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  Gul Daoud thanked them all for their help. As they were leaving, he asked Baker and Winston, as a special favor, to check on the status of his loan at Chase Manhattan for his fast-food chicken place in the Bronx.

  CHAPTER 11

  Campbell saw Baker pointedly consult his compass several times, although the sun was full out and he didn’t need a compass needle to tell him they were riding north toward Russia instead of west toward Iran. Campbell let him sweat it out. Winston and Turner were keeping their mouths shut also, leaving it to Baker to do any challenging that was to be done. Campbell waited for Baker to confront him, but the most Baker was willing to do was to whip out his compass from time to time, look at it and then at the sun in a puzzled fashion, shake his head as if the sun and his compass must be wrong and Mike Campbell right, yet keep his tongue quiet on the subject and submit to Campbell as leader. Which was all Campbell wanted. That settled, he had no wish to be unreasonable by demanding that anyone follow him blindly without hope of an explanation.

  Mike rode his horse into a central position so they could all hear him. “Some of you must be wondering where in hell we’re going. And you got to figure out that if you don’t know, neither will the Russians.” He let that sink in. “We all know the Russians are going to be able to trace our movements, and our best hope is to keep a bit ahead of them. They’ll find out from their informants that we’re heading north. They’ll figure out we’re doing this so we can swing east toward Pakistan, and they’ll respond accordingly, tying up a lot of their troops on the ground hundreds of miles from where we’re going. Apart from ourselves, only Gul Daoud knows we intend to swing west toward Iran just short of the Russian border and follow that border, at a safe distance, all the way across the Iranian border.

  “Why do this when there’s a road running west to east across Afghanistan, from Kabul to Herat? Because as soon as we set foot on it, the Russians would know exactly where we were going and easily head us off. This way we’ll keep them guessing. And I’m betting on getting a head start during the time it takes them to discover us. They have unlimited power and resources working for them, against our mobility and the surprise factor. Right now the Russians don’t even know the team exists. They’re still hunting three trapped Americans. I’d like to keep them believing that as long as we can.”

  Winston laughed. “That’s not bad at all, Mike. Maybe the Russians will think we’re on our way north to attack the Soviet Union.”

  Andre Verdoux said, “Don’t put thoughts like that in Campbell’s mind. We don’t call him Mad Mike for nothing.”

  They all laughed, except Baker, who was resentful of having been put in his place and deserted, as he saw it, by Winston and Turner.

  The three-man rebel escort, provided by Gul Daoud, had ridden ahead and now returned, gesturing to them to slow their horses. They explained things to Crippenby.

  Jed said, “There’s a lone Russian tank ahead, on the other side of the river. They only take us as far as this river, and we pick up our new guides as arranged on the far side. Instead there’s a Russian tank sitting there. But our guides don’t think we’ve been betrayed. They say that the river is swollen with water from the melting mountain snows, and judging by the banks, the flood was higher and is dying down fast. They think that the bridge must have been weakened by the flood and couldn’t take the tank’s weight, so it had to leave the main road and come to this ford while the rest of the truck convoy or whatever went on without it. The river water is still high and very dirty, so the soldiers in the tank can’t find exactly where the ford is and can’t find anyone to tell them. So they’re just sitting there waiting, which is what we’ll have to do, too, until they go away.”

  They hid the horses among a big clump of bushes, where there was grass for them to eat, and then went forward on foot to investigate the riverbank. From their hiding places they could see the tank dominating the far side. The river was about the width of a six-lane highway, and its fast-moving brown waters wove in and out in currents and eddies. It was plainly deep enough to swamp a tank’s engine and probably drown its occupants as well.

