Cobra Strike (28 page)

“Sure we’re going to drive this tin can into Herat,” Campbell said, “unless someone comes at us with a can opener.”

“Or unless we don’t find more fuel real soon,” Murphy added, who was still driving the personnel carrier, his injured leg
long forgotten.

“Don’t forget your promise to drop us off at our assignment,” Op said. “We don’t take one inch of tape on you. That shows
we keep our part of the bargain.”

“That shows you know you’ll get a bullet up your ass if you do,” Waller commented.

“Ya, I think that is a possibility too,” Op admitted with a grin. “Harvey does not like us because he thinks he is a brave
man to spend days in Afghanistan with his guns. Then he sees us, with no guns, and we spend weeks here. He won’t admit I am
a braver man than he is.”

“You fucking tulip-sucking cream puff!” Waller bellowed. “You’re some kind of fellow-traveling half-assed leftist from a welfare
state that the Russians can’t arrest or kill in case it shocks all your pinko friends back home.”

Op howled with laughter. “I’ll tell them that, Harvey, if they catch me.”

“You’re even crazier than! am,” Waller muttered.

“We’ll stop with your rebel friends tonight, Op, provided we reach them,” Campbell told him. “We can’t travel by night in
this carrier, since we could be ambushed at any point by unseen enemies, either communists or rebels.”

“Mike, problem ahead!” Murphy snapped. “Two personnel carriers, same model as this, at roadside ahead. Too late to turn off.”

“Pull in alongside them,” Mike told him calmly. He fetched one of the Stolichnaya bottles he had confiscated from the Dutchmen,
“so there would be no misunderstand-
ings,” and unscrewed its cap. He undid some buttons on the Red Army tunic Op was wearing, mussed his hair, and handed him
the bottle. “Drink,” he said. “Lance, you and Joe take that clear plastic tubing.” When the carrier eased to a stop next to
one of the others, two young Russians left to guard the carriers while the others ate in a tea house came around to see who
had arrived.

“You’re real drunk, Op. Part with the bottle,” Mike said as he pushed the Dutchman out the hatch. Campbell closed the hatch
and said softly, “We should all be wondering why we are not having to bust through roadblocks by now, and why we’re not having
rockets shot at us by gunships, and why the soldiers that belong to these carriers have not been warned to look out for us.”

Winston knew the answer to that. “They want to take us alive, Mike, and they know that these guys out in the boonies would
fuck up. They’ll have the elite squads stretching steel nets for us where we don’t expect it, but certainly well before Herat.”

The soldiers were just kids too dumb to demand to know why this drunk had been pushed out the hatch to them and why he was
bearded to look like an Afghan, but they were not too young to have developed a taste for high-quality vodka. Op muttered
at them and made a futile effort to hide the bottle from them. They grabbed it and pushed him away. He stood with them, grinning
foolishly when they gave him an occasional toke from his own bottle.

While the guards were distracted, Hardwick and Nolan siphoned the fuel from the empty carrier into their own vehicle and got
two-thirds of a tankful. Nolan signaled Op with a knock on the steel plate when they had finished, and Op left, unnoticed,
to climb back in the hatch. The two young soldiers waved cheerfully after them when they pulled out.

Colonel Matveyeva rode in the Mi-24 helicopter high and to the east of the road to Herat, which at this point ran due south
before swinging to the southwest at Maimena. Here the road left the northern plain and became more difficult to control. It
did not make her happy to allow the Americans
free passage all this way—and she wouldn’t permit it if she was in full control because they had already shown themselves
to be very slippery—yet there was nothing she could do about it except watch them far below her, as a cat watches a bird in
a cage.

She had waited impatiently for this chopper, anxious to climb to an altitude where she could have good direct radio contact
with HQ in Kabul, forgetting that once such contact was established, she might be taking orders rather than giving them. That
swine Kudimov had maneuvered her into taking full responsibility for the capture of these American adventurers, and now he
was ordering her to take them alive without harming a hair on their heads. After they had blown up a barracks and maybe two
hundred and fifty men!

