Kara Kush

  The three villagers who were unhurt, carried their friend two hundred miles over the mountains to Pakistan, lifting, pulling, fording rivers; their only stretcher two sacks stitched together.

  The journey took thirty-nine days, and the group, begging food from one village to another and living on wild onions, grass and leaves, were attacked and strafed by Russian helicopters three times on the way.

  When they reached Pakistan, they heard about the tiny hospital run by dedicated Afghan doctors who had escaped from the communists. It was so well run and excellently equipped that even the International Red Cross delegation described it as their inspiration. But the journey had taken too long. Riyaz Khan died three days after reaching safety, at the Afghan Surgical Hospital.

  His three friends eventually reached the refugee camp at Nasirbagh, in Pakistan, twelve miles from Peshawar. They sat there in the dust, listlessly, for days, without food, drinking only a little water, traumatized by shock. All felt a sense of overwhelming failure. Nobody could convince them that they had not let Riyaz Khan down.

  But the murderers of Riyaz Khan were about to learn what it meant to hold the life of an Afghan too cheaply.

  That night, the long Khyber knives took a hundred lives for every one who had perished in the village of Riyaz Khan. His name, from every throat, were the last words heard on earth by many a soldier of the Fraternal Limited Contingent. As each man of the Ishak-Khel felled a Russian, he shouted ‘Riyaz Khan!’ – and the night’s watchword ‘Ala al-hisab! in part-payment!’

  For three hours, as if in a medieval combat, the fourteen thousand men fought hand to hand.

  Salahuddin Khan, named after Sultan Saladin and descended from the Sons of Qais, unstrapped his battleaxe from the side of his jeep and spat on it for luck. Its handle was four feet long and it had a tempered steel blade inlaid with silver – made and signed by Salman the Smith six hundred years ago. Salahuddin’s family had been wiped out in the destruction, that April, of the town called Hussain Kot.

  His ancestors had fought the Ephalites, the White Huns, the Greeks, Persians and Indians. They had dealt with the Mongols, the Arabs, the Tartars and the British. He didn’t know all that, but he did not need to.

  The terrible weapon glittered in the flare-light as Salahuddin swung it around his head – and threw. Its five-inch spear point, protruding from between the crescent-shaped double blades, caught a Russian – who had just brought down a Muhjahid – in the exact centre of the back of his neck. The Russian turned over, eyes rolling, mouth moving – then lay still, his spinal cord broken.

  Salahuddin ran up and jerked the battleaxe away.

  ‘Shabash, changhalah! Well done, Sweetheart!’ Most Pashtun weapons had their own, special names.

  A Russian knelt, turned around and pulled the pin from a grenade, hurling it too soon at the tiny form of Simab Khan, a lad of just thirteen. Simab saw it coming, reckoned – rightly – that the fuse was a four-second one, caught it like a world class sportsman would receive a ball, and hurled it back, throwing himself to the ground at the same time.

  When he looked up the Russian was lying in a hollow depression, his head blown off, the neck still spurting blood. Simab Khan was violently sick, and lay there, amid the shouts and the screams, the explosions and cordite fumes, retching, his vision swimming. It was his first kill. He had no weapon: he’d joined the battle to get hold of one. Forcing himself up, he crept forward. There. Now, at last, he had a Kalakov, one of the new AK-74s, and two – no, three – magazines in a satchel. He ran forward, squeezing the trigger. The gun setting was on ‘AV’, automatic. Within ten seconds half a dozen Russian riflemen were writhing in the sand.

  Ten seconds more and Simab fell, dead, riddled with automatic fire. He was so small the bullets had lifted him into the air. He had been the last survivor of the genocidal air attack on the village of Pul-i-Sufian.

  Pendergood was jerking his bayonet from the last of a bunch of Russians, surrounded by a knot of Pashtuns, when a great flash lit up the sky to the east. A new type of flare, he thought, as he paused to wipe the blade clean. Callil came running up, a broad grin suffusing his face. ‘All my own work, Pendergood!’

  ‘Where did you get the flares?’ Pendergood said wondering at the same time why Callil had lit or fired them.

  ‘Flares? I haven’t seen any.’

  ‘What’s that light, then?’

  ‘Oh, that.’ Callil, elaborately, affected indifference. ‘That’s only thirty Nikolai amphibious battle-vehicles, BTR-60s, coming to get us, to wipe us out, that’s all …’

  ‘What do we do?’

  ‘Nothing. Our scouts spotted them, coming down the Arghistan River – you know, the one just south-east of here. I thought I’d do something.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘I’d noticed a 10,000 gallon oil tank installed at the water’s edge and my engineering training – that you sneered about so much, back in Pakistan – came in handy. I released the lot into the water. A match did the rest.’

  ‘And the rest was?’

  ‘Up to five hundred and forty men, armed to the teeth, enough to swing this battle the wrong way, burnt to a crisp.’

  ‘Poor bastards!’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know; I’d call it poetic justice. They are a specialist unit using napalm. They normally operate against civilians, with blazing oil, napalm and toxic chemicals. Those five hundred and forty have probably killed several thousand civilians. They specialize in the destruction of villages which help rebels, near Pakistan. The Pashtuns know them by their unit badge.’ He stopped talking. The Russians were coming on again.

  6

  The Eagle’s force

  Herat Road boundary

  Kandahar city

  0230 hours

  The Eagle’s force arrived at the Herat Road boundary of Kandahar to find the Russians, using the Red Afghan Army infantry conscripts as a shield, about to force their way into the city. They had laid down a barrage of high-explosive and phosphorous shells.

