Cobra Strike (8 page)

Turner felt sorry for the other three men who had to stand and see what was in store for them. They were gagged, but their
eyes expressed the agony of their terror. The man with the blade went about his work as methodically as a pork butcher, stopping
to laugh and light a cigarette and, from time to time, winking at his American friends for whom he was clearly putting on
this special show.

Turner said in a low, nasty voice. “This is a big chance for you students of war to do a little fieldwork.”

Winston and Baker said nothing.

When all four prisoners were cut and bagged, Turner led the other six out from inside the cave. Their hands were still bound
behind them, and electrical tape covered their eyes. Kalashnikovs hanging from their shoulders, Turner and Winston set out
with the Afghans and the six asses. Baker stayed behind to watch over the missiles and their own asses, still safely stashed
in the cave. They came to the edge of a broad, low valley after a twenty-minute walk, and one of the Afghans pointed. A group
of military vehicles was clustered on the far side of the valley floor.

Turner studied them through binoculars. “Tents. Armored personnel carriers. And Russians.” He watched some more in silence.
“They’re Russkies, all right. No sign of Afghans there. This looks good.”

Turner nodded to the Afghans, and he and Winston concealed themselves behind rocks. The Afghans stripped the tape roughly
from the men’s eyes, which made them howl. Then he cut loose their wrists. They put headdresses on the three unshaven prisoners
and left the three “Americans” bareheaded. Four of the Afghans held sniper rifles with telescopic sights on them as they marched
the six asses across the valley. Turner noticed the bloodstains on four of the sacks. The Russians soon saw the men and animals,
and a vehicle came out to meet them.

Turner said, “Chances are those dumb Russians have never seen a real American in their lives and won’t be able to understand
what those six are saying. Maybe they’ll think they’re talking English! We only need a few hours to slip out of here.”

Back at the cave, they loaded the missiles on the asses while Baker, who spoke Russian, monitored the radio channels to see
if that Soviet unit announced its capture of what had been reported to be Americans with missiles. Just a few hours of confusion…

When Mike Campbell first went to live in the Arizona desert, he’d hoped to find a deserted rancho in a lonely box canyon which
he could fix up. But desert is desert, and he found very little of anything in the scrubby lands. Then he met Tina. Like a
sensible, practical woman, she refused to live without electricity and running water and with only coyotes, rattlesnakes,
and cactus for company. Mike refused to live in a town. So they made a temporary compromise by buying a mobile home and setting
it up in a trailer camp a way out in the desert. Most people there were retired couples who now devoted their lives to growing
miniature lawns in the desert and to keeping alive sickly shrubs imported from Michigan or New Jersey or wherever they had
spent their working lives. Campbell’s prolonged periods of inactivity and then sudden disappearances for weeks on end led
to a lot of talk. The general agreement was that he was a criminal of some sort, with various factions favoring particular
activities such as drug smuggler, hitman, seller of Mexican babies. They were lavish in their sympathy for Tina being stuck
with such a brute, while trying to pry
information from her. Born in Arizona, Tina had cousins and friends all around, and the trailer camp folk’s constant gossip
and questions amused her more often than annoyed her.

The truth was that she had no more idea than they did of where Mike went and what he did there. She knew, of course, that
he was a mere and that each time he left he was leaving for war and that she might never see him again. Some of the old Southwest
lingered in her attitude in that she did not find it odd that women stayed home and worried while their men did crazy, dangerous
things. She knew Mike told her nothing in order to protect her. And it had to be nothing. She never even knew what continent
he was leaving for. None of Mike’s associates, even his close friend Andre Verdoux, knew her name or where to find her. A
couple of times each day, Mike checked with a phone-answering service in Phoenix for urgent messages, and he picked up his
mail there once a week.

That was plenty of contact for him with the outside world. Increasingly he had come to enjoy near solitude, except for Tina
and his nosy neighbors in the trailer camp. They bugged Tina but mostly let him alone. They knew he practiced with automatic
weapons out on the desert and still remembered with gratitude the time he single-handedly chased off a marauding biker gang
from the trailer camp with a machine gun. The retired folk felt they hadn’t too much to worry about alone out on the desert,
so long as Campbell was around, though this did not stop them from bitching about his not earning a decent, straightforward,
nine-to-five living.

