The setting sun glittered on their helmets and picked out the white lettering on the green and black banners as the doomed men kneed their horses eastwards along a narrow defile to their rendezvous with the Russian tanks: and death. The dervish mentor smiled. ‘We call them, here,’ he said, ‘shah-gun, the kingly ones.’
Both Adam and his companions knew Afghanistan too well to believe that they could intervene, could tell this holy but misguided man that he would never see his knights again, that the country would not benefit from senseless sacrifice, however noble it might seem. Even as a demonstration of the unquenchable flame of the human spirit to inspire others, their sally would be useless: Afghanistan, Noor thought, already had enough tales of glory, from a hundred wars.
As in so many Eastern lands, the dervish system, based on the teachings of the Sufi mystics who preached understanding and enlightenment, had fossilized into an intriguing, sometimes exciting, often admired formalism which produced and lived on emotion, wrongly imagined to be spirituality. It must, Adam reflected, have taken a similar path to that of the Western monastic orders of the Middle Ages, until the form and the feeling almost completely overcame the content. Even a thousand years ago, the classical writers were bemoaning this, as they wrote of the many allegedly Sufi schools which were then publicly known.
2 The Mulla and the Water of Life
Baghran Town
Descending towards Kandahar
South-Central Afghanistan
LATE AUGUST
The caravan travelled southwards, to the town of Baghran, high up in the central mountains of the Hazarajat, and camped nearby. They felt the influence of Kandahar now, and signs of the Red Afghan presence were everywhere: in posters, on local radio programmes. ‘Shun the Bandits, support the Revolution.’ The clatter of helicopters, the miserable-looking Afghan conscripts, their families hostage for their good behaviour, probably aching to desert.
The Kochis tethered their animals and, leaving some of their number in charge, went into Baghran to trade.
‘Bandits, interventionists, imperialists will all be killed!’ The voice went on and on, screeching from the cracked loudspeaker mounted on a lumbering, battered Party truck. ‘Alexander the Great came here to find the Water of Eternal Life! The Water of Life and the Programme of the Party are one and the same!’
The truck stopped in Baghran’s great flat maidan, which had been cleared of its market stalls, leaving a large paved space for the local citizens of the world’s newest communist state to assemble and drink of this wisdom.
The Eagle’s band, disguised as Kochis, watched the scene with interest.
The truck’s door opened and a young man, a Party activist, fresh from the Ideology School at Dabalkhar, climbed out and onto the cab’s roof. He unfurled a red flag and looked nervously around, to make sure that his escorting armed zhondarm was in place, automatic rifle at the ready. He was there; bored and smoking a smuggled Peter Stuyvesant cigarette, and thinking about women of all shapes and sizes, but he was indeed there.
‘The Water of Life!’ screamed the activist. The crowd rustled with interest. Yes, he thought; the Ideology Department was right: see Red Wisdom – chapter 7, page 233 – ‘Always link the Revolution with ancient values to pre-empt their use by the feudalist-romantics.’
‘The Water of Life, comrades, workers, peasants, intellectuals and fellow Afghans! The Water of Life means the New Age, the New Man, the reaching of a new height, the attainment of a goal, the fulfilment of a dream!’
A towering figure, a real Kandahar mulla, beetle-browed and hugely turbaned, pushed his way through the crowd, his stick plied to right and left with that dexterity which speaks of much experience. The townspeople recognized him: Mulla Azimi, from the Shrine of the Prophet’s Cloak in Kandahar.
For a moment the activist was afraid of this clerical intervention. These abominable priests were always poking their noses into things which did not concern them.
As Azimi reached the truck, the activist noted with satisfaction that he was wearing a very large, red, cardboard hammer and sickle badge. This must be one of the comrade mullas who had joined the people’s struggle. They were useful in keeping the people quiet; they would be dealt with when the Revolution had triumphed. Labour camps were the answer.
The mulla held up a hand, and the activist automatically helped him aboard. The man was so immense that he dwarfed the little intellectual. Indeed, he pushed him into a sitting position and took over the meeting with the accomplished air of a man who has spent his life spinning sermons of enormous length from a single catchword.
