Cobra Strike (20 page)

Waller was in the lead and in the middle. He rushed at the middle Russian, who was in the act of cocking the Kalashnikov slung
on his right shoulder, and hit him a straight right in the middle of the chest, like a boxer in the ring, only that in place
of a glove, Waller held the steel blade of a combat knife in his right hand. The tip of the blade entered the Russian’s solar
plexus, and the weight of Harvey’s shoulder behind the punch sank the blade all the way in until Harvey felt the tip scrape
the inside of the man’s backbone. The Russian gripped Waller’s arm with both his hands and looked into his grinning face with
imploring eyes as his body slowly collapsed and slid oflf the blade. The dying man’s fingers clutched Waller’s wrist even
as his body crumpled to the ground, and the light faded from his eyes. Waller kicked him away and broke his death grip.

Murphy stood a good six inches above his opponent and weighed almost twice as much. He charged into the Soviet
serviceman before he could free his automatic pistol from its holster. Both men tumbled to the ground. Bob knelt on his struggling
victim’s chest, grasped a handful of his hair in his left hand and twisted his head back and to one side. With a quick, easy
motion he drew the blade of his combat knife across the man’s throat. The slit on his throat opened like a wide mouth. As
the Russian wrenched his body beneath the Australian’s massive strength and weight, bright red blood squirted fom the severed
arteries in his neck. He died slowly, struggling like a farmyard chicken.

The Russian with the radio backpack took one look at Lance coming at him with the combat knife and turned around to run. Were
it not for the radio, Lance could have buried the knife in his back. Were it not that he had been warned to avoid damaging
the radio, he could have grabbed on to it and use it to pull his prey down. Lance swung the blade in an upward thrust beneath
the radio, trying to drive the knife into the soldier’s right kidney, a few inches above his belt, but he ended by giving
him only a superficial wound. This close call spurred the Russian on to a burst of speed. He made for the edge of the clearing,
with Lance running right on his heels, thrusting at him with the blood-smeared knife. Suddenly the Russian came to a dead
stop and Lance banged into him from behind. To Lance’s amazement he saw die point of a knife emerge from the back of the Russian’s
neck and almost touch his own nose. The Russian fell lifeless at his feet, and Harvey Waller was standing there easing the
blade out of the man’s neck with the crazy grin on his face Harvey always got when he killed people.

Jed stayed in the scrub, monitoring Russian broadcasts, while the others got into positions on both sides of the dirt road
where Joe Nolan and Andre Verdoux had seen one of the construction trucks lose eight cinder blocks on a bump. They pulled
the blocks out from where Joe and Andre had hidden them and left them scattered on the roadway as they had originally fallen.
They were not enough to act as a block to any truck, and indeed only a few minutes after they placed them, a loaded truck
passed them, steering around them so the blocks were between its wheels. Then two
empty trucks came from the opposite direction, without stopping either. Mike had told them that this would happen, yet they
should not try to erect a barricade because this would cause gunfire, which they could not let happen because of nearby military
positions. Mike said all they need do was wait for one driver conscientious enough not to waste the blocks.

Lance, Harvey, and Mike were on one side of the road. Lance was tying his combat knife to one end of a long, straight branch
from which he had trimmed the twigs and leaves. He ignored the condescending smile of Harvey. He knew Waller would be giving
him a hard time now because he had not managed to kill his assigned man when they took the mortar. Harvey would move on to
making remarks about Hollywood stuntmen who looked great on camera so long as everyone was pulling punches. This would go
on until something else distracted Waller or until Lance proved him wrong. Which was what he was about to do. He hoped.

They heard the grind of gears as the loaded truck downshifted to negotiate the long steady climb up the winding road. This
truck was a flatbed with a load of cinder blocks, identical to the others. The driver swerved to avoid the blocks on the road,
going to one side of them. For a moment he appeared to be going on without stopping, then they heard his brakes squeal to
a stop, and more grinding of gears, and the truck slowly reversed back. Leaving the engine running, the Afghan driver got
out on one side, a Soviet soldier on the other. The soldier was mistrustful and alert. He circled the entire truck as the
driver began to load the blocks. His finger rested on the trigger of his Kalashnikov, and it looked like no one could take
him without a firefight.

