Cobra Strike Read online

  She looked at her face in a small mirror and winked at the men. “He won’t shoot at me because even though I’m in uniform”—she thrust one hip and thigh against her straight military skirt— “I’m not carrying a gun.” She reached in the top of one cowboy-style boot and pulled out a tiny revolver.

  The men were startled at the sudden transformation of this Amazon into a flirtatious lady.

  “Don’t disturb us until I give the signal,” she whispered, and hurried off through the trees.

  Lance’s expectations were low, and the last thing on earth he expected to see while walking in these woods was a beautiful blond in a Russian uniform. He trained the Kalashnikov on her all the same, until it became evident that she was not carrying weapons. If Lance wasn’t so horny, he might have wondered about the coincidence of meeting a beautiful Russian woman like this, but Lance was horny, very, very horny, way past being sexually frustrated, and she looked much too good to him for him to have any doubts about her.

  She smiled and greeted him in Russian, showing that she was not fooled by his imitation Afghan costume and beard. For one terrible moment he thought about answering her in English, then it dawned on him who he really was, not the Hollywood resident with the phony name but Miroslav Svoboda born in Minneapolis of Czech refugees, who had grown up listening to his mother speak to him in the old language and tell him about the old country.

  “I’m a Czech, not a Russian,” he told her in Czech. Do you understand?”

  “I spent two years in Prague with the Red Army,” she said in passable Czech. “Imagine us meeting like this in Afghanistan!”

  They both laughed at the world being such a small place. He told her about serving in a Czech army intelligence unit, one of several sent by the Warsaw Pact countries to show support to the Soviets in Afghanistan. She hadn’t heard about these units but supposed she hadn’t because they were in intelligence operations. He was grateful she didn’t ask any difficult questions, such as how he could coordinate with the Red Army here if he didn’t speak Russian. He decided that maybe she was horny too.

  “I was on my way to the village,” he said.

  “I will walk back that way with you. I just passed an empty house a little way back and wanted to look inside, but I was too scared to go in alone.” She took his arm. “Now, with you along, I will be able to see inside.”

  Lance wasted no time in getting her there. The house wasn’t deserted, like she had said, but no one was around. He led her into a back room with a window looking onto the woods and a large straw-filled mattress on an ancient four-poster bed. They embraced and kissed passionately while lying side by side. She tried several times to get him talking about the other Czechs he was with, but he had other things on his mind. She would have to take care of those first before they got into deep conversation.

  She was willing. He watched her as she undressed and revealed her beautiful, silky-skinned body to him. Only two things slightly disturbed the amorous atmosphere in the room. The first was a glimpse Lance thought he caught out of the corner of his eye of a pale blue uniform slipping behind a tree not far outside the window. The second was the sight of the wood grips on a steel pistol butt down inside one boot his blond angel had left next to the bed. But in his biological condition Lance was not going to let little things like those interfere with the great urges of life.

  Viktor Mikhailovich Kudimov, general of the Red Army, touched down in his Mi-24 next to the waiting gunship and slick. He smiled at Anatoly and said, “Good work, Comrade. Where is she?”

  The senior pilot said, “Not far. But there’s been no radio contact yet.”

  “Make contact,” the general ordered, “but no word of my arrival.”

  The lieutenant told the senior pilot to be patient. On the pilot’s demand he gave his location.

  A half hour later the lieutenant’s jaw dropped when he saw General Kudimov, a major, and several other officers arrive on foot outside the house. He explained hurriedly that Colonel Matveyeva was interrogating an American captive inside and had left strict instructions that she was not to be disturbed until she gave the signal.

  The general shrugged this off, and he and the other officers went to the house and walked in the door. In the back room they found the colonel lying facedown on the mattress, wrists and ankles bound to the four bedposts, gagged with her panties.

  General Kudimov made no move to release her. Instead he beckoned to the major, whom he knew could read English, and asked what the characters lipsticked on Yekaterina’s smooth and rounded buttocks meant.

