Duel of Assassins (16 page)

The sun came tardily to the little valley, delayed by the
limestone peaks that formed its eastern barrier. But on this first day of June,
it came mercilessly, angrily ablaze as it vaulted those jagged summits to blast
the rock walls and meandering watercourse below. On the valley floor it was
soon above eighty degrees Fahrenheit, on its way to a hundred. Along the
ridgelines first struck by the sun’s high hammerblows, it was hotter still. And
it was there, on a naked spur of rock, that a heap of stones and dust began to
stir itself and assume vaguely human shape. A man lying prone, a man who knew
his hiding place was now on fire and that he must quickly make his move.

He was wrapped in an earth-colored
patou
, the woolen
blanket used by the mountain fighters for both warmth and camouflage. Beneath
this, a khaki
kameez partouk
, the baggy Afghan pajama suit, was already
encrusted with salt sweat. His feet, blistered and bleeding from a night’s scramble
over rocks, were shod in cheap Pakistani sneakers, in preference to
chaplis,
the traditional Afghan sandals. Slowly he lifted his head, dark eyes showing
first beneath his
lungi
, the rough cotton turban, then a flowing black
mustache that tightened over a grim mouth. Binoculars lifted to mask the dark
visage, and the concealed man squinted out along the valley, careful not to
betray his presence by a blinding sun-flash off the coated lenses. In his every
aspect he seemed the epitome of the wild
mujahid
, the ferocious freedom
fighter of Afghanistan.

Except this man was Russian.

Major Taras Arensky knuckled the sweat from his eyes,
shifted the binoculars and began to study, meter by square meter, the
exfoliated, stratified cliffs that faced him across a narrow ravine. It didn’t
take long to find what he was looking for. A transverse ledge just wide enough
for a single man showed human tracks in several sandy places, and among the
limestone strata were several openings that could be caves—shelters hidden from
the Antonov reconnaissance planes and protected against even the
five-hundred-pound bombs of the Migs and Sukhois.

He was looking at a
mujahideen
hideout, Arensky was
sure of it. He had followed a band of them—perhaps as many as twenty—hereabouts
the previous night after they’d rained their 60mm mortars and 107mm rockets on
a tank and infantry column down the valley near the Chagan Sarai firebase. Had
he required further confirmation, less than an hour before and a kilometer away
he’d surprised a mountaintop sentry leaning against his Chinese-made Dashika
12.7mm heavy machine gun. Only after pulling his combat knife from the ragged
corpse had Taras discovered to his disgust that he’d killed a barely bearded
boy. Not that this was an oddity among the Afghan rebels; these days they were
going to war at ten.

This busy little cliff-dwelling committee of
muj
,
however, was about to be permanently disbanded. Arensky dusted off his R-350M
portable radio to call up the Jalalabad airbase thirty kilometers away. In a
matter of minutes a couple Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunships would be hovering
right outside the rebels’ front door, strafing and rocketing the cliffside into
vaporous powder. Taras, meanwhile, would be plucked off the mountain by one of
the Mi-9 Hips and evacuated back to Jalalabad, one more mission accomplished.

With any luck, Lieutenant “Markus Zholly” (for the Cowboy
had collected a battlefield commission along with numerous combat medals) would
be at the base waiting for him. Or Marcus might yet be working one of those
ridges across the narrow valley, where an Mi-9 had dropped him as part of a
four-man
Spetsnaz
team, searching for a second
mujahideen
band
that had participated in last night’s raid at Chagan Sarai.

Both groups, Taras was convinced, were key elements of the
fierce resistance they had encountered during the preceding week in the Kunar
Province, resistance that was preventing this Soviet thrust—the second Kunar
Valley offensive of 1985—from relieving the Afghan garrison farther up at
Barikot on the Pakistani border. As elsewhere in Afghanistan, the tortuous
topography here, with its many side valleys and deep defiles, was perfectly
tailored to the
mujahideen
’s hit-and-disperse mountain warfare. The
steep-walled and narrowing river valley twisted its way a hundred kilometers
through the Northwest Frontier with Pakistan, all the way from Jalalabad east
of Kabul to the Kunar’s headwaters high in the Hindu Kush.

