Cobra Strike (29 page)

They heard the tanks before they saw them, clanking along the road, deep roars from their powerful engines. When Campbell
saw them, he knew they were T-54s, which
the Russians had supplied to the North Vietnamese. These were Red Army tanks, and although they were not the latest thing
in Soviet tank design, they carried a powerful 100mm cannon. It was clear to Mike that they had come in search of the Americans
in the armored personnel carrier. A direct hit from one of these cannons would have left the carrier looking like one of those
ultralight compacts after being totaled by a Mack truck.

The mercs were enjoying this. For once their asses weren’t on the line. They could scrunch down and watch Noor Qader’s men
do their stuff. They hadn’t been told exactly what was going on; they hadn’t seen any weapons or mines heavy enough to do
much more than scratch the paint job on these tanks, and they thought it a reasonable possibility that they would be running
for their lives in the next few minutes with 100mm shells ripping craters in the ground behind them. But no one had asked
for their help, and as Campbell said, they weren’t going to force themselves on anybody. They caught sight of Op van de Bosch
and Jan Prijt from time to time, with their camera and microphone, as the two men moved themselves closer and closer to the
road edge, only to be pulled back by Noor’s rebels.

The tanks descended from the higher mountains, rumbling down the center of the road, one behind the other, awkward and careless
and capable of crushing all in their path. The first tank drew level with the team’s position and passed them. Then they saw
the road give way beneath its front end. The lead tank fell nose first into the deep trench that had opened up across the
road. The tank’s weight had broken through the light timber that had been used to support the light skin of road surface stretched
over the trench. The second tank bumped into the first from behind and drove it deeper into the pit. The other five tanks
ground to a stop with several yards between them and shifted into reverse as their guns swung around to bear down on anything
that might try to stop them from backing out of this situation. At that moment three heavy pine trees fell across the road
almost simultaneously, each more than five feet in diameter and weighing at least twenty tons. The last tank
began to butt against one trunk to try to roll it out of the way.

Noor’s rebels swarmed out onto the road and up on the tanks. They smeared mud over all the slits so that the crews inside
were blinded. Then these men scattered, and the first bottle with a blazing rag stuck in its neck arced through the air and
smashed on the top surface of one tank. The gasoline inside spread as the bottle smashed and was ignited by the flaming rag,
so that it covered the tank with a leaping carpet of flames.

More bottles were thrown in a constant series upon the lumbering, blinded tanks, so that they constantly remained engulfed
in fire and the men inside began to scream for mercy. Some burst through the escape hatches, their hair and skin immediately
catching fire. The rebels let some die slowly, half in and half out of the tanks, clawing the air and hoarsely roaring. Others
they cut to bits with automatic fire as soon as they showed themselves.

A helicopter flew in from the south to observe the action but did not present itself suitably for a rocket shot.

Yekaterina knew they should have stopped those Americans while they were still on the plains. Now they had been allowed to
regain rebel-held high ground again, and this was the result of it! Seven totally destroyed T-54s and crews! But, needless
to say, wily old General Kudimov had covered his ass again by ordering her to proceed the previous night to Moghor, from where
the tanks had set out. As colonel, she had found herself to be the ranking officer in the town. She saw now why that had been
arranged. Viktor Mikhailovich Kudimov had not remained a general in the Red Army all these years without having found a way
to dispose of unwanted mistakes. She knew his immediate action, once he heard about the tanks, would be to suspend her from
active duty and that after that she would have no means of restoring her reputation. So she might as well be hung for a sheep
as a lamb.

“Maintain radio silence,” she told the two pilots of her chopper, “and make for the Moghor landing zone with all speed. If
either of you mention a word to anyone of what
you
think
you
may
have seen down there on that road, I’ll have you executed for treason. You’ve heard what they say about me. I’m pretty, so
I’ve got to be extra mean to make dumb bastards like you believe.”

“We two saw nothing,” the senior pilot assured her, “and neither did the engineer or door gunner. I’ll talk with them.”