But as he passed Lance’s position, squinting suspiciously into the undergrowth right where the men were concealed, he spun
around to look at the road on the other side of the truck. Perhaps he thought he heard a sound. Lance noiselessly rose to
his feet, drew back the javelin balanced in his right hand, then launched it forward with all his might. The long tapering
branch with the combat knife bound to its heavy end hit the soldier in the small of his back. He staggered a few paces, dropped
his assault rifle without firing it, and
reached behind him to desperately try to pluck out from his back the blade and long spear whose end was trailing in the dust
behind. He flopped down on his face, and the long stick drunkenly reeled upright on his back and then fell sideways at an
angle, still supported by the knife blade deep in the prone soldier’s flesh.

Lance heard Harvey give a grunt of satisfaction and felt an approving poke in the ribs before Harvey burst out onto the roadway
and descended on the petrified, unarmed Afghan driver, who had been in the act of picking up a cinder block. Harvey hit him
head down, arms outstretched, like an enraged water buffalo. He was screaming, “Goddam fucking traitor! Selling your country
to the commie robots! I’ll put some sense in your fucking head!” He began to smash the driver’s face into the corner of a
cinder block. “I’ll learn you! You won’t deal with no more Russian scumbags when I’m finished with you!” He kept on beating
the man’s head against the cinder black until it was hardly more than a bloody pulp upon a set of shoulders.

Andre walked out on the roadway and coolly watched Waller in his frenzy. He said, “That’s really showing him, Harvey.”

Mike told Jed to drive, since he spoke Pushtu well enough to fool a Russian. Although both spoke Russian, neither Mike nor
Andre could impersonate a Russian soldier because of their black beards.

“Move out!” Campbell yelled as soon as they had thrown the bodies and bloodstained cinder block in the undergrowth. “We’re
going to have another truck along any moment.”

The six men on the back of the truck worked feverishly to build themselves a hideout from the cinder blocks as the truck was
in motion over the bumpy dirt road. They lost some blocks and threw others off to make room for themselves inside a rectangle
of double-walled cinder blocks interlaced like brickwork and placed crosswise to provide stability. Gaps were left through
which to poke rifles in this five-foot-high fortress.

They met no other trucks on the road, and Mike supposed
that this was because it was early afternoon. “Keep driving till I tell you to stop,” he yelled up front to Jed, and situated
himself so he could peer through the rear window and windshield to see what was ahead. Mike had no idea how soon they would
come to the building site and what he would do when they arrived there. Although he and the others in the back of the truck
were well fortified against enemy fire, both the driver and the truck itself were vulnerable to even the mildest form of attack.
Campbell watched the road carefully and shouted frequently to Jed to make sure his voice could be heard.

The truck continued climbing up and up the winding dirt road, and they could feel the air become cooler and thinner. Joe Nolan
cursed from the moment he felt pressure on his eardrums, and he yawned constantly to relieve the discomfort. They passed through
a zone of heavy timber, mostly evergreen, and after that came increasingly smaller and stunted trees until there was nothing
taller than foot-high heatherlike plants. Higher still were patches of snow and clusters of bright wildflowers nourished by
the runoff of melted snow and which looked out of place on these barren, exposed slopes. On the right side the road fell away
in an almost sheer drop, a slope so steep, it could not be climbed in many places without ropes. Down below they saw the blacktop
road leading to the main pass with trucks or military vehicles moving in both directions along it. Although they had climbed
high, it was only to a pass, and there were huge snow-covered peaks and entire ranges without a break that rose into the air
many times their height.

The road swung sharply to the left and ran between two gradual upward slopes as it entered the pass. As they went deeper into
the pass the mountains towered on each side of them and cast the road in deep shadows, which made the air chillier than before.

“You see them, Mike? Both sides.”

