On their vehicles’ radios, the guerrillas had heard the frantic messages from the military at Qizil Qala, and the answers from Khanabad HQ, which showed that the Russians were convinced that a paratroop unit had mutinied, either at Kunduz or Talaqan, and they were trying to find the fugitives upstream or else on the other side of the Oxus. Reports had poured in, claiming that the ‘Russian mutineers’ were trying to reach the USSR, to desert, and also that they were trying to join some disaffected infantrymen to the east of the port, where the Russians had had trouble with their own garrison before. The KGB, or military intelligence, must have decided that Azambai was a real Russian colonel, pretending, for some reason, to be a guerrilla.
Adam, sitting beside Major Han in the cramped amphibian, asked him how the Soviets could have become so confused.
‘Ah, well you see, we have a good radio system back at Wolf Castle, and some pretty good disinformation men, too. I’ve already informed them that the escapees are going north or east, and they have broken into the Russian radio network to report it for us.’
The Eagle smiled. ‘You think of everything. So where shall we head now?’
‘Home. We could even make it to the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, two hundred kilometres from here, along the sand dunes: we’ve got enough fuel. But it’s safer to get home before dawn, and to get immediate treatment for the wounded.’
There was no road from here to the reed-beds, but the APCs had big tyres, centrally pressurized, and power-steering. They were able to travel overland, and, in a zigzag, the convoy found the surface firm enough to complete the journey in under two hours. At three o’clock in the morning they were rolling beneath the creepers at the eastern entrance to their hideout.
They had not even had a puncture. Soviet vehicles were not only rugged but they had few of the frills which other armies usually consider necessary, and that made for reliability and less maintenance.
Warned by radio, the Wolves’ hospital was ready for the casualties.
As the fighters climbed down from their vehicles, they slapped the bullion boxes for luck, and poured, cheering and hungry, into the messhall where a feast was waiting for them.
Noor hugged Adam as he came in. ‘And that’s not because of your millions in gold,’ she told him.
In spite of the journey, the tension, the battle, nobody slept that night.
When the casualties had been visited and pronounced to be ‘in a stable condition’, the leaders held a meeting to discuss the loot. In terms of arms purchases, fifteen million dollars would buy no more than ten thousand automatic rifles. On the other hand, such money, to the impoverished guerrillas, meant medicines, arms, and some relief for the victims of the Russian terror. In the end it was decided to send an equal amount of the gold to each of the twenty-eight provincial commanders of the Resistance, to spend as they wished. The equivalent of six hundred guns for each province was at least something.
Then Adam broke open the captured document case.
One of the papers in it dealt, in detail, with the transfer of the treasure of Afghanistan to the Soviet Union. The gunboat was to be used, since there was no air freight capacity available: the Army monopolized it. And it was to be guarded by a large KGB contingent. The direct route from Termez railhead, across the Oxus, was too vulnerable to guerrillas, hence the choice of Qizil Qala. This involved a long trip along the Kara Kum Canal, detailed in wearisome pages of orders, itineraries and explanations.
‘Pirates who are also bureaucrats must be the most tedious combination on earth,’ complained Noor, as she skimmed the documents.
At the bottom of the case lay a thick book, marked ALTINKUSH. Noor opened it and read: ‘Operation ALTINKUSH. Highest Secret Classification: Committee for State Security, KGB.
‘GOLD SPECIE. Obtained from Kajakai (Engineer SHARIFI), hoard of Ahmad Shah. Coins to the bullion value of $30 million approximately, consigned via Qizil Qala to Moscow KGB. Attention: HALZUN, Dzhanmagometov, for Traditional Arts Foundation. Transportation Orders in Document KGB/6/765/00987 “Afghansky”.
‘After the transfer of this consignment to the USSR, the remainder of the Kajakai gold in Kandahar Province will also be known as ALTINKUSH, and comes within the control of the Operative ALTINKUSH.
