Cobra Strike (26 page)

Rasool looked her in the eyes and said, “He died honorably, speaking the truth. He did not see the Americans. I saw them.
Many of them.”

“Who else in this village saw them?”

He spread his hands. “No one. Only me.”

The pistol spat flame, and the lump of lead stove in his forehead above his right eye. He sprawled across the body of his
fellow villager.

Yekaterina put her gun in its holster and felt better. This was the third of these Afghan rumor-mongers she had silenced,
along with one or two others each time in order to test that they were telling her the truth. She intended to stop these unfounded
reports of there being more than three Americans. She had assured the general that these stories were nonsense. The Americans
were here all right—close to the Soviet border! The Red Army was on full alert on its own side of the border, and in Yekaterina’s
considered opinion these three Yankee provocateurs had already crossed onto Soviet soil for their own private vicious purposes.
There were three of them. No more.

Having hid for the rest of the daylight hours in long rushes not far from where they had concealed the toppled truck in the
ditch with the same rushes, they walked all night to reach a point on one of Gul’s maps, covered Crippenby while he inquired
alone at a shepherd’s hovel for the local rebel leader, and followed the shepherd down a dry ravine in almost total darkness.

“Tell him he’ll be the first to die if he leads us into a trap,” Mike instructed Jed, “and that we’ll all go back and violate
his wife.”

Jed talked to the man and reported back, “He says he’s not afraid of death and he has no wife. He has nothing in this world
except his sheep.”

Waller said, “Tell him I’ll violate his sheep.”

Winston and Murphy, the only two who had been badly knocked about in the capsizing of the truck, were being allowed to take
it easy, which in Campbell’s unit meant that Mike might be inclined to listen if they claimed they could go no farther. Andre
Verdoux added their care to his duties and, on a number of occasions, called a halt when he decided Winston needed a rest.

“The fucking frog has never once called a break on my account,” Murphy complained.

“I was afraid that by doing so I would insult your manhood,” Verdoux explained. “We all know how vulnerable Australians are
about their manhood.”

“You rotten
eau-de-cologne
Paris faggot,” Murphy roared.
“Mike only takes you along to do the bookkeeping. You don’t have any right to talk to a fighting man.”

This was a low blow, touching as it did on Verdoux’s status as an aging warrior, and Bob Murphy regretted saying it as soon
as it was out of his mouth.

“Sorry, Andre,” he said, suddenly subdued. “You know anything awful about Australia you want to say to even us up?”

“You’d have to give me time to think up something,” Andre replied gallantly, touched that his enemy had such respect for him
as a soldier. Then the Frenchman turned to the black American. “How do you feel, Winston? Ready to push on?”

“I’m okay, Andre.”

“Great,” Andre said. “All right, Mike, we’re ready to move out.”

“What about me?” Murphy demanded. “Why not ask me if my leg is rested enough so I can walk?”

“Australians are good at hopping,” Andre answered.

Masood Haq was a steely-eyed giant with a big floppy turban and a loose brown pajama suit. “The Russians say there are only
three of you,” he said. “They shoot people for saying there are ten of you. What do you want of us? I mean, of course, beyond
a place to stay and food to eat. What can we do for you?”

“We need transportation west,” Campbell said, using Jed as an interpreter.

“West?” Haq smiled. “I will not ask where you are going. I know someone who will go part of the way with you. This man has
excellent transport. But you must remain here for a few days until my present work is completed.”

Mike said to Jed in English, “I’m not sure we can trust him. We could do with a rest, but I don’t want to stay put here unless
I know the reason for it. Be diplomatic, but insist on finding out why we must delay.”

Jed and the rebel leader fenced verbally for some time before Jed was able to tell Mike, “They’ve dug a tunnel under the local
army barracks, and they’re preparing to blow it up. The people we travel west with are part of this plan,
and so we have to wait. It sounds to me, Mike, as if it’s going to be one helluva lot harder to get out of here even with
their help, after they pull this caper, than it would be to leave right now and forge ahead alone.”

