Cold (6 page)

Eagles moved with stately purpose, circling the mountain. Slow-worms of asphalt wriggled on the valley floor more than a mile below. Above, the whirring blades of the bee bit into hard rock and the rotor engine exploded into a ball of fire, and the entire broken flying machine began to tumble down the mountainside, passing so closely that Zeke could clearly read the engine housing’s safety warnings in Cyrillic script.

As it thump-thumped past, rotors still jabbing at rock, out of the flaming tail a burning ‘x’ of a thing came at them, following them down the slope, every limb on fire, emitting a high-pitched shriek that still returned to Zeke in nightmares.

The general pulled out his handgun and shot the x-shape three times. The corpse carried on falling, bouncing hard on the rock and pitching off into the abyss below, still burning. They watched until an outcrop masked the end of his fall.

‘The pilot,’ spat the general, and holstered his gun. ‘Viktor. Three kids. Best pilot in the whole 40th Army. Managed to park his bee on the top of a mountain. Saved our skins, but lost his. When this fucking war is over, I will crawl on my knees in front of his woman, his kids . . . This fucking war. Viktor used to talk about becoming a Zinky Boy. I said, “Come on, you’re too good for that. You’re the best.” And now we’ll never find his body.’

The puzzlement on Zeke’s face was plain.

‘Zinky Boys. They put us in sealed coffins made of zinc. The cherry on the cake is that the bosses don’t want anyone to know that Russian lads are being killed in Afghanistan. We’re not fighting, we’re helping with international solidarity. So the Zinky Boys get delivered in the middle of the night. On our graves, they write “Dead”, not “Killed in Action”. Dying for a lie. It gets you down.’

The heat of the sun was beginning to fade. The washed browns and greys of the mountains, above and below, were turning darker.

‘And if we don’t get a move on, the dukhi will have some more Zinky Boys to boast about by sundown.’

Five of them had made it: the general, Zeke, Uygulaan, and two young recruits who looked as though, if they could convert themselves into jelly, they would do so. Only the general and Uygulaan had weapons – two pistols and one hand grenade. None of them had water.

It was five o’clock in the afternoon, the air beginning to cool. In the fall, Zeke had cut his lip, badly, and sprained – maybe broken – his weak wrist; the Yakut had a pronounced limp, but made nothing of it; the general and the two soldiers were bloodied but walking.

The general pointed to a jagged escarpment on the far side of the mountain they had crashed into. ‘The dukhi hit our bee from over there. Heavy machine gun, not one of your Stingers. Otherwise, I’d have to shoot you.’

Zeke could not be sure he was joking.

‘They can’t kill us from over there,’ the general said, ‘but their scouts will probably have seen there are survivors. So, which way down?’

The drop immediately below them meant death; going back – up to the top and down the other side of the mountain – exposed them to the dukhi machine-gunners. To their left, towards the sun, the mountain soared into the sky, its rock as smooth and unclimbable as marble. The general screwed up his eyes, squinting.

‘Uygulaan, can you make out a ridge over there?’

The Yakut grunted, ‘It’s as narrow as my little finger.’

‘Big enough for all of us, then.’

It was, just.

Zeke, the smallest and the lightest of the five, had to edge along the sliver of rock that stood out from the face, his fingertips clamped to what holds he could scramble for. How Uygulaan had made it with his round Buddha belly, Zeke never understood. The ridge widened out onto a bluff and the way down to the road, although severely difficult, was not impossible. It meant sliding and slipping down a ravine. But they weren’t going to beat the sun.

‘We can’t get down that at night,’ said the general. ‘Best wait up here until sunrise. Then we go down to the road and hide and wait for a convoy.’

They walked and slipped for another hour, until they found a half-cave made by a great slab of rock, protecting them from being seen by the dukhi. In this lee, they fell to rest. Only when they had slumped down did Uygulaan take out two small oranges from his pocket, like a magician producing a white rabbit. With his murderer’s knife he sliced the oranges neatly into six slices, and the sixth slice he cut in half. The general, Zeke and Uygulaan got one slice each, the two conscripts one and a half. His lips cracking with thirst, Zeke savoured the burst of orange juice as if it were the finest champagne.

