Kara Kush

  Instinctively, almost, Barakzai reached for his pistol. It wasn’t there and, besides, his arm was useless. And Adam hadn’t seen the Russian.

  As he was about to throw himself between Adam and the Russian’s line of fire, Noor, from her sitting position to his left, picked up a heavy, jagged piece of rock and hurled it straight at the Russian’s face. It struck him a glancing blow on the forehead. Unbalanced, he gave a scream as he fell back, dropping into the fighting swarm below.

  Adam had just realized what had happened. He turned his grimy, sweat-streaked face towards the girl and smiled his thanks, with a rueful shrug. There was no time for anything more. Besides, he felt sick at the sight of the slaughter.

  The colonel could not resist standing up to take stock of the situation: nobody, anyway, seemed to be taking any notice of the little group with the machine-gun.

  The picture was now fairly clear. In the small valley with the road snaking through it, the Russian convoy was well and truly bogged down. Barakzai could see, too, that the Afghan cadets, who had been put in front of the Soviet forces to bear the brunt of the attack, were instead fighting side by side with the men and women of Paghman and Kohistan. As he watched, he saw that the confusion of battle, and especially the defection of the Afghan cadets, had caused the Russians to attack each other. One Soviet infantry platoon counterattacked a Russian paratroop section as he watched, mowing down almost all of them.

  He counted thirty tanks destroyed or out of action. Some Russian officers were shooting at parties of their own men as they prudently ran away, their rifles empty, from fresh waves of guerrillas who at times outnumbered them by as many as twenty to one.

  In the end, the Russians managed to get sixty tanks away, while the helicopters – which had been unable to attack the swirling mass of men for fear of killing their own – systematically strafed guerrilla reinforcements still swarming down from the hills.

  The Molotov cocktails and the grenades had run out, and the rebels were down to their last few rounds, when the Russians broke and ran. Their tanks were black with troops clinging onto any projecting surface, having abandoned their own trucks and ACPs, most of them burning or severely damaged.

  Back at his headquarters, The Eagle reviewed the gains and losses. Of the three hundred cadets who had been forced, at gunpoint, to spearhead the attack, seventy were dead. Two hundred joined the guerrillas and the rest were missing, probably in Russian hands. Just over a hundred guerrillas, men and women, had died, and fifty-three were wounded, some very seriously, with no proper medical service to help them. One helicopter had been downed, ten trucks were captured. Thirty tanks were burnt out. Guns and ammunition were looted from the Russian vehicles, though this was not easy; the helicopters bombed and rocketed them to prevent their use by the rebels. The Russians killed their own wounded as they lay in the trucks, with fire-bombs and high-explosives, which were dropped from the hovering choppers. And they abandoned their dead, seven hundred in all.

  Qasim had two tank kills, the colonel one, the boy Wali one tank and a truck, and The Eagle had brought down the scouting helicopter with his heavy machine-gun, as it flew, too low, into the valley.

  Najib and Wazir Shah were found among the dead. Their names were given to two new battle groups formed by the Afghan officer-cadets.

  The Fourth Battle of Paghman was featured in the world’s press, through the many accounts given by cadets, Russian prisoners and even leaks from Russian Army Headquarters.

  Paghman is so near to Kabul that even the Afghan newspapers had to make some mention of the event. They could not say, of course, that a full-scale battle, involving no less than ninety tanks and seven thousand, two hundred Russians – one tank regiment and one motor-rifle division – twenty helicopters and a squadron of fixed-wing attack aircraft, had been outfought by poorly-armed guerrillas. Not when the rebels had won. As Colonel Barakzai pointed out, the outcome would have been in doubt even if two equally matched armies had fought the action.

  So the Kabul New Times, for instance, had to content itself with the words that ‘a major operation against bandits’ had taken place in Paghman.

  Two days later, hundreds of thousands of leaflets were dropped by Soviet aircraft over the vast Eagle domain of Paghman, Kohistan and Koh-i-Daman.