  The major read slowly in heavily accented English. “USA” on the left cheek, and on the right, “ALL THE WAY.”

  CHAPTER 15

  The truck, a vintage model from the 1950s, rattled along trails a little narrower than its wheelbase, with dropoffs of hundreds of feet to one side at speeds that would have been dangerous in such a vehicle on a flat, modern highway. Campbell claimed that the only time he really thought he was going to meet his end on this mission was during this ride to the Iranian border. They crossed a main highway running north from Herat to the Soviet Union, where they had been seen by a spotter prop plane. The plane called in Mi-24s and MIG-25s, which seemed to concern the driver very little. He liked to pause before crossing a rise, look around like a prairie dog checking the sky for hawks, and then make a run for the next gulch, pass, or canyon in which he would wait, concealed again for an opportune moment to make his next dart forward.

  They took three close misses from rockets and were strafed eleven times by gunship fire. The aircraft lost them at dusk. They kept going well into the night, the truck headlights being so weak that they hardly showed the ground ten feet ahead, let alone give away their position to the air.

  Joe Nolan and Andre Verdoux were kind of mad at Lance for not bringing the Russian lady along. They refused to accept his explanation that he had been lucky to slip out the window in the woods unobserved. The mercs realized she had been a trap intended to lure them, but none realized she had been the chief Soviet officer in charge of their pursuit. It never occurred to any of them that she might in any way have been involved in the tortures and atrocities that had taken place in Noor Qader’s territory as the Russians searched for them.

  The constant stops the truck made kept the men on edge, since they never knew what to expect. One time, when the truck suddenly braked, they looked out and saw three gunships search a valley they had been about to enter. Not long afterward the truck came to an even more sudden stop, and the mercs piled out, only to find the driver at one of his five daily prayers heading toward Mecca.

  They arrived at a staging area for convoys across the border. The driver ignored them from this point on, concentrating all his energies on collecting passengers and goods for his return journey. As a force of ten heavily armed men, the mercs were respected by the various groups trading and discussing the most favorable routes. As the acknowledged leader of the team, Campbell was offered cups of tea and shown other marks of respect by various eagle-eyed warriors. Crippenby was kept busy translating their compliments and well wishes and invitations to travel with them.

  Mike and Andre Verdoux took a walk around to see for themselves what each group of smugglers looked like. Only very few were glassy-eyed and passive, indicating that they had been sampling their own wares. Most of them looked wild and irresponsible, the sort that, even if they made a successful sale of their opium, would linger on to find some other kind of trouble. Three of the groups were large, well armed, disciplined, and organized. These were obviously the professionals, the ones most likely to succeed and the ones most likely to survive.

  “I don’t want to be mixed up with any kind of drug smugglers,” Mike explained to Andre, “but if we have to, let’s be sure they’re not junkies and losers. We’re going to have enough problems in Iran without that.”

  “Have you given up on us going ahead on our own without cooperating with any of these groups?” Andre asked.

&
nbsp; “From what Crippenby has learned, we have no choice but to cooperate. The Iranian police and some army units are waging a big campaign against the drug traffickers. We may not care for the looks of these characters, but at least they know all the routes and where the Iranian police are most likely to be.”

  On Turner and Winston’s advice they avoided one group that was bringing in its merchandise on packhorses. The two Institute men had not forgotten hauling arms on donkeys from Pakistan. They left with two groups, of six and eight men, all of whom carried large pictures of the Ayatollah Khomeini on their Western knapsacks.

  One of the smugglers, who had learned to speak good English and Arabic while working in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, told the mercs, “This can save you from being shot in the back by an Iranian policeman. He sees you and raises his gun, you turn your back to run, he aims at you—and what does he see? A picture of his spiritual leader, the holiest man on earth, the Twelfth Imam! He cannot hit that with a bullet, so he must adjust his aim—by which time you are gone, no? You need pictures of the Ayatollah to wear?”

