Cobra Strike (24 page)

She had shouted at him on all previous occasions and it hadn’t gotten her anywhere. In Yekaterina’s opinion a fully meant
and fairly dire threat should be spoken very softly so that the person being threatened had to strain to hear the details.

She went on, “General Viktor Mikhailovich Kudimov has sent for me, and one of his aides has warned me that it’s about an assignment
in the Arctic. I just want you to be
ready, Lieutenant, to assume your duties under my command at this new location in the very near future.”

She thought for a moment that there was no one at the other end of the line until a strangled sob confirmed for her that her
message had been received and would be acted on. The lieutenant would have heard that that swine Viktor Mikhailovich had arrived.
The general was the closest thing to Stalinist purges they had in the Red Army these days. His victims still disappeared into
the Arctic but to army outposts instead of work camps. And like survivors of the Gulag, they returned after only many years,
broken men and women, content to live in obscure villages on tiny pensions. The Arctic was no place for a woman of her beauty
and brains, yet she knew that neither her beauty nor her brains would save her if she failed General Kudimov. It was typical
of him to have the subject of his interview with her deliberately leaked to her by an aide. He would thus expect her to come
prepared to defend herself.

She hung up the receiver while the lieutenant was in the middle of a long litany of reassurances, glanced at her wristwatch,
checked herself in the mirror, and left her small private room in the military base for the office the visiting general was
using. She arrived punctually and was shown in. The general sat on an easy chair, smoking a cigarette, glasses and a bottle
of vodka beside him on a side table. He courteously asked her to sit down and offered her a drink and a smoke, which she politely
refused. She tried not to look back into his gray eyes, magnified by his steel-rimmed spectacles, as he sat there and calmly
looked her over.

“Tell me, Comrade Colonel,” he finally said, “how your views differ from those of army intelligence on these three American
infiltrators. Do you agree that they are Americans?”

“Without doubt, Comrade General. I generally support our intelligence profile of the three. They are not a unit trained specially
to operate behind our lines. Their behavior is much too erratic for them to be regular soldiers; in fact, their unpredictability
has helped them against us. If we have one fault as a military force, General, I think you will agree that it is our predictability.
I have been trying to shake up our field officers to be more innovative in their search for
these men, but all most of them do is come down with a heavier hand in the same old way. I say this to you confidentially,
General, and it is in no way a criticism of the Red Army or of the brave and dedicated soldiers under your command.”

“I appreciate your frankness, Colonel,” he said. “Where are the three Americans now?”

“They have vanished, Comrade General.”

“Vanished?”

“Into some hillside cave or a hut in a mountain village. We are using ground sweeps over the entire region to flush them out.”

“With no results so far?”

“None yet.”

“Perhaps they have left the region,” he suggested.

“I hope they have,” she responded. “Word will soon come to us. When they travel, they are most vulnerable.”

“You agree that intelligence is right to discount the rumors of more armed Americans in the region?”

She smiled scornfully at this notion. “Already these three infiltrators are being credited with the most fantastic victories
over Soviet forces, victories in which hundreds of our men have died—”

“Somebody is killing them,” the general said, interrupting tersely.

“Gul Daoud is, and all the other bandit leaders loose in the mountains, yet these three Americans get credited with actions
hundreds of miles from where we know they were definitely located on a particular date—”

“That would seem to support the stories of more Americans in the region,” the general said, interrupting again.

“I’m certain it’s merely a result of the myth that has built up around these Western adventurers. The Afghan bandits are religious
and superstitious. They need to believe in a miraculous American intervention in this struggle, and so they multiply everything
the Americans do in order to make them look like gods who can confront Soviet power.”

“That may be so, Colonel,” the general said in a voice that made it clear he was keeping other possibilities open. “Now you
have spoken frankly with me, which I
welcome, and so I will take my turn in being frank with you. The other senior officers here have all steered clear of any
responsibility for the capture of these three Americans, leaving all the burden to you, as well as all the credit for success,
of course.”

