‘You could be very useful to us, here, Karima. You know how much we depend upon you for housekeeping and so on.’
‘There are other women here, Eagle, who can do everything just as well. We have got it all properly arranged.’
‘Karima!’ Adam felt that he must stamp this out at once. ‘Let’s look at this logically. As you must know, it’s going to be a terrible journey, up and down mountains, in snow and ice, and we may well have to fight from time to time. We might all be killed.’
Karima said nothing. Perhaps he was impressing her.
‘Every man or woman on this trip must be able to do things which are necessary and which are useful to everyone else and to the mission. If you can tell me how you would fit in, I will consider it.’ That, he thought, should clinch it.
Still she did not speak. She was giving up the idea, no doubt.
‘Is that decided, then?’ He looked at her.
‘No, Eagle, I was waiting for you to finish, so that I could answer.’
Here comes the tortured reasoning, Adam said to himself.
‘Very well, Karima. You have your say.’
‘How many reasons do you want to allow me to go with you?’
‘Reasons? Well, let me see – give me six reasons, six good ones.’ That should settle it.
Karima stood upright, her hands folded respectfully. Then she said:
‘Commander! I offer you six reasons: first, it is unseemly for Noorjan Khanum to go alone, without another woman, among so many men. Second, it is unbecoming for her not to be accompanied by someone to look after her, as she is a woman of rank. Third, I am strong and can carry a pack much heavier than the twenty-kilo ones that the Muhjahidin wear on their backs and complain about. Fourth, I am from the north and I speak Turki, so that will be useful: many people wouldn’t understand even you up there. Fifth, I can organize the eating arrangements and buy food without attracting suspicion. Sixth, as a woman I would not be suspected as a spy if you needed information, and I could get it from other women and even children, while armed men could not.’
Adam was flabbergasted. He sat at the table, wondering what to say.
The colonel said, with a wry smile, ‘Commander, if you want a seventh reason, it is that she has out-thought you!’
Everyone laughed. Adam said, ‘You can come. But I have to know one thing. I thought that you always went by instinct. How did you produce a list of arguments like that? Not by instinct, surely?’
Karima smiled, something that she very seldom did. ‘Commander, it was instinct that told me that you would demand strong and simple reasons. After that, it was easy.’
Inwardly she felt a quiet satisfaction. It wasn’t really so hard to think, not if you’d seen it done as often as she had. Many a time, in the old days, Mr Zoltan had shown her. ‘Now, Karima. I know, intuitively – that means inside me – that I have to widen the road a full two metres here, where it is marked, on this map. What I have to do, however, is to find five or six good reasons which will satisfy the Russian Chief Administrator. He does not believe in feelings, only in facts.’
Thank you again, Mr Zoltan.
Forty-one people were selected. Adam, Noor and Karima, plus Captain Azambai with his Russian and Turki knowledge, all made lists, to compare with those of Colonel Barakzai. Zelikov was included, because he could, if need be, impersonate a Russian soldier; Qasim, as second-in-command; and Nanpaz the baker and Halim from Afghan Tour, who had had to leave his employment in a hurry, were strong and useful in many different ways. Twenty other guerrillas, including Louis, and twelve of the newly recruited Afghan Army defectors made up the total: roughly equivalent to two guerrilla battle groups.
The expedition, in accordance with Resistance custom, was given a name. At Haidar’s suggestion, remembering the fort of his dead chief, the partisans named themselves ‘the Sher-Qala Commando’.
When all was prepared, Colonel Barakzai wrote a message to the Russians, to be broadcast over Radio Homeland, the Kabul clandestine station:
From an Afghan soldier to the Russian colonisers! It is an historical fact that we are still here when all our invaders are little more than encyclopaedia entries. The Greek, Persian, Mongol and other empires are gone. Reflect, how much is left of the domains of the Zoroastrians, the Buddhists, the Hindus and the Arabs and all the others who came here: either to ‘help the people’ or to make this land their own? History, dear Russians, offers you no chance at all, and yet you talk about the ‘historical process’. It offers even less than the supposed Law of Averages – and that is non-existent!
