Cobra Strike (17 page)

“I was in the Rangers, Verdoux,” Lance spat back. “I was trained for special operations forces.”

“Peacetime army, mon vieux,” Andre said with disdain.

Lance was stung into silence as Andre touched his weak spot; he was the only member of the team who did not have combat experience
outside Campbell's missions. Lance raged, but like the others, he accepted Andre as second in command to Mike without question.
Like the others, he feared Andre verbally more than he did physically. What made the Frenchman's acidic remarks all the more
deadly was their timing and accuracy. To attempt a punchout with him would only confirm the truth of what he had said. Campbell
left it to Verdoux to maintain his own dominance over the others as second in command, except for one phase in the mission,
which was this one. During training Andre Verdoux was in command and Mike Campbell had to rough it on the same terms as the
others. Andre reserved his crudest, wittiest observations for Mike, so that by the time training had ended, the other team
members had formed close psychological bonds with their leader under the shared physical sufferings imposed on them by the
merciless and precise French military man.

They stood on the Camino Cielo, waiting for Mike to
show with the new man. Apart from Andre and Bob, all they knew about him was that his name was Jedediah Crippenby, which was
enough to make Joe Nolan crack up. Bob Murphy joined in the general kidding around while he and Andre tried to keep out of
one another's way. Each time they met at the beginning of a mission, they renewed their personal dislike of each other, but
increasingly they found this mutual dislike tempered by a respect for each other as soldiers. Each would have been more comfortable
not to have the other along, yet each knew he could totally rely on the other no matter how disastrous things got. They did
some mental sparring but tried nothing serious on each other. Murphy had no problems with Verdoux as second in command, since
the Frenchman never allowed personal feelings or power plays to influence his control over the others-something for which
they all respected him, yet also something that made him into an even more formidable opponent.

After Mike arrived with Crippenby and the gangly six-foot-four intellectual was given a moment of unbelieving silence, Andre
gave his orders. “We're at this spot because we can see both our departure and arrival points from here. We leave from down
there”-he pointed to a crinkle in the ridge to the south-”and we arrive due north at that point. We go from the southerly
high point down to Gibraltar Reservoir, which is the lake you see down there, and back up the ridge to the northern high point.
Each man gets a snakebite kit and leaves his cigarettes and matches behind- this is brush-fire country. Don't walk through
that thorn scrub, go around it or it'll cut your legs to ribbons. And don't feed the bears.”

He sent Lance in one car and Bob in another, to drop off one car at the arrival point and come back to the departure point
in the second car. All the others piled in the third car and set off for the departure point. Three cars were already pulling
into the side of the road when they got there.

“Hang gliders,” Andre explained. “There won't be anything odd about our two cars left empty here.”

When they got out of the car, they were in time to see a guy step up on the bank of earth between the roadway and
the precipice on the ocean side of Camino Cielo, balance his fabric glider over his body, wait for an updraft of wind, and
hop off into the great blue yonder. He didn't sink at all; the updraft wafted the glider into an immediate upward spiral,
and the pilot cleverly went from updraft to updraft, climbing all the time.

“That's not a way I'd choose to die,” Joe Nolan said, and found that he spoke for the rest of them. “Maybe Lance would try
this shit. When he gets back, I bet he says he's done it.”

Waller picked up a Pepsi can on the other side of the road. He showed Nolan the claw punctures and scrapes in it and the teeth
marks where one end had been chewed off. “I guess Andre wasn't kidding about bears.”

Nolan nodded. “They got a taste for sweet things. You and me don't have to worry, Harvey.”

While they were waiting for Bob and Lance to come back, five more hang gliders floated past at their eye level. One glider
was piloted by a woman with an infant in a pack strapped beneath her. On another glider a man had a small terrier sitting
in harness on a platform beside him.

Mike said slowly, “I sometimes think maybe I'm crazy, Andre, until I take time to look at what other people do.”

Campbell had only forty miles to go across land from Pakistan's Karachi International Airport to find Naseeb Amin, and one
mile out to sea, where he stood on the bridge of the S.S.
Guadalquiver,
a rusty tanker sporting a Panamanian flag.