‘It constitutes gold specie of the sixteenth century and earlier, minted in India, Iran and elsewhere, to the face value of $400 billion, repeat $400,000,000,000, four hundred billion American dollars.
‘Signature of Amount Confirmed … (Uvarov).
‘The treasure, now at Kandahar, is to be transferred abroad under the orders of ALTINKUSH, in the Caspian transports and all aspects of this activity are to be subject to the greatest secrecy. The reference numbers for communications, security, and so on are as follows …’
‘Four hundred billion dollars’ worth of gold coins?’ Noor repeated the sum and looked at the others, sitting around the table in the messhall.
‘Are you sure?’ Adam craned his neck to make out the figures.
‘I’m sure, and even the Nikolais could hardly believe it, since they repeated it and had the confirmation signed by someone at KGB HQ,’ Noor said.
‘Your father found the hoard of Ahmad Shah, and only a part of it is what we’ve captured,’ said Yusuf.
‘The rest of it is still there,’ Noor said. She looked stunned.
Major Han needed a moment to get used to the idea. ‘I know I’m slow, but I find this kind of information hard to absorb,’ he said.
Qasim said, ‘We can hardly go to Kandahar and capture the gold. We’d never manage it, would we?’
‘Wouldn’t we?’ asked Adam. ‘Four hundred billion dollars, is about equivalent to the total assets of all the Gulf oil states. If the Russians had that, they would be out of their financial problems in one bound. There’s no knowing what they might be able to do. Of course, if they put it all on the market at once, the price of gold would collapse, and with it, perhaps, world trade. On the other hand, if they spent it slowly, on development, food and arms, they could rival the United States itself. They have always been poor. With such reserves, they really could compete. The way they do things, and with the people they have in power now, there’d be very little hope for the rest of the world.’
‘OK,’ said Palmer, ‘that means we’ve got to do it. But you realize that Kandahar is right the other end of the country, fifty or sixty miles from the Pakistan border, almost on the Arabian Sea, don’t you? We’d have to cross the Koh-i-Baba range, go right through the high Hazarajat uplands – hundreds of miles of country that people never traverse.’
‘But they do,’ said Karima, ‘that is the route taken by the kochis, the nomad people. They’ve been doing it for hundreds of years. They used to come, in trading caravans and selling sheep, to our village. Many of them were from Kandahar itself.’
They looked at the documents again. There was no sign of any date, no hint at all, as to when the treasure might be ready to be moved. Only that it seemed still to be there, pending ‘finalization of export arrangements’ by ALTINKUSH.
‘All right,’ said Adam, ‘let’s go and find Altinkush.’
As the days passed in the Wolves’ redoubt, the excitement of the expedition caught everyone’s imagination. Major Han, with his near-perfect organization, sat day after day with Adam, Azambai and the others, planning the route, discussing the likely conditions, putting together the necessary equipment. Food, medication, water, clothing, animals, radio communication, arms and ammunition: Major Han had – or could find – the answer to them all.
Ten days after the capture of the Jihun’s gold, when it was already on its way by courier to the provincial commanders which the Turkestanis had located, most of the wounded guerrillas were either recovered or well on the mend. The exception was Louis Palmer. His bayonet wound, though reopened and cleaned by Dr Babanour, became more and more septic. The bacteria were resistant to the weak Russian antibiotics which were all that could be obtained: day by day Adam and the others watch
ed as the infection became generalized. Two weeks after the attack on the Jihun Louis Palmer died.
It was with heavy hearts that the guerrillas took part in the simple burial service. In the words of Major Han:
Ghazi Kalan, the Big One, the American who came to this land and made his life here, was the opposite of those of us who were born Afghans, whatever our physical stock. He took this Afghanness on, of his own free will. He took it on, and he died for it, for freedom. As he has given us so much, may the All Highest give him peace.’
BOOK 11
Southwards to Kandahar
If Russia put a million troops into the country, ten times the initial number sent in, the Afghans would simply wait them out. Sufficient outrages would occur to keep the populace in a properly hateful frame of mind.
