Cobra Strike Read online

  “This is Sayad Jan, headman of this place,” Aga said. “I have bought six asses to carry the weapons—no more back-breaking work for you. He will send three men with you to the next stage. I am sorry but no one speaks English. But they understand everything. You will stay here tonight and leave at dawn. Now I and my men must go. From here we can reach a border crossing by nightfall and reach safe territory in darkness—it’s a shortcut we could not take with the weapons. We must go now. I hope I will see you again. May Allah watch over your journey.”

  Aga watched the Americans shake each of his men’s hands in turn. Allah would need to be very merciful if they were ever to see freedom again. Aga had done his best to try to make them less conspicuous, but they had not cooperated. Now that Baker had grown a dark beard, if he had worn the local costume, he might not have attracted immediate attention wherever he went. But what was he, Aga, to do with a big brawny black man and the other one who kept his head uncovered, his hair clipped short, and his face shaved clean? Those two might as well carry little American flags on sticks so they could wave them at the Russian helicopters.

  Baker strode back and forth, back and forth. “Fucking asses. Donkeys, no less. What do we do when a Soviet gunship comes? You know what we’re going to look like standing on some bare hill with six asses loaded down with missiles? What do we do? Shout at them to sink to their knees?”

  “That’s camels,” Winston clarified.

  “Right. Asses don’t do anything except move their ears. They’re too stupid.” Baker looked at Turner. “I’m beginning to see that you were right, Don, when you said the weapons will weigh us down too much and restrict our movements. You might also have mentioned that they will make clay pigeons out of us.”

  Turner ignored him.

  Winston said, “Don warned us, all right. Fact is, he was right and we were wrong. What do you want us to do, Don? David is right about it being crazy for us to drag asses loaded down with shit across these mountains.”

  “If we run into trouble,” Turner said in an unconcerned voice, “we can always give the stuff away. We won’t have no trouble getting them missiles off our hands. Donkeys and weapons is all the style here.”

  The three slept that night at the mouth of a bunker with the weapons inside. Like Aga’s men, Sayad Jan’s troops looked greedily at the mysterious six-foot-long cylinders and square boxes shrouded in camouflage nylon casing. That these weapons were being given by the Americans to another tribe, rather than their own, was probably an added annoyance. When Baker suggested that they take turns at keeping watch during the night, Turner told him that he wasn’t going to lose any sleep over the weapons and that if Sayad Jan tried to take them, he was not going to stop him. Baker and Winston were too tired to really care anymore at this point, and they, too, sacked out for the night.

  Yet it was Turner who slept light enough to hear, over the snores of the other two, the rasp of a footstep in the darkness. He did not move. Holding his head still, he darted his eyes back and forth to try to see something. He heard another rasp of a boot on soil—and nearly leapt up when something moved directly above him. But Turner checked himself and didn’t move a limb. He saw now what was happening. Sayad Jan’s men were quietly stepping over their sleeping bodies, going into the dugout and sneaking back out again with the missiles. When the Americans woke next morning, everything would be gone, and of course, no one would have seen anything. Maybe they’d blame the Russians for it. Turner silently pulled the zipper down inside his sleeping bag and reached for his Marine Corps combat knife….

  An Afghan toting a four-foot-long missile in his arms stepped carefully over Turner on his way out of the bunker. Turner shot his arm up and pressed the point of the blade into the Afghan’s groin—not hard enough to cut flesh but with sufficient enough force to let him know that the message was urgent. The tribesman froze in midstep over the prone American. The other Afghans could not see Turner’s extended arm and the threatening knife. Not able to make any sound in case they would wake the sleeping men, they quietly tried to push their way past their immobilized comrade.

  Turner snapped on his flashlight inside his sleeping bag, and keeping the beam covered, he eased out of the bag fast so that he stood alongside the Afghan holding the missile. He switched the combat knife from the man’s groin to his throat and kicked back the top of the sleeping bag from over the flashlight. The beam caught the flash of steel across the tribesman’s throat. Turner knocked the man’s headdress off and yanked back on his long, greasy hair to expose his throat in a sacrificial offering to the knife. The other Afghans could see everything clearly in the flashlight beam.