  While they were keeping watch, one of their rebel guides came back from a reconnoitering trip along the riverbank—Mike wanted all the non-Afghans to stay out of sight as much as possible. The rebel said that there were local people hidden on the same bank of the river as they were, wanting to cross but unwilling to reveal the location of the ford to the Soviet tank crew. He confirmed their earlier guess about why the tank had been left behind. The locals had seen Russians, not Afghans, in the tank, but there were no other soldiers remaining in the area. Mike was relieved to hear this and said they would wait for the water to subside and the tank to leave. They made themselves comfortable and opened their C rations.

  A man arrived on a black horse at the far bank of the river, about three hundred yards upstream from the tank, which he ignored. They could see he wore a long brown robe, had a pointed black beard and a very large white turban, and carried a black lamb before him on the saddle. Behind his horse, on foot, a boy drove a black mother sheep and her second lamb. The boy waited with these two animals while his father rode his horse into the river. By keeping the horse’s head upstream against the current, he walked the animal slowly across the ford. As he went, the mother sheep left behind answered the calls of the lamb midway across the river and ran back and forth between the water’s edge and the other lamb she had with her on dry land, the conflict of both their calls driving her hysterically back and forth.

  The man on horseback dropped the lamb close to where the team was hidden and then returned slowly across the river. His son caught the second lamb and handed it up to him. This time the ewe did not hesitate; she plunged into the water after the horse but, being a much weaker swimmer, was washed downriver a distance before gaining the opposite bank. The man on horseback dropped the second lamb and went back across the river for his son. While he did so, the ewe ran up die bank to have a loud, bleating reunion with her offspring. The son put his foot on his father’s left boot, and together they forded the river on horseback. The whole thing was like something from an ancient era, were it not for the presence of the silent tank. The Russians waited for the man and his son to leave before they started the engine and eased the tank slowly into the water at the ford.

  When it came clanking out of the water and onto the bank only fifty yards or so from where the mercs were hidden, a small boy, perhaps twelve at most, appeared from behind some rocks and stood directly in front of the tank, shouting something. This was not the same boy they had just seen cross the river with his father and the sheep. The mercs could not hear what the boy was shouting until the tank stopped six feet in front of him and idled its engine.

  “ Allahu akbar!” he was yelling over and over. God is great.

  The standoff between the small boy and the tank lasted almost two minutes. Then they heard the tank grind into gear and inch forward. The boy did not give way, so the tank stopped again, less than four feet from him. The tank driver, obviously having to obey an order from his superior, lurched the tank forward. With a final “Allahu akbar!” the boy did not give way and went under the tank.

  Campbell had to restrain Harvey Waller. “The rotten fucking commie whoresons!” he roared. “I don’t believe it, Mike! I don’t believe you’re going toilet them cold-blooded child murderers go so they can go on doing it.”

  Mike took his hand away from Waller’s shoulder. “Okay, Harvey, waste them.”

  Lance lifted the shoulder strap of his RPG2 over his head and handed the Soviet-made missile launcher to Harvey. Waller pushed a six-pound fin-stabilized round into the muzzle of the tube. The tube had an awkward pistol grip near its muzzle end and was encased in wood so it could be safety placed on the right shoulder but not on the left, since there was a gas-ejection port on the right side of the tube. Harvey raised the large rear sight and selected the fifty-meter graduation. He operated the firing pin and bolt, then squeezed the t
rigger, releasing the HEAT round, capable of penetrating 180mm of armor plate.

  Having ground the Afghan child into a boneless pulp in the dirt, the tank rumbled away from the river. The RPG2 round caught it at the base of the turret, ruptured the steel plates with its impact blast, and, inside the tank, melted the plastic insulation from the cables and the flesh from the bones of the crew. The tank went off to the right at a sharp angle until it came up against a big rock, could move no farther forward, and its engine stalled.

  Harvey patted the RPG2 launcher tube affectionately. “It’s not such a bad little weapon, even if it is Russian-made.”