Guerrilla preparations for the expedition to the north were well advanced when the Russians decided to wipe out the Resistance in Paghman. Its valleys and mountain ranges had always harboured dissident fighting men. Unpopular Kabul regimes had never reduced the independence of its people. Strategically, as well as tactically, Paghman threatened the capital. And, somewhere in its higher mountains, the Russians knew, was the headquarters of Kara Kush, the leader whose power was growing by the day.
They had tried before to bring the region under control: seizing hostages, poisoning wells, bombing villages. This time they were determined to conquer it, to teach the Paghmanis a lesson they would never forget. And to show the rest of Afghanistan who were the masters now.
4 The Fourth Battle
Valley Entrance
Paghman
JUNE 24
The Fourth Battle of Paghman began at dawn. Sayed Wazir Shah, until recently a medical student, now a partisan, lay in his foxhole on the curve of the road. It was sixteen kilometres north of Kabul, at the approach to the Paghman valley, and he had just taken over highway observation from Ustad Najib, the middle-aged schoolteacher.
Najib had been the only man to escape from the massacre of everyone in his village, on the other side of Kabul. Six thousand people had died there. The place had been levelled, on suspicion of harbouring guerrillas, by air attack. Afterwards the Army had come in and shot all those they found still alive. The bodies were burned with napalm, the ruined buildings set on fire.
Najib had escaped by what seemed a miracle. Early in the attack, the schoolhouse had collapsed, burying him, unconscious, in its debris. His dog had sat by him all night, whining, but ignored by the troops. In the morning it had partially freed his face and neck by digging. Grasping its collar with a hand which he had worked free, Najib had told the dog – Kahraman, ‘Champion’ – to run. Champion, understanding, it seemed, what he had to do, had pulled his master from beneath the wreckage. Afghan hounds could kill leopards, for all their effete looks. Kahraman showed that they could do other things, too …
Suddenly, Najib was back at the foxhole, his dog at his side. A small urchin, pushing a bicycle, was with him. It was Wali Jan, from a mile down the valley: the son of a smallholder.
‘Respectfully reporting, sir!’ Wali, at eight, was eager to imitate the warriors. He saluted.
‘What is it, Wali?’
‘They’re coming. The Rouss. Very many of them, with tanks and much armour: houz, houz – clank, clank!’ He was out of breath, panting with excitement.
It was too early to put up the signal flag: nobody would see it in the pre-dawn haze, the false dawn that was only just starting to pick out the mountaintops behind them. But The Eagle had to be warned. There was no radio, and his Caves were some kilometres away. ‘Have you got a Verey cartridge, Najib?’
‘No, the nearest person I know who has one is Haji Suleman. He’s at Sang-i-Surkh, two kilometres from here.’
Wazir Shah took a flashlight from his pocket and scribbled a message. Wrapping it in his red handkerchief, he tied it to the dog’s collar. ‘Now, Najib, tell him to go to The Eagle, fast!’
Najib stroked the dog’s long mane. ‘Go home, Kahraman, quickly home!’ The ash-grey hound was straining at his collar: then he was away.
‘Do you think he’ll make it?’
‘I don’t know. I expect so. He’ll go to Roman first. He’s n
ever missed a titbit yet.’
No Verey lights, no rockets. Not much of anything, in fact. Of course, the Russians scarcely ever ventured out at night. They had infra-red equipment, but they needed air support, and you can’t attack guerrillas with helicopters in the dark. That’s why the flags had always been sufficient – before this.
‘Wali Jan, go home. Lie low. This is no place for you.’
Wali turned and rummaged in the saddlebag of his battered bike, taking out a Fanta bottle. ‘If you send me away, I’ll only go down the road and use this on a tank, as they come up the hill.’
Wazir hesitated. Then he shrugged. ‘You should be out of the battle, chuchim, kiddie.’
‘I am supposed to be too young to fast in Ramadan,’ said Wali. ‘But I’m not too young for this.’ He inspected the rag-fuse stuffed into the bottle’s mouth, and fixed a box of matches to his wrist with a rubber band. ‘I’m out of that, but,’ he drew himself up, and repeated a common Afghan saying, ‘Afghaniyati khudra chitor tark kunam? How can I abandon my Afghanness?’
