Cobra Strike (27 page)

“Now listen carefully, Comrade Lieutenant, this is what I am going to do. Under the special authority extended to me by General
Kudimov, I am countermanding all other orders issued to local troops and canceling all leaves for officers and men. I want
all available regular forces to fan out between here and the border. Have all units assemble here in the barracks in four
hours time, at eighteen hundred hours precisely.”

Beneath her, in his clay womb, Joe Nolan was setting the
automatic timer before connecting up the electrical circuit powered by four heavy-duty car batteries.

Op van de Bosch hefted the video camera on his right shoulder, and Jan Prijt moved his mike around while he checked dials
on a leather case suspended against his left hip. Mike Campbell looked at them and cursed Masood Haq first as a deceitful
bastard and then himself as a credulous loon.

Campbell said to Crippenby, “Tell Masood I thought he meant he would be leaving with his men since he said they would be involved
in the tunnel explosion.”

Jed talked with the rebel leader and told Mike, “Masood says the Dutch TV crew is here specially for the explosion, which
is why it has to be done by daylight. He says you must talk with the Dutchmen yourself about leaving town. Masood says you
will be pleased with the arrangements.”

Campbell glared at the cameraman and soundman, who were halfway through a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka, regardless of the anti-alcohol
feelings of Masood and his rebels. He walked over to them and picked up the vodka bottle. “If we go with you, don’t touch
any more of this.” He replaced the open bottle on the table between them.

“Ya, ya, no more today,” Op van de Bosch agreed cheerfully. “We must see straight.”

“And hear straight,” the slightly drunk soundman put in.

Mike looked from one to the other of the half-sloshed reporters and asked, “You really need us along with you? We don’t have
the protection of international press passes.”

“The present Afghan government does not recognize press passes,” Op responded. “If we get caught, they’ll either shoot us
to get rid of us quietly since we are free-lance and not with a network, or they will sentence us to twenty years as spies
if they want to annoy our government. Either way, it does not work out as much of a choice for us. You are going west from
here, ya? Jan and I have spent weeks shooting many meters of tape out that way. Masood will tell you that I know more of the
rebel headmen in these regions than he does. You know how we escape from here after the big bang, nay?”

“No.”

“I will tell you.” The Dutchman was about to reach for the vodka bottle, but he saw Mike’s look and stopped. “All right, then,
I tell you. Two weeks ago, up near the border, some rebels ambushed a Soviet tank convoy. All they got was one truck, and
they, being good Moslems, were disappointed to find that all it contained was vodka and not ammunition or guns. Big disappointment!
Jan and I were there and filmed everything, including the look on the rebels’ faces when they saw all the vodka. Jan and I,
we hid the vodka and bought an armored personnel carrier with it from Russian soldiers here in this town.”

Mike prided himself on being a hard man to surprise, but when someone did so, he did not begrudge them his admiration. “You
paid some Russian soldiers…” He just let it trail off.

Op nodded his head vigorously. “But we don’t know how to drive it. So we need you along.”

Mike was tempted to reach for the vodka bottle himself but resisted the urge.

Privates Valery T. Timofeyev and Sergei V. Prokopchik figured they had enough Stolichnaya to keep them and their friends pickled
for the remaining four months they had to serve in this hellhole. The personnel carrier had already been listed as “damaged
beyond repair” and “stripped and abandoned,” a casualty of a flash flood with no attendant human casualties. That paperwork
alone had cost them thirty-six bottles, and the two privates were becoming appalled at the greed of their fellow servicemen
who thought nothing of extorting such heavy payments for a few moments of their time.

This new problem was more worrying. The pretty blond woman colonel, who was said to be hard as nails, thought the Dutch reporters
were the Americans she was hunting. Timofeyev and Prokopchik steered reports her way, at the cost of more bottles, reports
that stated things clearly enough, while understandably, they themselves were not in a position to volunteer more personal
information because of regulations against trading with the enemy, which, of
course, in reality had no application here because the men were Dutch, and vodka was vodka; but a woman could not be expected
to understand that, and even if she did, they would end in irons at hard labor, anyway.

The problem was what to do now so this colonel would realize that these two were not the Americans she was looking for. The
privates did not want the Americans to escape while the colonel was distracted by the Dutchmen. Another nagging worry was
that the Dutchmen knew their names and might talk if captured. That was the essence of their problem: how they could put the
colonel back on the right track after the real Americans, for the good both of Russia and themselves.

