Cobra Strike (25 page)

The little girl was left-handed, and she picked up the butterfly an instant before the boy reached for the toy truck. The
explosion of the miniature anti-personnel mine disguised as a butterfly blew her hand off at the wrist and burned her body.
Her brother lost his right hand a fraction of a second later.

Yunis jerked upright from his weeding at the sound of the two detonations on the hillside above him. He saw his two small
children sagging to the ground, clutching to them the bleeding stumps at the end of their arms. With a hoarse cry to Allah
he clambered wildly up the hillside to them.

Mike saw the turbaned Afghan holding his two blood-soaked children by the side of the road. Jed listened to his story as they
were helped into the back of the truck, then rejoined Campbell and Nolan in the cab as the truck set off
again. Andre Verdoux was tying tourniquets to stanch the bleeding in the children’s arms and giving them small doses of morphine
to deaden their pain.

“The man says there’s some sort of medical unit off this road farther north,” Jed told Mike. “He says a government hospital
will refuse to treat his kids because they only treat pro-communists. One of the truck drivers says he knows the place, that
it’s at Zari and he’ll show us where to turn off.”

Mike nodded grimly. “We Americans say a lot about talking peace with the Russians and having to rely on their word in negotiations,
but you can’t talk peace with a nation’s government that is willing to manufacture mines in the shape of children’s toys.
It’s not just a matter of differences in political philosophy, it’s a matter of one side observing certain limits of decency
and the other side none. We Americans had instances of individual misconduct in Vietnam, but the manufacturing of mines with
the aim of crippling children is a government policy, not the act of an individual. If you learn nothing else while you’re
with us, Crippenby, I want you to remember what you’ve seen here today.”

They slowly had to round two landslides that almost blocked the road a few miles before the pass. Nolan barely accelerated
out of the way of one of several large boulders that dislodged themselves from the glue of liquid mud and rolled rapidly downhill.
The Shibar Pass was at an altitude of ten thousand feet, and there were still large unmelted patches of snow everywhere. On
the far side of the pass the corn was just emerging on the bare brown hills. The village of Shibar was a lonely group of windswept
houses beneath massive faces of rock. They met frequent convoys of army vehicles and passed through some inactive checkpoints
without being challenged. Dugouts and emplacements by the side of the road at first made them hold their breath till they
had passed by, but after a while they drove nonchalantly past everything, waved cheerfully back when waved at, or looked ahead
stonily if that was the treatment they received.

All of them, except Turner, had full beards and had freshly dyed them black. Under Campbell’s orders Turner had stopped shaving
and dyed his hair, yet somehow he still
managed to look like a U.S. Marine no matter how Campbell tried to disguise him. Winston did not have to be told to stay
out of sight, since even a quick glance would have given away die black American’s presence to observers. At first the Nanticoke
Institute men kept to themselves and even shunned their fellow Institute member, Crippenby. Turner was the first to open up,
and after him, Winston. Only Baker still held himself aloof from the mere team; he silently and sulkily obeyed Campbell’s
orders to the letter and gave nothing more. Baker had once been spokesman for his group, and now he found himself outclassed
in leadership by Campbell and in linguistic knowledge by Crippenby. He had wanted to return a hero, not the object of a rescue
mission. None of the three were aware that they were under the close scrutiny of Andre Verdoux. The Frenchman had given up
many of his other team duties to keep a close watch on them. Campbell and he had not even discussed it. Andre just automatically
took on a thing like this, and Campbell totally, unquestioningly, relied on him.

They turned off to Zari and found the hospital. It was run by a group called Doctors Without. Borders. A young Belgian doctor
was the only M.D. He had three nurses, all young. Like the doctor, one was a Belgian man, and the other two were women, one
Belgian and the other French. The strict Moslems would only allow women to give medical attention to women. When the mercs
arrived, supplies were so low that they were down to using veterinary anesthetics on humans. Mike donated a large part of
the team’s medical supplies. Turner and Nolan had the correct type of blood to give the two children transfusions. The doctor
worked on his patients on a ramshackle kitchen table under a camouflage canvas awning.