Mike shook his head. “We’ll be leaving with their people. He said we would be going with people involved in this project.
They take care of their own. No matter what goes down, we’re better off sticking with locals. If they’ve survived against
the Russians this long, they’ve got to be doing something right. Tell him I want to see this tunnel.”

“He says that’s not possible,” Jed translated.

“Hang on to him here while I fetch Nolan.”

Mike returned with Nolan, who showed Masood Haq some Tovex TR-2, an underground mining explosive, and C-4, the powerful military
plastic explosive, along with sophisticated detonators.

Haq’s attitude changed instantly.

“They have been using the scrapings from artillery shells and mixtures of artificial fertilizer and sugar,” Jed translated.
“Masood Haq hereby appoints you chief fireworks-maker in the kingdom, Nolan.”

The rebel leader escorted the three Americans across waste lots to a small house at the edge of a town. The four men crawled
on their bellies all the way. The tunnel led from the floor of the house in a steep incline down beneath the town. It ran
level for about a hundred yards and then angled gently upward for another twenty yards or so. No timbers shored die hard,
dry earth in which the tunnel had been constructed. It was barely wide enough for a man’s shoulders to fit without his turning
sideways, and it varied in height, without apparent reason, from five to seven feet. The air was stale at the far end of the
tunnel. Nolan checked the explosives already in place.

“Not bad,” Nolan said after he had examined the mixtures and their placement. “What they have here would have caused the buildings
above to collapse. When we mix in the C-4 and Tovex TR-2, we’ll blow their asses sky-high. Where’s the wiring?”

“That has been the holdup,” Jed translated. “They expect it tomorrow or the day after.”

“Ask him if he knows any communist who lives alone in a nice new house,” Nolan said.

Masood did, and Mike agreed that they would drop by to visit him. Joe slid the catch of a back window with his knife blade
and climbed in. He tiptoed across the unlit back room and peered through a doorway into the front room. A young Afghan in
Western-style gray pants and a blue shirt, with heavy-rimmed spectacles, sat cross-legged on the floor, leafing through a
pile of documents.

Nolan walked silently across the carpet toward him. The knife, blade horizontal, point forward, was held at his right side.
The Afghan was suddenly startled to see a pair of boots beside his documents on the carpet. He looked up to see who was in
them. The knife blade swung in an arc die length of Nolan’s right arm. The point of the blade penetrated the man’s voice box,
and its edges sliced through his trachea. Nolan savagely jerked the blade from side to side to sever the arteries and veins
and was immediately rewarded with splashes of blood on himself, the carpet, and the nearest wall. But Nolan had already lost
interest and was on his way around the house, warm, sticky weapon in hand, to make sure it was empty before signaling to Masood
and Jed to come inside. Mike would stand guard while they worked at stripping the house’s entire electrical wiring from the
walls.

The explosion was set for six that evening, when the soldiers would be eating their meal. Masood Haq insisted that it take
place during daylight, and Nolan agreed to humor him. The mercs and Institute men slept late, and most passed the early afternoon
listening to an older cousin of Masood’s, Rahim, who spoke good English and had been a career officer in the Afghan army before
the Marxists took over. He had been to the United States three times, taking courses at Fort Knox, Kentucky; Fort Benning,
Georgia; and Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He told them it was a “real pleasure” for him to speak to Americans again and that
he was “mighty pleased” they were here.

What interested them most was what Rahim had to say about life under the communists in the capital city of Kabul.
Unlike Masood, Rahim did not consider himself one of the
mujahidin
, or holy warriors, fighting a
jihad
, or sacred war, against the infidels. He had even gone along with the leftist takeover, prior to the Russian invasion, because
it promised modernization and new prosperity. The communists had not fully trusted him and transferred him from his active
duty post to a desk job in Kabul.

“The government compound where I worked had three gates. The Khad—the secret police—used two of them, and everyone else used
the other one. Even the prime minister, whose office was at the center of the compound, could not use the two Khad gates.
One day someone must have observed me looking overly long at the Khad buildings, and I received orders to avert my face from
them every time I was entering or leaving the compound. After that I was assigned a new typist, a sixteen-year-old girl who
had been trained to type in Persian in Moscow. The typists had a meeting every day from two to four, and she always carefully
locked her desk drawer before she left. One afternoon I had a cousin visit me, and he picked the lock while I kept watch.
He found that she had a miniature tape recorder and a pistol in the drawer. Then I knew my days were numbered.”