  Colonel Yekaterina Matveyeva smoothed back her blond hair, crossed her legs in her military skirt, and whispered into the telephone receiver, “Lieutenant, if you don’t find them for me, you’re going to be guarding ice fields inside the Arctic Circle from American attack. And not only that, Lieutenant, but I’ll be your superior officer up there, and I won’t let you forget how your failure to locate three U.S. infiltrators in Afghanistan caused our military careers to end in the snowy wastes. We will have all those long, dark winters to think about it.”

  She had shouted at him on all previous occasions and it hadn’t gotten her anywhere. In Yekaterina’s opinion a fully meant and fairly dire threat should be spoken very softly so that the person being threatened had to strain to hear the details.

  She went on, “General Viktor Mikhailovich Kudimov has sent for me, and one of his aides has warned me that it’s about an assignment in the Arctic. I just want you to be ready, Lieutenant, to assume your duties under my command at this new location in the very near future.”

  She thought for a moment that there was no one at the other end of the line until a strangled sob confirmed for her that her message had been received and would be acted on. The lieutenant would have heard that that swine Viktor Mikhailovich had arrived. The general was the closest thing to Stalinist purges they had in the Red Army these days. His victims still disappeared into the Arctic but to army outposts instead of work camps. And like survivors of the Gulag, they returned after only many years, broken men and women, content to live in obscure villages on tiny pensions. The Arctic was no place for a woman of her beauty and brains, yet she knew that neither her beauty nor her brains would save her if she failed General Kudimov. It was typical of him to have the subject of his interview with her deliberately leaked to her by an aide. He would thus expect her to come prepared to defend herself.

  She hung up the receiver while the lieutenant was in the middle of a long litany of reassurances, glanced at her wristwatch, checked herself in the mirror, and left her small private room in the military base for the office the visiting general was using. She arrived punctually and was shown in. The general sat on an easy chair, smoking a cigarette, glasses and a bottle of vodka beside him on a side table. He courteously asked her to sit down and offered her a drink and a smoke, which she politely refused. She tried not to look back into his gray eyes, magnified by his steel-rimmed spectacles, as he sat there and calmly looked her over.

  “Tell me, Comrade Colonel,” he finally said, “how your views differ from those of army intelligence on these three American infiltrators. Do you agree that they are Americans?”

  “Without doubt, Comrade General. I generally support our intelligence profile of the three. They are not a unit trained specially to operate behind our lines. Their behavior is much too erratic for them to be regular soldiers; in fact, their unpredictability has helped them against us. If we have one fault as a military force, General, I think you will agree that it is our predictability. I have been trying to shake up our field officers to be more innovative in their search for these men, but all most of them do is come down with a heavier hand in the same old way. I say this to you confidentially, General, and it is in no way a criticism of the Red Army or of the brave and dedicated soldiers under your command.”

  “I appreciate your frankness, Colonel,” he said. “Where are the three Americans now?”

  “They have vanished, Comrade General.”

  “Vanished?”

  “Into some hillside cave or a hut in a mountain village. We are using ground sweeps over the entire region to flush them out.”

  “With no results so far?”

  “None yet.”

  “Perhaps they have left the region,” he suggested.

  “I hope they have,” she responded. “Word will soon come to us. When they travel, they are most vulnerable.”

  “You agree that intelligence is right to discount the rumors of more armed Americans in the region?”

  She smiled scornfully at this notion. “Already these three infiltrators are being credited with the most fantastic victories over Soviet forces, victories in which hundreds of our men have died—”

  “Somebody is killing them,” the general said, interrupting tersely.

  “Gul Daoud is, and all the other bandit leaders loose in the mountains, yet these three Americans get credited with actions hundreds of miles from where we know they were definitely located on a particular date—”

  “That would seem to support the stories of more Americans in the region,” the general said, interrupting again.

  “I’m certain it’s merely a result of the myth that has built up around these Western adventurers. The Afghan bandits are religious and superstitious. They need to believe in a miraculous American intervention in this struggle, and so they multiply everything the Americans do in order to make them look like gods who can confront Soviet power.”