“Be sure you do.”

Her plans began to fit into a more logical framework as she turned them over in her mind on the flight back. She had met a
lieutenant the night before and spent an hour in bed with him. He’d been coarse and brutal; he had even imagined he was her
master because she had permitted him in her bed. He had soon learned he was mistaken there! He would be perfect for this job
she had in mind. By the time she had finished, the general would have something to criticize her for—or she would have succeeded
on her own where he had failed, by bringing in these Americans. At this stage it mattered little to her whether they were
dead or alive. So long as she got them, she was off the hook.

She watched impassively as her gunship raked the field and workers crumpled in the rain of bullets. She glanced at Lieutenant
Tokar. The oaf was grinning. The slick carrying eight infantrymen followed the gunship as it headed north through fertile
valleys in the bare red mountains. Lieutenant Tokar would do all right.

She did not want to travel too far north, and yet the progress of the Americans would be slowed now that they had to stay
off the main road into Herat. Also, she would need fairly fast results since she was operating without clearance from her
superiors. In a short while she spotted an ideal village in the sheltered end of a valley. The Americans would not have lingered
after the tank attack. If they had not passed through this place, they could not be very far from it.

“Soften it up and signal to the other chopper to prepare to put the men in,” she said to the senior pilot, who had to swing
around to make himself visible to the slick pilots and use hand signals to them. He then dove the gunship on the
village, rocketed a few of the houses, and strafed the streets as they filled with fleeing people. The gunship then pulled
back and hovered to give cover to the slick as it selected an LZ and went down to put in the men.

After a while, when no resistance was offered, the gunship touched down beside the slick and waited for the infantrymen to
bring back prisoners for questioning.

The colonel had a basic working knowledge of Dan, the Afghan dialect of Persian. She kept her question simple. “You see Americans?”
“No.” “No.” What else did she expect them to say? She told the lieutenant what she wanted him to do and waited for his reaction.
He grinned again.

“Take them over by their houses so they don’t damage the choppers or mess us up,” she told him.

The lieutenant tied the thumbs of five people together behind their backs, after selecting an old man, two mothers who had
to be separated from their children and from whom he ripped their head and face covering, two children of eight or nine who
had to be separated from their mothers, and one youth he would use as a demonstration to the others. He had the five set twenty
yards apart, close to the houses, and had the soldiers keep back their family and other villagers at about forty yards. Then
he bound a single stick of dynamite to the belly of each of the five, set a cap at one end of each stick, and connected a
twenty-foot fuse to each cap. He stood by the youth and waited for the colonel to ask her question.

“You see Americans?”

The youth might have been retarded; the lieutenant couldn’t tell. Or maybe just filled with hate, as so many of these rotten
Afghans were. Anyway, he didn’t answer the question, so the lieutenant touched the end of the fuse with a match flame and
moved away fast.

The youth remained for some time, watching the long brown fuse turn to white ash as the point of ignition crept nearer to
the stick tied to his belly. Then he tried to back away. He even tried to run, his thumbs tied behind his back, but his long
tail of creeping death was attached to him and went where he did. He spent his last moments standing still with his head bowed.

The dynamite blast knocked him on his back, splitting open his chest cavity and splashing his blood on the mud-brick wall
of the house behind him.

The lieutenant next selected a nine-year-old boy whose mother the soldiers were having trouble keeping at a distance. He waited
for the colonel to ask her question.

“No,” the boy replied in a firm voice.

The lieutenant lit the match but did not yet touch it to the end of the fuse. He looked at the colonel.

She walked over to the boy’s mother. “You see Americans?”

“There are none! I would tell you if I had!” the woman screamed.

The colonel herself had to knock her to the ground when she saw the match light the fuse leading to her small son’s body.

“The crazy bitch!” General Kudimov shouted to the major. “Are you sure she’s on this rampage?”

“Certain, Comrade General. Do you want me to send forces to restrain her?”