Verdoux was ecstatic to meet others who spoke French. They told him that they volunteered for eight months duty and, on their
return, would be paid three hundred dollars for each month.

“Would you treat a Russian?” Andre asked.

“Certainly,” the doctor said. “Anyone who needs medical attention gets it. But I’m afraid no injured Russians have
reached us alive. They always seem to slip off stretchers and take terrible falls before they get here. The Afghans apologize
and say they slipped. What can I say? There are so many steep mountains.”

The team descended from the highlands into flatter, heavily Soviet-occupied country. The road wound down a sinking green plain
covered with prickly clover and tall, bright yellow flowers. Horses and cattle were plentiful, and apparently the Soviets
found less need to use their “scorched-earth” policy in this region. The team was aware that, in the event of trouble, they
might find it much harder to find friends here than among the remote highlands. They passed through the old, fortified towns
of Kunduz and Balkh, whose ancient walls were little more than crumbling mounds in places. All the same, sandbagged barracks
and rolls of barbed wire around enclosures told a different story, that not everything was a charming antique. But they met
no challenge and drove on their way right through enemy-held territory.

Nolan sensed that Campbell was becoming very edgy. “What’s wrong, Mike? Think this is too good to last much longer?”

“Something like that,” Campbell admitted. “So we just keep going until they try to stop us. That’s when the shit
hits the fan. I know they promised that word would not get out at the medical center, and I believe the two Afghan drivers
who say that they will stay in Zari for three days before they report our seizure of their truck. But this many Americans
is very tempting bait to anyone who needs to pick up easy money for information.”

“I bet it don’t happen that way, Mike,” Nolan said. “You know what I bet will happen? Some joker on the roadside will decide
to play the heavy just to do a little power trip on us—not because he’s suspicious of us or anything, but just to give someone
a hard time because he didn’t get laid last night or couldn’t get it up.”

“You think you can handle that, Jed?” Mike asked.

“I’ll try. This is no longer Pathan or Pushtun country here. The people are mostly Uzbek here. They speak a language that’s
close to Turkish, which I speak fairly well, and it’s possible they may take me for one of the other ethnic groups speaking
their tongue. I don’t really know, Mike, what their reaction will be.”

“I think that if anyone tries to stop us,” Nolan said, “we should get Harvey Waller to ‘speak’ to him.”

“You’re right,” Campbell allowed, and had the truck stopped so Waller could be squeezed into the cab along with them.

The road crossed and recrossed the Kunduz River at a few points on old brickwork bridges that showed much flood damage. The
river itself was about sixty yards wide, filled with turbulent, pinkish, muddy snow water sweeping by at high speed, the banks
lined by willows and reedy marshes. They came to one place where a string of more than a hundred loaded camels, many of them
ridden by veiled women, crossed the road. Nolan eased to a stop some distance from them. A plump man in a silk cap and a long
bright blue robe waved them closer. Nolan pretended not to see him. The man shouted and walked toward the truck.

“Here we go,” Nolan muttered.

The plump man in the blue robe was clearly angry at having been made to walk to them. He shouted and gestured at them with
an old bolt-action Lee Enfield rifle. Nolan stared straight ahead, as did Waller next to him, while Jed
leaned across them both and yelled back at the man in die Uzbek language. The man in blue seemed to be having a good time.

Jed gave them a quiet voice-over of what he was saying. “We Pathans are a very stupid, backward, belligerent people, and it
worries Uzbeks like himself that since we are all Sunni Moslems, we will have to share Paradise together. In his opinion we
Pathans will be in the bare, stony parts of Paradise, while Uzbeks will inhabit the river valleys and live beneath fruit trees
with dancing girls. He doesn’t seem to be joking.”

Crippenby said no more in case the man heard him speak English, but the Uzbek was so preoccupied with his own concerns, he
hardly paid any close attention to them. Finally something must have struck him as odd, because he climbed up on the footrest
at the base of the cab door so he could peer inside closely at them. His eye immediately went to the Pakistani rupee notes
Harvey held in his hand; he took them, stepped down on the road, made the notes vanish inside his blue robe with a gesture
a professional magician would have been proud of, waved them on, and mentioned Allah several times. The last of the camels
had cleared the road as the truck resumed its journey and began to pick up speed again.

