Kara Kush

  Pashtu lends itself well to military terminology, Pendergood reflected. Now, cripple the transmitters in the tower. That should cause confusion among the Russians attacking the city eighteen miles away.

  ‘Those are the targets. There is no sign of enemy troops between us and the airport perimeter. But if they do appear, lay down smoke by mortar in front of them, without further command. Understood, Fire-Master?’

  ‘Understood, Commander.’

  ‘Now, Hamza, load all five mortars with high-explosive for ranging shots.’

  Hamza relayed the order. ‘Loaded for ranging shots.’

  ‘Following ranging shots and any necessary correction of sights, prepare for high-explosive barrages, rapid fire. Understood?’

  ‘Understood …Order relayed …Mortars ready.’

  ‘Mortar battery, ranging shots ready …FIRE!’

  Hamza passed on the command: ‘Da khampara khalas krah!’

  Two mortars fired short, a third hurled its round too far, just over the control tower, falling on the far side. Two struck the transmitting masts and the control tower.

  ‘Seriously damaged,’ Pendergood murmured. ‘Not bad, Hamza! Now re-range: three on the tower, two on the masts, and move!’

  Within seconds, as Pendergood and Callil watched through their night-glasses, the masts collapsed in orange flame and the tower itself, made of concrete but not designed to resist high-explosives, was severely damaged. Most of the lights went out: those that were still on in the main building alongside it were blanked out by smoke and debris.

  The nine huge arches of the passenger terminal, designed in the style of the magnificent entrances to the ancient Afghan imperial palaces, collapsed. The bright fluorescent Pashtu-language signs, A A A – Da Ariana Afghan Hawai Shirkat – Ariana Afghan Air Company, went with them.

  Fires were soon burning fiercely in the great 50-metre by 75-metre hangar, built by the American Federal Aviation Agency for the Royal Afghan Government and designed for the largest intercontinental jets on the Far East route.

  ‘Fire-Master: cease fire! Aferin, Muhjahidin! Well done!’ The commanders clapped, and the Pashtuns, always delighted at the sight of fireworks of any kind, gave a loud cry of Allahu-Akbar!

  At the airport, all was confusion. At first, the commanding general thought that an air raid was taking place. He shook plaster out of his hair and ran for the dugout shelter which was all that was available to him, general or not. His adjutant managed to raise the administration building on his small transceiver, but only after several minutes.

  ‘Gospodin general! Mortar attack from the east!’

  ‘Mortar? What mortars? Is it more Afghan deserters? Is it the Pashtun force from Pakistan – or the bandit “Eagle” from the north?’

  ‘I do not know, Comrade General.’

  ‘Find out then, you fool! And see what perimeter defence is doing about it. We’ll be overrun at any moment at this rate!’

  The general was fed up with the war, with Afghanistan, with the airport on this sunbaked plain and its stifling heat. He wanted to retire, to go fishing, to read books in his dacha in the cold Baltic birch forests. He was a Balt, anyway. What was he doing here in Central Asia? The general pulled out his last Havana cigar, a long thin Romeo y Julieta, and bit off the end. Thank God he wasn’t in charge of defending this place. Colonel Antonov was commanding the perimeter. Moscow, or even Afghanistan High Command, would make someone pay for letting the attackers get so close. Moscow had warned of two guerrilla bands due in the area soon …

  Suddenly he remembered. The tank attack on Kandahar. Due in an hour. That was what he was here for. No communications, no attack.

  ‘Mikhailov!’ He called for his adjutant.

  ‘Gospodin general?’

  ‘Get some communications fixed with Tank Attack Command. They’re on the way to Kandahar already, and they’re radio-deaf, on the normal network, or we are, or both! We’ve got to get things together or call off the attack! We’re the nerve centre of the Sistema Svyazi, the whole troop command and control communications system.’

  ‘At once, General.’ The man clicked his heels and went off at the double.

  Of course, it wasn’t up to him, a communications man, to call anything off, the general realized. He’d probably get court-martialled, or reprimanded, anyway. Great God …

  The mortars could not do much to the helicopter patrols, the general thought. It had been a surprise attack, and communications were disrupted: but the Mi-24s would surely be able to deal with the guerrillas.

