‘No.’ They all leant forward.
‘Right and left of the front, Russian tanks have fuel containers which are not heavily armoured. If we are in luck, they will not have sandbagged these. All tanks are now being modified to protect the diesel, but there is this design fault and for the moment the best they can do is to tie sandbags over them. Go for these soft spots. With luck we can roast a few of them.’
‘That’ll even things up a bit,’ said Wali, once again.
‘Perhaps. Now, we are on an incline here; the road slopes upwards behind us. The best place to attack a tank. We’ll set off now, four on one side of the road, in the rocks, and three on the other, in spaced lines. Each man will be ten metres from the next. Each pick a tank or, if you can’t, an APC. If they fire first, I’ll either throw one grenade or fire one green smoke flare into the sky. If you see that, throw. Do you all understand?’
‘Understand.’
‘Wait.’ He looked around a rock towards the enemy column. Something unusual was happening. The seven rebels looked at each other: the enemy vehicles had ground to a halt.
They were under three hundred yards away. The freshly stencilled insignia of the Afghan Army were clearly to be seen on the leading machines.
‘They’re not expecting an attack yet. The turrets are open.’ Colonel Barakzai whispered to Wazir.
As they watched, some men, dressed in Afghan tank-crew gear, got down from their turrets and walked back from three of the lead tanks, evidently looking for someone, perhaps a senior officer. Seven or eight vehicles back, they halted beside a scout car. ‘Mark that one, it’s a colonel or above,’ said Barakzai; ‘he must be in command.’
Nine men were talking, gesticulating, shaking their fists. The crews of the three lead tanks, minus the drivers.
Suddenly, as they watched, the guerrillas saw two men stand up in the rear of the scout car, aim their automatic rifles, and shoot at the tank-men with a hail of rapid fire. The nine men went down.
Mutiny? The rebels looked at one another, grimaced their puzzlement, and shrugged.
‘Now!’ It was the colonel. ‘Something is going on, but it does not matter to us. It’s too light to cross the road, so we’ll file down this side of the highway and carry out the plan I gave you. Are you ready?’
‘Colonel seb!’ Wali had his hand up.
‘Boy?’
‘We must name our battle group.’
‘All right, name it.’
‘I name it Kahraman, Champion.’
‘All right. Now get on with it. Haraka, March!’ The convoy had not moved. The seven guerrillas, each with a grenade ready in his hand, crept silently towards the array of guns, men and metal, each determined to disable at least one tank.
It took them a quarter of an hour, eyes down, to avoid dislodging even a pebble, before they were in position, each behind a boulder or a pile of rocks, each standing stock-still, opposite and above his target. Looking through the lacy leaves of a rock-plant, Najib saw that many of the tank commanders were now standing up in their places, turrets open.
The colonel had led his men past the first dozen tanks, and beyond several personnel-carriers crammed with troops, all in the Afghan field-grey. His intention was to cause havoc towards the middle of the convoy. The rear vehicles might then reverse, and those in front could be left to the main body of the Muhjahidin when they arrived. Seven men could make quite a mess, strung out like this; he was sure of that. Cut the dragon in half: always sound tactics.
He squinted down at the shoulder-strap on the summer uniform of the tank commander whom he had chosen as his own first target. He was about twenty metres away, sitting there, looking bored. Two small stars on a red stripe, two more on either side. A captain. The Soviet must be sending officers in for training. He crept forward. When he got to within ten metres of the man, who was now lighting a cigarette, the colonel remembered that he was a Pashtun, of the Barakzai clan, and could not attack a man without warning. Now and again, famous in history, this kind of bravado possessed the frontier men.
He shouted, at the top of his voice, ‘Gospodin Kapitan! A Barakzai is here!’
A grenade went right past the astonished Russian’s shoulder as it curved, falling into the bowels of the tank, as Barakzai threw himself behind the rock which he had already marked down as his shield against the blast-wave.
There was a moment of total silence, and then a roar as the impact fuse set off the half-kilogramme high-explosive charge. The tank was buckling: then it exploded with a sound of screaming metal which blended with the crash of six other tank-killers, as the weapons of Kahraman Battle Group came into play.