Nolan said to Campbell, “I think our new boy Jed here is really getting the hang of things.”

“That was smooth, Jed, real smooth,” Waller allowed.

Jed grinned and waited for Campbell to compliment him.

Campbell didn’t.

They had not much farther to go down the road before they ran into real trouble. This was in the form of a communist government
military checkpoint consisting of two machine gun nests about a hundred yards apart, one on each side of the road, and a soldier
with a white piece of cloth, which he waved as he stood in the middle of the road at the first machine gun position. These
were not dugouts like they had seen before in rebel-infested areas. The soldiers squatted behind a double layer of sandbags,
protected from the sun by galvanized zinc sheets resting on metal
rods, supported in turn by four-foot pillars of empty metal boxes marked 81 MOR HE.

“Slow to a rolling stop,” Mike ordered Nolan. “See if you can drift past the first gun before stopping.” As he spoke, he passed
a wad of rupee notes to Harvey Waller.

Nolan braked and let the truck roll. The soldier, used to the varying quality of Afghan brakes, quickly stepped out of the
way and trotted alongside as the truck ground to a stop. Nolan took it a couple of lengths past the first gun. The soldier
jumped onto the footrest and poked his Kalashnikov inside. He spoke in Uzbek. When Jed replied, the man switched to Pushtu.
Jed said in Pushtu, knowing he couldn’t fool this man into believing he was a native speaker, that they were Tajik and changed
to Dari, the Afghan dialect of Persian.

The soldier wasn’t buying this, and he wasn’t taking the cash in Waller’s hand. Unfortunately for him, he had a face that
revealed his emotions. The hand that only a second previously had offered him a small fortune in Pakistani rupees now grasped
his throat. Nolan tore the Kalashnikov from the soldier’s grasp and lifted his foot off the clutch pedal. The truck lurched
forward, fishtailed, and skidded broadside off the road so that it knocked the galvanized zinc roof on top of the soldiers
in the second gun emplacement. Nolan kept the truck off the road, keeping the roadside bank of earth between him and the first
gun.

Waller was still holding the soldier by the neck in his right hand as the truck went back on the road, but the man was no
longer feeling anything, as evidenced by his bulging eyes and protruding tongue.

“Let him go, Harvey,” Mike said.

Waller released him unwillingly, like a dog wanting to hang on to a tasty bone, and the soldier’s body flopped on the blacktop
road.

“Those soldiers will have radioed ahead,” Mike said to Nolan. “They’ll be waiting for us along the road and searching for
us by air. Joe, turn off the road as soon as you can. See if we can cut across country for a while before they pinpoint us.”

They were now heading west, no more than thirty miles
south of the Soviet border. Nolan pulled the truck onto a dusty pair of tracks heading across the undulating land more or
less to the west. They had gone maybe ten miles when they came to a long irrigation ditch and had to travel alongside it till
Nolan found a bridge made of poles and turf. The truck’s wheel base barely fitted onto the primitive bridge, and Nolan inched
the vehicle across. Equally slowly the bridge sagged under its weight. As Nolan felt it giving way beneath him he accelerated
forward. The dry poles snapped like shots, and the bridge collapsed in a rumble of lumber and dust. The truck fell on its
side into the ditch.

“Some fucking driver,” Waller muttered, trying to separate himself from the others and get out of the muddy water flowing
into the cab.

Nolan growled from the bottom of the heap. “Know what broke the bridge, Harvey? The weight of your fat ass.”

Colonel Yekaterina Matveyeva kicked the shin of her driver to make him stop. She nodded to the two Afghans in the back and
said in Uzbek, “Ismael Rasool and one other.”

The two Afghans ran through the village and came back in ten minutes with two worried men trotting in front of their Kalashnikovs.

“Which is Rasool?” the colonel asked.

One of the Afghans nodded to his right.

She directed her attention to the other man. She asked in Uzbek, “Are you the one who saw these many Americans?”

“No.”

She drew her 9mm Makarov pistol, slid a round in the chamber, and drilled a slug into his forehead. He fell stiffly over,
like a length of wood. She pointed the smoking muzzle at Rasool.