  They offered amnesty to any guerrillas surrendering, and a guarantee of their safety. Anyone who brought in the ‘so-called Eagle’, would be given fifty thousand dollars and a free pass out of the country.

  As Noor put it, ‘American money and a chance to get away from Socialist Afghanistan! It shows you what the Reds think is really valuable.’

  The Russian soldiers did not relish it when small boys started to shout after them, in the Kabul streets, ‘Trapped by a dog, Nikolai!’

  The Soviet troops who took part in the action fought well enough, but revealed more of their shortcomings than Russian pride could bear. Their word for that battle is the short, expressive one that their parents still use to describe Stalin’s reign of terror: koshmar, a nightmare.

  BOOK 9

  Across the Hindu Kush

  Our ‘heroic’ representatives, politicians in exile, should have this message about their two duties: stop criticizing each other, and come here to do some real fighting.

  Guerrilla from Koh-i-Daman, when asked for a message

  for Afghans abroad.

  1 An Izba in Nuristan

  The Koh-i-Daman Foothills

  JULY 3

  The Sher-Qala Commando, bent on finding and capturing the battered old treasure ship on the far Oxus River, set out on July 3rd from the Paghman Caves. Less than a half day’s march into the Koh-i-Daman foothills, fate played a card: and the future of the expedition fell squarely into the hands of a twenty-one-year-old helicopter pilot, Leytenant Yuri Nikodemov.

  Afghanistan, even under alien occupation, was crisscrossed by a myriad of caravans like The Eagle’s; there were some on the spanking new roads of the Great Circle of highways which engirdled the country: but there were thousands more, at any given moment, following the ancient cross-country routes. Nikodemov, on routine patrol, usually paid little attention to these travellers: his job was to look for trouble. One third of the whole population, it was said, was on the move at any one time: you couldn’t bother with them all.

  This bright July day, Nikodemov in the air and The Eagle’s band on the ground, both felt the uplifting joy of the early Afghan summer. The Russian, looking down from his huge Mi-24, glimpsed and dismissed as harmless the small party of no more than forty people – traders, no doubt. A motley assortment of mules, donkeys, even camels, probably heading for Turkestan before the autumn snows trapped them there for the rest of the year.

  Here in the foothills the trail wound through the enchanted countryside, whose meadows, orchards and streams, hoopoes and nightingales, had moved Afghan poets to compose some of the country’s best-loved odes. But there was no cover against air attack, nowhere to shelter, no crags or valleys, where people could hide or melt into the background. The Eagle and his friends looked up from time to time at the helicopters, on watch and ward duty, seeking infiltrators from the north. There would be no hope if the gunships attacked.

  As Nikodemov passed over, swooping down to get a better look at the caravan, the vista seemed one of calm and peace. His eyes dwelt on the flocks of sheep in emerald pastures, the quail, the rabbits; he could even see timid white deer standing nervously not far from the trail.

  There was nothing suspicious about the caravan. But someone must have known its composition, someone connected with the Russians, and alerted them. The radio crackled in Leytenant Nikodemov’s ears:

  ‘Base to Nikodemov, attention, attention! Notorious bandit nicknamed The Eagle and his band, believed attempting to break out beyond Paghman disguised as caravan, heading north. White horse in front, black one in rear. Find and destroy, repeat destroy, these bandits.’

  Automatically, the lieutenant acknowledged the message and went back
to have another look at the plodding beasts below. He took the helicopter lower, its great bulk swooping just a few hundred metres over the line of animals. Yes – that was it! Positive identification!