She knew General Kudimov’s game. If he took all of these eight to a dozen Americans alive and put their trial on international
television, it could earn him a place in the Moscow power structure, a big apartment, an official car, and a
dacha
for country weekends. Clearly he was not going to let her stand between him and all that. But she would benefit, too—in a
more modest way, of course. No, Viktor Mikhailovich was right: These Americans could not be harmed. These Americans, if handled
right, could be her and the general’s tickets to a life of power and prestige in Moscow’s top military circles. If she failed,
she could see that the general had it all set up so that she alone would be disgraced. That was the risk she had to take.
But she would not fail.

She would track the personnel carrier unobserved from this height until it crossed the Murghab River, about a hundred miles
farther on. Then she would signal the armored column to leave Moghor, to the south, and the Americans would find themselves
with an easily guarded barrier behind them in the form of the big river, with wild mountains on all sides, and a Red Army
column of tanks eating up the road toward them. This was going to be something the White House would remember with a shudder,
and strangers would smile at her in the Moscow streets, near her apartment in a fashionable section, recognizing her as a
people’s hero.

* * *

Mike Campbell didn’t like the looks of what he was seeing. Something smelled wrong. The other team members seemed happy that
things were going so easy for them. Mike sounded out his old friend Verdoux.

“Are you noticing some of the things I’m noticing, Andre?”

“You mean how soldiers at the checkpoints along the road conveniently lode the other way when we pass through?”

“Things like that.”

“There’s been no general alert put out for us,” Andre said. “Those military transports we pass don’t know us from Adam and
don’t care. But I have a feeling that the soldiers at the checkpoints do and have been ordered to let us pass. It’s just not
natural that some tight-assed lieutenant or regulations-minded sergeant hasn’t stopped us by now to check that our papers
are in order, that we’re in the zone we’re supposed to be in, that our faces are shaved and our boots shined, that we still
remember how to stand at attention. No, Mike, it’s just not natural.”

Campbell nodded, pleased to have his suspicions confirmed. Together they pored over the map inside the bouncing, swaying personnel
carrier. Mike put his finger on the crossing of the Murghab River and shook his head. Andre nodded his head to show he agreed
that it would be suicide for them to attempt a crossing. Mike was suddenly restless now, fidgeting in the crowded, enclosed
space of the carrier. He poked Lance Hardwick in the leg, and Lance, who had been riding with the top half of his body out
of the personnel carrier, took the binoculars from his eyes and drew inside.

“What do you see?”

“I dunno, Mike. Once, a while back, I thought I saw a high-flying speck behind us to the east. Now I could almost swear I
glimpsed it to the west of us, making use of the sun setting in our eyes. I don’t want to sound paranoid, but I think we might—no,
hell, I think we
are
being tailed by either a light observation plane or a chopper that’s really hanging back and giving us room to move. I wasn’t
going to sound the alarm till I caught another look at it, because what
I saw might have been a hawk or even a goddamn pigeon, just a high-flying dot—”

Mike pointed upward. “Look out for a track for us to pull off this road.” Then he went back to intensely studying the map,
a silence spread among the men cooped inside the armored vehicle, who realized that something was about to happen now to change
the tedium of the journey. Baker, who had been in an almost wordless sulk for days, looked carefully around him and began
to take close note of things.

General Viktor Mikhailovich Kudimov had flown in by Mi-24 to inspect the bridge over the Murghab River for himself. Things
were set up as he ordered. Two heavy trucks waited to the side at each end of the bridge. When the personnel carrier mounted
the bridge, the trucks would seal off both ends, leaving the armored vehicle trapped on the spans. Coils of barbed wire had
been laid according to his instructions on all the parapets of the bridge to stop the Americans from jumping into the water.
Floodlights were strategically placed, since the crossing would almost certainly be attempted after dark.

The general was not particularly concerned when Colonel Matveyeva’s helicopter radioed a coded signal that the personnel carrier
had left the road. They were nearby and stopping to wait for dark. Her helicopter could not just stay out there without being
spotted, so he ordered it to Moghor. This pleased Yekaterina, who thought she was still communicating with him in Kabul, more
than four hundred miles to the east. No doubt she expected him to be present for the confrontation between the tanks and the
personnel carrier, a scenario she still believed was in his serious planning.

