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  THE SOVIET SOLDIERS JUMPED TO THEIR FEET…

  Murphy stood a good six inches above his opponent and weighed almost twice as much. He charged into the Soviet serviceman before he could free his automatic pistol from its holster. Both men tumbled to the ground.

  Murphy knelt on his struggling victim's chest, grasped a handful of his hair in his left hand and twisted his head back and to one side. With a quick easy motion, he drew the blade of his combat knife across the man's throat. The slit on his throat opened like a wide mouth.

  As the Russian wrenched his body beneath the Australian's massive strength and weight, bright red blood squirted from the severed arteries in his neck.

  He died slowly, struggling

  like a farmyard chicken…

  COBRA STRIKE

  Also by J.B. Hadley

  THE POINT TEAM

  THE VIPER SQUAD

  Published by

  WARNER BOOKS

  Copyright

  WARNER BOOKS EDITION

  Copyright ©1986 by Warner Books, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Warner Books, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: October 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-56765-7

  Contents

  The Soviet Soldiers Jumped To Their Feet…

  Also by J.B. Hadley

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  CHAPTER 1

  Their only warning was a burst of machine-gun fire. The door gunner had opened up on them too early, giving them all a chance to dive for cover before the helicopter gunship swooped low over their position and strafed the ground. The chopper had appeared out of nowhere and disappeared again in seconds over the steep wall of the valley.

  “Keep down!” Aga Akbar yelled in English to the three Americans. He had no need to warn his fellow Afghan tribesmen. They knew how the Russians operated.

  In a few seconds more they saw a pair of jet fighters rise over the back rim of the valley, drop into it, and skim over the terrain. A white vapor trail squirted ahead of the lead plane, seeming to come right at them. A missile slammed into the ground one hundred and fifty feet from the prone, unmoving men, deafening them with its explosion and showering down stones on them like hail. A second missile hit maybe thirty feet closer to them than the first, and they felt the ground under their bellies tremble from its impact before the dirt and stones scoured by its explosion thumped down on their backs to tell them it had missed and they were still alive. The men waited a couple of slow, suspenseful seconds for the other plane to deliver its pair of missiles. They landed off the mark but close enough to shower their loads of stones on the prostrate men. Then the jets were gone. Silence returned to the valley.

  “Everyone all right?” Aga Akbar shouted, but meaning only the three Americans, since he spoke in English. It was only after hearing that they were unharmed that he checked with his own men. No one was hurt.

  “You see their accuracy?” Aga Akbar said to the Americans. “Those MIGs aimed their missiles exactly on the position where the helicopter door-gunner opened fire. If they had not made that mistake about our position, they would have nailed us for sure. All the same, the Russians are stupid—they do the same thing all the time. If the helicopter clears off after only one strafing run, you know it has called in MIGs. If the gunship comes back at you again, there are no planes close by.”

  “Won’t the chopper come back?” one of the Americans asked anxiously, looking around the sky.

  Aga Akbar shrugged. “Why should they? It will be easier for them to report us all as destroyed. If they come back, they might have to report that their attack was not a complete success. Why would they want that? We might even fire on them—if we had the weapons to do it. We don’t, but they can’t be sure of that. America might have sent us weapons. You haven’t. But you might have. Someday maybe you will.”

  The Afghan tribesmen were standing again, readjusting the loads on their backs, which had become awkwardly positioned after their sudden dive to the ground. Dust raised by the four missile strikes still hung in the air, and four fresh gouges in the stony earth stood out like wounds in flesh. The tribesmen spoke among themselves and laughed, obviously at the unsuccessful Russians, then moved out in a long line on the path halfway up the valley’s steep side. Aga Akbar gestured to the Americans to stay near him, about midway in the line of men, and they obediently fell in behind him.

  Having spent eight years in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which resulted in a doctorate in physical chemistry from the University of Michigan, Aga Akbar spoke very good English with a distinct Midwestern accent. Though the three Americans had known him almost a week now, they still found themselves startled from time to time to hear a home-grown American accent from this tall, skinny man with bronze skin, fierce dark eyes, and a flowing black mustache, who wore at all times an Afghan headdress that looked like two cloth pancakes flopped on top of his hair and a Kalashnikov automatic rifle hanging by its strap from his right shoulder.

  By now the Americans were used to his bitter references to the scarcity of sophisticated weapons from the West, chiefly of rocket and missile launchers capable of downing choppers and jets. Indeed, Western countries had been very stingy with all weapon supplies while at the same time being very generous in verbal support for the rebels, words being cheap. Communist China gave the rebels as much aid as any Western country, so the rebels liked to point out. They knew that Peking was not helping them out of any real sympathy but only to irritate Russia, yet aid was aid and a helping hand still a helping hand, no matter what the real motive behind it was. The only trouble with aid from Peking was that the Chinese themselves did not have the surface-to-air missiles the Afghan rebels so badly needed. Without these weapons in the hands of the Afghans the Russians ruled the skies and selected their prey on the ground beneath without much fear of counterattack.