‘None of us can, but take care, Tiger.’
There it was, now: the rumbling of caterpillar tracks. Tanks and armoured personnel-carriers, approaching in some strength. They moved to the outside of the bend in the road. Yes, there they were. They had their headlights on, too.
It was a good vantage point. The road went through a rocky patch, with boulders on either side; boulders which rolled down the mountainside and had, at times, blocked the highway. The Construction and Maintenance Unit, from time to time, brought men and machines along here, to clear the road. They pushed the boulders just off the carriageway, at places piling them up so continuously that they looked like sangars, rough defensive embrasures, which the hillmen had always used for sniper refuges.
Behind one such natural breastwork, the three checked their weapons and looked at the column snaking its way towards them, like a Chinese dragon of the night, studded with headlamps, stretching back for several kilometres.
‘Wazir, there’s thousands of them, Russians!’
‘Dorogh na gufti, you’re not lying.’ Wazir counted his magazines. Ten. That was three hundred rounds, just over seven minutes’ continuous firing. The Kalashnikov, one of the best guns in the world, derived from a German design and developed by captured Germans in Russia after World War II, was the most successful of all modern infantry weapons. And in the foxhole, buried in loose earth just below the surface, there were a dozen RKG/3M stick grenades. They could penetrate six and a half inches of armour. They might get a tank or two.
The men crept back to the foxhole and scrabbled the grenades out of the ground.
‘If they are T-54 tanks,’ said Najib, ‘these will do. These grenades will penetrate 165 mm armour-plate. But if they are, say, T-10s, the real heavies, well – they’ve got eight-inch armour. Too thick.’
‘Right;’ Wazir was making three piles of the stubby weapons, ‘but if we can’t get at any vulnerable places, like the side, just under the turret, then let’s concentrate on the personnel-carriers, they’re much weaker.’
‘I know. Four to six inches.’ It helped to talk shop, to repeat what they had learnt from the stolen textbooks. This must be why, in military training, there was so much jargon, Najib thought. It helped to fill your mind, make you interested in something other than the dryness of your mouth, the strange new stiffness in your knees, the growing sense of unreality. The approach of death.
The rumbling was getting louder, and in the early morning mist the three watchers could now see the long file of death, snaking up the mountainside, lights still on, raising a cloud of dust. Khaki, the word as well as the colour, that the British had adopted from their Afghan campaigns.
‘How many rounds have you, Najib?’
‘Five magazines. A hundred and fifty shots.’
‘Wali?’
‘Three Fanta orangeade bottles, sir!’
They were right by the road. Wazir handed the others four grenades each, and took four himself. When they had clipped them to their belts, they took up their ammunition and crept from one boulder’s cover to the next, to a rise some twenty feet above them. Far better cover.
Kahraman the hound bounded into the cave where Roman Zelikov, who often fed him, was shaking himself awake from his sleeping bag. He’d been dancing until late the night before, learning the whirling Milli Atan, which the Pashtuns danced to whip themselves into the right state of fervour before an attack. The tune, Youth into Battle, was still running around in his head.
Kahraman licked his face and buried his muzzle in the Russian’s furlined sleeping bag. Was he looking for a morsel to eat? the man wondered.
There was a piece of red cloth tied to the dog’s collar. A paper in it. Zelikov, unable to read Dari-Persian, looked at it, guessed its message must be urgent and jumped up, naked, rushing to the cave where The Eagle sat, eating oats, yoghurt and raisins, the usual Afghan breakfast. An illustrated Russian book on military tactics lay open before him. He couldn’t understand the text, but the diagrams told him a lot.
Adam took the paper. Enemy advancing in force: already reached Safedpul. Heavy armour. Perhaps hundreds of tanks and APCs. Wazir.
Zelikov read it from Adam’s face. As The Eagle buckled on his gun belt, the little Russian, still stark naked, ran to the cave mouth and was already beating out the rallying call on the giant drum. DA, DA, DA DA! DA-DA-DA!
‘Haraka, haraka! – get moving!’ The call ran through the honeycomb of caves.