  “You mountain motherfuckers, you put back all that stuff where you found it, y’hear?”

  The Afghans did not need anyone to translate what Turner meant. They hustled back into the bunker with weapons they had been removing. In his hurry one of them stood on Baker’s hand. All Baker did was moan and roll over. At least it stopped his snoring.

  Turner had one of them take the missile from the hostage’s arms and replace it in the bunker. He figured that although everything seemed to be there, they may have managed to sneak off some of the pieces before he woke up. There was nothing he could do about that. He could see the Afghans grinning at him in the flashlight beam. No doubt they regarded anything they had gotten away with as hard-earned and were not about to return it because he said so. He released the blade from the tribesman’s throat and let go of his hair. The man scooped up his headdress and slapped it over the top of his head, as if he were covering something indecent and obscene. Then he smiled politely at Turner and left, along with the other tribesmen.

  Baker was snoring again. Winston had never stopped. Turner thought about savagely kicking them but only laughed quietly to himself instead. Both of the younger men had been patronizing to him on the climb here. “You making out okay, Don?” and, “Need a hand on this slope, Don?” or, “Watch your footing here.” Now the two young, red-blooded macho men were asleep like babes in the wood while a battered leather-skinned old soldier like himself had to take care of business.

  He’d let that pair of snot-nosed kids hear about this tomorrow. Then again, maybe he wouldn’t.

  “Hey, Turner, you look like death warmed over,” Winston said. “You have bad dreams during the night?”

  Don Turner was too busy shaving to bother to reply. His shaving soap would not lather properly in the icy mountain water, and he scraped his straightedge razor along his bristly jawbone.

  “You going to be all right, Don?” Baker asked in his patronizing tone, talking as the young jock to the old guy over the hill.

  Turner ignored him.

  “Shit! We’re missing two missiles and one launcher,” Winston called from inside the bunker.

  “Sayad Jan’s men took them,” Turner said, and paused to scrape his upper lip. “Don’t raise a fuss. Let’s just get out of here as quick as we can with what we’ve still got.”

  Winston and Baker exchanged a look. It was dawning on them that things might not be running smoothly and that maybe they had missed out on something.

  “All right,” Winston agreed. “We can skip their Afghan breakfast and open our C rations when we get on the trail. That way we can get the animals loaded and move out of here within the hour. Where is everybody?”

  The sun had risen. Although the valleys and cliffs all around them were still shrouded in mist, they could see the blue sky seeping through the gray vapor floating over their heads. It was going to be a clear day. Yet there were no men moving around among the stone-reinforced network of trenches, dugouts, and bunkers on the hillside.

  “Maybe they’ve gone on a sortie against the Russians,” Baker suggested.

  “And were too polite to disturb us before they left?” Winston added doubtfully. “Where’s the three men they promised us?”

  Turner stared in his stainless-steel mirror and went on shaving.

  “We can’t go anywhere without those thre
e men,” Winston went on. “They know the way, they know the language. We can’t go on without them.”

  “I can,” Turner said.

  “How?” Winston challenged.

  “Find them six donkeys, tie this shit onto them, and head north-northwest into them hills. Simple as that. Either them three tribesmen show themselves when they see us go or they don’t. Nothing much we can do about it. This is their turf and they do what they please on it. Things work a bit different out here in the real world than they do around a long table in the Nanticoke Institute. You boys are going to see some things out here that the professors back in D.C. never knew existed. That’s why they sent you. So it’s time you forgot about what you been told and start thinking for yourselves. These people up here don’t have Pepsi, Kleenex, or TV.”

  “They’ve got Adidas running shoes,” Baker said with a grin.

  “Yeah, and they got combat boots and fatigues, too, but that don’t make them think like you and me—if ever you two and me think alike, which can’t be too often.” Turner rinsed off his face before saying, “If both of you scruffy types are done with your morning wash, let’s move out fast.”