  As he completed his pass over the meadow through which the caravan was passing, Nikodemov caught his breath at the beauty of the place. Trees, just enough of them to relieve the flatness, rushing streams and the brows of the distant mountains, the haunting blue-green of the Afghan upland light. His craft had swooped so low that he could even smell the richness of the forest leaves …

  One part of the pilot’s mind was running strictly to routine. Signal to helibase: ‘Bandits sighted, going in to attack.’ Then circle once, to manoeuvre into a correct sighting position, while alerting the bomb-aimer and machine-gunner. Must give them time to prepare. Then – attack! Two or three passes should be enough: gunfire, high-explosives and phosphorus bombs to finish off the enemy, the so-called Eagle …

  Then another thought intruded, started to take over, and Senior Lieutenant Yuri Nikodemov’s mind was filled with another scene, a scene of nine months before.

  It had been in Nuristan, the mysterious part of the country to the east, where he had been on a reconnaissance mission, in another Mi-24. In those high mountains, Nikodemov had swerved a precarious route through a gorge, and come too near to an out-jutting rock. Half a metre too close.

  That was the length of the main rotor blade sheared off by the rock. The craft shuddered, yawed, steadied for a moment. It held just enough lift for the pilot to put it down, preciously, on the very edge of a cliff face. He could see the sheer drop an arm span from the aircraft’s nose, and he threw himself through the door onto a ledge, even as the giant gunship tilted, slid forward and then toppled, into the deep valley, pieces flying off as it was battered against the jagged rock-spears jutting out from every side.

  From his ledge, Lieutenant Nikodemov saw the machine, with the rest of the four-man crew, come to rest at the bottom of the valley. Soon afterwards there was a loud report as the fuel tanks exploded: then a dense cloud of oily smoke. Finally, the entire wreck was encircled by roaring flames. Nobody could have survived that.

  He clawed his way off the ledge onto the cliff-top, shocked but unhurt, and lay, panting, on the ground. When he felt better, Nikodemov looked around him. This place might have been on another planet. Huge cedar trees, high mountains stark against the sky, eerie silence. Nuristan, ‘Land of Light’, renamed a hundred years before, by the Afghan king AbdurRahman Khan who disliked the old name: Kafiristan, ‘Land of the Infidels’.

  He climbed down until he came to a small valley hemmed in by rocks, a hundred feet or so above the valley proper. It was tree-covered in places, bare in others, and – like a garden – well supplied with bushes and flowering plants of all kinds, all designed by nature.

  Nikodemov, through some process which he, briefly, thought of as a return to the mentality of some remote ancestor, began to think of this place as his very own, and of himself, the former city-dweller, balletomane and dashing pilot as – ‘the man’. The man who belonged here, the man for whom this place had been waiting.

  *

  Two months went by. No Russian aircraft had passed overhead. The year was turning, the leaves yellowing in the forests, though there was still food to be gathered. The man collected mulberries, found pine kernels, dug up roots, tried various leaves and flowers to vary his diet. He was in good enough health, but in these high mountains where the air was thin, he tired easily.

  He had thought, many times, about getting away. North of where he had built what he called his izba – no more than a Russian peasant hut roofed with branches – there was nothing but a huge, sheer mountain wall, with the snowline almost daily descending, as it became cooler, as if it was eating away at the valley in the high ranges which he shared with the wolves, a few deer, birds, hedgehogs and a multitude of other small animals whose names he did not know.

  To the west, as he knew from aerial maps, there were more mountains, clad in tall pines, their cliffs so perpendicular that none could climb them, to reach the next valley, without ropes and pitons. And the next valley beyond that: what if it were just the same? This was the Hindu Kush, the Hindu Killer Mountains, and he was an outcast, lost in the wastes of the ancient Kafiristan, one of the least known lands on earth.

  The east or south: those were the options. Day after day he thought about the problem. But there was something about the mountains, the altitude, perhaps, or the food – or even about his own nature – which made it harder and harder, with each day, to come to a decision. Besides, if he left the izba, would he always be sure to find food? Would the mountains be even higher, the snow line lower, the glaciers larger, the ice cliffs more menacing?

  It was these thoughts which soon took him over, even when he had tried walking towards a possible escape route. He always returned to the izba, to his home.