A war is fought to a conclusion. Disorders may go on for hundreds of years …Disorders are fought, with whatever deadly force is handy, plus the legendary hearts and minds.
James F. Dunnigan
How to Make War
1 Ride and Die!
High Hazara Land,
Central Afghanistan
LATE AUGUST
When Karima had suggested that the only practicable way to cross the high plateaux of Afghanistan to the Kandahar desert region in the south was with the Kochi nomads, Major Han had at once set about finding a suitable migrating caravan.
Malik Aziz’s people, totalling almost two hundred, were ideal. They were healthy, friendly, straightforward people, they knew the way, and they were known for their reliability and astuteness. To them, the high mountains and the desert were their own, natural world. Although not warriors, they knew that the guerrillas must be helped in any way possible, if their country was to be saved.
They had no false pride, did not flinch from the description, sometimes disparagingly used of them, khana ba-dosh, ‘those with their house on their back’.
Indeed, although they walked rather than rode, they carried no burdens: there were plenty of animals to do that. Since the motorways, linking the main cities, had been completed in the past few years, the Kochis’ value had increased. They provided transportation through areas where there was no road, they competed with the road hauliers, and they brought news, goods and gossip to the thousands of villages which the new, macadamed highways had bypassed. And the Kochis, some two and a half million of them, were often far better off than the peasants of the settled lands, or even the gun-toting Pashtuns who lived at subsistence level as trade-despising herdsmen-warriors.
The Eagle’s party numbered thirty: eight from his original caravan, ten Nuristanis, and the remainder composed of Afghan Army deserters and three Turkestani soldiers supplied by Major Han. In Afghan terms, it was quite a formidable force, especially since absurdly small parties of Afghans, with local knowledge – once they had battle experience – had shown that they could easily deal with Russian formations several times their size.
For a week the caravan had moved westwards, through the province of Balkh, home of the ‘Mother of Cities’ of that name, the ‘Place of High Banners’ of the ancient Parsee scriptures. Then, amid both the desert and the sown land, the column struck southwards into the high central massif. Here they moved through boulder-strewn river valleys of austere beauty, passed great forests of pistachio trees, and climbed towards the great mountains of the Koh-i-Baba, the Father Mountain Range.
Then the caravan plodded farther west, still on the long road to Kandahar and Pakistan, skirting the valley of Bamiyan, from where, in Buddhist times, the message of the Eightfold Path was carried to China, Japan and other great centres of the Far East; and where, more recently, the Russian tanks had been expelled by the Afghan garrison, which had risen against the puppet governor and his Soviet advisers.
South of Bamiyan the caravan rested near the arterial road which bisects central Afghanistan, running from Herat, on the Iranian side, to the east. Here, not far from Chakcharan, in the district of Ghor, the supposed first home of the Bani-Israil in their Afghan diaspora, The Eagle received a message.
The head of a monastery of dervishes, men who had preserved their military tradition since before the times of the Crusades, when they had sent their cavaliers to join the great Sultan Saladin in Palestine, was preparing his men for another war against the infidel.
He had heard, even in his remote fastness, that there was work to be done, and that komondon Adam Durany was passing through his territory. Would The Eagle care to come and see the commissioning of a group of his men, who, following the news that Russian tanks might again invade Bamiyan, were preparing to do battle?
Adam, together with eight close friends from the Qizil Qala expedition, followed the guide sent from the dervish settlement, while the Kochi caravan, having declared a two-day halt to do some trading, waited for their return.
It was a three-hour ride to the site of the monastery, hidden in the jagged mountains south of the Koh-i-Baba. Soon after midday, the travellers reined in their horses on the outskirts of a Hazara village, a rock-built, fortified place below a crenellated medieval keep: the main entrance to the dervish stronghold.
Adam followed the other guerrillas into the monastery complex through a tunnel hewn out of the living rock. From the outside, the place looked like – and was – a mountain; but the interior was a honeycomb of passages and chambers. The massive entrance which he had first glimpsed was not now used.