The mangled remains of a heavy machine-gun, torn from its mounting, fell with a thud that he first thought was a shell, only feet from where the colonel crouched.
He could not see how many hits they’d scored. There was firing; automatic weapons, bullets from a dozen carbines whipped past his head, chipped his sheltering rock as he lay there, scrabbling in the hard ground, instinctively trying, like some lizard, to dig himself in.
Now men were swarming all around him, men in Afghan Red Army uniforms, in full battle-kit, with carbines, fixed bayonets, grenades. In a few moments, he thought, I shall be dead. But I got my target. He unclipped a second Russian grenade, gripped it by the polished yellow wooden handle, and jumped up, prepared to rush upon another tank.
The turrets were all shut now, and the soldiers had scrambled from their carriers, up the slopes on either side of the road. One of them pulled him down; as he was about to smash his grenade on the man’s head, blowing them both to pieces, Colonel Barakzai recognized Arif Qamrudin, the brightest officer-cadet at the military college, and a relative of his as well. He could not kill him …
Barakzai handed his grenade to the young man with the fixed bayonet, in a token of surrender, and lay back on the uneven ground, hands behind his head. Afghanistan, the Homeland, had come to this. Arif had come to Paghman to kill his own people. The bayonet was so close he could see its blue-black, serrated, wire cutting, edge.
Shooting, screaming and explosions became more intense, and louder, as the colonel waited for the bayonet thrust. It didn’t come. He looked up. Arif was standing, steadying himself against a rock, firing towards the enemy convoy. Barakzai struggled to his feet, slowly realizing that the cadet was on his side. He unslung his AK-47 and took his stand beside the younger man, aiming for the red and yellow epauletted figures, the Russian officers, who were trying to rally groups of their own men as the Afghan cadets, three hundred of them, turned on their supposed allies.
Barakzai and his three men worked their way down the convoy, throwing grenades until they had no more, firing their guns into the knots of howling Russians who, betrayed and perhaps surrounded, fired in all directions, at whoever seemed to be the enemy.
Dense clouds of black, oily smoke were rising from crippled tanks, trapped men were screaming in the blazing battle-monsters, dying amid the orange flames, while ammunition exploded all around them. The acrid, burnt cordite fumes made the colonel cough. It was a strange sight, he thought, surveying the scene as he snapped his hinged bayonet into position. Hand-to-hand fighting, some shouting orders, some howling with battle elation, even though blood gushed from wounds they had not felt. Barakzai looked around for someone to attack, just as a Russian, a six-footer with a huge moustache, a caricature of a Caucasian bandit, came for him with an automatic carbine spitting fire. His lips curled back to show a new sight for an Afghan. Common enough in the Soviet Union, here the stainless steel teeth, top and bottom sets, looked like something from the nether regions.
The bullets were whipping wide. In his excitement, the Russian had forgotten to correct his aim. Kalashnikov 47s, because of a design fault, always fire high and to the right.
Even before the colonel had time to react, another man came hurtling at the Russian from behind. He was a small, thickset figure in shirt and baggy trousers, with a rolled-brim, soft wool Nuristani hat
pulled down, almost over his eyes.
His knotted arm muscles stood out as he clutched the long-handled, sharpened spade, swinging it like a flail. Its edge glittered in the early morning sun as the guerrilla brought it down at an angle onto the Russian’s neck, just under the ear. The paratrooper fell, blood gushing from his mouth.
Reinforcements had arrived.
The irrigation ditch diggers, the terrible belchis, spade wielders, were here.
Sergeant Rybakin was a veteran of several battles with the Muhjahidin, and had learnt many of their tricks. As he had told his men, that was the only way to survive, once you got to the hand-to-hand stuff. He was a Ukrainian, but a good Soviet soldier nonetheless. Beckoning to his section, he jumped from his transport and led them into the thick of the fight. They fought in twos, as he had taught them, back to back, putting short bursts of AK fire into every bandit they could see, cleanly, effectively, like executioners: no bullet wasted.
The tactic worked – until the Russians met the Kohistanis, massive mountain men who took three, four, five bullets and still came on. Rybakin’s kit was shared out among the surviving sergeants in his barracks that very evening.
