wastes.
We will have all those long, dark winters to think about it.”