Cobra Strike (31 page)

The colonel, the lieutenant, and the eight men moved out of the village on the double. They were well armed, in radio contact
with the two choppers, and making no effort to hide their presence in the village. This would frighten off any local rebels
who might have ideas of attacking them. It would be essential to move with speed to reach the Americans before word of their
presence did. They moved fast through the tree trunks parallel to the dirt road that Noor’s two horsemen had taken with the
food. In less than ten minutes they saw a lone American, heavily armed, walking
along the dirt road. The Russians froze. They watched him amble along, kicking the dirt and looking around him as if he were
on a country stroll. Realizing that her men wanted to mow him down, the colonel thought fast.

She eased her Kalashnikov from her shoulder and handed it to one man, undid her pistol belt, and handed that with its attached
holster to another. She whispered to them, “I will take this one alive. He will tell us where the others are. So long as I
have at least one alive, I don’t care if you kill all the rest.” She did care, because the more she brought in alive, the
greater her triumph, but she knew she had to promise the men blood to keep them in line. “That house we passed farther on—two
of you go and empty it and keep the owners away. I will bring him there.”

She looked at her face in a small mirror and winked at the men. “He won’t shoot at me because even though I’m in uniform”—she
thrust one hip and thigh against her straight military skirt— “I’m not carrying a gun.” She reached in the top of one cowboy-style
boot and pulled out a tiny revolver.

The men were startled at the sudden transformation of this Amazon into a flirtatious lady.

“Don’t disturb us until I give the signal,” she whispered, and hurried off through the trees.

Lance’s expectations were low, and the last thing on earth he expected to see while walking in these woods was a beautiful
blond in a Russian uniform. He trained the Kalashnikov on her all the same, until it became evident that she was not carrying
weapons. If Lance wasn’t so horny, he might have wondered about the coincidence of meeting a beautiful Russian woman like
this, but Lance was horny, very, very horny, way past being sexually frustrated, and she looked much too good to him for him
to have any doubts about her.

She smiled and greeted him in Russian, showing that she was not fooled by his imitation Afghan costume and beard. For one
terrible moment he thought about answering her in English, then it dawned on him who he really was, not the Hollywood resident
with the phony name but Miroslav
Svoboda born in Minneapolis of Czech refugees, who had grown up listening to his mother speak to him in the old language and
tell him about the old country.

“I’m a Czech, not a Russian,” he told her in Czech. Do you understand?”

“I spent two years in Prague with the Red Army,” she said in passable Czech. “Imagine us meeting like this in Afghanistan!”

They both laughed at the world being such a small place. He told her about serving in a Czech army intelligence unit, one
of several sent by the Warsaw Pact countries to show support to the Soviets in Afghanistan. She hadn’t heard about these units
but supposed she hadn’t because they were in intelligence operations. He was grateful she didn’t ask any difficult questions,
such as how he could coordinate with the Red Army here if he didn’t speak Russian. He decided that maybe she was horny too.

“I was on my way to the village,” he said.

“I will walk back that way with you. I just passed an empty house a little way back and wanted to look inside, but I was too
scared to go in alone.” She took his arm. “Now, with you along, I will be able to see inside.”

Lance wasted no time in getting her there. The house wasn’t deserted, like she had said, but no one was around. He led her
into a back room with a window looking onto the woods and a large straw-filled mattress on an ancient four-poster bed. They
embraced and kissed passionately while lying side by side. She tried several times to get him talking about the other Czechs
he was with, but he had other things on his mind. She would have to take care of those first before they got into deep conversation.

She was willing. He watched her as she undressed and revealed her beautiful, silky-skinned body to him. Only two things slightly
disturbed the amorous atmosphere in the room. The first was a glimpse Lance thought he caught out of the corner of his eye
of a pale blue uniform slipping behind a tree not far outside the window. The second was the sight of the wood grips on a
steel pistol butt down inside one boot his blond angel had left next to the bed. But in his
biological condition Lance was not going to let little things like those interfere with the great urges of life.

