‘All right then, leave me alone and I’ll tell you.’
‘Well, tell us.’
The Pashtun bared his teeth. ‘I am telling you. Guess what?’
Their faces darkened. They clearly did not want to guess. Perhaps the hillman would give him a thump.
Wasif saw this change at once. ‘No, sorry, this is the story. You all know Mr Samarkandi here? He’s not a spy after all! He’s an officer from the Russian menagerie.
‘And he’s become one of us. He just said to me, Kuja’st Kara Kush – Where’s The Eagle?’
Everyone looked at him, then at Azambai, and then very quietly they stepped forward one by one, and shook his hand. Wasif kissed him on both cheeks, the awful beard getting in Azambai’s eyes.
‘How did you know I wasn’t a spy?’ Azambai asked Wasif, when all had returned to their places to talk over the implications. Heart Ease was serving tea to everyone, free of charge.
‘Well, it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? Spies don’t go about asking anyone, at random, how to find a wanted man, a man with ten million afghanis on his head, now do they? Anyone asking “Where’s The Eagle?” in Kabul is either one of us or he had better have the protection of a uniform and a gun. Even then we’d probably give him an Afghan Salaam for asking, and not tell him anything.’
An Afghan Salaam. A stick of dynamite inserted into someone from the rear and detonated. It was said to date from the time when a military officer, from another foreign invader’s troops, fresh from a rather different experience in a docile colony, had shouted at a hillman, ‘Afghan, Salaam me!’ They had said it was the rapid and explosive response that had given birth to the phrase. Nobody knew, however, if the act had actually been tried. Among the tribes, of course, anything was possible …
Wasif waved for some more tea. ‘Are they after you?’
‘I don’t think so. Not yet. Not unless they get suspicious.’ Azambai told him what he’d done that morning.
‘Aferin! Well done. But you must be careful: you might be recognized in the town. We’d better get you to The Eagle today.’
‘That’s just what I want. But listen Wasif, are you sure that nobody will talk, the people here, I mean?’
‘I am quite sure. Don’t worry. A lot of funny things have happened already, and without a leak, among us Mountain Violets.’
That evening, dressed as a mountain man, former captain Azambai was dropped off a day-workers’ truck in the foothills, and sat waiting at the rendezvous, a goatherd’s hut looking like a mere pile of rocks, where the guerrillas of The Eagle would collect him as soon as they were sure it was not a trap.
To pass the time, he tuned his stolen army radio to the various frequencies which might carry something about him. Nothing. Routine military traffic. Either he had missed it, or they weren’t going to announce his unfortunate death. It did not do to give too much currency to Muhjahid successes. They’d be sure it was an ambush. Killing a captain and destroying military property, and with army explosives, would qualify as such a coup …
There was a sound now, outside the hut. In a second someone was inside, and the door slammed shut. A flashlight glittered; in its reflected light Azambai could see a tall figure in hillman’s dress.
‘Welcome: I am The Eagle. Welcome home.’
Azambai took the hand held out towards him. ‘Is there work, master?’ he asked in Dari.
‘Work enough, and more. Come with me, and bring your tribute.’
‘Tribute?’ Azambai stammered. Of course, it was customary in the East to give your leader something every time you saw him, or at least when you swore allegiance. A gold coin, usually. But he had not thought that such ancient customs were still carried on. ‘Forgive me, my Lord Eagle, but I have nothing …’
‘Nothing?’ The Eagle laughed. ‘You have, I am told, something which is worth more than gold to us. A Russian army multiple-frequency radio nothing? Wait and see …’
10 The Treasure
Kajakai
Kandahar Province
South-West Afghanistan
APRIL 30–MAY 10
‘Cowards weep and cowards work, but fighters go to Paradise …’ He wasn’t weeping now, but he had to work, was too old to fight.
Sirdar Akbar thought of the poem as he sat, slumped over his drawing table, slide rule in hand, in the tiny room which the Administration allowed him. He would have fitted more naturally into a Paris salon or the Assembly Hall of the United Nations, where he had been Afghanistan’s ambassador not so many years before. As Minister of Mines, appointed by the Royal Government because of his geology and engineering degrees, he had served his country well. As a diplomat, too, he had been an outstanding success. Diplomacy was in his blood: his ancestors had been feudal lords, courtiers, kingmakers, even.