“As soon as these three are captured, all those officers will be standing ready to accept congratulations for the success,”
Yekaterina said bitterly. “You will find me standing in the second row.”

“Not if you are successful,” General Kudimov said with a smile. “I will personally see to it that you get full recognition.
Do you accept the assignment?”

Yekaterina saw the trap. These man were palming off an unfamiliar challenge on her, unsure of how to handle it themselves
anymore. The general himself was covering his own ass as much as the senior officers by having her as someone to point at
if things went wrong.

“Yes, I accept,” she said, determined to show these slothful, cowardly men what she could do.

“You will have to go into the field yourself,” the general said. “No more sitting at a desk and talking on the telephone.”

Yekaterina knew in an instant that he had already heard a tape of her phone conversation with the lieutenant, just before
she came to see him. That had been fast. “If I fail, I will be sent to Siberia to count the birch trees.”

He nodded.

“But if I succeed—”

“Full recognition and promotion.”

She smiled.

Without moving from the armchair he fiddled with the front of his pants and pulled out his erect dick. He beckoned to her
to come and kneel beside him.

The mercs’ rebel contacts on the far side of the river had been in hiding and had witnessed how the team avenged the boy’s
death under the Soviet tank. They embarrassed the mercs by their adulation and embraces, their constant singsong praise and
instant willingness to do anything for their heroes.

“We’ve hit them right in a soft spot,” Jed Crippenby
explained. “They saw us avenge a wrong against them. They feel like an American would if you walked up to him and handed
him a million dollars in the street. Like the American, they are amazed, overjoyed, and not quite sure what it all means.
For the Pathans, or Pashtuns as they are often called here in Afghanistan, we have behaved according to their code of honor,
which they call
pashtunwali
. The three parts of this code of honor are
milmastia, badal
, and
manawatai
, namely hospitality, blood revenge, and sanctuary. We’ve all seen everyone’s hospitality to us-they literally give a stranger
the last piece of bread in the house and starve themselves. And since you can demand sanctuary from one group when another
group is after you for blood revenge, I suppose everything works out in the end somehow. So what we did was
badal
, blood revenge, something they don’t usually expect from Westerners.”

While the men had joked at Crippenby’s mini-lectures at first, they all now listened very carefully to them. Jed still might
be a library-bound intellectual, yet he only opened his mouth when he had something interesting to say.

Harvey Waller urged his horse forward among the rebel guides and yelled, “
Badal! Badal!
” and waved his Kalashnikov.

The rebels repeated his cries and added some more of their own. Harvey dropped back to ask Jed what they were saying about
him. These were just Muslim prayers and war cries, but Jed didn’t want to let Harvey down.

“They say you’re the greatest since John Wayne,” Jed told him.

Harvey looked at him doubtfully. “They know who John Wayne was?”

“I’m telling you what they’re saying.”

After that, Harvey was smiling and friendly to everyone all day. At one point he told Mike he had developed a new respect
for the Afghan people.

They moved slowly north on horseback. Mike had bought the horses from Gul Daoud and intended to give them as a gift to their
new guides when the team switched to some faster form of transportation. All going well, their journey would involve two hundred
miles to the north, two hundred
west, and another two hundred or more southwest to Herat, the Afghan city not far from the Iranian border. Twenty miles a
day on horseback over this rough terrain would be good going, so this journey on horseback would take about a month. That
was hardly Pony Express standards, but it was probably a reasonable estimate, considering unforeseen difficulties, lack of
fresh horses, etc. The great advantage of going horseback was the ability to stay off the main roads, which were mostly held
by communist forces during daylight hours.

But they could never expect to survive their Russian hunters for an entire month. Their loss of fast movement through going
on horseback would give the Soviets plenty of time to prepare for their arrival in advance. They needed some kind of rapid
transport and would have to use the major roads, depending on the Russians not expecting them to provide them with a clear
passage.