Viktor Mikhailovich Kudimov, general of the Red Army, touched down in his Mi-24 next to the waiting gunship and slick. He
smiled at Anatoly and said, “Good work, Comrade. Where is she?”

The senior pilot said, “Not far. But there’s been no radio contact yet.”

“Make contact,” the general ordered, “but no word of my arrival.”

The lieutenant told the senior pilot to be patient. On the pilot’s demand he gave his location.

A half hour later the lieutenant’s jaw dropped when he saw General Kudimov, a major, and several other officers arrive on
foot outside the house. He explained hurriedly that Colonel Matveyeva was interrogating an American captive inside and had
left strict instructions that she was not to be disturbed until she gave the signal.

The general shrugged this off, and he and the other officers went to the house and walked in the door. In the back room they
found the colonel lying facedown on the mattress, wrists and ankles bound to the four bedposts, gagged with her panties.

General Kudimov made no move to release her. Instead he beckoned to the major, whom he knew could read English, and asked
what the characters lipsticked on Yekaterina’s smooth and rounded buttocks meant.

The major read slowly in heavily accented English. “USA” on the left cheek, and on the right, “ALL THE WAY.”

The truck, a vintage model from the 1950s, rattled along trails a little narrower than its wheelbase, with dropoffs of hundreds
of feet to one side at speeds that would have been dangerous in such a vehicle on a flat, modern highway. Campbell claimed
that the only time he really thought he was going to meet his end on this mission was during this ride to the Iranian border.
They crossed a main highway running north from Herat to the Soviet Union, where they had been seen by a spotter prop plane.
The plane called in Mi-24s and MIG-25s, which seemed to concern the driver very little. He liked to pause before crossing
a rise, look around like a prairie dog checking the sky for hawks, and then make a run for the next gulch, pass, or canyon
in which he would wait, concealed again for an opportune moment to make his next dart forward.

They took three close misses from rockets and were strafed eleven times by gunship fire. The aircraft lost them at dusk. They
kept going well into the night, the truck headlights being so weak that they hardly showed the
ground ten feet ahead, let alone give away their position to the air.

Joe Nolan and Andre Verdoux were kind of mad at Lance for not bringing the Russian lady along. They refused to accept his
explanation that he had been lucky to slip out the window in the woods unobserved. The mercs realized she had been a trap
intended to lure them, but none realized she had been the chief Soviet officer in charge of their pursuit. It never occurred
to any of them that she might in any way have been involved in the tortures and atrocities that had taken place in Noor Qader’s
territory as the Russians searched for them.

The constant stops the truck made kept the men on edge, since they never knew what to expect. One time, when the truck suddenly
braked, they looked out and saw three gunships search a valley they had been about to enter. Not long afterward the truck
came to an even more sudden stop, and the mercs piled out, only to find the driver at one of his five daily prayers heading
toward Mecca.

They arrived at a staging area for convoys across the border. The driver ignored them from this point on, concentrating all
his energies on collecting passengers and goods for his return journey. As a force of ten heavily armed men, the mercs were
respected by the various groups trading and discussing the most favorable routes. As the acknowledged leader of the team,
Campbell was offered cups of tea and shown other marks of respect by various eagle-eyed warriors. Crippenby was kept busy
translating their compliments and well wishes and invitations to travel with them.

Mike and Andre Verdoux took a walk around to see for themselves what each group of smugglers looked like. Only very few were
glassy-eyed and passive, indicating that they had been sampling their own wares. Most of them looked wild and irresponsible,
the sort that, even if they made a successful sale of their opium, would linger on to find some other kind of trouble. Three
of the groups were large, well armed, disciplined, and organized. These were obviously the professionals, the ones most likely
to succeed and the ones most likely to survive.

“I don’t want to be mixed up with any kind of drug
smugglers,” Mike explained to Andre, “but if we have to, let’s be sure they’re not junkies and losers. We’re going to have
enough problems in Iran without that.”