Akbar had been one of the several hundred young men, fervent patriots, chosen by the King in the nineteen thirties and ’forties, to go abroad for higher education, for technical and scientific training. It was the King’s own idea; they would return and, instead of lording it over vast estates, the technocrats would transform the country, bring it into the twentieth century. Afghanistan had enormous natural resources: water-power, rich virgin land, coal, oil, natural gas, iron, zinc, copper, chromite, even rubies and emeralds. And it was a large country, the size of France, and with such enormous scope that Western experts, visiting it, babbled about the ‘coming Switzerland of the East’. With, for Asia, a tiny population, under ten million.
The new-age Afghan technicians had done extraordinarily well in the twenty-odd years before the revolution. Hydroelectric power stations lit Kabul and provided the power for the new cotton mills, cascading millions of square metres of cloth; vast quantities of fresh, dried and canned fruit flowed from Kandahar. Coal was mined, manufactures of all kinds started to pour onto world markets. The traditional industries, the karakul, ‘Persian’ lamb, the carpets and skins, were for the first time organized with proper quality control and efficient marketing. Kandahar International Airport, one of the most modern in the world, took shape. Afghanistan seemed set fair for prosperity.
But as the country’s world role developed, paradoxically, the skilled people became fewer and fewer. The demand for administrators and for overseas representation drained the specialists from the factories and the land schemes. The ministries were fully staffed; the diplomatic service sucked in technicians to send abroad as ambassadors. People like Akbar Sharifi went overseas, spent years in embassies, shuffling paper, attending cocktail parties, jet-setting around the world to conferences. The country started to slow down.
In the meantime, the Russians, beyond their long land and river boundary to the north, had mounted a plan of their own. They wanted Afghan raw materials for their empire, and they wanted Afghanistan itself as a launch-pad for their drive to the Middle East – and perhaps to India. The plan was to indoctrinate the young people who were replacing Sharifi’s generation, and to distribute them throughout the civil service and the army.
Russia watched its red moles, undecided whether to choose a political or a military coup: and prepared for either.
When most of the older generation had retired, they were succeeded by youngsters, far less able. Few of them – perhaps three or four dozen – were actually communists; but they were powerful within a weak and inefficient administration. The Western powers, afraid that a strong Afghan army might descend upon the Indian subcontinent as Afghans had done for centuries to establish their own Raj, refused military aid or training facilities. The rulers of the Soviet Union took all the Afghan military cadets they could, welcoming them with open arms, and indoctrinated them as deeply as they could.
Akbar Sharifi retired early, was no longer a possible threat to the Russians, even though he had a seat in parliament as a senator and was an adviser to the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.
Now he was demoted, probably lucky to be alive, supervising the installation of the new turbines in the giant white walls of the Kajakai Dam.
That December, when the traitor Karmal was brought in as ‘President’ by the Russian Army, many people had been taken out and murdered, even in the public streets. But the Sirdar would never have worked for the Russians merely to save his own life. Brigadier Sahki had anticipated that. The Afghan Secret Police, the KHAD, had been well trained by the Russian KGB in techniques of blackmail.
The old man remembered that perfect Spring day, April 27th, 1978, when the revolution had begun. Certain cadets, trained in Russia under a perfectly normal military aid scheme and completely indoctrinated, had worked their way up in the armed forces for years, until they reached the rank of colonel. This was during the rule of Daud Khan, who had displaced his cousin, the King, and made himself President. On the day of the coup, there had been only a few communists in the whole country, but the Army was trained to obey orders.
The Afghan Fourth (Armoured) Division, led by Colonel Aslam Watanjar, moved into Kabul and seized the small airfield near the Royal Palace. While the Fourth Armoured Division secured strategic points and government buildings, another communist, Colonel of the Air Force Abdul-Qadir, seized a helicopter and flew it to Air Force Headquarters at Bagram, forty miles north of the capital.