He would personally trap these Americans on that bridge. They would probably try some dramatic stunt, like holding out inside
the armored vehicle and raking the bridge with fire from their two machine guns. The bridge walls were too strong for them
to break through and topple down into the water. He would let them strut and storm for a while. It would only make their final
personal surrender to him all the more sweet.

* * *

Bob Murphy peered through the grating and into the fading light, and Lance Hardwick yelled down directions to him from on
top.

“Just keep pushing south any way you can,” Mike urged them, “and we got to hit the river.”

Waller had fitted the machine guns with tracer bullets every fourth or fifth cartridge. He manned one gun, and Turner the
other. Harvey expected company on the river-bank. It would be fully dark when they got there. If there was going to be a firefight,
they would need the glowing tracers to indicate to them where their bullets were hitting.

But the riverbank was deserted. Campbell inflated the rubber raft from inside the carrier. He sent Op van de Bosch along with
Joe Nolan to make contact with Op’s friend the local rebel leader and kept Jan Prijt, Op’s very quiet soundman, behind to
make sure Op came back. Lance paddled the raft across the wide river and brought it back. Waller and Turner removed the two
machine guns from their mountings and collected the ammo for them. Mike wanted to present them as a gift to the rebel leader
and ordered Lance and Harvey to ferry them one at a time across the river. Each of these KPV heavy machine guns weighed about
a hundred pounds and fired 14.5cm shells from a hundred-round metal-link belt-feed system. Campbell wanted the rebels to have
these weapons because he knew their value as antiaircraft guns—the Cong and North Vietnamese had used these Soviet weapons
very effectively against U.S. aircraft in two- and four-barrel models known as the ZPU-2 and ZPU-4.

Everyone else stripped everything of use from the inside of the personnel carrier, and each man was ferried with this merchandise
and his own weapons across the Murghab. Campbell and Murphy were the last to cross in the rubber raft, paddled by Hardwick.
Before leaving, they selected a deep stretch of water close to the bank, and Bob set the personnel carrier heading for the
river at about 20 m.p.h. He jumped off and removed his hat in respect for the machine as it trundled over the edge of the
riverbank and tipped over into its watery grave.

The rebels, thirty strong, came by horseback to the far
bank with spare horses for the newcomers and their equipment. Some of them took the machine guns and equipment scavenged from
the personnel carrier to hiding places in the steep hills that rose south of the river, while the main body of men rode with
them to a temporary camp the rebel leader was not using and which was not far from the main road to Herat. He had promised
the Dutch TV team that he would let them film an exploit of his, which Op suspected was blowing up the river bridge. Joe Nolan
had ridden back with the rebels and assured Mike that things looked good at the other end. There were about a hundred men
in this encampment, in addition to the riders with them, and all were armed with automatic rifles, according to Nolan. The
leader’s name was Noor Qader.

He met them on their arrival, welcoming each of them individually with hugs and handshakes but no English. He was a big man,
not unlike some of the mountain Pathans they had come across near the Pakistani border, although he was not Pathan but a Dari-speaking
Tajik. He wore the Afghan rebel’s usual collection of loose garments. Instead of a turban he wore a pale blue synthetic-fur
Soviet army hat with the red star pulled off. They could see why Op had been anxious to come here. This Afghan was photogenic.

Two riders galloped in out of the darkness, jumped from their mounts, and ran, breathless, to Noor Qader. Jed Crippenby elbowed
his way in close so he could overhear. Seven tanks had left Moghor earlier. They had stopped at darkness, were now blocking
the road less than ten miles away, arid could be expected to start forward again and pass close by at first light. Groups
of rebels immediately began to hurry around. At first the mercs thought they were abandoning the camp. This was not the case.
Men hurried back and forth all night as the team rested on full bellies in their sleeping bags to one side of the cooking
fire. Campbell was insistent that his men all rest, regardless of the preparations taking place around them.