‘The Water of Life,’ Mulla Azimi was roaring, in a voice that needed no amplification; ‘come and listen, comrades, for I shall tell you what the Water of Life means, exactly what it signifies and why tireless strugglers like this, our visitor, the activist delegate of the Party and the Leader Babrak Karmal, seek to bring it to us!’
The activist lit a cigarette. No need to keep a dog and bark yourself, he thought; and settled down to reflect on how he would wind up the meeting. There were several matters to consider, announcements as well as agitprop functions, handed down from the highest quarters.
‘The Water of Life, O beloved ones,’ the mulla was saying, ‘is, as we know from the Histories, the real reason why the Great Alexander, the Lord of the Two Horns, came to our land. He journeyed to the farthest east, to Beluristan, Land of Crystals, where, in a cave, he finally found the water which gives eternal life. One drink is enough. This was what Alexander desired, and it was this which he duly found.
‘He saw the water, issuing from a spring in the cavern, and he knelt to scoop up a palmful of the limpid liquid. Then, suddenly, he heard an anguished croak. What was it? Yes, you all know the legend, but is it legend or is it fact? The croaking came from a bird, whose beak was decayed, whose feathers had all dropped out, whose talons were scarcely able to grip the ledge on which it perched.
‘“Stop, Alexander!” cried the bird. “And, before you drink, reflect that I myself, a thousand years ago, found this miraculous spring and drank from it. And, for the last nine hundred years I have been praying that someone or something would, could, put an end to my life. Eternal life I have, indeed; but it is a life of total misery and sickness, the unbearable exhaustion of old age. None can kill me now, and I am doomed to stay in this state until the end of time!”’
‘And that,’ roared Azimi, ‘that is the life which the Party wants to bring us all. Allow them to do it, and you will exist in total misery like everyone else who has sipped of their infernal water …’
‘Shoot him!’ screamed the activist, purple in the face at the betrayal. The burning tip of his cigarette seared the flesh of his clenched fist where he had frenziedly grasped it.
The gendarme gasped, his head reeling. His orders were not to fire first, but only to protect the Party man. He fingered his gun nervously. The mulla, at the same moment, ripped the communist emblem from his breast and spat on it. Someone threw a stone, hitting the activist on the face. He started to scream with anguish and fury. A murmur, low at first, rose to a menacing climax, from several hundred throats: ‘Kus-i-khuk! Kus-i-khuk, Kus-i-khuk!’ The ultimate insult, hideous even to a liberated Kabul intellectual, describing him as one of the most intimate parts of a female swine, drove the little man into a worse frenzy. Snatching the carbine from the guard, he slid off the safety catch and waved the weapon wildly at the crowd.
The mulla reached over, almost casually, and plucked it from his hands. He looked at the mechanism, altered the setting from ‘automatic’ to ‘single shot’, by rotating the safety selector as far down as possible. Then, turning towards the activist like a demonstrator at a trade fair, he pushed the barrel of the gun into the other man’s open mouth and, carefully pressing the trigger, blew the back of his head off.
The crowd erupted, throwing turbans and shoes into the air. The mulla, after peering briefly at the corpse which had spun onto the ground behind the vehicle, tran
sferred the gun to his left hand and, placing his right over his heart, bowed in a courtly manner, and pointed chivalrously towards a fat lady who had been giggling throughout.
Then he raised his hand for silence. ‘Make way for the lorry, the luri, to be driven by these sheep back to their shepherd. We want them to report what we think of the Water of Life in this town, at least.’
He jumped down into the crowd.
Amid frantic cheering, the terrified gendarme and the driver, faces white, careered away through the path cleared for them by the exulting rejectors of the benefits of the Great Good News of the Soviet Water of Life. The body of the activist lay, crumpled, where it had fallen.
The mulla held onto the assault rifle. ‘It must be worth at least fifty thousand Afghanis,’ he murmured. ‘I think, my little one, there’ll be much more work for you, in days to come.’