When Campbell got back from his week-long cruise on the aircraft carrier, there were a half dozen phone messages from Andre
Verdoux at the answering service. Mike drove twenty miles to a tavern, loaded the box with quarters, and phoned England, only
to be told that Andre was not in his hotel room at the moment. A few drinks and one hour later, Mike phoned again and this
time got him.

Andre was brief and careful about how he worded things. When he had finished telling Mike what he had been doing and what
had happened to him, culminating in the dog
attack at the airfield, he mentioned the finances and suggested, “You might consider coming here, Mike, with some of your
associates. I can supply the two cameramen from this side. I don’t think any special equipment will be needed, apart from
a few standard pieces, which should be fairly easy to obtain in Liverpool. Three men and yourself should be enough. No need
to bring the Aussie.”

“I’m confused, Andre.” Mike’s voice was humorous, yet had an edge to it. “Is this your mission or mine?”

Andre paused. “Well, if you come in on it, you’re the chief.”

“Then I’ll be the one who decides how many go and whether or not the Aussie goes, won’t I?” Mike was not going to tolerate
the continuing feud between Andre and Australian Bob Murphy.

“All right, Mike, you call the shots,” the Frenchman said in his accented colloquial English. “I suppose I will have to consider
myself lucky if you include me.”

“I also want to put things together over here, not in England.”

Andre did not want this, but he could not argue with the logic he knew was behind it. A mere mission was best organized far
from the field of operation, so that when the team arrived, they knew what their roles were and more or less what would be
expected of them. To bring in an unorganized group of men and to try to set things up in the field of acton was to court disaster.
Even though this photography thing would hopefully be a noncombat mission, Andre knew Mike would organize it as if they were
going inside the Kremlin. That was how Campbell succeeded where others failed.

“Mike, I’m in a big hurry with this. It would be much quicker if you and the others could come straight to Liverpool. We could
go to the Lake District or the Yorkshire moors, even the Scottish Highlands, to get ourselves in shape—”

Mike interrupted, “I want a look at everyone before we ship out, not after. You know how it’s done, Andre. Give me a call
in three days time, I’ll give you the meeting place, and we’ll be ready to move out one week after that. Ten days. I can’t
do better than that and you know it.”

Andre knew it.

Mike hung up and dug more quarters from the supply he had brought with him. He had left one other number to call from this
public phone because he did not like the sound of it. A Mr. Lowell from the Nanticoke Institute in Washington, D.C.

Lowell took some time to come to the phone. “Mr. Campbell? Good of you to return my call. Could you spare us one day of your
time as a consultant? For a fee, of course.”

“In about a month’s time I’d be pleased to, Mr. Lowell.”

“I was thinking about tomorrow.”

“Sorry.”

“I forgot to mention the fee, Mr. Campbell. Five thousand dollars. Can any of us turn down that for a single day’s work?”

“It’s tempting.”

“You will have to leave this evening in order to join us for breakfast at eight tomorrow. Tonight you will find a room reserved
in your name at the Hay-Adams Hotel, across from the White House on Lafayette Square. In the morning a car will be sent to
fetch you at seven-fifteen sharp.”

Mike guessed that everything about Lowell would be sharp. He replaced the receiver. His curiosity was aroused, and five thou
was five thou. One thing sure, this Nanticoke Institude, whatever it was, was too much of a big spender to be federal government.
He thought for a moment about bringing Tina with him for the trip, then realized that this thing could not be as clean, safe,
and aboveboard as Lowell had made it sound. No one paid five thousand dollars for that.