“
Izzatl
” Naseeb roared. “
Izzatl
What you English call honor! There is no more sacred word in Ptishtu!”

“Where's that?”

“Pushtu is not a place. Pathans speak Pushtu.”

“I see.” Campbell looked out over the Arabian Sea, which extended south of Pakistan and into the Indian Ocean. It was oily
and calm, without a breeze stirring or a seabird in sight. “I want to clear up things about our backgrounds. I speak English
but I am an American, not English. My confusion about Pathans is that I sometimes hear them called Afghans and sometimes Pakistanis.”

“We live on both sides of the border. You could say that the eastern half of Afghanistan is Pathan, and Pakistan's Northwest
Frontier Province-it still goes by its old English name-is our land too. You have heard of the Khyber Pass?
We Pathans beat back the British Empire. They could never conquer us.
Izzatl
Honor! When your honor must be regained, what must you do?'

“Kill?”

Naseeb Amin nodded his head gravely. “I see you understand some things.”

Campbell read through the paper Amin had given him. He looked wonderingly at the perfect copperplate lettering written with
a nib dipped in ink. The whole thing looked like a Victorian document. Aga Akbar, the guide into Afghanistan offered by the
Nanticoke Institute, received a good recommendation. An inventory of weapons and supplies was provided, along with a bill-payment
in U.S. dollars specified-for his signature. A dozen letters of introduction to rebel leaders in English for Campbell's guidance
and the message itself in what he presumed was Pushtu. He would have Crippenby look them over, although he had no doubt that
they would all be in order.

“I knew I could rely on a friend of Cuthbert Colquitt's,” Mike said. “He told me you and he went raccoon hunting when you
visited him.”

“Allah be praised He did not put raccoons in the lands of the Pathans.”

“I live in the desert, not too unlike what you have along here, so there are no coons there. I've been out with Cuthbert a
few times and didn't do so well, but he told me you were a crack shot and could rival an old hand like himself.”

“Show me a pair of eyes shining up in a tree and I will put a bullet between them for you if you wish,” Naseeb said. “I said
a bullet. No Pathan could miss with a shotgun. But neither does a Pathan wish to walk around after a heavy dinner in swamps
and woods, listening to stupid dogs bark and chase into a tree an animal that is not good to eat, I was told, and which is
not dangerous and thus honorable to hunt. I tell you I would sit in their comfortable house after the large quantity of food
I mentioned, hoping to watch shows on their television, sipping excellent coffee—a Muslim, I did not share in Cuthbert's passion
for alcohol—lking with a very beautiful girl who worked for him and a
somewhat less beautiful but very acceptable female companion she brought along for me, when Cuthbert would suddenly insist
that I hunt raccoons in the swamps with him. How could I refuse such an offer without offending my host? It was impossible.
So I went. Every night.”

“And the female companion?”

“She waited up for me each night. She was collecting the skins for a fur coat.”

Campbell caught the sly, amused look the Pathan gave him. Mike guessed he was in his late fifties, a bull of a man with a
handlebar mustache flecked with gray, a barrel chest, and a commanding presence.

Mike signed the cost estimate for the weapons and supplies after a cursory examination and handed die sheets back to Amin.
The prices were much more exorbitant than usual, as Cuthbert had warned him they would be, but since the Institute had to
meet these expenses, they could discuss any discrepancies themselves.

“That seems to be everything,” Mike said. “I seem to have arrived at an awkward time for you.”

“Yes, it's high tide. Man must bow before nature. But if you wait four hours for this tide to crest, my work here will be
done and I will go north with you.”

“I would greatly appreciate that, especially since it's not something expected of you.”

“We Pathans can be depended on to do what is not expected of us.”

“Such as teaching the Kremlin a lesson about straying too far south?”

“If Allah wills it, we will be pleased to oblige.”