“Have you given up on us going ahead on our own without cooperating with any of these groups?” Andre asked.

“From what Crippenby has learned, we have no choice but to cooperate. The Iranian police and some army units are waging a
big campaign against the drug traffickers. We may not care for the looks of these characters, but at least they know all the
routes and where the Iranian police are most likely to be.”

On Turner and Winston’s advice they avoided one group that was bringing in its merchandise on packhorses. The two Institute
men had not forgotten hauling arms on donkeys from Pakistan. They left with two groups, of six and eight men, all of whom
carried large pictures of the Ayatollah Khomeini on their Western knapsacks.

One of the smugglers, who had learned to speak good English and Arabic while working in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, told the
mercs, “This can save you from being shot in the back by an Iranian policeman. He sees you and raises his gun, you turn your
back to run, he aims at you—and what does he see? A picture of his spiritual leader, the holiest man on earth, the Twelfth
Imam! He cannot hit that with a bullet, so he must adjust his aim—by which time you are gone, no? You need pictures of the
Ayatollah to wear?”

“I think my men would prefer to cut their throats,” Mike told him.

The Afghan thought this was very funny and told it to the others, who all laughed. They agreed with the Americans and said
they were right to prefer death than to hide behind a picture of someone they hated.

“Do you like the Ayatollah?” Mike asked.

“I am not Shiite, but I think he is good for all Moslems.”

“What about all the people he has executed?” Mike put to him.

“What about them?” the man answered. 44The people needed to have revenge against the Shah, but the Shah escaped, so they had
to have revenge against someone.
They took your hostages in revenge because you helped the Shah escape. What should they do with his supporters? If they put
them in prison, they would bribe the guards, escape, organize an army, and come back to execute the people who put them out
of power. So they had to be executed. Anyone sensible can see that.”

Mike decided that, as a mere, he was hardly in a position to criticize people for seeking blood vengeance. He learned some
interesting facts as he listened and avoided argument. Iran was still mostly owned by rich landlords, with the clergy owning
most of the rest. The real menace in Iran came from the Revolutionary Guards, the Pasdaran, who were now 150,000 strong, rivaled
the army in strength, and were used by ambitious mullahs for their own private ends. These were city mobs, jobless, without
schooling, who now had power and status so long as they were blindly loyal to the mullahs.

“What about the police we are trying to avoid?” Mike asked.

“They are good men. Since the army has to fight the Iraqis on the opposite border of Iran, they have sent the police here
to fight us. The army was well trained and made things very hard for us. The police do not have training to operate in wild
mountains like this. You do not have to worry about them. But they are sending Revolutionary Guards here too. We don’t like
them. We kill them but they send more. For each one we kill they send three more. The Pasdaran are fools. They think that
they have only to shout at us and we will run. That is what happens in Teheran and their cities where they beat women for
not wearing modest dress. Up here in the mountains they shout at us, and we kill them for making too much noise.”

Mike laughed at his joke.

They were in Iran. As the Afghan smuggler had said, the police were easy to avoid. They seemed to make lots of noise while
moving around in tight-knit groups, almost as if saying, “Here we come, quick hide, then we won’t see anything and won’t have
to fight you.” The smugglers and the mercs lay low each time until it was safe for them to
move on again. They met another group of smugglers, nine men, coming against them. The team covered them with their weapons
until they were sure of who they were. The men showed the Afghans with the mercs their unsold opium. They were returning across
the border and would come back again in a few days time when things were quieter.

“They say that there are thousands of Revolutionary Guards ahead of us,” Jed Crippenby translated. “These men tried to break
through but could not. They escaped only because they know the country here so well, while the Revolutionary Guards are strangers
here, flown in by helicopters specially to search for smugglers. This is some mullah’s idea, they say, and the Pasdaran will
get tired of walking around in these mountains after a few days, of being bitten by snakes, of being shot at by mountain tribesmen,
of being baked by the sun. Then the helicopters will take them back to the cities and things will be quiet again in a few
days.”