“Absolutely not! Maybe she’ll get them this way.” The general knew the major resented having a woman for a senior officer
in a combat zone and would do anything to get rid of her, which might come in handy later if Yekaterina did not succeed. On
the other hand, if she did succeed, he would have no choice but to give her some of the credit. He said aloud, “Right now
Colonel Matveyeva is the only senior officer making what I regard as a serious effort to apprehend these American outlaws.
I think that instead of finding ways to try to block her efforts, Major, you might attempt to initiate some of your own.”

After the major had left, suitably chastised, Viktor Mikhailovich Kudimov began to worry again about what she might be up
to. She was crazy enough to capture the Americans, load them into those two choppers, and fly them across the border into
the U.S.S.R., all on her own, taking
all the credit. No, as little as he wanted to be associated with her campaign of torture and terror, he would still have to
pay her a visit in the field, if only to remind her who she still reported to, like it or not.

He would give her a little more time and try to keep a watch on her. Then he would pay her an unexpected visit himself and
see what she had to show him.

The colonel and lieutenant had refined their technique. Their early methods had been too time-consuming. They had wasted huge
amounts of time on people who had no idea what they were talking about—country people who became confused when strangers dropped
out of the sky and demanded to know about other strangers these people had neither seen nor heard of. But she could never
be sure if they were lying until she tested them physically. Their new technique involved fewer victims in a greater number
of locations, so that she could mark off the grids in her military map of the area as having been thoroughly investigated.
Coming into villages was dangerous. They had drawn fire in two of them, and now they approached people in fields just as readily
as those in villages. They had run out of dynamite but had discovered a safer and even more effective replacement—kerosene.
Few of the houses here had electricity, so kerosene was in plentiful supply everywhere they went.

“There!” The colonel pointed down to a group of women working in a field. The gunship and the following slick made fast descents
and touched down in the field, close to the women, before they could scatter very far. The infantrymen from the slick knew
their job by this time: they rounded up two of the women whose small children clung to them like lambs to a ewe. One soldier
seized a girl about five, and another poured kerosene over her head so that it ran into her eyes and over her skin and soaked
her clothes.

“You see Americans?” the colonel asked the struggling mother.

“No! No Americans!”

The lieutenant tossed a match on the kerosene-soaked child. The flaming figure ran toward her mother, who was
dragged away by the infantrymen and then held so she could watch her now blinded child die an agonized death before her eyes.
They did not release the woman until the fire-blackened little torso lay still on the ground.

Then the lieutenant seized a child from the second woman, one of four who clung close to her. This mother managed to hang
on to her boy by one arm as the lieutenant pulled him away by the other.

“I see Americans!” she shouted. “I see Americans!”

The lieutenant immediately released her boy and stepped back from her.

The colonel walked over, looked her in the eyes, and said in her slow, deliberate Dari, “If I think you are lying to me, I
will burn
all
your children.”

“I see Americans! I will tell you where they are!

Campbell had abandoned the idea of going as far south as Herat because of the communist forces now being set up to intercept.
Word was coming in to Noor Qader’s men of major troop movements just north of the city. The main road into Iran went from
Herat, and in time it, too, would be blocked. Along with Verdoux, Campbell studied the maps and listened to the advice of
Qader’s men. They were presently about thirty miles south of the Soviet border and about a hundred and fifty miles east of
the line with Iran. Old smugglers’ routes ran due west for hundreds of miles, and these were still used today by Afghan opium
smugglers.

It seemed that in spite of all the Islamic fervor in Iran, the country still had a huge population of opium addicts. The Afghans
grew the poppies, as they had done for centuries, and smuggled in the sticky opiate they drained from slits in the pods. Campbell
refused to go in as an armed escort to a drug train, and instead exacted a deal that made it worth the smugglers’ while to
transport the team in place of opium. They would travel by horseback one day’s ride and wait there for a truck to bring them
the rest of the way.