  The line of men moved laboriously along the narrow path. In a little while they came to a ruined village. The mud-brick walls of the one-story houses were half collapsed, and their corrugated zinc roofs were stove in. Nothing moved in the single street lined by the tumbledown houses, and weeds grew knee-high in the middle of it.

  “Only a year ago,” Aga Akbar explained, “this was a busy village. Women kept their houses clean, their children played here in this street, the men worked the fields on the valley slopes. Today the ones not killed by Russian air strikes live as refugees in tent cities across the border in Pakistan. The younger men still come back to fight as guerrillas. So long as any still live, they will fight”

  The Americans listened sympathetically and tried to picture in their minds what daily life in the valley was once like for these colorful mountain people before the Russian communists reduced it to a desolate ruin. The Americans knew about the new “scorched-earth” Soviet policy in Afghanistan, by which the invaders hoped to destroy the food supply of the mountain guerrillas who resisted them so successfully and to break the fighting spirit of these brave warriors. Those they could not kill, they hoped to drive into exile. The Russians were determined to add this territory to their empire, with or without the people who lived there. And yet these hardy mountain tribesmen continued to defy the Soviet Union’s massive war machine with mostly antiquated wea
pons and with hardly any outside help.

  “This place looks deserted,” Aga Akbar informed them, “but it is not. The Russians are meant to think that all the men have gone forever.” He laughed contemptuously at the stupidity of such a notion.

  Then he turned and shouted several times up the overgrown street between the two lines of mud-brick houses that were now mostly rubble. A thin form appeared from behind a heap of rocks and stopped, covering them warily with a rifle. Aga Akbar shouted some more, and the thin figure came forward again, only to stop once more and measure them with his rifle sights. Only when the lone villager was quite close did the Americans see that he was a boy hardly more than twelve. His rifle had a bolt action with a heavy wood stock, of World War II vintage at the very latest. Aga Akbar spoke with him and pointed to four goats high on a rocky slope above the village. There was much arguing between the two of them for some minutes as they pointed first at one goat and then another. Finally Aga produced a wad of Pakistani rupees, peeled off some notes, and handed them to the youth, who immediately raised the heavy rifle to his puny shoulder and picked off the second goat from the right in a single shot. The boy then went back up the village street toward the pile of rocks whence he had come.

  “We’ve just bought our evening meal,” Aga told the three Americans. He added with a sly smile, “I hope you like goat. The boy says the men are all away attacking a government garrison two days march from here. He was left to guard their possessions. At first he thought we might want to rob him.”

  They climbed the hill to recover the carcass of the goat. None of the Afghans seemed to find it at all remarkable that the twelve-year-old with the cumbersome rifle almost half a century old had hit the goat in the eye and brain with his single bullet. The Americans had a feeling that this had not been just a lucky shot.

  They waited till dark before lighting a fire in one of the wrecked houses so the smoke would not give away their presence to planes. They roasted and ate the goat, along with dry, hard bread they had to soak in water to make chewable. Then they slept deeply on the stony floors of several houses, their weariness so great and the comfort of warm food in their guts so strong, they were untroubled by the cold of the mountain night or the rough surfaces on which they slept. They woke before dawn, ate more bread soaked in water, drank warm tea. The three Americans walked a little distance away to watch the sun rise.

  “I got to be the only preppie in Afghanistan this morning,” David Baker said, massaging a stiff shoulder.

  “Just what the poor Afghan mothas need right now—a fucking preppie from Yale,” Clarence Winston said with a grin. He had once told David that Yale had turned him down on a football scholarship, which was about the only way the son of a black clergyman in Mississippi could hope to go there. Football hadn’t worked out for him, anyway, and he ended by taking a doctorate in political science from Howard University. He had worked in the unsuccessful election campaign of a black Republican candidate for the House of Representatives before joining the Nanticoke Institute, which described itself as a nonprofit defense research foundation and which had sent all three of them to this part of the world.

  The third American, Don Turner, as usual said nothing. He was more than twice the age of the other two, fifty-four, a retired Marine Corps sergeant who saw no reason not to be freshly shaved and neatly turned out even though they were thousands of feet up in the Hindu Kush Mountains. He was the last man anyone would have expected to find in a Washington think tank like the Nanticoke Institute. He explained his role there by saying: “All the clever shitheads here think everything they dream up is gold. Me, I’m strictly copper or lead. I graduated in Korea and did two tours of postgraduate work in Nam, and I just love to hear bright ideas from curly-headed children.”

  “You know, it’s just beginning to occur to me,” David Baker said. “That was a real Soviet gunship yesterday, those were real MIGs, that was the Red Army we were messing with. You ever find it hard to believe, Don?”

  Turner nodded. “All the time, and it stays that way. Worse things get, the harder it is to believe what is going on in front of your eyes. That’s what gets to a lot of men in the end. They can take it up to a certain point, then one day they wake up and they’re not able to tie their bootlaces.”