  “I think my men would prefer to cut their throats,” Mike told him.

  The Afghan thought this was very funny and told it to the others, who all laughed. They agreed with the Americans and said they were right to prefer death than to hide behind a picture of someone they hated.

  “Do you like the Ayatollah?” Mike asked.

  “I am not Shiite, but I think he is good for all Moslems.”

  “What about all the people he has executed?” Mike put to him.

  “What about them?” the man answered. 44The people needed to have revenge against the Shah, but the Shah escaped, so they had to have revenge against someone. They took your hostages in revenge because you helped the Shah escape. What should they do with his supporters? If they put them in prison, they would bribe the guards, escape, organize an army, and come back to execute the people who put them out of power. So they had to be executed. Anyone sensible can see that.”

  Mike decided that, as a mere, he was hardly in a position to criticize people for seeking blood vengeance. He learned some interesting facts as he listened and avoided argument. Iran was still mostly owned by rich landlords, with the clergy owning most of the rest. The real menace in Iran came from the Revolutionary Guards, the Pasdaran, who were now 150,000 strong, rivaled the army in strength, and were used by ambitious mullahs for their own private ends. These were city mobs, jobless, without schooling, who now had power and status so long as they were blindly loyal to the mullahs.

  “What about the police we are trying to avoid?” Mike asked.

  “They are good men. Since the army has to fight the Iraqis on the opposite border of Iran, they have sent the police here to fight us. The army was well trained and made things very hard for us. The police do not have training to operate in wild mountains like this. You do not have to worry about them. But they are sending Revolutionary Guards here too. We don’t like them. We kill them but they send more. For each one we kill they send three more. The Pasdaran are fools. They think that they have only to shout at us and we will run. That is what happens in Teheran and their cities where they beat women for not wearing modest dress. Up here in the mountains they shout at us, and we kill them for making too much noise.”

  Mike laughed at his joke.

  They were in Iran. As the Afghan smuggler had said, the police were easy to avoid. They seemed to make lots of noise while moving around in tight-knit groups, almost as if saying, “Here we come, quick hide, then we won’t see anything and won’t have to fight you.” The smugglers and the mercs lay low each time until it was safe for them to move on again. They met another group of smugglers, nine men, coming against them. The team covered them with their weapons until they were sure of who they were. The men showed the Afghans with the mercs their unsold opium. They were returning across the border and would come back again in a few days time when things were quieter.

  “They say that there are thousands of Revolutionary Guards ahead of us,” Jed Crippenby translated. “These men tried to break through but could not. They escaped only because they know the country here so well, while the Revolutionary Guards are strangers here, flown in by helicopters specially to search for smugglers. This is some mullah’s idea, they say, and the Pasdaran will get tired of walking around in these mountains after a few days, of being bitten by snakes, of being shot at by mountain tribesmen, of being baked by the sun. Then the helicopters will take them back to the cities and things will be quiet again in a few days.”

  “Ask them how they know the Pasdaran traveled by helicopter,” Mike told Jed.

  When Jed found out, he answered, “There are forty to fifty choppers on a landing zone north of a small village ahead of us. We will be able to see them from the top of the next ridge, but that’s also the point at which we can expect to run into these Revolutionary Guards. They say we should come back with them inside Afghanistan and return when this antismuggling crusade is over. The men who came with us are going back, too, I think.”

  “They should,” Mike said flatly. “But we go on.”

  His men looked at him.

  “Haven’t you wondered why the Russians haven’t pursued us over the Iran border?” Mike asked them. “It’s hardly because they’ve suddenly grown scrupulous about borders. It’s certainly not because they’re afraid of the Iranians. I think they’ve made a deal with the Ayatollah. Khomeini has probably promised to return us to them in Afghanistan if the Russians don’t cross his borders. The Russians believe he can keep his promise because he has no rebels to give us shelter and we have a nine-hundred-mile journey before us to get to Iraq. I’d say the Ayatollah’s chances were pretty good, too, except for one thing. He doesn’t know us.”