Mike had asked the guides to bring them to the main road that led northward from the capital city of Kabul. Kabul, by far
the most Westernized city in Afghanistan, was a stronghold of Afghan communists and their Red Army supporters. The team had
stayed south of the city and then cut to the north about forty miles west of Kabul. The road north followed the course of
the Kunduz River, and Mike planned to join it east of the Shibar Pass. They made their farewells with, the rebels close to
the road, gave them the horses, and had them wait in concealment at a distance until the mercs commandeered a vehicle north.

They watched at a steep uphill grade where trucks traveling north had to climb slowly in low gear. The traffic was sparse,
and most of it was military trucks and personnel carriers traveling in small convoys. Then they saw what they wanted—a lone
truck, painted green and white, with large Arabic writing on it. Jed grinned but said nothing. Harvey Waller stepped into
the roadway in front of the approaching truck and looked along the sights of the RPG2 launcher tube on his right shoulder.
There was no escape for the truck toiling uphill. The driver pulled onto the side of the road, and he and his coworker climbed
down out of the cab and put their hands in the air, talking together in a frightened
squabble in Pushtu to Waller. They were both Westernized Afghans, without turbans or other head covering and in the same
T-shirts, jeans, and running shoes Waller would expect to see in Jersey City.

“I can see these bastards are commies,” Waller snarled. “Why don’t one of youse guys snuff them? Or do you want me to do it?”

“Harvey, they say they are for the rebels,” Jed said. “They know we’re Americans and they’re pointing out that they work for
an American company. This is a Coca-Cola truck that we’ve stopped. Coke had to change its usual red-colored trucks to the
Islamic green and white because a lot of backcountry rebels would just assume that a bright red truck was Russian and open
fire on it.”

Waller wasn’t convinced until he saw the crates of Coke in the back of the truck.

“Let’s move out,” Mike shouted. “We’ve been here long enough. Now that they know we’re Americans, we’ll have to take these
two men with us and decide what to do with them at the other end.”

Joe Nolan drove, Campbell and Crippenby beside him. The rest made room for themselves as best they could among the crates
in the back of the truck, and the vehicle resumed its slow uphill pull toward the Shibar Pass.

Yunis Latifi and his two remaining children huddled in the bomb shelter he had dug with his own hands close to his house.
His wife and youngest son had been dead almost a year now, from a bomb dropped on them while they walked in a nearby field.
This morning he had heard a plane searching in the nearby valleys, and he had gathered his son of six and daughter of four
into his arms and rushed to the hole he had dug with a massive, flat boulder for its roof. This bomb shelter was close neither
to the house nor to his crops, both frequent targets for planes sweeping through the valley. At last they heard the plane
scream down low overhead, and they put their fingers in their ears to deaden the sound of the bombs. But no explosions came.
When it became clear that the aircraft was not returning, Yunis emerged and searched for an unexploded bomb. He found
nothing and decided that the plane had not considered the place worth attacking. He called the children up out of the shelter
and told them to care for the sheep and lambs while he worked in his fields.

Many of the people in the area had fled to Pakistan, although the men came back to fight and die for these hills, which belonged
to them. Yunis had been one of those who had refused to move his family, preferring to die or live on the soil he and his
forefathers had tilled rather than eke out an existence and dwell in a tent in a squalid camp across the border. He had been
badly shaken when his wife and youngest child were killed. He blamed himself for not taking them to a refugee camp. But still
he did not take his two remaining children to a camp, feeling deep down that they would all be happier defending what was
theirs at any cost, rather than scavenge from day to day as refugees.

The six-year-old boy helped his four-year-old sister along the twisting sheep path on the hillside above the field in which
their father stooped, weeding between rows of young corn. His sister was the first to see them. She struggled to free herself
from her brother’s hand so she could run and pick up one of the treasures that had appeared as if by magic on the lonely hillside.
She wanted the small, brightly colored plastic butterfly; he, the toy truck.