Sometimes the passage led into great storerooms, lit by candles or flaming torches. Sometimes there were great dark gaps to the left or right, with the sound of trickling water or what might have been the scuffling of bats, disturbed by the footfalls of the party.
It was cool inside the mountain, it smelt musty, and the passages were only dimly lit by tiny lamps.
Suddenly they were at the entrance to a lofty hall, somewhere between a cave and a cathedral. The scene could have been right out of the Middle Ages. Burning pitch torches flickered in wrought iron sconces, jutting at an angle from the whitewashed walls. The chamber could have held upwards of two thousand people. A low humming sound came from the very centre of the place.
There, sitting cross-legged in a circle, each on a white lambskin mat, with heads closely shaven and wearing baggy breeches and white cotton caps, sat thirty-three men. The torches brought out the glow of their terracotta-coloured, sleeveless tunics. Five candles, in giant, intricately patterned, brass holders, stood before them on the floor. At the centre of the circle sat their leader: eyes half-closed, a green turban on his head, rosary in hand. He had the air of a magician, or of a vizier or paladin from Thousand and One Nights.
One of the escort motioned Adam to sit, making a sign denoting silence. The humming rose to a crescendo, following and imitating, though without words, the phrases called out in a melodious voice of the central figure.
The man sitting beside The Eagle whispered to him.
‘This is the Sheikh of the Tarika, the Order. The disciples are dressed in the sleeveless haydaria, the tunic designed by Ali the Lion, Companion of the Prophet and founder of the Futuwwa – the first order of chivalry – a thousand and a half years ago. After this benediction, the men will go to join the war.’
A file of men, dressed like the grooms of those regions, in round felt hats and belted, long white shirts over baggy trousers, came soundlessly in soft deerskin boots, into the hall. Each carried a bundle of items which glinted in the torchlight. Each, as he reached one of the sitting warriors, placed his burden behind him, and lightly touched the border of his haydaria as he did so. Then they padded out again.
Adam’s companion said, into his ear, ‘That is their equipment, dug up from its grave where it has rested since the Third War with the British, sixty years and more ago. Taken from its oiled silk and grease, repaired and polished, it is ready.’
Suddenly, everyone rose. The grooms had come back into the room, this time carrying banners and large oil lamps, which they placed on the ground.
The men on the lambskins
rose and turned to their accoutrement, while Adam was taken forward to shake hands with the Sheikh, who motioned him to sit on a fur just beside his own, small prayer rug. As they watched, the knights pulled on shirts and coats of fine chain mail, then soft Bokharan boots. The haydaria tunics, which they had taken off, were then put on as surcoats. Finally, as Adam gazed at the scene in stupefaction, each man placed a round steel helmet, peacock feathers in its slots and a fringe of chain mail around the neck, upon his head, and took his place, arms folded, standing to attention before the Sheikh. A perfect replica of a Saracen knight perhaps: but no threat to the soldiers of a modern army …
One by one, the men stepped forward to kiss the hand of their mentor. As he took each hand, the divine spoke the watchword which had been issued just before the desperate but decisive Battle of Hittin, by Saladin, almost eight centuries ago: ‘Ride and die!’
Adam followed the elegant procession of knights and the motley guerrilla band back along the maze of passages. Before they left the castle, however, the Sheikh allowed his men to continue along the path, and drew The Eagle and the others into a different tunnel, leading away from the main thoroughfare. A few moments later the passage turned at a sharp angle, and, almost at once, they found themselves blinking in broad daylight.
The passage had led to a wide ledge halfway down the hill, which formed part of the castle-monastery. From here they looked down, over ancient embrasures, upon the stronghold’s main approach. It was one of many perfect vantage points, an outpost for the defence of the main complex. Such a place could only have been planned by a military architect of great genius.
As The Eagle and his group watched, the dervish warriors lined up. The grooms brought their horses, magnificent Arab-Mongol crosses with white manes, covered in rich trappings. They helped each man to mount, handing him his round shield and long curved sword.