The MiG fighter-bombers, at Abdul-Qadir’s command, then scrambled and headed straight for the Presidential Palace. Their incessant pounding, with bombs, machine-guns and rockets, broke the resistance of the elite Presidential Guard, who were holding out on the ground against everything that the Fourth Armoured could throw at them. Loyal Air Force units, ordered in from Shindand Airbase, five hundred miles to the west, arrived over Kabul to crush the revolt, only to find that command communications had been disrupted, and they had no idea where, or what, to strike. Running out of fuel, they returned to Shindand, where they were arrested.
Thus the communists won the vital battle for Kabul. Immediately afterwards, Akbar remembered, hundreds of people were murdered, and among the many hostages taken – they included members of the royal family – was his only child, his daughter Noor. He had not been able to contact her since. Thousands of civilians and soldiers were buried in mass graves.
In April, the ‘Democratic Republic of Afghanistan’, whose birth had been meticulously planned and organized by the Kremlin, was proclaimed. Afghanistan was virtually a part of the Soviet Union. Only the people stood between the government and Russification.
Akbar had been left alone at first. Then, three months ago, a civilian captain in the Secret Police had come to him, just after three o’clock in the morning.
‘Safirseb?’ – Mr Ambassador. People in Afghanistan, after they retired, always retained, by courtesy, the highest title they had held during their careers. ‘Please come with me. You have a meeting with Brigadier Sakhi.’
Sakhi. The Butcher, they called him. More recently, too, Bacha-i-Rouss, Child of the Russians. Ambassador Sharifi exchanged his pyjamas for a dark three-piece suit.
Ghulam Sakhi looked wide awake, at four a.m., one of those night people, as the Americans called them, who were most alert while others slept.
He sat behind his desk at KHAD Headquarters, chainsmoking. He had a close-cropped head and a Mongolian face covered with pockmarks. There was a nine-millimetre Beretta pistol near his hand. A tiny gun: but at point-blank range like this it could kill instantly. The Sirdar hadn’t seen Sakhi for twenty years: since he was President of the Anjumani Aryanie Afghani, the AAA, that crazy association whose name stood for the Association of Afghan Aryans, modelled on the German SS. Its members liked to use the ancient name for the country, Aryana, and to feel that they lived in the cradle of the Nizhadi Humayuni, the Imperial Race. Sakhi had even lived in Germany. On his Kabul office wall was still to be seen the brown banner of his Hitler Youth unit.
The captain withdrew, with a smart ‘Zindabad Inqilab! Long Live the Revolution.’
Sakhi was grinning, with a false grimace which only made him look the more malevolent.
‘Come in, how nice to see you, may you never be tired, Ambassador, have some tea, are you well?’
Akbar took the chair which Sakhi indicated, and folded his neat hands on his lap.
The brigadier leant forward, one arm on his desk.
‘You will have been waiting to hear from us, respected sir, and therefore this meeting will doubtless be a relief to you. It is often so, as we have found in similar cases; and I am happy to be the instrument of your adjustment.’ A psychopathic killer and a lunatic; that was his reputation: and definitely a fantasist, thought Akbar. He waited. Sakhi picked up a pencil and weighed it in his hand.
‘From now on you revert to your proper rank and title of Engineer Akbar. None of this “Sirdar” business. We don’t have princes and the like nowadays, you know. One leader, one teacher of socialist reality: that is the … Afghan Way.’ Ha, you nearly said ‘Aryan Way’, didn’t you? thought Akbar.
Brigadier Sakhi tapped the pencil on the desk.
‘Engineer Akbar. A lot of people have died, or have gone missing, since the revolution. Many of these have been specialists and technicians. We all know that they were killed by the terrorists, working for Israel and America, or bribed to desert the Homeland, to impoverish it. That is a well-known capitalist economic weapon. Because of this, I am collecting people with technical knowledge and you are one of them. The Kajakai Dam, near Kandahar, is, as you know, one of the largest in the world. The Americans botched the job there, or else it was them and the King’s regime. We Afghans lost a hundred and twenty million dollars because of that. Anyway, we need massive electricity generation in that area. You have been chosen to install the new machinery. It is a shturm effort, a crash programme.’ He used the Russian word, Akbar noticed.
The old man spoke: ‘But there aren’t any turbines, and anyway, I heard at the Ministry that the project failed because the specifications were badly drawn up. You have, in any case, capacity for 120,000 kilowatts and no industry to use it.’