He turned to the crowd, again. ‘Brethren! The calamity is here! We need vigilance, we need supplies and arms, we need to bear great burdens and to learn new ways. And we must remember this:’
He recited from Sura II, verse 255 of the Holy Book: the potent Verse of the Throne,
‘“God! There is no deity but he,
The Living, the Ever-Abiding One.
No slumber seizes him, nor sleep.
His is all that there is in the heavens and on the earth.
Who may intercede with him, but by his leave?
He it is who knows all that is before, after and beyond.
Nor may they compass any of his knowledge, but what he may allow.
His throne extends over the heavens and the earth:
And, in guarding and preserving, he is burdened not at all:
For he is the Most High, the Supreme”.’
That was how Mulla Azimi, one of his staunchest supporters, came to join The Eagle.
BOOK 12
Ekranoplan, the Sea Monsters
Encouraged by rich peasants, poisonous Zionists and international imperialists, isolated incidents should not be mistaken for opposition or ingratitude towards the fraternal, neighbourly, peace-loving and democratic USSR.
It is untrue to say that there are only three hundred socialists in Afghanistan. All the toilers of the Afghan Democratic Republic are socialists.
Spokesman of the Ministry of the Interior, Kabul
1 Wild Horses
Southern Hazarajat
AUGUST – SEPTEMBER
From the cool uplands of the Hazarajat, home of the people supposed to be descended from the hordes of Genghiz Khan, The Eagle and his companions descended into the blazing autumn heat of the Helmand river valleys.
At the town of Sangar, fifty miles north of the great Kajakai Dam, they met Hafiz Buyukbay, War Chief of Koh-i-Sangan, the Stony Mountain, whose peak scraped the sky at thirteen thousand feet. He was undisputed leader of thirty thousand warriors.
He received The Eagle’s party in a long, low black tent, whipped by the constant wind, sustained only by wooden poles and carpeted with sacks. Before the Russian invasion, he had owned half a million sheep and his home had been decorated with Persian rugs and Sèvres china. That had all been sold, for weapons. Today, he was a white-bearded eighty-seven-year-old, who carried an Austrian Mannlicher eight-millimetre rifle slung across his back. He was short, stocky and pugnacious, a farmer-turned-guerrilla with more than a dash of the robber baron in his dress: crossed bandoliers, turban-end across his mouth, long, close-quarters killing-knife in his belt.
Everyone addressed him as Harb-Bashi, War Chief.
His military adviser, far from being a Western capitalist-interventionist, was a Russian prisoner-turned-Muhjahid: Antoli Mikhailovich, formerly a lieutenant in the 346th Soviet Motorized Rifle Division, captured when the city of Kandahar had last changed hands, as it did eight times in 1981/82.
They sat drinking tea and looking down at the Helmand Plains as Antoli, at a sign from the war chief, told of his change of heart.
‘It’s those bunglers in Moscow,’ he began, pursing his lips and screwing up his pale blue eyes. He was from north-western Russia, and could not get used to the heat here, sometimes reaching 112 degrees Fahrenheit.
‘I don’t know whether the general staff or the civil servants are the worse fools. They blame Stalin for not opposing the Nazis when they first invaded us. He couldn’t believe it! But I think that misperception of an opponent is their characteristic.’
He loved the word characteristic, and used it all the time.
‘When I was briefed, they warned me to be prepared for the monsoon in Afghanistan. The monsoon! There isn’t such a thing here. Then we had a session with a geographer, who seemed to think that this is a land of coolies and steaming jungles. I’ve read some books about American top-level bunglers, but ours can beat them every time!’
The Eagle laughed. ‘Well, even in the USA when I was there, when I told them I was from Afghanistan, people said, “What state is that in?”’
‘That may well be,’ said Antoli, ‘but I bet they did not say “upcountry” as if we were in Africa. Why, our people thought that the Afghans ate Indian curry, ran in terror from “white sahibs” and were good communists into the bargain!’
Noor asked him, ‘Why did you desert?’
