Kara Kush
Everyone in Moscow. That meant the people who supported ‘wings against stings’, the air lobby which was always struggling with the gunners for primacy. Bakunin had prepared himself for this one.
‘Tactical supremacy does not win wars, Comrade General, as I believe you once said, in that important speech at the Polish Military College which was afterwards published in Krasnaya Zvezda.’
Bakunin was rather a creeper, thought Kishniyev, and he did not get his facts quite right. Still, he might be useful in getting the Afghan anti-bandit weapons evaluation report done. And he did read Red Star, the Ministry of Defence newspaper; and remembered what he read: which showed that he was keen.
‘Bakunin, at that time I also said that smaller weapons, mortars, automatic rifles, grenade-launchers and flame-throwers did not win wars, but had to be harmonized in operation with the overall plan.’ Bakunin had been sent on ahead to do the basic study. How did he relate it to the general’s doctrine?
‘With respect, Comrade General, I was coming to that, for I think that it is your primary contribution to the moulding of strategic thinking.’
Primary contribution? Well, he might have an idea, let’s hear it, the general thought. And the lunch at the Military Mission’s mess was not bad at all …
‘You do rather a good borshch here, and the bread is delicious. Have another drink and tell me all about it.’ No point, the senior officer thought, in letting the fellow imagine that he himself had no idea how an inspector of ordnance could actually influence strategy.
Bakunin raised his glass. He had deep-set eyes, a mop of black hair, and the olive complexion of his trans-Caspian forebears. ‘To the victory of the Socialist Camp and our fraternal aid to the peoples of the Marxist-Leninist nations!’ They drank.
‘In the evaluation of the disastrous outcome of the Six-Day War, your summary, Comrade General, insisted that short-range, wire-guarded missiles should replace heavy guns for the tank-killer formations of the Egyptian Army. The Egyptians pinned their faith, and based their strategy, on this doctrine. The result, though not a victory, was a significant loss of Israeli tanks, caused by the Egyptian Special Services and Seventh Brigade.’
‘That’s true. The thirteen-centimetre wire-guarded missiles did really well. This is excellent bread.’ No point in looking too keen.
‘The bread is made from Soviet wheat, Comrade General, supplied to the Afghan Government on the personal order of the President of the Presidium of the USSR.’
‘Soviet wheat? But, Bakunin, this country is a rich cereal-growing one. What’s Soviet wheat doing here – especially when we’re having to buy grain from America?’
Bakunin searched his mind for a moment, arranging the correct words to explain. ‘A lot of the standing crops have been destroyed in, er, operations. Farmers took up arms. They had to be punished. They are like our Kulaks, rich peasants who hated socialism, who had to be liquidated. Then, of course, er, terrorists have burnt some fields, to interfere with the land-redistribution programme.’
‘Then what do the people eat?’
‘A lot of the enemies of socialism starve, I understand. I certainly hope so.’
The general was a professional soldier, who had been in the army since the Great Patriotic War against Hitler, since 1942 in fact, and remarks like that brought back painful memories. He sighed. ‘Carry on with your report, Major.’
‘Comrade General. The ground-to-air missiles and the MiG fighters and fighter-bombers are for national defence, against invaders and so on. So is the heaviest artillery.’
‘Yes, I do know that, Major.’
‘This leaves among the rest, the tanks and helicopters, which in Afghanistan have a well-established role. Tanks can only move along certain kinds of terrain, and many get bogged down or cannot manage the mountain tracks; they are, therefore, of limited value. And there are separate reports for these two items, in any case.’
‘Right, but continue.’
‘Now, we know that helicopters can be used against all kinds of targets, but, as all armies have found out in counter-insurgency operations, at the end of the day the infantry must go in and flush out the enemy, man to man: or, at least, with relatively short-range weapons.’
‘Exactly, Major.’
