He led the way into the hut. There, slumped in various attitudes of exhaustion, were the rest of the expedition’s survivors.
‘They’ll be all right in the morning. Nobody has frostbite: they’re just starving, that’s all.’ Captain Babanur was the unit’s medical officer. He added, ‘I’m glad you are keeping Zelikov with you: some of our men wanted to rough him up when they found out he was a Russian, and I’m short of sutures for sewing on any pieces that might get cut off!’ He was a large, beefy man, with the very white face that is often seen among Tartars, and had a stethoscope dangling, like a badge of office, from his neck.
‘They have all had glucose and vitamins, a non-voluntary contribution from the Soviet Army medical branch,’ the doctor told Adam, ‘and we’ll have to keep the lot of you here for two weeks at least, to recuperate.’
‘That’s not possible,’ Adam told him, ‘we’ll all have to be back on our feet in less than a week. We have important work to do.’
‘All right, call it five days. I’ll give them meat stew and yoghurt three times a day and plenty of exercise.’ The doctor sounded resigned. He added, ‘I don’t know why it is that you people are always so keen to be patched up so that you can go back and get your heads blown off. In industrialized countries, where I have worked, the least headache or cut finger and they want a piece of paper saying that they must have a long rest, on full pay.’
‘Ah,’ said Adam, ‘the difference, doctor, is that in our kind of business, “full pay” is getting back into action. That’s all the pay we get. So you mustn’t stand in our way.’
They all laughed.
The scorching heat of the Oxus plain was a complete contrast, except for the chilly nights, after the terrible glaciers of Kara Dagh. The Turkestan operational area seemed like another world.
The forest petered out into groves of immense tamarisks and huge reed-beds in the marshes which followed the course of the great Oxus River, to the north. It was full of game: teeming with pheasants, marmot, jerboas, and giant fluffy bustards which could hardly fly. The jairan, graceful gazelles, nibbled at the green shoots of the grass and flowers which covered the jungle’s floor. The Turkish soldiers even kept flocks of sheep, which grazed on the natural hay formed by the parched summer grass whose roots were still alive. There were crops for people, too, wild liquorice, sugar-cane, fruits and vegetables.
The live-off-the-land plan organized by General Mustaghani, the overall Resistance commander of the north, had turned the forest settlement into an extraordinary place. The major showed Adam the workshops and storehouses first. Here, in addition to repairing and servicing weapons, the soldiers had actually set up a munitions factory. ‘We obtain, from local deposits, the sulphur and nitre which, mixed with charcoal in the proportions of two, fifteen and three parts respectively, makes excellent gunpowder,’ said Major Yildiz Han. ‘And,’ he added, with all the pride of the pioneer, ‘we get all the lead we want from an outcrop of rock near here, and make our own bullets.’ Fires were built on the rocks, melting the lead from the veins. It was then taken to the moulds, where the bullets were easily made.
Parts of the forest, which had once been clearings, were overgrown with immense beds of reeds, sometimes standing twenty feet high, their roots deep in the marsh which underlay the leavy loam. The Wolves, following the pattern of the marsh people, had built enormous halls, muzifs, entirely of reeds, great structures which soared in arches, reminiscent of the cathedrals of the Middle Ages. The buildings were closely patterned on the dwellings and near-palaces of the marsh people of Iraq. Indeed, this part of the world had been colonized by people from there, over a thousand years ago, after the Saracenic conquest.
Log cabins, reed houses and even tents were covered with fast-growing vines, forming a matted, perfect camouflage. Even where there were bare patches in the forest, creepers had been trained to break up the surface pattern and to provide walkways, safe from aerial reconnaissance.
‘It took us over a year to get right,’ the major said, in answer to Adam’s question.
Eight hundred men lived and worked here, going out on sorties for three days at a time, and returning to be replaced by fresh troops.
That such a place, with a school, library, garages, hospital, volleyball court and machine-shops, could exist, within forty miles of major Russian military installations, was astonishing.
‘Supposing,’ Adam asked Major Han, ‘you were betrayed, or the Russians decided to destroy the reed-beds or the forest with napalm, which they have been using in the south?’