The general had a thumb of dried meat, which Uygulaan cut into five with mathematical precision; one of the conscripts had four mints. Zeke said he didn’t like mints, which amused the general.

‘Not bad for an American,’ he said. ‘I want to show you something.’

He pulled out a scrap of paper from his wallet, and Zeke found himself staring at a crumpled postcard of an oil painting of a lone British officer from the nineteenth century, more dead than alive, astride a dying horse, a fort in the background.

‘
Remnants of an Army
by Elizabeth Butler,’ said the general, admiringly. ‘I have the real thing in my office in Jalalabad. I borrowed it from the British embassy in Kabul.’

‘Borrowed?’ asked Zeke.

‘Traded. They got twelve goats. The British had long gone and the janitor got the better part of the deal. The officer on the pony is Assistant Surgeon William Brydon, the only one of some sixteen thousand British and Indian troops and camp followers who made it back from Kabul in 1842. As if what happened to the British then wasn’t warning enough,’ the general continued, ‘we Russians have stepped on the same rake. We don’t belong here. Nor do you Americans. No one from outside does.’

‘Tell me, why do you admire this painting?’ asked Zeke.

‘It haunts me. Do we ever learn from the mistakes of others? My grandmother told me how the Nazis behaved in Ukraine, and in western Russia. Treated people worse than dogs. People hated the Soviets, but they hated the Nazis even more. In Afghanistan, it’s not so easy. You see what happened to Viktor? But I’m determined not to repeat these mistakes. I’ve ordered my men to respect people. If they don’t, I put them in the slammer. We dig wells. We build schools, not just for boys but for girls too. And the other side – your friends, the dukhi? They drop dead mules down the wells we build. The school we opened in one of the villages? They broke the arms and legs of four of the children who dared to attend. In the centre of Jalalabad, they threw acid in the face of the headmistress of the big girls school. So it’s closed. That there are no girls schools in Jalalabad or in the countryside is not our fault. It is the fault of your friends, the people you are supplying with your fancy surface-to-air missiles. Mr Chandler, we Russians are in the wrong place. But be careful what you wish for. One day, you too may care to worry about these men who live in caves and throw acid into the eyes of a headmistress.’

Zeke kept his own counsel for a while and then spoke.

‘One of my colleagues’ – it was Crone, but he didn’t say so – ‘says that if you’re fighting the Soviet Union, what matters is who fights the hardest. The exiled Afghan king in Rome, the less-extreme dukhi commanders, they’re no good against the Sovs. The phrase my colleague uses is: “The CIA can’t have its anti-Soviet jihad run by some liberal arts jerkoff.”’

The general laughed genuinely, deeply amused. ‘Maybe they’re right. Maybe we’re so wrong to be here that you must have no worries about your bold allies. But what happens if’ – the general surveyed the miserable, cold rock under which they were hiding from the dukhi
–
‘or maybe
when
we lose? What do you do when the jihad turns against you, Mr CIA?’

Zeke had no response to that. Instead, he asked a question.

‘The dukhi commanders. They’re all the same?’

‘No. Massoud, the Tajik Lion of Panjsher, he’s a fighter but he’s correct. When we fight him, our men die, our men are captured, but they’re not skinned or castrated, at least not routinely. With Hekmatyar, the ISI’s favourite, our men suffer. It’s his men who throw acid at headmistresses, who hate the twentieth century. With him, there is no conversation. He is a fanatic, like Mao, like Stalin. Different ideology, same fucking madness.’

Their conversation was interrupted by the Yakut. The sergeant produced a torch from nowhere, switched it on and, using its feeble light, laid a booby-trap line to the single grenade he had on him, stretching it from side to side of a narrow defile in the great rock. In the dim light cast by the torch, he put his fingers to his lips.

The general leaned over and spoke into Zeke’s ear: ‘The dukhi will have watched us enter this rock and not leave. So we must go, but quietly.’