They waited another hour before Naseeb Amin rang down to the engine for full speed ahead. He had selected a niche hardly a
hundred yards wide on the sandy beach between two beached wrecks. The S.S.
Guadalquivir
emptied of its cargo of oil, riding high with its Plimsoll mark many feet above the water's surface, charged in on the high
tide at a good fifteen knots and ground its prow and keel onto the sandy bottom forty yards from shore, at a right angle to
the beach and exactly halfway between the wrecks on either side.

Crewmen on the foredeck set loose a winch, and the starboard anchor chain rattled out to lower its burden. Men on the beach
wound a steel hawser around the anchor and, when it was securely attached, signaled to the operator of a heavy winch on the
beach. This winch pulled the steel hawser and anchor chain tight. Then, at each surging wave, Naseeb gave the ship full steam,
and the winch on shore pulled at full power, so that the thirteen-thousand-ton steel carcass of the beached ship crept up
on land inch by inch. They kept this up for as long as the tide was at its peak, after which the ship's heavy bulk could be
moved no more.

“My work is done,” Naseeb Amin announced with the satisfaction of a master.

Mike looked up and down the beach, on which more than a hundred big ships were beached and in various stages of demolition.
On the shore itself, huge stacks of metal parts awaited trucking away. Beyond them lay a ragged string of hovels, constructed
of scrap lumber and other unsalable materials, and beyond the hovels stretched the empty desert.

Once the ship was settled as close to the beach as it could be brought, the anchors were allowed to drop to the sand. Men
walked up the chains to the prow high above the beach as casually as city dwellers on an escalator. They carried oxyacetylene
torches and cylinders, crowbars, sledgehammers, and wrenches. One group immediately began to lower the lifeboats over the
side and throw life rafts and other deck fittings down to others waiting below, who dragged each item ashore and placed it
in a pile with like items. Other men were removing the brass fitting of the portholes. The ship's radar scope, sonar, and
compass were gone in minutes. They were already putting thirty-foot lengths of piping over the side. Mike could hardly believe
the speed at which they worked. The ship was disintegrating before his eyes. A half hour previously it had been a vessel capable
of sailing around the world. Now these human piranhas were devouring it. While some were still ripping out the fittings, others
were cutting steel plates from its sides with torches.

With an ironic touch, Naseeb Amin saw the crew members and Mike safely down a rope ladder over the side before he, as the
vessel's last master, abandoned ship.

When Mike looked back for the last time, they were lowering the ship's ceramic sinks and toilets over the side.

While they waited for a flight north from Karachi to Rawalpindi, Naseeb told him that all the workers at Gadani Beach were
Pathans who traveled more than a thousand miles south to earn the equivalent of less than four dollars for a twelve-hour day
of dangerous work. Naseeb himself earned about fifteen hundred dollars for each ship he beached, a task that required more
skill than it might seem. Any ship that could not be brought close enough to shore could not be broken up economically.

“Do Pathans buy these ships to break up?” Mike wanted to know.

Naseeb laughed at the idea of Pathans buying something like an oceangoing ship. “We are mountain tribesmen. All we know how
to do is work and fight.”

“You are an educated man,” Mike said.

“I work and I fight. These people who buy these ships and sell the steel are millionaire investors. They watch for ships more
than twenty years old bound for Karachi or a nearby port and they make a bid to the shipowner, with or without the cargo included,
depending on who owns it. But you could have a ship, say, bound for Bahrain with a cargo of Japanese television sets. These
investors might buy the whole thing, sell the television sets in Muscat or Karachi, let most of the crew go, and have it run
up to Gadani Beach for scrap.”

Mike estimated from Naseeb's casually quoted figures in Pakistani rupees that an old ship could be bought for about $100 per
ton, be broken up on Gadani Beach for $40 per ton, and its best steel, about half the ship's weight, be sold for $240 per
ton with the investors about breaking even on the other half of the ship's weight. Estimating a $100 profit per ton for half
the
Guadalquivir's
13,000-ton weight would give a $650,000 profit to whoever decided to end her sailing days. A Pathan working a twelve-hour
day in a seven-day week earned less than twenty-eight dollars.

Campbell was beginning to gather that life was not milk and honey for the Pathans either inside or outside of Afghanistan.