“Yeah,” Mike yelled back to Jed. They were coming to one rocket and machine-gun emplacement on the right side of the road,
and another two hundred yards farther on to the left. He could see three or four Soviet soldiers in light blue
uniforms in each of the sandbagged bunkers, their weapons pointing along the road in both directions. They passed the first
emplacement, receiving only a glance, and then the second, with only bored, frozen, miserable looks from the soldiers inside.
The truck continued on around a gradual bend in the high-walled pass and came to the highest point in the road, beneath a
mud-walled fort that looked as if it had been there since the days of Genghis Khan. Six or seven hundred yards before the
fort, they saw the construction site, which was composed of stacks of cinder blocks, two empty trucks, and a cement mixer
next to trenches excavated in the ground. A circle of turbaned men gathered around a fire some distance back from the road-obviously
workers and drivers on their lunch break. There would be no siesta at this cold temperature.

“Pull over behind the other trucks as if you were going to unload,” Mike shouted forward to Jed. “The rest of you keep down
out of sight. You can bet the Russians are watching from that fort. This building is probably living quarters for them. Andre
and Bob, sight that mortar tube. Rest of you place blocks on the base plate to hold it steady.”

When Mike had heard from Bob and Lance that they had seen a mortar, he guessed correctly that it was an Ml937 medium one,
the mortar popular with all Warsaw Pact countries though it dated back to the year of its model number. It was a simple tube
steadied on the ground by a base plate and held at an angle by a bipod. It fired on the Stokes principle, invented during
World War I by a British manufacturer of agricultural machinery: a loose-fitting bomb, with propellant contained in a cartridge
in its tail, was dropped down the simple tube with a firing pin in its base. In older mortars the loose fit of the bomb within
the tube, which, of course, enabled it to be dropped on the pin, allowed propellant gas to escape around the bomb, which caused
variations in aim and range. The Ml937 had been modernized, like most other present-day mortars, by adding a plastic driving
band that expanded on firing by providing a close fit for the bomb within the tube. Since the tube, base plate, and bipod
each weighed more than forty pounds, and
the bombs six pounds each, the other team members were a lot less enthusiastic about the M1937 than Campbell.

By now the truck had come to a stop next to the stacked cinder blocks. The workers were looking toward the truck, but none
seemed anxious to leave the warmth of the fire. There was no sign of any movement from the fort.

“Keep your heads down,” Mike warned again. “Andre, is she set? I’d say your range is a little more than six hundred yards.
You agree? Jed, leave the engine running, open the door, leaving it open behind you. We got to have something from that fort—is
it empty or are those bastards ready to blow us into dust? Walk around a bit, Jed, in front of the truck.”

A steel door opened in the side of the fort, and a uniformed Soviet serviceman emerged. He turned his head, and another came
out to join him. This one raised binoculars to his eyes.

“They’re wondering where the soldier is who was with the driver,” Mike said. “Okay, Jed, jump back in the truck. Andre, give
‘em a taste.”

Andre dropped a mortar round tail-first into the mouth of the tube, and they heard it rattle down inside for a second, then
it whizzed out in an explosive burst and arced across the intervening space to the mud-walled fort. It hit the flat roof of
the fort with a growling roar. Flames spat out the doorway behind the two Russians who were observing the truck. One man huddled
to the ground, the flesh seared from his bones, his cheeks melted off his skull, while the other ran briefly, waving his arms,
in an orange sheet of flame, before he, too, was consumed by the deadly combustion.

Bob had passed another bomb to Andre, who held it at the mouth of the smoking tube waiting for Mike’s signal. Campbell nodded
to him, and Andre dropped in the projectile. It, too, landed on what remained of the flat roof of the fort, five or six yards
behind the first. This time the explosion was not triggered off until the bomb hit something inside the fort. The upper third
of the heavy mud walls folded outward as everything inside collapsed downward. Tall, angry red flames mixed with dense black
smoke, and a great cloud of gray dust rose over everything.

“Let’s go!” Mike yelled to Jed, who seemed mesmerized at the sight behind the wheel.

The truck lurched forward and swung back onto the road. Mike knew one thing for sure now: They were not going to be allowed
to pass the rocket and machine-gun emplacements that must lie on the exit from the pass. If these were in the same position
as those they saw coming into the pass, with steep walls rising on either side of the road, they would find themselves trapped
inside, unable to go forward or backward because of the bunkers, and unable to climb the walls of the pass with speed enough
to avoid being picked off by sniper fire. But they were in luck. The road opened onto a high flat-topped ridge, which it followed
for hundreds of yards before beginning its descent on the other side of the pass.