A swarm of small girls and boys, village children of the valley, suddenly came running through the band of warriors, skipping and dancing, heading for the Soviet fighting vehicles, zigzagging as they ran.
They carried, in both hands in front of them, containers made from gallon oilcans, half-filled with some substance, each with a burning slow-fuse on a stick strapped to the side.
Incredibly, their figures too small to register in the soldiers’ eyes as attackers, these children – some forty or fifty of them – got within a few yards of the invaders before being seen.
Then, almost as one single individual, they whipped the smouldering, wax-soaked cord-fuses from their straps, plunged them into the cans and hurled them at the Russians.
Dense clouds of smoke, blown by the morning wind, drifted over the tanks and made the Russians choke, as their eyes filled with tears, visibility obscured.
Zubeida, daughter of Pir Samander, led her friends in a wide circle, to attack the Russians towards the end of the convoy, where no guerrillas had yet penetrated. Zubeida’s fighters had been practising, with a weapon that had seldom been seen in Afghanistan since the time of the Mongols, seven hundred years ago. The Russians were wearing flak-jackets: but the women’s arrows found the heads and throats.
A bunch of Russian soldiers, standing back to back on the top of a great, six-wheeled truck, had turned it into a fire-point of devastating power. The truck must have been crammed with rifles and ammunition. As each of the paratroopers emptied his magazine into the attacking Afghans, he threw the weapon to another man squatting at his feet, a loader, who handed him another AK-74 complete with fresh magazine. These new guns had a killing range a hundred yards better than the standard Kalashnikov. The firing was so continuous, the action so rhythmic, that there was almost a poetry in the sound, the movement brought about by the sheer professionalism of the firing of these superbly trained soldiers. Each Soviet tank battalion had its special parachute company, for deep penetration and arduous missions.
A pile of bodies mounted up, like a barricade of flesh, around the sweating, cursing, straining Soviet strongpoint. Again and again the Afghans came on in waves, but were always beaten back, dragging and carrying their wounded, men with star-fractures caused by the new, tiny 5.45-millimetre tumbling bullets which made wounds which would not heal. The modern form of the outlawed dum-dum bullet.
There were twelve Russians firing, and at least as many loading their guns for them. In between attacks they changed places, the fighters getting some rest from the intense concentration of continuous automatic weapon firing.
Abdul-Ghani Khan, son of a peasant, formerly manager of a textile mill and now a mechanic with the Resistance, struggled to an outcrop of rocks, two kilometres from the fire-truck. His rocket-launcher had five times that range. If he fired soon and scored a hit, he might save the lives of a group of some fifty fighters whom he could see about to make another suicidal assault on the Russian paratroopers. He unshipped the launcher from his back and put a SAM-7 into the tube. With the sight dead on target, he fired his one and only shot. In seconds, the twenty-pound missile had hit the back of the driver’s cab; after the orange flash, nothing moved.
Abdul-Ghani whooped with joy. The launcher and four rockets had cost him $2,000 – two years pay at his old job. Money well spent.
Wazir Shah was perched on a rock beside the road, his rifle set at ‘single shot’. He was picking off, for preference, every man he could see with the bright epaulettes of an officer. Russian troops, the Afghans had soon discovered, became bewildered in combat if not given constant orders by their officers. Wazir inwardly blessed the name of Stalin. It was he who had reinstituted the broad, flashy Czarist shoulder-boards which made it easy to recognize – and deal with – a Russian officer in battle. The rank and file of the Red Army called these huge shoulder-boards ‘Stalin pancakes’, someone had told Wazir Shah. He was totally exposed to enemy fire, but had no sensation of danger.
It was a dissociated feeling. Now and then, he became aware of the din of battle, even the stench of blood and sweat and guts. It was like a slaughterhouse which he had once visited: the smell was the same.
Looking at the absurdity of the scene, at people who – if history had been otherwise – could have been friends, trying to maim and destroy each other, he remembered what he had seen a week ago in Kabul, less than twenty miles away. He’d sneaked into town on reconnaissance.
Standing on the pavement of the newly-surfaced main avenue, the Jadi Maiwand, near the smart shops, he had been waiting to cross the road. A woman was in a hurry: alone, apparently, among the silent crowds standing patiently while a seemingly endless Russian convoy of heavy military trucks, ZIL-131s with fearsome mounted rocket-launchers, streamed past them.