  The three huge rotorcraft, radio-deaf through the loss of the airport’s transmitting mast, at last spotted the Pashtuns and swooped to the attack, searchlights blazing down.

  Pendergood, seeing them wheeling overhead, signalled to his small air defence squad and breathed a prayer of thanks that he had agreed to buy the small Russian bazookas and rockets from the sleazy arms dealer from Cyprus, that day in Istanbul.

  All the same, the men had not had any hot firing experience with the weapons: the rockets had cost too much to waste on training.

  The Pashtun rocketeers, chosen for their sniping experience, picked up the launcher tubes as if they had been handling them all their lives. They aimed at the aircraft over open sights, pressed the triggers halfway and waited until the red light came on, for ‘Seeker locked onto target’.

  As the red turned to green, ‘fire’, they squeezed the triggers all the way.

  With a roar the boost charges fired, and the missiles leapt from the tubes, at the speed of Mach 1.5 – one and a half times the velocity of sound.

  The helicopters were very low – not more than 800 feet – when the first missiles struck. A British Hawker Hunter fighter-bomber, it was known, had been hit by a SA-7 over Oman at fourteen times that height, and the effect on the Mi-24s was correspondingly great.

  Although not destroyed, the helicopters were soon out of action. One had its supposedly blast-proof windscreen blown in; the second exploded as the missile found its exhaust pipe; the main rotor of the third was twisted. It was only with difficulty that the three aircraft managed to land back on their pads within the airport’s perimeter.

  4

  The Eagle’s Force

  North of Kandahar City

  2151 hours

  There were three hundred MBTs, big battle tanks, in the main formation sent to attack and occupy Kandahar that night. As they moved forward to their baseline position, awaiting the assault order, Azambai tuned in to their radio traffic.

  He listened for a moment or two, and then turned to Adam with a grunt.

  ‘Something’s gone wrong with their command and control communications! They are using a makeshift, highly unsuitable, frequency, and they are getting all kinds of orders and messages. It’s made them quite annoyed.’

  ‘Why unsuitable?’

  ‘There’s static, for one thing. For another, not all of them have radios which can pick it up. They’re mostly crystal-calibrated, you see, which means they can’t switch to unplanned frequencies.’

  ‘Bit of luck for us. Any reason why it happened?’

  ‘Yes. Someone at Tank Command says, hysterically, that the main control headquarters, communications, has been knocked out. At the airport. Guerrilla action.’

  ‘Great! We have friends at work.’

  Bands of heavily armed men were always appearing unexpectedly in Afghanistan. They might just as quickly melt away.

  Adam turned and peered over the rocks at the silent tanks below. They were in a long line in the gully, three abreast, risking the choking of their line of approach with breakdowns, as the Russians always seemed to do. Just like that dawn attack at Paghman.

  He ordered the guerrillas to disperse in two lines, to try to reach the end of the column, and to be prepared to attack from above at his signal.

  Ten minutes later, a runner came up, and whispered: ‘Eagle, all the men are in position, right to the end of the column, on both sides, in battle array.’


  ‘Good.’ The tanks were still stopped, every turret open. Men were smoking, the red glow of their papirosas lighting up faces and outlining their black, padded tank helmets. Sitting targets, almost literally. Some had got out of their vehicles to urinate, some were chatting, probably discussing the breakdown in communications. They were all Russians: there was no sign of the Afghans who were usually sent in ahead, to take the first enemy fire.

  The Russian tank commander had not been able to get through to Afghan Infantry Headquarters. The attack was going to be delayed: it was only sixty minutes to zero hour, and still no readiness alert had come through.

  With machine-guns, grenades, rocket-launchers, and tank-killing grenade launchers, the guerrillas stood, silently, on the rocks above, like veritable hawks hovering over their prey.

  Adam lobbed the first grenade, signalling the attack. It was one of the terrible Russian RKG-3Ms; spinning on its potato-masher handle, it plunged right down into the open turret of the first tank.