Bakunin was now getting into his stride. ‘When, as in this country, the bandits move around and change their locations all the time, we use flame-throwers, light and heavy machine-guns, mortars and grenade-launchers and the like: all close-contact arms. Initially, when the Soviet Limited Contingent entered Afghanistan, during December 1979, they brought with them hundreds of tanks and large aircraft. Experience has shown, however, that we can best root out terrorists by a swift descent upon them, using the smaller weapons.
‘The formation of small combat groups is the answer to the Afghan situation. We are busy forming these now. They will change strategic thinking. We have already produced good effects in counter-terrorist actions.’
‘Yes, of course.’ The general was pleased. ‘I would like to see something of such operations, in the field. Could this be arranged?’ Then, he thought, he could use a telling phrase in his report, ‘as I observed in the field’.
Bakunin hesitated, though only for a moment. ‘Everything can be arranged, Comrade General, and it will be my pleasure to do it. But it may take a day or two. The reason for this is that the political people do not like high-ranking officers, even anyone of field rank, to be too near a scene of action. There have been losses – senior officers killed, including fifteen generals – and this makes good propaganda for the enemy.’
‘Damn the political people! I’m here to do my job. I have a piece of paper from even bigger political people, saying that I must be given “every facility to complete my task”.’
‘Yes, Comrade General. I shall bring this to the attention of State Security at the highest level. Colonel Sementsev is the man. Then of course, we have to deal with Operations Command and Control.’
‘And what about them? They’re soldiers, aren’t they? They carry out the operations, I watch them. That’s all there is to it. It’s perfectly normal, almost routine. I’m not trying to sleep with their wives, you know.’ Even fighting soldiers, he thought, seemed to be behaving like bureaucrats nowadays.
‘Understood, Comrade General. But we have had difficulties in the past. This is because Operations does not like noncombatant personnel near a scene of action …’
The general’s face went purple. ‘Non-combatant personnel! Son of an animal! Just you tell those fancy boys that I, Kishniyev, holder of the Order of the Red Banner and a dozen other medals for gallantry in action, was a fighting soldier, killing Germans, when they were pouring out liquid from both ends of their bodies in their cradles. Operations! They don’t know what an operation is! I’ll show you something, little father!’
The general unbuttoned his tunic and pulled up his shirt.
‘What do you think this is, a love bite?’
He showed the scar of an old knife-slash, or bayonet-wound, stretching from his collarbone to his navel. ‘This was done to me, to Boris Kishniyev, outside Kiev, in 1944, by a Nazi panzer grenadier. And it was I, even with my guts hanging out, who turned that Germanski bastard into good-quality fertilizer. Operations!’
‘Homage to the heroes who saved our Mother Russia,’ stammered the Major. ‘I’ll make sure that Operations knows of this.’
The following morning General Kishniyev, Major Bakunin and a captain attached to them by Operations, were standing on a hill overlooking one of the gulleys which commanded the entrance to the Panjsher Valley, north-east of Kabul. The armoured personnel-carrier was parked a short way off, with a black-haired, thickset, smug-looking officer in it. He had been introduced as Colonel Sementsev, and he made sure that everyone knew he reported direct to the State Security Chairman. ‘I am reluctant, Comrade General,’ he had said when he joined the group, ‘to dignify a fly-swatting operation like this one, against khuligans, hooligans, with
the presence of a man of my rank. I speak only of the dignity of the rank, not of the man, you understand. But I admit that the instructions are quite in order.’
The general disliked him on sight. Still, he knew the type: politicals dressed as soldiers – and they called them colonels, even generals. Moscow was crawling with them, and crawling was mostly what they did, when they weren’t bullying. But they had power, and could only be handled with an equivocal joke. And if that didn’t work, kaput … And what about his own, very senior rank, anyway?
‘It is a great advantage to have you here, Comrade Sementsev. I agree that things like this are a bore, and must be doubly so for a man of your distinction. Still, we all have to do things that we don’t like. It’s the penalty of honourable service. Let’s just look upon it as a day out, like partridge shooting.’