The main combined-arms column was pinned down just beyond
Chagan Sarai, unable to move. Taras had flown over it the day before, a long,
ocherous, metal-scaled snake basking lazily in the sun—big T-55 and T-62 tanks
interspersed with smaller BMDs, and BMP and BTR armored personnel carriers, all
strung out along the dusty river road—halted by the threat of grenade and heavy
machine-gun fire from the flanking hills.

“Fucking
basmachi!”
the chopper pilot had sworn. It
only took a couple dung-eating bastards hiding in the rocks with a beat-up
RPG-7 to stop an army—just like a spoonful of shit in the honey barrel!

And it almost was an army, Taras thought. There were
elements of the 9th and 11th Afghan Infantry Divisions down there, reinforced
by the 37th and 38th Commando Brigades from Kabul and the 31st and 46th
Infantry Regiments. The entire parade, heavily armored and perfectly
motionless, was spearheaded by two Soviet units—the 191st Motor-Rifle Regiment
and 66
^th
Motor-Rifle Brigade.

Which is why he and Marcus and their special operational
teams had been called in, along with a brigade of crack Soviet airborne-assault
forces. For the past several days heliborne detachments had been deployed along
the ridges to develop flank security; but these units were routinely withdrawn
at night, whereupon the
mujahideen
raiders would simply move back in.
The
Spetsnaz
teams were more formidable.

He and Marcus had done this before. They had fought from the
southern deserts around Kandahar all the way to mountains of Nuristan and
Badakhshan in the north; had led offensives in the Panshjir, in Paktia
province, Paghman, Khost, and now the Kunar. They had been among the first to
cast off the traditional paratrooper outfit and disguise themselves as
mujahideen
in turban or pillbox hat, shirt and baggy trousers, concealing their special
weaponry. It made eminent sense, and it was no sacrifice to forgo the jaunty
blue beret. Lately even motor riflemen with two weeks of air-assault training
were permitted them—along with the coveted blue-striped T-shirts under their
camouflage overalls. As far as Taras and Marcus were concerned, it took more
than a fashion statement to make a man a
Spetsnaz
fighter.

They had employed their climbing skills to scale steep
mountain faces at night—and thus to fall upon totally unsuspecting
mujahideen
bands. Taras recalled a dawn attack on a bivouac apparently considered so
impregnable that the confident rebels had posted no sentry. After several hours
of fairly straight-forward class-five climbing, the
Spetsnaz
team had
burst into a clifftop camp to find the entire band kneeling in three rows, facing
Mecca for dawn prayers, their sandals and rifles stacked neatly to the side. In
a hideous, muted fusillade from silenced AKR submachine guns, twenty-three
devout warriors had simultaneously acquired the status of
shahids,
martyrs.

Other favorite
Spetsnaz
tactics were to be
air-dropped in the rear of a rebel raid, to cut off retreat routes, Or, using
night-vision equipment, to ambush night-traveling groups of
mujahideen
,
who had come to rely, with proud contempt, on the fearful Russians withdrawing
to the safety of their firebases after dark, where officers would souse
themselves in imported vodka and conscripts get stoned on cheap local marijuana
or hashish.

It had taken a little while for word of these terrible new
enemies—who looked and fought and moved across the land exactly like the
mujahideen
themselves—to spread among the scattered mountain tribes of the resistance. But
eventually it had done so, and had now filtered back to the Soviets by way of
rebel POWs. They had attested again and again that the foreign
Spetsnaz
devils were the only enemy fighters the
mujahideen
truly feared.

Well, there were similarities, Taras thought. Like the
muj
,
he had become inured to death, and to life. He no longer asked himself why he
did the terrible things he did, took such suicidal risks; or why he’d
volunteered to remain in Afghanistan beyond his two years. It wasn’t the money,
heaven knew—though, at three times normal officer pay, Taras had nearly twenty
thousand rubles put by. And it wasn’t the damn combat medals. He had a
drawerful now—nearly everything but a Hero of the Soviet Union. Only the crazy
Cowboy, who’d been here a year longer, was still hoping to get one of those.

No, Taras fought on because he had somehow lost the vision
of any other, more normal kind of life. His ten months in London, for instance,
now seemed to him an impossibly distant daydream, the vaguely recalled
fantasies of another man. How could he ever go back?