It struck Zeke as insane that they should be on the move again, in total darkness on an almost vertical slope. He was beginning to understand the depth of the Soviets’ fear of – or respect for – the dukhi
.

The Yakut sergeant, who had eyes like a cat, led them out of the darkness of the half-cave into the blackness of the night. The wind soughed through the mountain passes, and in the far distance they could hear the sob of Soviet bombers, as melancholic as the draw of the bow across a cello’s strings.

Walking, stumbling and tripping, they staggered downhill for more than an hour, until a greyness ahead of them hinted at moonrise. They stopped and lay in the shadow of a rock the shape of a hammer, and waited for dawn. Zeke couldn’t find anywhere comfortable to rest, so he didn’t.

In the morning, they struggled down the mountain, half dead from lack of sleep, but made it to the road. The Yakut found a stream running, with cold water of the utmost clarity. They feasted on it until they were almost sick. Then they hung back in shadow, hidden from view, and waited.

An hour passed; two; three. The tension grew. After another twenty minutes, a convoy of Spetsnaz – Soviet special forces – thundered through. The general and the Yakut leapt out in front of the vehicles, screaming and cursing, using the most foul-mouthed Russian oaths.

The convoy juddered to a halt, but the moment it did the dust and rock around them began to pitter and pang and
zsssst
with incoming bullets. The rear door of a Russian APC clanked open and they ran inside, safe. Beyond exhausted, Zeke sat back, protected by bulletproof glass and thick metal. The general handed him a spent .303 bullet.

‘A memento of your stay in Afghanistan.’

The bullet was marked ‘POF’ – Pakistan Ordnance Factories – proof for Zeke that the CIA had been cheated out of hundreds of millions of dollars by the ISI.

Zeke smiled his idiot smile and put it in his pocket.

The handover took place on a wooden bridge on the road to Pakistan, a blue torrent bursting with snowmelt far below. Twenty Soviet soldiers, looking sheepish but delighted to be alive, trooped west. The general stood on the Russian side of the bridge and greeted every one of them, asking after their health, hugging some, slapping the backs of the others. They looked on him as if he were a god. After all twenty soldiers were safe on the Russian side, the general held up his hand.

‘Men, I’m glad you’re back with us. To be honest with you, how we did this’ – he smiled at Uygulaan, who grinned back at him – ‘wasn’t entirely by the rule book. So keep shtum. Not a word about what’s happened today to anyone. Not a word about him’ – he gestured towards Zeke – ‘or else it will be my balls on the wire. OK?’

He shook Zeke by the hand and pointed to a motorbike with a white flag flying from it.

‘Here, take this. It’ll save you a long walk. Your people are one, two miles away, straight down the track, on the southern side of a second bridge. And none of our Hinds’ – the Soviet attack helicopters – ‘will fire on this track for two hours at least. If they try, my men will alert them to their fraternal error.’

Zeke was embarrassed to admit that he didn’t know how to ride a motorbike. The general roared with laughter and then proclaimed in English: ‘I teach CIA.’ His troops stared, agog, as the teacher and the student, enemies in war, worked through the mechanics of double-declutching a Soviet Army motorbike. As the bike clattered in the dust, Zeke, riding solo at last, dared to salute the general and his boys as he went round, and in doing so almost came off, causing more hilarity.

Just before he left, the general whispered something in his ear: ‘I didn’t want to tell you this until I was sure the trade was done and my boys were safe. I heard a whisper in Kabul: there isn’t just one CIA man in town, but two. One is you. The other, the second American, is with us.’

‘Who?’

‘I don’t know. Your job, I think. Good luck, Mr Chandler, good luck! Now go.’

Zeke rode the bike extraordinarily slowly at first, but as he got used to the machine and the flattish terrain he began to speed up, almost enjoying himself. The general had given him much to think about.

Jed Crone was waiting for him at the second bridge. Zeke got off the bike, killed the engine, and yanked it onto its stand.

Someone coughed, not quite meaning it.

‘How was Kabul?’ asked Crone.

‘So-so,’ said Zeke. ‘So-so.’

That fake cough again.