Sementsev relaxed a little. He was a terrible snob and he would be able to tell his wife that evening that, on a special mission, he had been hobnobbing with General Kishniyev, Hero of the Soviet Union. He might even get the great man to lunch with them. That would be quite a coup. At the same time he remembered with satisfaction that he was, in a sense, actually above the general. He had been told by Moscow to keep an eye on him. When people reached the rank of general, they sometimes said unwise things. Rank went to their heads, probably. There was that major-general who had defended the Crimean Tatars, saying that they had been unjustly decimated and exiled by Stalin. Pyotr Grigorenko, that was his name. They’d had to put him in a lunatic asylum and fill him with drugs. That was the KGB, they had the power. And then they’d slung Grigorenko out of the country, out of the USSR. That was the KGB, too. And all that remained of the entire Crimean Tatar nation was still in exile, somewhere in Soviet Asia.
Now Grigorenko’s voice was heard on the terrorists’ Radio Free Afghanistan, slandering the Soviet Union. That proved he was a traitor.
The four men were now looking through their field-glasses at the countryside below. Panjsher, which means ‘Five Tigers’, had been one of the playgrounds of Afghanistan. Its beauty was such that people came from all over the world to see it, to swim in the rivers, to ski in the winter. Now it was the home of the infernal bandit Mahsud and his ruffians. The huge valley in the Hindu Kush slashed through Afghanistan in an arc, from almost Pakistan to above Kabul. It was used as a guerrilla base, and, as Bakunin’s frank and indignant briefing put it, ‘insolent interventionists and spies abounded, doctors from France were actually treating the Afghan terrorists there. And making films about it, and showing them in the West’.
But, the night before, men of a Soviet motorized rifle division had treed some of the tigers. In a small group of caves near the town of Gulbahar – ‘Spring of Flowers’ – commanding the valley’s mouth, an advance party of Mahsud’s guerrillas had established a look-out post, to warn of any approach into Panjsher by their enemy. The Russians, and a contingent from the Afghan Army, were dug in here, trying to seal the Panjsher off, to protect Kabul, only sixty miles away.
There were twelve of them, sent there by Commander Mahsud to gain experience and to constitute his outermost patrol. This was part of their two-weekly stint, after which they went to a remoter part of the valley for rest and relaxation, and some more basic training. Huddled in the caves, with no food, scanty ammunition and no radio to warn their chief, the guerrillas looked down on the Russian troops below, and knew that they would never get away. They had, it is true, left a sentry at the bottom of the cliff where the caves were, but he had been surprised by a Russian picquet of the airborne division in rubber boots and camouflage uniforms, who had then called up the riflemen.
‘There’re three caves, and we estimate about three or four men in each,’ said the Afghan lieutenant who, for appearance’s sake, was in command.
‘How do you propose to deal with them?’
‘We’re going to make this a letuchka, a short training exercise, Comrade General, to give as many men as possible experience of how to do these things. Starving them out would take too long, and using heavy artillery would be a waste of expensive shells. So we’ll use mortars.’
‘Right. Carry on when you’re ready.’
Lieutenant Ablagh saluted and did a smart about-turn. Until a week ago, he had only been a senior corporal, but, with the desertion of more and more Afghan soldiers, promotion was very quick these days. Anyway, he was a Kabuli and it was better to go into the Army and get somewhere than to be snatched from the streets by one of the pressgangs and kept in the ranks until a Muhjahid bullet got you. Or a knife in the back from some teenager in an alleyway.
The Soviet troops had drawn back three hundred metres, and a scruffy Afghan Army mortar crew, some of them only sixteen years of age, shuffled forward, reluctant, dropping things, spitting and cursing, looking at the Soviet general like dogs might at a vicious master, half-fawning, half afraid of him.
In the caves, the twelve men, three old, five middle-aged and four who were little more than boys, had dug through the limestone, working all night, and connected their burrows. Now the three small caves were linked they might just be able to think of something. Nobody knew what. But the digging had been something to do. For one thing, they needed only one look-out now, and the rest of them could take it in turns to sleep.