  They found a group of asses tethered on the far side of the fortifications. They took six that had bridles and carrying harnesses on their backs. It took them more than two hours to balance the loads on the animals’ backs and tie them securely in place so they wouldn’t slip beneath the animals’ bellies or otherwise shift in motion. The three men changed from hilarious laughter at each other’s efforts to frustrated curses and back again to laughter. During all this time they never saw an Afghan. Although the trenches appeared deserted, the three Americans did not believe they were and so made no attempt to explore them. Winston and Baker saw the wisdom of Turner’s advice—get the hell out while they could, without trying to stir up trouble for themselves or hanging around for it to find them.

  As soon as the loads were secured, the three men checked their Kalashnikov assault rifles. These were old AK-47 models that they had bought in a Pakistan marketplace for the equivalent of fifteen hundred dollars each. Baker and Winston’s pieces were battered, their mechanisms smooth from use. Turner’s rifle wasn’t any newer, but it hardly had been used. The poor fit of the gun’s components and the sloppy finish had not been worn easy through use. Turner had to file away burrs from the magazine well and from some of the magazines to enhance reloading speed. They checked their thirty-round detachable box magazines before moving out and pushed their 9mm SIG-Sauer P220 pistols in their belts. These pistols were made by a Swiss firm in Germany because of Switzerland’s strict arms export laws. They carried no American weapons, except for Turner’s Marine Corps combat knife, and they figured that this hardly constituted direct U.S. arms aid to the rebels.

  The animals went easy enough, head to tail, once they got them on the trail. Turner walked alongside the lead ass, Winston was rear guard, and Baker kept an eye on everything in between. The path zigzagged down the bare, rocky hillside from the fortifications. Turner periodically paused to check his map and compass, which wasn’t necessary, since there was only one path in a northwesterly direction, and the six beasts of burden plodded steadily along it as if they, at least, had no doubts about where they were going.

  They came down off the hill and followed the trail along the bottom of a valley where weeds grew high in what once had been small fields. There was no sign of life, only some crows or ravens that lifted off when they neared them, cawing loudly. The sun was high now in the blindingly blue sky and gleaming on the snows of the far-off peaks that they could glimpse occasionally from the valley bottom. When they saw a group of men some distance in front of them, Don Turner tried to slow the lead ass to a stop. The animal snapped at him with its large, yellow, chisel-shaped teeth and shouldered past him, followed by the five others.

  Don cocked his AK-47, ground his teeth, and yelled at the lead donkey, “If it didn’t take us so long to load you, ya skinful of shit, I’d drop you in your tracks. And the others are so stupid, they’d probably fall over you rather than stop.” He kicked a passing donkey in the rump. “This whole fucking mess is unbelievable. We don’t have to worry about no Russians—these jerk-off tribesman will waste us before any commies do.”

  Both Winston and Baker were surprised at Turner’s sudden verbosity. The donkeys plodded relentlessly onward. The other two men cocked their AK-47 rifles. Hanging by a strap from their right shoulders, the gun could be fired from the hip at split-second notice. Turner glanced back at the other two, and it was clear that he was as much concerned about being shot in the back by his less experienced buddies as he was by the unmoving group of Afghans ahead. When they came closer, they saw that Sayad Jan stood at the front of this group of nine or ten men and that to one side another man lay on the ground, covering them with a light machine gun. The gun’s barrel was raised on a bipod and was fed from a drum magazine beneath it, which might contain as much as seventy-five or a hundred rounds. It wasn’t going to be much of a shooting match, but Turner swore quietly that he would nail the son of a bitch behind the machine gun if it was the last thing he did, which it probably would be.