“There’s nothing we can do, Sergei Vladimirovich, except shape up at eighteen hundred hours along with everyone else,” Timofeyev
said to Prokopchik. “If something turns up after we move out, we can steer it her way. We stand to lose too much by volunteering
information we’re not supposed to know.’’

Prokopchik nodded. “You know we could be out for days in the field before we come back to town. If both of us were to take
a couple of bottles along to help pass the time for us, they’d fit easily in our packs and would be hardly any extra weight
to carry.”

Timofeyev thought this a brilliant solution to all their problems. They still had half an hour before shape-up time at eighteen
hundred hours, just enough to go outside the town and take four bottles from one of their numerous stashes.

Bob Murphy and Lance Hardwick had left the area earlier with two of Masood Haq’s men and moved down the personnel carrier
from its hiding place. The Dutchmen were to be picked up at an agreed location precisely at 6:07, giving them five minutes
to film the effects of the explosion. They had wanted twenty minutes. Mike gave them five, plus two to move their ass. Whether
they were there or not, the mercs were leaving town at 6:07 in the personnel carrier. The Dutchmen sighed and said, “Ya, ya.”

Nolan was confident of his timer, so the rest of the team
was to be picked up outside the town precisely at 5:55. The personnel carrier would remain at that spot until the explosion,
at 6:00, and then proceed to the rendezvous with the Dutchmen, which would take them five minutes to reach at most. After
that, nothing short of antitank missiles could stop them, and they could depend on the damage and confusion caused by the
blast to cripple all serious opposition.

At 5:50 Prokopchik and Timofeyev, hurrying back to the town barracks with their vodka bottles safety stowed inside their packs,
& weight heavily armed Americans waiting in a group outside the town. They got away without being seen, ran to the barracks,
and shouted to the colonel. She was sitting in a vehicle next to a driver, and so they piled in the back and shouted directions
and explanations as they went.

“Eight Americans?” the colonel asked guardedly.

“Yes, Comrade, including the black one. They were all dressed as Afghans, but they are Americans.”

“Maybe three of them were American and the rest Afghan,” Colonel Matveyeva hinted in a cold voice.

“No, Colonel. All of them. All Americans.”

Well, if she took them all prisoner, they could hardly criticize her because she had been wrong previously. She would establish
visual contact with them from this vehicle and wait for the lieutenant to arrive with two platoons in the next few minutes.
She knew better than to doubt the account of these two seasoned infantrymen. Later they would have to explain what they had
been doing out here, but she#took them at their word. Eight of these rich, grinning Americans! She’d wipe the smiles from
their well-fed capitalist faces!

She did not see the looks of horror that spread over the faces of Timofeyev and Prokopchik behind her when they saw, instead
of the eight waiting Americans, the personnel carrier they had sold to the Dutchmen and had listed as damaged beyond repair.

The carrier lumbered forward at surprising speed and headed straight for their vehicle. The driver could not at first understand
why he should flee from a Russian personnel carrier, not comprehending how eight Americans or more could be inside it. This
delay nearly cost them their lives as the heavy carrier tried to ram diem. The driver
pulled out of the way at the last moment, but not far enough, because the personnel carrier twisted toward them and sideswiped
their vehicle. All four occupants were thrown clear as the open-topped vehicle flipped over, its wheels in the air.

The colonel lay on her side in the dust, gasping for breath and allowing tears of rage to stream down her cheeks as she gazed
after the armored vehicle heading slowly toward the town.

As she watched, the barracks erupted in a blinding light, and she clearly saw bodies and large sections of buildings lifted
high into the air as shock waves traveled through the ground beneath her and the deafening blast resounded in her ears.

Murphy drove the personnel carrier at high speed westward across Afghanistan, never more than thirty or forty miles below
the Soviet border. With the two Dutchmen they now amounted to a force of twelve heavily armed men in a heavily armored all-terrain
vehicle, mounted with two heavy machine guns and topped up with fuel. One well-aimed rocket could take care of all that. But
at least it beat slogging up and down mountain slopes and throwing themselves facedown on the bare rock every time they thought
they heard a jet or a chopper.