The major tapped his nose. ‘As you must know from your Kabul experience, there are hardly three thousand communists in the whole of this country. On the other hand, almost everyone else working for the Nikolais is prepared to help the Resistance. They fear for their families, or they wouldn’t be working for the Russians at all. We get all the information we need. We can’t easily be taken by surprise.’
The settlement was only sixty kilometres south-west of Qizil Qala port, their destination. From there, the Turks explained, they were able to get all kinds of things which the Russians, unloading supplies, stole and then bartered with the local people. ‘They take gold and silver, which we get from the Badakhshan mines, in return for petrol, kerosene, even electricity generators,’ Lieutenant Ghalib said, as he proudly showed off his lathes, blacksmith shop and flour-grinding mills. ‘This Soviet equipment is often not the best – it’s very basic – but it does the job, and some of it wears well. Their motor fuel is, for some reason, dyed green, and is of very poor quality, low-octane, but it serves the purpose.’
‘Is there anything that is difficult to get?’ asked Adam.
‘From time to time you can’t get things that would really be useful. At the moment we can’t get antibiotics. But then, the Russians are plagued by shortages themselves. And sometimes, of course, the opposition gives us problems.’
‘Who’s the opposition?’
‘Well, independent operators, people who are trying to carry on Resistance work on their own. There was a case a month or so back. Some people from the industrial city of Kunduz arrived in carts loaded with good quality grain marked “Gift of the people of the United States of America”. The Russians “bought” it for a stack of uniforms, which we eventually got hold of ourselves.’
‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘Nothing.’ The lieutenant laughed; ‘except that the Afghans had refilled old sacks and added a lot of purgative plant material to the flour, so the Nikolais soon wanted their uniforms back. Apparently the effect of the purgative rather ruined their clothes!’
‘Weren’t they furious?’
‘At first they were, but the Afghans explained that American wheat always had that effect on normal people, very different from good Soviet flour!’
The people of north Afghanistan, living so close to what was in fact – though not in theory – the Soviet empire, knew a great deal about its strengths and weaknesses. ‘The flour story,’ Lieutenant Ghalib told The Eagle, ‘tells us a great deal about totalitarian regimes and how to deal with them.’
‘In the first place, since the enemy – America – has been presented as a bogey, many people in the USSR will believe almost anything about it. Hence, “The Americans are demons, and so their flour must be horrible”.’
‘But the Russians, the people, must one day get out of this warped way of thinking?’ Adam asked. ‘After all, a time is bound to come when they just won’t credit the propaganda.’
Ghalib rubbed his chin, reflectively. ‘That’s something which will take time, I would think. In any case, there’s nothing that we, fighting a war, can do about it. I was talking about the weaknesses in Soviet thinking which come from such distortions, not about the remedies. I suppose it’s up to the Americans, and the fair-minded Russians, to solve the brainwashing problem.’
‘Have they brainwashed the Turkestan people on their own side of the border?’ Adam wanted to know.
‘Some o
f them, but not the majority. The chief problem there seems to me to be that the Soviet Turkestanis don’t know much more than what the Russians feed them. Mind you, they don’t like the Russians, and that has nothing to do with socialism. They have a saying, “A Russian rat is a rat who is a Russian.”’
Adam said, ‘I heard that there were masses of Uzbek and Tajik soldiers among the first Soviet troops to enter Afghanistan, in December 1979, but that they were withdrawn because they became too friendly with the Afghans.’
‘That was an experiment, which failed,’ Ghalib said. ‘You see, the Russian Army, which is what the Soviet Army really is, makes sure that members of the ethnic minorities are distributed throughout its units. The Soviets never had locally raised regiments. The Central Asians are a seventeen per cent minority in most army formations.’
‘Then what was the “experiment”, Ghalib?’
‘Well, since the education and training of Central Asians is deliberately kept at a lower standard than those of the Slavs and even the Balts, the annual conscript intake always contains a large number of men who are not suitable for learning technically advanced tasks. They are channelled into support troops – transport, logistics, mine-clearing and so on. But these are never posted to Central Asian depots.