As the drum-beats reverberated through the hills, the answering flags went up in the Paghman valley. In relays, scraps of cloth appeared, like petals scattered in the dawn, and other drums took up the call: DA, DA DA DA! DA-DA-DA! As the early breeze swept down from the Hindu Kush, more and more flags appeared. There were the standards of Paghman, of Karez-Mir, of Shakar-Dara, of Bezadi, of the Lord of Bezak. Now the huge drums of Koh-i-Daman answered, the purple banners of Kohistan joined the flags of Begtut, of Sabzao, and the triangular pennants of Qala-Muhjahidin.
‘Come to the battlefield!’ The chant went up from a thousand throats in a hundred caves and cottages. People snatched up guns, knives, even spears, and started to sharpen their long Khyber swords.
‘DA, DA DA DA! DA-DA-DA!’ Men, women and children, all of those who had survived three devastating Russian campaigns against them and could still walk or run, streamed from rocket-blasted houses, from shacks, farms, tents.
‘To the battlefield!’ A blacksmith picked up a new, very evil-looking scythe and sprinted to his appointed place. Butchers brought out their knives and cleavers, the irrigation men seized their long-handled spades.
‘DA, DA DA DA! DA-DA-DA!’ Modern weapons were still scarce in Paghman and, beyond it, in Kohistan: but most of the fifteen thousand Russians who had already died in the Afghan mountains had been surprised at what could be done by the rebels, even when they had only rocks in their hands.
The old people and the walking wounded, not yet recovered after the earlier attacks, were being marshalled, with the children still too young to fight, into the deep caverns. ‘Ajala, ajala, hurry, hurry, the Nikolai helicopters will soon be overhead …’
*
The two men stood with the boy at the valley’s mouth and saw the green pennant of the kashshafi, the advance scouts, go up. The drums thundered louder as it was joined by Paghman’s ancient orange battle-flag, with its black eagle emblazoned in the centre. The message had got through. ‘Shabash, Kahraman – well done, Champion!’ Wali jumped up and down with joy, until the schoolmaster pulled him down.
The advance guard of the invaders was now less than six hundred yards away, swathed in dust. The tail of the roaring, clanking convoy was invisible now, so great was the cloud raised by the vehicles in front, mixed with the fumes from the groaning, five hundred horsepower engines.
It was still too early to fire. The AK-47’s effective range was three to four hundred yards; and the grenades could only be used in really close-
up fighting. If, as often happened, one or more of the tanks broke down, this would slow down the advance. There was not much room to get a tank off the road, and even less to bring a heavy recovery vehicle up parallel to the column. The Russians, obsessed by the vast plains which formed most of the Soviet Union, had not yet learnt much about mountain warfare.
They were still coming.
Suddenly, young Wali pulled at Wazir’s jacket. ‘They’ve got scouts. Look.’ He pointed downwards, towards the road below them. Sure enough, four men were crawling into the foxhole which the guerrillas had just left. They were wearing Afghan Army grey uniforms and full webbing equipment. Numerous hand-grenades, tank-killers, were clipped to their shoulder harnesses.
Ustad Najib was craning over the rocks and looking down too. Then, to Wazir’s amazement, he beckoned, carefully, to the newcomers, to climb up and join him.
For a moment Wazir thought that Najib was a traitor. Or that he was trying, rather foolishly, to lure the men up so that he could shoot them as they approached. Then, as Najib grinned, he put his gun down and recognized, climbing towards them, Colonel Barakzai, the Afghan Army defector.
Wali gave the Pashtun cry of delight, but quietly. ‘That evens things out a bit.’ In a moment, the colonel and his small party were beside them.
‘We were out on a training patrol,’ said Colonel Barakzai, ‘when we saw the flags go up.’
‘“Luck is not sold in the markets”,’ Wazir quoted, as they all shook hands.
‘Who’s in command? How many men have you got?’ The colonel was very professional.
‘Nobody in command. Three men,’ said Wazir.
‘How many grenades have you got?’ the colonel asked.
‘Twelve, anti-tank,’ said Wali.
‘Good. We four have six each. Our task is to delay the enemy, try to destroy or at least to detrack as many vehicles as possible, preferably tanks, and the bigger the better. Do you know about the fuel tank weakness?’