Sheep grazed on rich grasslands here, roses grew in front of houses, jays and squirrels squawked beneath poplar trees. They
fitted Op van de Bosch into a Russian uniform discarded inside the carrier, and he spoke rapid Dutch to the local peasants
and paid for lamb kebab, milk, yogurt, bread, tea, and other supplies in Afghan currency supplied by Mike. Campbell had always
paid the highland rebels in Pakistan currency, for that was where they made their purchases, but this part of the country—Afghan
Turkestan—was a very different place populated by very different
people. Many of the men were strongly Asiatic in appearance and wore long, striped or flowered robes.

Fierce mountain warriors they were not! In one town the local government soldiers walked around each with a flower in the
muzzle of his Kalashnikov. They refueled the personnel carrier at the base there, letting the Afghan doing the work see Op
in his Russian uniform and hear, but not see, Jed Crippenby talk Turki to him in a Russian accent from inside the carrier.

“Op, all you have to do is sign for the fuel,” Jed said softly in English. “The Russian officer in charge here has been down
with dysentery for five days, the Russian sergeant has been drunk for three days, the radio receiver and transmitter have
never worked properly but haven’t worked at all in two days, and none of the soldiers have gotten laid in more than a year.
Sounds like our kind of town, Mike. You think we should settle down here?”

She had always warned the slow, rotten son of a bitch that he would freeze his nuts off in the Arctic for not catching these
Yankee terrorists, and once again he had evaded her by burning to death in the American-engineered explosion. If the lieutenant
had obeyed her promptly and followed on the double with two platoons, he and they would have been clear of the barracks when
the explosion, took place. But, as always, he had dithered. She was well rid of him. Only now, when the kicks were passed
down to her, she had no one to pass them along to.

“We have work to do,” she snapped to the driver of her damaged, but still operable, vehicle. “Those two privates have given
me the slip. To hell with them. And we have no time to bother with what’s happened here. Take me to the main highway.”

“But, Comrade Colonel, many of these men were in my unit. They were all under your command. Some are still alive. We must
help—”

The driver stopped talking when she pointed her Makarov at him. He started the engine and pulled it onto the road to the highway.
The vehicle’s transmitter had been smashed, and the chaos and destruction around the town barracks
would make another difficult to locate. On the highway she could commandeer the first suitable transport and communications
she saw.

She halted a small Afghan army provisions truck traveling east, and the driver told her he had seen a lone Red Army personnel
carrier traveling against him at high speed not long ago. She sent the truck into the town to help out at the destroyed barracks.
The next vehicles were a convoy of eight Afghan army trucks going west. They had not seen a personnel carrier on the road,
so it went west. The lead truck had a powerful transmitter, on which she called in first the data on the eight plus Americans
in the carrier, arranging to be picked up in a slick at her present location, and then put in a call for emergency medical
assistance for the destroyed barracks. She placed a warning that the medical evacuation efforts must not be allowed to interfere
with the ongoing military effort to apprehend the American provocateurs and enemies of free workers. She ordered the eight
trucks to the barracks.

Despite his pleas to be allowed to return to help rescue his buddies, she kept her driver and vehicle with her in case the
chopper didn’t arrive. Yekaterina paced up and down, deep in thought. When the chopper arrived, she would have three to four
times the speed of the land vehicle at the very least, with the added ability to take shortcuts. The personnel carrier could
leave the road, too, but where could it go? Head for Russia? Or the high mountains of Afghanistan’s interior? No. It was plain
now to her where they had been headed all along and that this was a carefully staged wild goose chase. First three Americans.
Now eight Americans. Maybe even more. This was an elaborate morale-boosting tour, which was just the kind of thing she had
read that Americans believed in. They thought that they could rush around Afghanistan and stir up trouble, like they had in
Poland and Hungary and Czechoslovakia, trying to make simple working people discontent through their elaborate lies and false
promises. No wonder the Moscow authorities wanted to capture them so desperately. And she herself would have failed the cause
of world communism if she did not cut out this cancer that was threatening the healthy tissue
of Marxist society, which was in the process of being grafted onto Afghanistan. She knew now where they were headed. Herat.
That hotbed of revisionist superstition and banditry, where brave Soviet lads gave their lives every day to bring the class
revolution to these backward, ungrateful people.