The woman was pushed back by a military policeman as she made to dart across the road. Turning on him, she screeched, ‘Is this communism, Nikolai?’
A tall, fair man, to whom Wazir had been talking a moment before, smiled. He was a timber expert, brought by the Russians from Latvia, another Soviet-occupied nation, on the far Baltic Sea. He, at any rate, had seen all this before. ‘Yes, madam citizen,’ he said. ‘That’s exactly what it is.’
Najib threw away his empty, useless rifle and ran, drawing his long Afghan knife, into the middle of a knot of struggling men. A group of Russian soldiers had surrounded three Kohistani hillmen and were jabbing, slashing, lunging at them with their bayonets, panting and screaming in turn. The mountaineers, armed only with thick staves, were desperately holding the attackers off, but only just. The bayonets were too short to reach the Afghans’ vitals, but the rebels would soon flag, as they tired.
As he came within six yards of the whirling mess of figures, the balding schoolmaster, gasping with the unaccustomed effort of the battle, saw and snatched up two green-painted grenades lying in a hollow in the ground. He wondered, briefly, if they were duds, then hesitated. If he threw them now and they exploded, he would kill five or more Russians – but three guerrillas would die, too.
Like many Afghans, Najib had a loud and penetrating voice. And his was immensely powerful. At this moment, above the roar of battle, his words came over, clearly, to the embattled Kohistanis. ‘Brothers, run!’
There was a distinct pause; even the Russians slowed down their attack. Then the hillmen took to their heels, without knowing why, but sensing something imperative in that order, and scrambled up the hillside.
The Russians turned to meet this new challenge and then came at him, bayonets at the ready, their faces contorted, a picture of grimy demons with deep-set eyes and button noses …
Najob turned around and ran, fumbling with the ring-pulls of the RGD-5s. Four-second delay fuses, that’s what they had. For a few moments he was outdistancing them. That should be time enough. He turned an
d tossed the grenades right into the bunch of them, throwing himself on the ground at the same time. His pursuers disappeared in the terrible explosion; the blast-wave crushed the breath from Najib, but he survived.
A huge Russian, demented with fear, rushed behind a tall rock and came upon an Afghan, Shola Khan, whose brother had been roasted on a spit by Soviet soldiers: they had wanted him to give away the position of a partisan band. Shola was in no mood to receive a surrender or to take a prisoner, though that was the Russian’s hope.
Colonel Barakzai made as if to raise his bayonetted gun once again, to run forward, when he noticed that something was amiss. His right arm did not work. Grinning reassuringly, a spadesman led him, quietly, away from the fighting, to a hollow where several other casualties were sitting or lying, being given water by some village women. Their wounds were dressed with the liquid from boiled willow bark and tar: the nearest thing to first aid that the rebels knew.
Barakzai saw Qasim loping past, almost casually, carrying a large, shiny, button-type anti-tank mine. He shouted, ‘Where’s The Eagle, Qasim?’
Qasim pointed. ‘Over there, on the ridge. Machine-gun post.’
Barakzai struggled to his feet and found Adam manning a Russian Pika machine-gun, with Noor steadily feeding the heavy, two hundred and fifty round belts of cartridges through the acceptor-gate. Several more belts were coiled in a box beside her.
The gun, accurate up to a thousand yards, was earning its keep at a quarter of that range: the heat from the barrel could be felt at two or three feet. Adam was keeping separate the two parts of the enemy force, where the colonel’s group had attacked, so that the various partisan dastas, five-man sections, could cut the Russians into still smaller units and finish them off.
Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, the colonel saw a Russian soldier, a tiny, neat tank officer with black uniform and padded crash helmet, gasmask and hand-grenades, climb over the crest of the natural parapet in front of them, and start to unsling his rifle. He must have scaled an almost sheer cliff, and Barakzai knew a moment of admiration for the courage of the man. He could have been picked off at any moment if a single guerrilla with a rifle had looked up from the road. But he had taken the risk, to stop the murderous fire of this single machine-gun, which was methodically riddling one group of Russians after another as they ran forward, or sought cover, or tried to get away.