On his sunblasted ledge, he wiped his brow again. He hadn’t
really mastered the proper winding of the three-meter-long turban cloth to keep
the sweat out of his eyes. He squinted again at the valley below, at the
onrushing, silt-clouded Kunar, pearl-gray here in deep cliff shadow, but
further downstream flashing and frothing into momentary sunshine, endlessly
cutting its fertile swath, a blessed relief in the otherwise barren landscape.

It made for a lovely and tranquil scene—deceptively so, as
was proven an instant later, when the morning stillness was shattered by the
deafening roar of turbojets. Taras looked up to see four silver streaks across
a sky of deep cobalt—a line of Su-25 Frogfoot ground-attack fighters. They went
screaming down the valley, probably to shell rebel positions around Asmar
before returning to their squadron at Bagram airfield north of Kabul.

Taras chuckled.
Good hunting, comrade pilots, and thank
you for rousing a daydreaming
Spetsnaz
and reminding him of his morning
business.
He fingered the radio to call for gunships—then froze.

Across the narrow ravine—too close for binoculars, only a
few meters below him—a tiny Afghan girl had suddenly appeared on a ledge. She
was barefoot, dressed in an embroidered cloth cap and filthy gray smock, and
her brown, doll-plump face was canted skyward in the direction of the vanishing
thunder. So, there
was
a cave opening here; a whole village might be
hidden away in a network of passages in the fissured limestone. And Taras was
right on top of it.

Still he hesitated, watching her, his thumb massaging the
radio’s flex antenna. He became aware of a hammering in his chest, an absurd
welling panic that the toddler was much too close to the precipice, might fall
to her death before his eyes. His teeth bit down on an obscenity. He told
himself there was no reason to delay. His job was to call in the coordinates
and get the hell out. What was the alternative? Let her go, spare an entire
village, so they could go on killing Russians?

 It was war. The enemy was woman, too, because mothers made
rebel soldiers. A boy was ready to join the
jihad
by twelve or thirteen;
maybe seventy thousand of them came of age each year, in isolated villages like
this or infiltrated back from the camps in Pakistan. Could the Red Army kill
mujahideen
faster than Afghan women could bear them? Probably not, but that was still
their soldierly business, the endless business of war, and Taras had been
trained to do it well. Killing the other guy. Or, if need be, the other guy’s
little girl.

He watched as a breeze ruffled the black bangs under her
cloth cap. She was still too tiny to be hidden away forever behind the
chadori,
the tentlike veil worn by Afghan women. She frowned, clenched soiled, chubby
cheeks, bent slightly forward.

He swore silently again. The little girl was waddling
reck-lessly toward the brink. She had spotted something just ahead, something
that crinkled her eyes and drew her mouth wide in delight. Leaning far out from
his own ledge, Taras saw it, too. A little green bird-shape was wedged among
rocks along the precipice, its plastic surface burnished by a sudden shaft of
sunlight through the ravine.

It was a “toy” mine. Low-flying Soviet helicopters had
scattered them by tens of thousands over trails, mountain passes and caravan
routes, along with hundreds of thousands of PFM-1 “butterfly” anti-personnel
mines. The idea was to interdict rebel supply lines, but the bright plastic
objects—diabolically shaped like dolls, trucks, birds, combs, pens,
watches—were irresistible to Afghan children, despite incessant warnings. Had
this child accidentally stepped on the toy, her foot would have been blown off.
If she picked it up, she’d lose a hand, perhaps both, maybe her eyesight. In
any case, she was about to be maimed for life—if she didn’t die of infection.

The pressure came boiling up from deep within, bursting out
of him:

“Nyet!”

The tiny figure across the gap froze—squinting up at this
strange
mujahid
who had suddenly appeared on the opposite ledge and
roared so fiercely at her, a frightening sound that was still reverberating off
the rocks.

Knowing the echoing cry could summon
mujahideen
any
instant from the caves, Taras waved his AK-47 at the motionless child, first
menacingly, then frantically.

She was frightened, took a faltering step back. But the 
shiny toy was too close, almost within reach, and the desire to pick it up too
powerful. Taras saw her small body bending, her hand reaching. She had made her
decision.