  The impact-fused half-kilogramme of high-explosive, which could penetrate six inches of armour, exploded with such violence that The Eagle himself, twenty feet away, felt as if he had been struck with a giant hammer. Winded by the shock, he leant against a rock while the men of the rebel formation, hearing the explosion, went into the attack. It sounded like something straight from hell.

  Men screamed, automatic fire rattled, shells exploded in all directions. From the blazing tanks came the radio operators, frenziedly trying to beat out the flames on their uniforms and get away before the ammunition exploded. The dismounted tank crews were utterly bewildered. The darkness was lit by the red-orange explosions, while the yellow of the diesel flames and the choking black smoke mingled with the stench of burning rubber and human flesh. The Russians had put up field-flares, but this only helped the Afghans to see their targets better.

  The war cry of the Muhjahidin, Allahu-Akbar! was, again and again, drowned out by the explosions, the howls, the unearthly scream of metal as, within ten minutes, all three hundred tanks were turned into scrap.

  There had been nine hundred men in the tank crews. No more than a hundred escaped the slaughter. Now the guerrillas jumped down among them. In the narrow defile, eager warriors leapt and stabbed, man to man, lunging, swearing, killing. The heat from the burning tanks filled the place, flames flickering, rising and falling, the scene like something from Armageddon.

  As the full moon came up, the carnage continued. Ten Russian armoured personnel-carriers, with a hundred and fifty paratroops aboard, attempted a rescue. Their vehicles could not get past the wreckage of the tanks.

  Nobody could tell how the battle was going. The Afghans, although keen and motivated, lacked combat experience. The Russian parashyutniks were the cream of the Soviet Army. Well trained, well armed, these were regulars: not the bewildered conscripts who made up the majority in the USSR’s motor-rifle formations.

  It took three hours to deal with them. Neither side took prisoners or showed any mercy: the Afghans determined to rid their country of its oppressors, the Russians aggressive – and afraid of death or court martial if they failed.

  In the end, the battle followed the pattern pioneered by the Russians themselves during World War II, when small, determined parties of partisans took on the lumbering German armour and overcame huge formations of the enemy.

  By two o’clock in the morning, the Russian survivors had withdrawn, their ammunition exhausted and their entire tank fleet destroyed or abandoned. It was an impressive victory, but not the end of the Soviet assault on the city of Kandahar.

  The smell of burning, of cordite and of high-explosive still hung in the night air as The Eagle and his companions mustered at their rallying point. As Adam was receiving the reports of casualties, a battered car came jerking along the road from the direction of the city.

  An old man, waving a large flashlight and dressed in a western-style business suit, turban awry, slammed to a halt and jumped out. ‘Kara Kush! Eagle, sir, Kara Kush! Where is he?’

  Adam stepped forward. ‘I’m Kara Kush. What’s the matter?’

  The ancient ran to him, grabbed his hand and kissed it. ‘I’m Neknam, son of Yakub, from Kandahar. Sent by Ashraf, patriot commander there. Lieutenant Tura is my son-in-law. The Red Afghans, traitors, supported by Soviet Airborne, are attacking us from the west, from the Herat highway direction.’

  Adam suddenly felt tired out, but this was hardly a time to think of rest. So that was where the Afghan Army was: the Russians must originally have planned a two-pronged thrust, and it had got out of phase, with the interruption of their radio communications. ‘Let’s get back to the command truck,’ he said, ‘and see what we can do.’

  When they had assembled, Adam was pleased, selfishly as he immediately thought, that none of his close friends had been seriously hurt. Under the butane gas lamp they saw that the newcomer had a bullet-wound in his left arm, which Noor dressed for him. His suit was covered in oil. Adam looked at the others, smeared with soot, blood, dust, grime, sand.

  ‘What’s the situation in Kandahar?’ Adam asked.

  Neknam shrugged. ‘We’ve got what’s left of the Russian occupation force surrounded in the Chowni, the garrison area. We’ve had them trapped there for a week. We can’t get in, they can’t get out. They’ve a lot of arms and ammunition there. Ashraf Khan was trying to breach the walls, leading a suicide squad with gelignite, as I left. God willing, they may have succeeded by now.’

  ‘How many of the enemy are there, and what kind of arms have they? Any tanks?’ Adam wanted to know.