The limestone had been quite soft, and the back of the largest cave was big enough to contain the material which they had dug out. The evening before they had thought that they might climb out in the cover of darkness. It only took a few minutes to discover that this was impossible. Flooding the rock face with infra-red light and using special goggles and image-intensifiers, the Russians had been able to see any movement almost as well as if it were day.
At dawn they had assembled, leaving one man on watch, in the largest cave, while Feroz, their leader, served as prayer-leader, facing in the direction which they supposed was that of Mecca.
They took comfort from the familiar words of the congregational prayer:
‘Glory to thee, O God! And thine is the praise and blessed is thy name and exalted is thy majesty: and there is none to be served besides thee …’
Then they went back to their places, lying on the cave-floors, waiting for the attack.
‘All ready to fire, General, sir.’ The Afghan lieutenant was back.
‘Right, carry on.’
Three mortars, three caves. The aim was so bad that sixty rounds produced nothing but holes in the cliff and powdered limestone. Emboldened by the conscripts’ blundering, the guerrillas poured a concentrated hail of AK-47 fire towards them, putting them to flight, although at that range and angle the soldiers were in very little danger. A runner came up to the general, a piece of paper in his hand. ‘Sending in the armour now, if you agree.’ He signed it ‘yes’, and went back to his binoculars.
Below them a specially-adapted T-62 battle tank, its turret closed, edged forward towards the cliff-face. In place of its 115-millimetre cannon, it carried a strange apparatus, ending in a very ugly spout. The Kalashnikov bullets glanced off the thick armour-plating, striking sparks and giving the group in the cave little comfort.
Feroz said, ‘Hold fire. We only have one thirty-round magazine left. Let’s see what they are going to do.’
Fifteen yards away from the cliff, the Ognemetnyy tank stopped. Slowly, the long snout moved upwards, to an acute angle, until it was pointing directly at the centre cave. Then, by telescopic action, it was elongated, became thinner, tapering to a point. A distance of thirty feet separated the snout from the cave.
Feroz could see it clearly: the greatest of all horrors …Atish-pash!’ he shouted, and started to take aim. Before he could fire, however, the atish-pash, the flame-thrower, like some obscene hose-pipe of hell, belched burning liquid death. Within a quarter of a minute, eight of the guerrillas were reduced to smouldering ashes. A pall of oily black smoke drifted over the cliff-top.
The other four, standing in their cave-mouths and waving unrolled white turbans in surrender, and coughi
ng, retching, climbed down the cliff-face as prisoners. While virtually every other army in the world had discarded the flame-thrower, the Russians still had uses for it.
‘Well done,’ said the Soviet major, who had not taken any active part in the operation. ‘But I wouldn’t have started with such a raw mortar crew. They need practice. Of course, I’m only here as an adviser.’
‘Fascinating,’ said the KGB man, ‘let’s see the prisoners now.’
The general watched the captives being rifle-butted forward, but said nothing.
The four captives, three of them old, one very young, were ordered to sit on the ground as an interpreter appeared. The oldsters were wearing traditional Afghan dress: shirts over baggy trousers, with turbans on their heads. The youngest, Aslam Jan – who was fifteen – wore sandals, jeans and a zip-up windcheater. He looked like the schoolboy he had been only a month before. They were all dirty, thin and quiet; their eyes glowed, with fear, hatred and exhaustion.
‘Have they said anything?’ asked the general.
‘Nothing much.’ The interpreter, a thickset townee, wriggled in his ill-fitting suit. He hated the job, but it was all he could get. Anyway, his wife and children would have suffered if he had refused to serve the Army. It was a pity they had discovered that he spoke Russian. His parents had escaped from the USSR at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution and settled here.
One Afghan prisoner spat, as best he could with a dry mouth. The others did the same. Then they started to chant, slowly, enunciating the words carefully, looking straight at the Russian general.
‘And what does that mean, Interpreter?’
‘Nothing much, gospodin General.’
‘It must mean something. Is it a religious hymn?’
‘They are only dogs, filthy ones, muzhiks.’
‘And they are saying?’