  The mercs and Institute men all cheered except for Baker, who said now that they were in Iran, they should negotiate with the Iranians.

  “Sure, Baker,” Mike responded, “they would love to negotiate with us for two or three years in jail cells.”

  “The Iranians would never try a stunt like that again,” Baker snapped.

  “I agree, they probably wouldn’t,” Campbell conceded. “They’d hand us over to the Russians instead, and both they and the Russians would deny that we had ever entered Iran. We’d be back to being captured inside Afghanistan and the Soviets would be happy again. Jed, you tell our smuggler friends here that this is no antismuggling crusade. Tell them that these Revolutionary Guards are after us, not them. They should stay inside their own border until we get away.”

  The Afghans wished them luck and offered them weapons and ammo from their own meager supply. Instead Mike gave them some of the team’s unneeded armaments, and they departed happy.

  Mike asked in a serious voice, “Did any man accept any opium?”

  “No, Mike,” Lance said in a loud voice. “It was offered and I refused.”

  “Anyone else?”

  Most had been offered some and all had refused.

  “Good,” Mike said. “That way maybe we’ll stay alive.”

  They saw the landing zone from the top of the ridge. Mike observed it through his binoculars. His lenses traveled over the camouflaged fuselages of the Huey choppers. The red, white, and green “target” symbol on their sides and large national flags of the same colors in horizontal stripes near the tail rotor defeated the purposes of the camouflage but looked good, which was perhaps all that mattered. Mike knew how to fly a Huey, more or less, from some bad experiences in Southeast Asia when he had to fly one despite no training. They were not easy to fly, but then, no chopper was.

  He didn’t want a Huey. Ten men aboard a Huey was a heavy load. The chopper’s range was 230 miles, or 460 miles one way, which was only half the distance they had to travel if they took the shortest way possible. He’d take a Huey in a pinch, but they needed something with a longer range.

  His binoculars settled on a familiar shape, a Sikorsky HH-3. This chopper would be ideal, if it weren’t for one thing�
��he wasn’t sure how to fly it.

  “Anyone know how to fly a Sikorsky HH-3?” he asked.

  Silence.

  “Damn. Too bad. Especially since we’re going to use one. It’s got a range of about seven-fifty klicks, as far as I remember. It has a twin turbine and can go up ten thousand feet or more. Last one I was in was a thirty-seat troop transport in Nam. But I’m fairly sure the Navy used them for air-sea rescues and as a submarine hunter/killer. You sure none of you can fly her? Too bad.”

  Mike’s attention was called by Andre to a lookout point farther along the top of the ridge. From there they could see the Revolutionary Guards scouring the scrublands at the base of the ridge on which they stood. A few groups had climbed higher. They kept in constant motion, like restless gangs in a city park, not sure what to do with themselves. Despite their apparent lack of military training, they could still be dangerous because of their numbers and because they all carried automatic assault rifles. Mike selected the shortest route from the hills to the landing zone as a point about a mile north along the ridge. Accordingly he had the team retreat, make its way north, and then reclimb the ridge. While they were doing this Andre mentioned to Mike that Baker had started acting up again.

  “He admits himself that he can’t fly the damn thing,” Baker said to Crippenby, Winston, and Turner. “Even if he knew how, he would have no chance of getting it across Iran to the Iraqi war zone. If the Iranians don’t shoot it out of the sky, the Iraqis will. Campbell has been brilliant so far, I’ll grant him that, but his success has gone to his head. He doesn’t know when to stop. We don’t need any more life-endangering heroics. Now is the time to talk. We’re all Institute men, so we have a deeper perspective than these soldier-of-fortune types, who are all brawn and no brains. Their only answer to every situation is violent action.^ I would hope you are more civilized.”

  “Stuff it up your ass, Baker,” Turner said, and walked on ahead of them.