Sakhi smiled. ‘How typical of a blinkered Western-minded lackey! Akbar, have you never heard of the Egyptian High Dam at Aswan? The Americans refused to finance it, Western capitalists said that it could never be done. Abdul-Nasser asked the brotherly Russians and, puff, the whole Egyptian desert is green! As for using the electricity, there will soon be an urgent need for all we can make there. We can even export it. Kajakai can be the biggest thing in Asia.’
Akbar sighed and thought: Export it like the Afghan natural gas, 2,500 million cubic metres, exported to the Soviet Union through a pipeline without metering, so that the Soviets could pay us what they say they have used; is that ‘the Afghan Way’?
‘You will have the title of Assistant Chief Engineer. The Chief Engineer is Yilderim Barqi, a good Party man.’ Sakhi emphasized the last four words.
‘Yilderim Barqi is a garage hand from Karta Chahar, and knew nothing about hydropower up to last week …’ Akbar could hardly believe what he was hearing.
‘He will be in overall charge, Akbar. You supply the technical know-how.’ So, Yilderim was the boss, because he was a Party man …
‘Now, Akbar, I want you to work for your country, build it strong, build it great, to become a fitting member of the socialist camp.’
The Socialist three-ring circus, Akbar thought. Yilderim couldn’t even change a spark plug. Maybe that was because he was studying Russian texts: ‘Always use Soviet electricity: watt for watt it is the purest in the world.’ Aloud he said, ‘I am obliged by your offer. But I am now an old man, not up-to-date in these matters. I would not understand a Russian turbine.’
‘Afghan technicians,’ said Sakhi, his eyes gleaming with a hideous malevolence, ‘can take a Soviet helicopter, demount the weaponry, find out how it works, and fire it at another aircraft from the ground, using string, hammer and nails as a firing mechanism, and bring the aircraft down. Afghan technicians can do anything, I have observed. If they are bandits and terrorists.’
‘Oh yes, I have heard of that,’ Akbar smiled. He murmured, ‘That’s when
they are dealing with the brotherly socialist gunships, the best in the world.’
‘What did you say, Engineer?’
‘Nothing directly relevant, Brigadier.’
‘The new Russian turbines have already been delivered to the site. They are the best in the world.’ Sakhi tapped his pencil on the desk again.
‘Brigadier Sakhi, I feel that, all things considered, I must decline the offer.’
‘Then I have to tell you, Citizen Akbar, something more. Hear it and then give your final answer. Your daughter, Noor Sharifi, has been denounced by a patriot for anti-Party agitation and is now in protective custody, to defend her from the understandable wrath of the toiling people whom she was trying to betray. We expect her confession hourly, of course. I am afraid that she will have to go to the correction centre. You may have heard of Tula.’
Tula! The concentration camp attached to the steel mill, two hundred and twenty-five kilometres south of Moscow. Hundreds of Afghan hostages, including women, were working there. Some had already died, of ill-treatment or inadequate industrial safety precautions.
I am the man who, as a youth, prayed that I might be tested, to show my faith, my resolution. Noor is my only surviving child, born in my old age. God damn you, Sakhi, damn your Democratic Party of the People, damn your brotherly Soviet turbines.
Akbar took a deep breath then pleaded as he knew all along he would have to plead. ‘Please don’t send Noor to Tula, Comrade Brigadier. Many of the hostages sent there have died already. Let me have her back! I’ll work for you, at anything.’
‘She is a strong girl,’ said the Mongolian. ‘If she is assigned to rehabilitative work at Tula, I am sure that she will come out of it refreshed and purged. We need them all, the reformed as well as the enlightened-to-begin-with, in the new Afghanistan. You will take up the post? I’ll have a travel warrant issued for you later today. You report to this office, with no more than thirty kilos of luggage, at eight tomorrow morning. Remember, it’s much warmer in the south-west, so you don’t need many clothes: that ambassador’s suit you’re wearing is ridiculous. Take overalls: and you’d better meet the production norms that Comrade Yilderim sets, remember? Just remember Tula steel mill, and I’m sure that will help you to solve all problems. Good day Comrade Engineer Akbar. Long Live the Revolution!’