“She was a member of the Khad?” Verdoux asked.

“Probably not a member,” Rahim said, “but she certainly worked for them. She was one of the many young people they send, some
very young, for training all over the Soviet Union. They come back brainwashed and think they are being patriotic by informing
on their less convinced countrymen. I know for a fact that they transport orphan boys to Moslem parts of the Soviet Union.
There they teach them that Russia and Afghanistan are just two friendly countries that belong on equal footing to the Union
of Soviet Socialist Republics. They teach them that the
mujahidin
are heretic Moslems and train them to use the AK-47 and TT 7.62mm pistol so they can come back here, shoot men in the back
whom no adult could approach, sneak up to buildings and toss grenades through windows, distribute bombs disguised as toys
to rebel children—”

“We’ve seen the result of that,” Andre said. “They were dropped from a plane on a hillside.”

Rahim nodded sadly. “You see things in this war that no one has stooped to before. Our Russian brothers have many things to
teach mankind if they are given the chance. We know that because we have always lived alongside their empire. I think you
Americans know it, too, but can’t really believe it because you want to feel you can make trustworthy friends of the Bolsheviks.
Only remember what they say—they say
they
never change, that the only thing that changes is other people’s opinions of them.”

Harvey Waller smiled warmly at him. Harvey was getting to love Afghanistan. This mission was working out like a vacation for
him. He was meeting interesting people who talked common sense, and there was something new to do every day. He felt no doubt
at all that he’d fill his quota for this trip-a dead commie to show for every day he was in the field.

“You knew your days in the army were numbered?” Andre prompted Rahim.

“Yes. Influential communists here all belong to what they call the Sazman Iwalia, or First Organization. One by one they appointed
each other to all the key posts in the armed forces. Officers who did not belong were not invited to key meetings and in time
found themselves transferred, like I was, to paper shuffling and donkey work. I was suspect because my brother Masood was
emerging as an active rebel leader. I did not spy for the rebels while I was in government service because that is against
my principles. I am a soldier, not a spy. I was loyal too. I did not leave until I saw that they meant to murder me.”

“That’s always a valid reason for leaving,” Harvey assured him very seriously.

Colonel Yekaterina Matveyeva did not realize as she sat at a borrowed desk in the town’s military barracks that she was less
than fifteen feet from an American whose presence in Afghanistan she had strenuously denied. Almost directly beneath where
she sat, in a narrow womb sunk in the hard earth, Joe Nolan jabbed detonators into explosive charges that were planted in
a pattern to gain maximum effect. He linked the detonators together with wiring from the slain
communist’s house. He worked carefully, neatly, methodically, leaving no room for error, insulating against the rare chance
of damp in the desert-dry soil.

Above him, the colonel carefully sifted through her information inputs. She yelled for the lieutenant. When he poked his head
in the doorway, she said, “They’re right here. In this town. I know it.” She waved one hand toward the reports. “All independent
sources, and they all say the same thing.”

The lieutenant approached her cautiously. “Certainly they all agree, Comrade. All the reports say that two non-English-speaking
Westerners with camera and sound equipment—”

“I can read for myself, Lieutenant! Why are you so dull? So totally unimaginative! Let me answer all your objections. First
of all, there are two, not three, men. Why? Because they have to keep the black one hidden since he would immediately identify
them as the group with Red Army priority notification status. The local people think they do not speak English because they
are used to the British-sounding English of Pakistanis and Indians; they are unfamiliar with American accents. You know what
their television cameras and sound equipment are? A shoulder-mounted ground-to-air or antitank rocket launcher plus wire-guided
missile gadgetry. These peasants here are too stupid to tell the difference. You see? This shows I was right about only three
Americans being involved, and not ten or eleven as some idiots have been claiming. I admit I was wrong about one thing—they
have not yet crossed the border into the Soviet Union. We have to get to them before they can do so. This town is their staging
area for the run across the border.