  “That may be so, Colonel,” the general said in a voice that made it clear he was keeping other possibilities open. “Now you have spoken frankly with me, which I welcome, and so I will take my turn in being frank with you. The other senior officers here have all steered clear of any responsibility for the capture of these three Americans, leaving all the burden to you, as well as all the credit for success, of course.”

  “As soon as these three are captured, all those officers will be standing ready to accept congratulations for the success,” Yekaterina said bitterly. “You will find me standing in the second row.”

  “Not if you are successful,” General Kudimov said with a smile. “I will personally see to it that you get full recognition. Do you accept the assignment?”

  Yekaterina saw the trap. These man were palming off an unfamiliar challenge on her, unsure of how to handle it themselves anymore. The general himself was covering his own ass as much as the senior officers by having her as someone to point at if things went wrong.

  “Yes, I accept,” she said, determined to show these slothful, cowardly men what she could do.

  “You will have to go into the field yourself,” the general said. “No more sitting at a desk and talking on the telephone.”

  Yekaterina knew in an instant that he had already heard a tape of her phone conversation with the lieutenant, just before she came to see him. That had been fast. “If I fail, I will be sent to Siberia to count the birch trees.”

  He nodded.

  “But if I succeed—”

  “Full recognition and promotion.”

  She smiled.

  Without moving from the armchair he fiddled with the front of his pants and pulled out his erect dick. He beckoned to her to come and kneel beside him.

  The mercs’ rebel contacts on the far side of the river had been in hiding and had witnessed how the team avenged the boy’s death under the Soviet tank. They embarrassed the mercs by their adulation and embraces, their constant singsong praise and instant willingness to do anything for their heroes.

  “We’ve hit them right in a soft spot,” Jed Crippenby explained. “They saw us avenge a wrong against them. They feel like an American would if you walked up to him and handed him a million dollars in the street. Like the American, they are amazed, overjoyed, and not quite sure what it all means. For the Pathans, or Pashtuns as they are often called here in Afghanistan, we have behaved according to their code of honor, which th
ey call pashtunwali. The three parts of this code of honor are milmastia, badal, and manawatai, namely hospitality, blood revenge, and sanctuary. We’ve all seen everyone’s hospitality to us-they literally give a stranger the last piece of bread in the house and starve themselves. And since you can demand sanctuary from one group when another group is after you for blood revenge, I suppose everything works out in the end somehow. So what we did was badal, blood revenge, something they don’t usually expect from Westerners.”

  While the men had joked at Crippenby’s mini-lectures at first, they all now listened very carefully to them. Jed still might be a library-bound intellectual, yet he only opened his mouth when he had something interesting to say.

  Harvey Waller urged his horse forward among the rebel guides and yelled, “Badal! Badal!” and waved his Kalashnikov.

  The rebels repeated his cries and added some more of their own. Harvey dropped back to ask Jed what they were saying about him. These were just Muslim prayers and war cries, but Jed didn’t want to let Harvey down.

  “They say you’re the greatest since John Wayne,” Jed told him.

  Harvey looked at him doubtfully. “They know who John Wayne was?”

  “I’m telling you what they’re saying.”

  After that, Harvey was smiling and friendly to everyone all day. At one point he told Mike he had developed a new respect for the Afghan people.

  They moved slowly north on horseback. Mike had bought the horses from Gul Daoud and intended to give them as a gift to their new guides when the team switched to some faster form of transportation. All going well, their journey would involve two hundred miles to the north, two hundred west, and another two hundred or more southwest to Herat, the Afghan city not far from the Iranian border. Twenty miles a day on horseback over this rough terrain would be good going, so this journey on horseback would take about a month. That was hardly Pony Express standards, but it was probably a reasonable estimate, considering unforeseen difficulties, lack of fresh horses, etc. The great advantage of going horseback was the ability to stay off the main roads, which were mostly held by communist forces during daylight hours.