‘Desert?’ The Russian turned to her with a snarl. ‘I’m twenty-four years old and a professional soldier. I didn’t desert. I rejoined the human race! I am a Russian freedom fighter. Afghanistan was free. The USSR is not.’
He was an earnest young man with an athlete’s build, in a neat Soviet uniform, from which he had removed all the badges.
The old chief grinned. ‘You see,’ he explained, ‘he complains a lot about the people in Mosku. But I keep telling him that they know a lot more about us now …’
‘Yes,’ agreed Antoli, ‘in some ways they know far too much. The bungling of the political people and the ordinary army commands has brought the GRU, Military Intelligence, to the fore. And what have they done? Established a huge, new secret army, the Spetsnaz Force, modelled on the British SAS.’
‘What can they do that isn’t being done already, to destroy the population?’ Adam asked.
The war chief answered. ‘They now have efficient units operating behind our lines. That’s to say, they roam the mountains disguised as guerrillas, and destroy Resistance forces. First they ingratiate themselves, then they swoop. We’ve lost many men that way.
‘Then they fire on refugees and destroy villages. This makes the people think that the Muhjahidin are murderers.’
‘Very clever,’ said Noor.
‘Clever!’ shouted Antoli; ‘do you know what they did in October last in Kabul? There were several hundred young students, with placards, protesting against communism at the Jashn Grounds, the park in Kabul. Fifty Spetsnaz men, dressed as Afghans, appeared and fired fusillades into the crowd. Among those killed were almost a hundred young girls.’
The Buyukbay, Adam realized, was biding his time. He would not commit any of his 30,000 men to battle until they were well enough armed to beat the Russians. Small-scale raids was all he could manage. The caravan moved on.
The guerrillas descended from the heights of Zamindawar towards Kandahar city, seeing more and more aerial activity each day. Russian fliers were on constant patrol, looking for guerrilla concentrations which they could blast from the air before they reached the low-lying land to attack Soviet installations.
If there were only some ground-to-air missiles, SAMs, Adam thought, as he saw the enemy passing overhead unmolested. What was the use of one rifle to twenty men? The encounter with the war chief, commander of tens of thousands with only a few light weapons and his men thin from hunger, and the sight of these aircraft; this told the whole story. Without massive support from somewhere – the war would be lost, another country doomed, sucked into the Soviet empire.
The south-west of Afghanistan is a land of deserts as well as fertile plains. With Iran to the west and Pakistan to the south, the huge area watered by the imm
ense rivers Helmand and Arghandab has as its centre the ancient city of Kandahar, founded by Alexander the Great during his thrust India-wards.
The Eagle knew this region better than just well. He had been born here, thirty-three years ago. The Americans had built a modern town for the people who worked on the giant hydroelectric and irrigation projects of the Helmand Valley Authority.
Adam Durany, he had been named by his father, one of the Authority’s top hydrologists: a name which could be used either for an American or for an Afghan, and few would have been able to tell which he was. ‘Durayney’, as the Anglo-Saxons said it, was quite a possible name for either of them. He might be from Idaho or Maine. And ‘Durraani’, said in the Afghan fashion, was the name of the great Pashtun tribe of the area, the one which had given Afghanistan its first king in modern times.
Adam loved the place, majestic Kajakai, and especially the great blue, artificial lake in the Arghandab, surrounded by high, upright terracotta crags, the beauty of the ancient city of Kandahar.
And there was a strong bond between this desert place and the cool, mountain uplands of fair Paghman, near Kabul, where Adam was to start his guerrilla career. The rulers of Paghman were ancient allies of the ruling family. Indeed, in the Koti Landani mansion at Kabul, Adam had heard a great prince of the royal house, Sirdar Mohammed Yusuf Khan, holding forth, often and at length, about how the Jan-Fishanis, the Paghman people, with their legions, had saved the Yahya Khel family, and hence made modern Afghanistan possible, as he put it.
Such alliances, and tribal, family and spiritual loyalties were, and are, the fabric of Afghan life. By some mysterious alchemy, over the millennia, the Afghans had retained a clear identity, though they had seen changes such as few people ever have.