  “And if that happens to me?” Baker asked.

  Winston put a forefinger to his own head and fired an imaginary shot. “We’ll have to put you out of your pain.”

  Turner nodded in agreement in the gray light now leaking through the cloud cover. There was going to be no splendid sunrise this morning, only gradual daylight in which they could first of all make out the tumbledown houses in the village, then the fields at the bottom of the valley, then the valley’s far wall, finally the snowcapped peaks to the north and south of them.

  “Yesterday I thought all this was beautiful,” Baker observed ruefully. “Amazing how sore feet and a stiff shoulder interfere with one’s enjoyment of scenery. You think we can trust Aga Akbar? I don’t like the way he keeps harping about his people not getting any missiles while he knows damn well that his men are carrying missiles and that they are going to a rival rebel group.”

  “I think Aga sees the big picture,” Winston disagreed. “He knows these weapons are needed more in the interior, where the Russians won’t be expecting them, than here, close to the Pakistan border. I think we can depend on him. We don’t have any other choice now.”

  Turner said nothing, but it was clear from the look on his face that he was placing his trust in no one—certainly not in Baker and Winston. Turner had been overruled back in Washington on this weapons business. He had willingly volunteered to accompany Baker and Winston on an information-gathering mission into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan and knew that he was being sent along to keep the other two from doing something dumb. It had been Baker who suggested that since they were going in, why go in empty-handed? Bring in armaments, bring out information. No point in wasting the first leg of the mission when they could be doing something useful. Turner had pointed out that reconnaissance and delivery of matériel were two different aims and that if you tried to combine them, one would interfere with the other—the end result being that you would neither deliver the weapons nor gather much information. For reconnaissance you needed mobility, which you lost if you were loaded down with a weapons delivery. For delivery of matériel you needed a secured supply route, which they obviously did not have into the interior of Afghanistan. Turner’s solution was to bring the weapons across the border from Pakistan and leave the distribution to the Afghans themselves.

  This made good sense, except that Turner was not allowing for one thing—the Nanticoke Institute, now that it had decided to deliver weapons, was not going to deliver the weapons to any old Afghan rebels. The think-tank intellectuals had their own star rebel, and no one else would do. This was a young tribal leader named Gul Daoud, who had proved himself less a Moslem fanatic and more a pro-Western anticommunist.

  “What we can’t allow ourselves to forget,” a bald-headed professor with rimless spectacles and manicured fingernails said, “is that the Afghans are Moslems and that some of their leaders are pro-Khomeini and others grow poppies for opium. Those are not the ones we want to see with our weapons.”

  “What the hell does it matter who he is, so long as he aims the thing at the Russians?” Don Turner wanted to know. “It makes no difference to a missile who fires it up some Russian asshole.”

  Turner was the only one who used impolite words in the sacred precincts of the Nanticoke Institute, a privilege allowed the battle-hardened veteran. But the thinkers had it all thought out—the weapons had to be delivered to Gul Daoud in person, with the compliments of the Nanticoke Institute! Turner could go along or he could stay home. Put that way, Don Turner had no choice. What they were going to do was foolish, but a fifty-four-year-old retired soldier doesn’t get too many offers, so of course he went. And here he was. With two college twerps who had read all the books but could
n’t hit a barn door with a shotgun at twenty yards.

  At first Baker and die others could see nothing. Aga Akbar pointed at some place invisible to the Americans, at something he could see near the top of a boulder-strewn hill to the northwest. Aga laughed at their bewilderment. The rest of the Afghans also seemed highly pleased that the Americans could discern nothing on the scrubby rocky hillside. They climbed the hill slowly, breathless from the thin mountain air. Patches of old gray snow lay like litter among the stones, even as new grass sprouted greenly in the valleys only a few hundred feet below. Massive cloud banks lay pressed against distant jagged peaks. The sky was blue and empty, but all of them knew, as they humped their loads up the steep hill, that in a matter of seconds a gunship or jet might catch them in the open with only a few boulders for shelter on a barren hillside.

  Baker and the other two saw nothing that stood out from anything else until they were almost on top of the perimeter of the fortifications and armed men emerged out of the ground practically in front of their noses. At first sight the trenches, breastworks, and bunkers looked carelessly and haphazardly built, but it was all to avoid a pattern easily seen from the air. The men were unsmiling and watchful, making no effort to welcome Aga’s men. There seemed to be only a barely concealed friction between them, as if they had no liking for each other but hated the Russians more.

  Aga spoke to a tall, heavy man with a bushy beard, dressed in three or four coats of different colors. He reminded Baker of a middle-aged hippie.

  “This one’s a real shifty-looking bastard,” Baker said to Winston. “See the way he keeps taking sneaky looks in our direction.”

  “Man’s only sizing us up. Can’t blame him for that.”

  Aga parted with two sizable bundles of Pakistan rupees, and the big man handed the money to others, who immediately squatted down and rapidly counted the notes. Aga came across to the three Americans.