  ‘I heard our patrol’s report,’ Neknam told him, ‘it was dark and they couldn’t see much, but they are mostly infantry in trucks, that’s all. The Karmal conscripts, the Afghan Army as they call it, in front. Just issued with guns they hardly know how to fire. No tanks.’

  ‘Any chance of falling on them from the flank, or from behind, Neknam Khan?’

  ‘Eagle, there’s every chance! There’s a spur from Highway 75, the main road only half a mile from here. Get your people into trucks and we can drive straight there. I’ll show you the way.’

  The Eagle shouldered his AK-74 carbine. ‘Rahla, rahla, march, march,’ he said.

  5

  Pendergood’s Army

  Kandahar Airport

  SEPTEMBER 16

  0100 hours

  The Russians at Kandahar Airport had now rallied, and got three gunships into the air. Spraying the Pendergood army with machine-gun fire, hovering close to the ground, they sought their prey by the invisible light of their infra-red searchlights, operated by the co-pilots.

  Pendergood called for the captured Dashka: there were no SAM-7 rockets left now. Aiming at the sound of the rotors in the dark, the men of the Yusuf-Zai brought the heavy Russian machine-gun into play. They exhausted three of the fifty-shot cartridge belts to bring down one craft and cripple the other two. The armourers who had installed the Dashka in its Russian tank in the first place had not intended it to be used against aircraft. For a swivel mounting, therefore, the Pashtun gunners had to hold it against the free-spinning wheel of an overturned truck.

  As the last helicopter limped away, fresh Soviet infantry appeared, in an endless stream of vehicles, from their huge encampment on the Kabul road. They had arrived in the country only five months before, during the annual spring rotation of forces, and had not seen real action: only punitive raids on unarmed villagers.

  They fired white magnesium flares, constantly, to keep the battlefield well lit. ‘Afraid of the dark?’ Pendergood shouted.

  Scouts observing them as they poured from their armoured personnel-carriers, estimated that there were about eight thousand men: four regiments, outnumbering the Pashtuns by about two thousand. When Pendergood heard this, he laughed a great laugh. Pashtun performance, regardless of what war it had been, was quite consistent. The tribesmen had never been beaten, in all their history, by odds of anything less than ten to one. He snatched u
p his machine-carbine and signalled to his ammunition-carrier to follow him. This was the life. Who’d be a transport king in England when there was this kind of work to do?

  The Russians advanced in line abreast, wave after wave of them, their NCOs howling the Russian Army’s constant cry, in war or peace, ‘Daway, daway – faster, faster.’ The men ran easily, as if charging across the barren steppes of their native land. Their khaki summer field uniforms showed up a dull green in the chemical light of the star-shells, and their assault rifles spat red flames. To Pendergood, the muzzle-flashes looked like fireflies as the first wave kept up a constant fire. The Pashtuns threw themselves flat on the ground, drew their killing knives, and waited. Shouting to keep their fervour up, the Soviet infantrymen were upon them with amazing speed. They had been liberally dosed with vodka half an hour before: forty-five per cent alcohol.

  Whether or not he had been in action before, every Pashtun was determined to see blood flow that night. There was hardly one of them who had not lost a close friend or relative in the Russian attacks against the civilian population. The rebels had seen the broken bodies of men and women, old and young, of children, too – from Zabul, Paktia, Nangrahar, Kunar – carried to the few hospitals there were beyond the frontier, journeys of unimaginable misery, only to die, often terribly mutilated, and in the most extreme pain.

  Such is the strength of the Pashtun’s commitment to the code of retaliation, that the presence of a large contingent of Ishak-Khel Warriors, from the Isaac Clan, in Pendergood’s army, was due to a single incident. They volunteered when it was known that their kinsman, Riyaz Khan, and several of his relatives, had been murdered by the Rouss.

  When the helicopters destroyed his village in Khair Khana valley, Riyaz Khan, blinded by the chemical bombs, shouted to the survivors to leave him where he was. They refused, and two men and two women started to carry him past the ruined mosque when the Russians came back. The aircraft swooped and spattered them with machine-gun fire, riddling Riyaz’s cousin, Askar, and putting two bullets into the blind man as well.