Campbell buttered his toast and let the distinguished-looking gents at the long table have a good look at him. There were
thirteen of them nibbling toast, sipping coffee, and chatting the usual “in” talk of long-familiar colleagues in the workplace.
Although there had been no introductions, Campbell recognized two of them from newspaper photos or TV. Plainly they were all
“experts” of one sort or another, the kind never elected to anything but who seemed to run
the country all the same. Lowell, gaunt, skin like parchment, his hands trembling, sat beside him but never said a word to
him. Mike worked on his toast, butter, and grape jelly and left it to them to get things going. He smiled a little to himself
at the thought that these egghead professors might think they could intimidate him by ignoring him in the stately surroundings
of this breakfast room. The ceiling high above the long table had plaster decorations, marble busts of grim-faced men stood
in alcoves, the service was silver, and the waiters were formal, and at one end of the vast room hung a huge painting of someone
in a cocked hat on a rearing white horse, holding his sword in the air, leading his troops into battle. Mike thought that
the place should have been good for scrambled eggs at least, if not eggs Benedict, but all they were served was this well-done
toast and very so-so coffee.

Lowell began the presentation without warning in the form of a loud, one-sided conversation with Campbell. He referred to
the three members of the Nanticoke Institute in Afghanistan as “fine young men who had gone there on a goodwill mission.”

Lowell concluded his account by saying, “It is simply out of loyalty to these fine young men that the Institute is trying
to organize a clandestine rescue party to get them out and, of course, for the good name of America.”

Mike looked at his coffee cup and said slowly, “This stinks of a government mission gone sour. What’s your relationship with
the CIA?”

“Since this incident we’ve been on very cool terms with the gentlemen at Langley,” Lowell answered in his precise voice. “We
did not consult them before sending our three men in, which they now regard as a breach of etiquette.”

“Is this Institute a CIA front?” Mike asked.

“Certainly not. No doubt some members of the Institute are also members of the CIA or NSA. I wouldn’t know.”

“What did you send the three to Afghanistan for?”

“To study conditions there.”

Mike smiled at the evasiveness of this answer. “I’ll be frank with you. It sounds to me like you deliberately sent in those
people to have them trapped and caught by the
Russians. Right now I’m second-guessing you to try to figure out why you did that. And why you want to involve me.”

Lowell looked angry, but a heavy man on the opposite side of the table laughed and said, “I think it’s reasonable for you
to suspect us of some convoluted conspiracy in which things that seem to be one thing turn out to be another. Yet you would
be surprised at how easy it is for clever men, confident of their own abilities, to do something stupid and irresponsible.
But that is what we did, and now we are trying to extricate ourselves with a minimum of damage to the Institute and, of course,
to our own precious reputations.”

Mike was satisfied with the sincerity of this answer. He next asked, “Were your men armed?”

“They may have smuggled in a few rifles and sidearms in a spirit of youthful irresponsibility,” Lowell said hurriedly at Campbell’s
side.

Mike looked across the table at the heavy man. He said, “They brought in missiles. Not U.S. manufacture, but all the same,
we don’t want them caught with them.”

“The Institute has no official knowledge of this,” Lowell added primly, “and certainly does not condone its members carrying
out such activities.”

“Just as you would not hire mercenaries to rescue them,” Mike suggested.

“Exactly,” Lowell agreed without a trace of humor. “Mounting a clandestine rescue effort to free these fine young men is an
entirely different approach.”

“Suppose they can be located but not rescued.”

“Then they will have to be terminated in such a way that their remains cannot be identified,” Lowell said in his stiff voice.

Mike looked across the table at the heavy man to see if he would disagree, but the man looked away from him.

Now Mike had the truth of the offer: Rescue them if possible; if not, scorch them into the dirt before the Russians can use
fhem. It was not the three men who were to be saved as much as the reputation of the Nanticoke Institute.

Mike sighed and played with his coffee cup. “A million dollars” he said.

Campbell returned to Arizona that evening with the matter resolved in his mind. He would go to Afghanistan after he completed
a prior commitment. His team would be ready in three weeks to a month. The professors hadn’t liked this at all. They couldn’t
see why their problems weren’t more important than everybody else’s. All Mike would say was that he was committed to a mission
but that he would do theirs back to back with it since the first mission would probably go easily. He wouldn’t tell them where
or what it was, and he left the mansion and walled grounds of the Nanticoke Institute under a cloud of disapproval, which
didn’t keep Mike awake that night back in Arizona with Tina.