  The line of six loaded donkeys moved past the group of men along the path, but Sayad Jan stepped in the way of the three Americans. There as an uneasy standoff for a few seconds as the Afghans eyed the Americans and the three outgunned Americans tried to show that they could not be separated from their property so easily. Then Sayad Jan began speaking to them in an impassioned voice that rose and fell with his excitement. The Americans recognized the name Gul Daoud, but those were about the only words spoken by Sayad Jan that they could understand. Every time the headman mentioned Gul Daoud, the leader to whom the Americans hoped to deliver the weapons, he contorted his face with disgust, sometimes spitting on the ground, and, soon after, tapped his own chest with an approving smile. It did not take a genius to understand that Sayad Jan had a low opinion of Gul Daoud and a high opinion of himself and that consequently there was no doubt in his mind as to which of them could put the weapons to best use. Meanwhile the asses had disappeared around a bend in the mountain path.

  “Looks like we just been relieved of our goods,” Winston summed up. “Only question now is do we want to fight about it, and I think they’re way ahead of us on that score too.”

  “Let’s go quietly,” Baker suggested.

  Turner wouldn’t budge. “These fucks ain’t going to walk all over me. If we let them do this to us easy, we’re not going to last long in these mountains. If we don’t get the weapons back, they have to give us something in payment for them. Maybe an armed escort to Gul Daoud.”

  Baker and Winston agreed, and Turner went into a long harangue with Sayad Jan, pointing repeatedly to armed tribesmen, to himself and to the other two Americans, then to the mountains in the northwest, shouting, “Gul Daoud, Gul Daoud. We need nine of your armed men to go with us to Gul Daoud, you mountain moron.” Sayad Jan either did not understand him or pretended not to, and yelled back at him, scowling or spitting every time he mentioned Gul Daoud’s name and tapping himself on the chest with his self-congratulatory smile.

  “This is probably something he can keep up for three days,” Baker warned Turner.

  “He’s going to have to,” Turner said, snarling. “The asses may be a hundred miles away by then, but he’s going to have to give me satisfaction for having taken them.”

  The other two watched in surprise as the usually silent Turner repeated his demands over and over, accompanied by increasingly vehement obscenities. Sayad Jan showed no signs of relenting, though it was plain that he had to have understood the American’s demands by now. The two men were still shouting each other down when something like a huge invisible snake rustled across the rocky ground close to them, its trail marked by spurts of dust and the sudden whine of bullets ricocheting off stone. One of the tribesmen went down with three dime-size red holes in a straight line across his chest. Then, in the same instant, they heard
the gunship and saw its door gunner lining them up for another cut. They threw themselves down as the machine gunner sewed another seam of bullets across the ground, this time curling up two of the Afghans into howling balls of agony, twisting and kicking in the dust.

  “Shithead commie,” Turner growled, and loosed off his AK-47, which he had been primed up to use at a half second’s notice, anyway.

  The door gunner’s head and shoulders flopped down over his weapon. They could see one of his arms hanging loose. By now the tribesman with the light machine gun had twisted it around. He sprayed the chopper. The pilot jerked his gunship up and down to evade the fire, maneuvering it from a side-on position to nose-on, in order to line up his rocket pods on them. But in turning to face them nose-on, the pilot exposed himself more fully to their fire. He desperately lost altitude in sudden drops and regained altitude in fast jumps to the left or right. The Russian gunship launched one rocket at them, a wild shot that exploded harmlessly a long way behind them. Then the Afghan’s light machine gun splintered the chopper’s plastic bubble into pieces on top of the pilot and copilot. This broke the Russian fly-boy’s nerve, and he lifted his machine out of harm’s way behind a massive shoulder of rock.

  Two more gunships appeared out of nowhere. Before they could begin strafing or fire their rockets, the three Americans and the Afghan tribesmen had time to scramble back into a jumble of big boulders at the lower lip of an old landslide. The two gunships whapped into them with rockets, a pair from each ship, but all these did was crack open some of the boulders and send blasts of loose stones hurtling through the air. The men on the ground kept their heads down and got off with a few scratches and minor burns. Then the gunships swung sideways and raked the rocky landscape with their flex guns. The Afghan with the light machine gun emptied a couple of drums at the choppers, but they kept changing their hover levels, and their powerful guns forced him into only occasional short bursts from the cover of rocks.