  At first he had thought a great deal about his real home, about his family. He had also feared that if he stayed there, his enemies, the Afghan bandits, would get him. Or that he might fall ill, perhaps with appendicitis; simple to deal with when there was a doctor, but a killer when you were alone.

  Then these matters had seemed more and more remote, unreal. He had started to wonder, instead, whether he should enlarge the izba, make some sort of weapon to use for hunting, collect seeds so that he could grow his own crops, especially those delicious sunflower seeds, or perhaps more berries. There were wild onions, carrots, mulberries by the ton. And there were so many fascinating plants, edelweiss, even: who would have imagined that? And rhododendrons everywhere. Masses of pomegranates. He might catch fish: there were many in the streams.

  But autumn was coming, and this would be his first winter here. First of how many? And what was happening in the world? The world, because this place was not in the real world at all. Two months was all it had been, but that was enough to tell the man that, when you were alone, you became someone else, someone different. Someone you would rather be.

  As he sat at the entrance of the izba, looking down over the valley, his own valley where, perhaps, no man but he had trod for years, another thought struck him. Of course: it was the rest of them that were trapped. He was what people were like once, what everyone really should be like. Free of desires and free of discontent.

  Unknown to Lieutenant Nikodemov, there was a transverse cleft between the mountains, and it connected his valley to another, where people lived. One of these people was Shtasu Zijik the hunter: and Shtasu was very angry at what he had just seen.

  He touched the hilt of his ancient ceremonial dagger for luck, and ran out of his wooden house which was perched, like an alpine chalet, on the mountain near the town of Kamdesh. Like most Nuristanis, he did not concern himself with strangers over much, although he was always polite to them. If they behaved themselves, that was. But this, he thought, as he took his shotgun from the decorated wooden rack at the doorway, was too much.

  A strange looking vehicle, of the kind he would soon know well enough as an assault helicopter, had made three sweeps over the little town, and had dropped something; something which burst into flames and had even set the butter and cheese shed on fire. He could imagine Mas Wousop and his men trying to put out the flames, and wished that he had been there to help him. But perhaps he would be able to do something just as good instead. Deal with this intruder.

  The rotor-craft had turned again, to make another pass, and by that time Shtasu was ready. Steadying the gun on a rock, as he would when stalking an approaching snow-leopard, he waited silently. The gun did not have a very long effective range: seventy-five metres, but it was loaded with heavy shot which would stop a deer, a big black buck, or a bear, dead in its tracks. He willed the aircraft to come a little closer, ‘Come on, kakiwar, big bird, whoever you are, and you’ll get something special here.’ Suddenly, as if in answer to his invitation, the helicopter, to get a better look and to take photographs, careered towards him.

&
nbsp; Shtasu had never been out of Nuristan, the strange country of blond, blue-eyed mountaineers whom people had thought to be the descendants of the lost armies of Alexander the Great. Shtasu spoke only Nuristani really well, and he wore the red, black and white woven headgear and long wool cloak of the country. The British, a century ago, had believed that the Nuristanis shared the same ancestry as the Europeans, partly because of their looks, and also because they sat on chairs and ate at tables, instead of on the floor. The simple, open-handed Nuristanis, when they first saw Westerners, had also described themselves as ‘Brothers of the Franks’.

  Shtasu knew about guns; and because of his twenty years as a hunter was known as Achchy, the Eye. His present weapon, moreover, was semi-automatic: one of the best, made by Luigi Franchi of Bescia, in Italy. It had been a gift from a big-game hunter for whom Shtasu had shot several snow-leopards and an ovis poli, the great wild sheep whose huge curved horns were so much prized by collectors. Naturally, the foreign gentleman would now be able to say that he had felled them himself. A Frank called Marco Polo had, apparently, told the West about these animals.

  Here it was, then, the big kakiwar. It must be three hundred metres away and was closing very fast.

  The helicopter was coloured in swathes of camouflage paint; and to the hunter it looked like some monstrous, batlike tiger of the skies, diving towards him. He took aim.