‘They go to the Ukraine, the Russian Soviet Republic, to the Baltic States, and so on. It was some of these that the Soviet High Command tried out in Afghanistan. They deserted in large numbers. Mainly, however, they are not fighting material.’
Major Han had made a careful study of the Kremlin’s Afghan campaign, absorbing the contents of captured documents and listening to military radio traffic. He outlined the position for the Paghman guerrillas.
‘The Soviet Union is split up into military commands. Logically, it is the Central Asian military districts – Turkestan and Central Asia – which should have taken on the Afghan campaign. Their territory borders ours. But the two of them quarrelled: Tashkent wanted to be in charge, and so did Alma-Ata.’
‘And how did they solve that one?’ Adam asked.
‘By creating another, completely independent command: Afghanistan. A marshal of the Soviet Union was put in overall control, and no less than twenty-five Russian generals were put under him.’
‘A marshal!’ Adam was impressed. ‘And why so many generals?’
‘Yes,’ said the major; ‘of course, any other army would have had only one or two generals – five at the most – for a “Fraternal Limited Contingent to pursue bandits and counter-revolutionaries”, as it is called. But the Russian hawks, the War Party, are very strong, and they spend most of their time lobbying for things to do.’
‘And, I suppose, there are decorations to be won?’
‘Naturally. The Soviet Army is top-heavy with officers, too, of all ranks. They have to do something.’
‘Who is the marshal?’
‘Marshal Sergei Sokolov, First Deputy Minister of Defence. He was appointed when the “handful of rebels”, in early 1980, started to kill too many Russians. It was he who authorized the communist Afghan admission that there were a million resisters in Afghan Turkestan alone. That was to explain why the Red Army had so many casualties.’
Within three days, the members of the Sher-Qala Commando were moving around the camp, being put through drill and familiarization courses by the Turkestanis, and generally getting the feel of the power and confidence which everywhere marked the ever-strengthening national mobilization.
With a large network of information-gatherers, and more and more agents among the Afghans working for the Soviets, the Wolves were able to provide Adam with a ready-made organization to plan and assist the descent upon the treasure.
‘I have to know,’ The Eagle told the Wolves’ commander, ‘whether the treasure is still in this area, and whether it is aboard the gunboat or not; and if not, where it is. In either case, if it is in this area, we need a plan to capture or destroy it.’
‘You’ll have to give me two more days,’ said the major. ‘This is Tuesday. Shall we say Thursday?’
‘I really like Afghanistan,’ said the Russian Zelikov; ‘in Moscow, it would take two days just to find out what day of the week it was.’
‘Don’t try to be too clever, son,’ Major Han advised him; ‘because you and Captain Azambai here are going to be among the people who’ll do the finding out for us. Get ready to go to Qizil Qala within an hour.’
3 The Gunboat Jihun
Qizil Qala
Oxus River Port
Afghan-Soviet Border
JULY 21
Thirty years ago, Gaidardost the Uzbek had been a Soviet citizen; with the risk which went with it, of being accused – as he was – of economic crimes against the state. He had owned thirty sheep for private profit. He could not have lived without the flock, for the administration at the cotton mill where he worked was corrupt. It recorded that he had been paid double what he actually received; but this was not stated at his trial.
His sentence was five years in a heavy labour camp, in Western Siberia. When he was released, Gaidardost found that he had been allocated a job in the Kara Kum Desert irrigation project. He collected his ticket to the town of Kerki, in Turkmenia, where the labour battalions were based: only sixty miles north of Afghanistan. The next weekend, instead of taking his Sunday rest, he started to walk southwards. Eleven hours later, after climbing a mountain, swimming a river, evading the border guards and crossing a mine-sown strip of ploughed earth guarded by watch-towers, he was free. In Afghanistan.
Now he lived near Qizil Qala, and he had a flock again. But the Russians, six years later, seemed to have caught up with him.
He shook his fist at the military convoy as it forced him and his sixty sheep off the broad tarmac of the northern road, covering him with dust, sending the animals into a field of lucerne from which they would have to be patiently retrieved.
‘Death upon the spiritual teacher of your Lenin and Karl Marx! Defeat to the Infidel!’
The splendidly turned out Soviet officer in the lead car, a Russian GAZ-69 field vehicle like a light jeep, with the aircraft and parachute insignia of the elite Soviet Airborne Troops stencilled on the side, made an obscene gesture back, and shouted an unrepeatable insult. Then he turned to his companion.
‘Every little helps, to stoke up the hostility, you know,’ Yusuf Azambai said to The Eagle who sat beside him, newly promoted to paratroop colonel by courtesy of the Wolves of Badakhshan.
Yusuf was a colonel too, now, thanks to Noor and Karima sitting up all night stitching stripes and stars, and arm patches showing parachutes and aircraft – not forgetting hammers and sickles – on the field-dress shirts acquired from the purgative flour transaction.
Behind them rumbled an impressive line of Russian BTR-60 PK armoured personnel-carriers, huge, boat-shaped amphibious ones. They had eight wheels for land travel, and, in their water-crossing role, swam powered by water-jets, driven by their rear twin engines. Now, they breezed along at fifty miles an hour, filled with guerrillas wearing the proud khaki and blue of the USSR’s Airborne, the most admired of all Soviet formations. The splendid military highway had been built by the Afghan Construction Unit’s engineers, using thousands of labourers from the Food for Work Programme.
It would take them only half an hour now to reach the port, the gunboat and the treasure.
Major Han’s intelligence work had paid rich dividends. In the two days’ research time which he had asked of Adam, his organization had found out that the treasure was still at the Oxus port, already loaded onto the gunboat Jihun. His ‘Special Duty Group’ had acquired Airborne insignia, eight personnel-carriers, a scout car, and a selection of top-priority identification documents like those used by LRRG’s: the Long-Range Reconnaissance Groups of the Soviet Army – and a fair knowledge of the way in which such units are run.
Although originally formed to collect information, these units had been upgraded. Now they were designated as special formations, ready to
carry out any task. Each group had twenty-seven men, six of them officers and the rest sergeants. Self-sufficient and armed with sophisticated weaponry and communications equipment, they were regarded with awe by the rest of the army. Best of all, from the point of view of the guerrillas, they were seldom seen by the rest of the troops. If Adam and his men made mistakes of behaviour or routine, most people – even Russian troops – were not likely to have standards of comparison.
In the back of the half-ton scout car sat young ‘Major’ Qasim. Beside him was Major Yildiz Han, the Paghman group’s host until this morning. Each of the personnel-carriers contained nine men, half its possible complement. Short on sky-blue paratrooper berets, helmets and jackboots – the Wolves had been unable to obtain enough of them in the time available – The Eagle’s force had to make do with paratroop goggles. Each man had a gas mask. Those who did not speak Russian were to put one on at once if Russian troops or officials looked like questioning them, and display a standard army ‘chemical decontamination’ sign.
Each vehicle carried three small packing cases, whose markings – Gelignit – gelignite – had been painted out. Carbolic disinfectant fluid splashed on the boxes masked the explosive’s tell-tale smell of marzipan. The reconnaissance men considered the ship to be so heavily guarded that there was next to no chance of stealing the treasure: it would have to be blown up. And they had enough explosive to shatter the gold coins and scatter the pieces far and wide over the vast expanse of river, to be lost forever in its treacherous, swirling waters. Not for nothing was the Oxus styled ‘the insane river’ by the Arabs when their armies first encountered it.
The sun was sinking beyond the distant Iranian border, when the convoy reached the first of the roadblocks on the main road from Kunduz to the Qizil Qala port area. At the sight of the red and light blue pennant on the lead car, the Russian soldiers on duty leapt to attention, while four Afghan conscripts manhandled the heavy log, which had been rolled across the road, out of the way. Giving them an airy wave of his hand, such as seemed appropriate for a dashing paratroop commander, The Eagle sailed past.