  Forgetting their exhaustion after the battle against the tanks, the guerrillas pushed through the demoralized Afghan conscripts’ left flank, and went straight for the Russians’ rear, catching them unawares. In the confusion, many of the Afghan soldiers simply took to their heels.

  Azambai led a charge which crippled a whole line of Soviet personnel-carriers, losing a finger in the process. Adam, attacked by three huge Russian infantrymen, went down under the hammer-blows from the butts of their empty rifles, rescued only in the nick of time by Haidar, the Turkestani. In a maniacal manoeuvre he cut the throat of one Russian, bayoneted the second, and shot the last one dead.

  Helping Adam to his feet, Haidar was briefly off his guard. A Russian sergeant came for him, Kalashnikov spitting fire. The Turkestani went down, just before a Pashtun tribesman shot the sergeant through the head.

  The battle surged away, leaving Adam standing by the motionless form of his friend.

  The Eagle knelt beside the man of Sher-Qala, Haidar, the Weapon-Bearer of his Battle-Lord, and saw the blood soaking away into the still warm sand. Haidar’s left leg was torn off: ripped away at the hip.

  ‘You’ll be all right, ghazi, hero, Haidar …’

  The Turkestani’s eyes were wide open, gazing as if into the distance, the pupils tiny in the bright flare-light, his face and neck muscles stretched with the agony of the pain. He tried to speak. The Eagle put a water bottle to his lips.

  ‘My Lord Captain Juma. The Russian helicopter …’

  ‘Yes, Haidar. Stay still. We’ll get you help.’

  Haidar’s voice again, whispering, like a sound from far away …‘Present and reporting! I come, my Lord, I come. Just reach out your hand …’

  His eyeballs moved upwards. With a shudder he was gone.

  Adam passed his hand across the eyelids, closing them.

  The sky was bright with Russian field-lights, flooding the battlefield in a ghostly glare.

  The battle was not going we
ll. Although the people of Kandahar had rallied and were flooding from the city to join the fray, they lacked both weapons and ammunition. Sometimes knots of three or four men, and women, shared a single gun. The deadly machine-gun fire of the Russians flailed through the rebels like a hailstorm destroying a wheat field. The Russians, in the Chowni garrison complex, still held out, guarding their abundant arms and ammunition.

  Just when The Eagle thought that all was lost, and the guerrillas were wavering, a contingent of horsemen, at the end of a headlong gallop of thirty miles, entered the fray.

  At first Adam thought it was a delusion: the thundering hooves, the rumbling of the cry, nearer and nearer: ‘Ajala, Ajala! Ajala, Ajala! Hasten, Hasten!’ The roar of the men matched the drumming of the hooves. Then he saw them.

  A messenger from Kandahar, riding a motor-cycle at suicidal speed along the Asian highway’s impeccable asphalt, had reached their mountain stronghold with the message: ‘Come to battle! To Kandahar.’

  These men, whose home was the great Paropamisus range north of Herat, the Afghan Caucasus, were feared and respected wherever, in the East, tales of war and romance were told. Like the dervish knights whom Adam had seen setting out from their monastery, their motto was ‘Ride and die!’ Calling themselves ‘The Agwans’, they were, in ancient times, the Argovani of the First Crusade.

  They wore scale armour, light and strong, and flowing cowelled and sable-lined cloaks. Long rosaries of wooden beads hung around their necks. Their shoulder-length hair was bound with tight turbans, and their great, square-cut beards rippled in the wind.

  Their medieval appearance belied their extraordinary discipline and outlook. In addition to their skill with the sword and dedication to horseriding, they could march fifty miles a day with a sixty-six-pound pack. They alternately marched and rested through the twenty-four hours, and were prepared for battle at the end of it.

  Their present leader was no stranger to the modern world. Samuri Zilzila ‘Earthquake’ Khan, knew something of Western Europe and the Soviet Union. He had borne the Russians no ill-will – until they had invaded his own land. Indeed, he still had a high opinion of Slavic chivalry, based on a visit some years before to Leningrad.

  Although a warrior, he was interested in literature, and his Intourist guide had taken him to the Petrograd side of the Neva River to see Maxim Gorky’s memorial. Zilzila mentioned that he was related to the Tartars who appointed the first Russian Grand Dukes, the Kipchakov, and therefore effectively founded the nation.

  Within fifteen minutes, he had been whisked away to the five-storeyed Military School nearby where the guard was turned out for him to inspect. The commandant, a soldier of the old school, invited him to review the ‘fighters of Russia, the country which his ancestors had helped to create’. Such courtesies always have a profound effect on military men.

  Tonight, Zilzila Khan led his men against the Russians in a wholly professional spirit. If the Soviet Union wanted to rule Afghanistan, they would have to fight for it. He doubted, though, whether Russian soldiers would willingly fight, year after year, in a foreign land where people had done nothing hostile to the USSR.

  Zilzila Khan’s standard-bearer raised the ancient battle-ensign, whose embroidered motto now came roaring from the throats of his three hundred cavaliers: ‘Al janna fi zill-as-saif! Paradise is in the shadow of the sword.’

  Grey-faced, the Russians turned, as their NCOs began to shout hoarse orders. The riflemen, Kalashnikovs in hand, started to obey; but their eyes stayed too long on the weird figures, the warriors who, they had been told, skinned prisoners alive and called out to death to take their enemies.

  The Afghans smelt the terror. ‘Tarsnak – Coward!’ they cried.

  Suddenly, as if at a signal, the Soviet ranks broke. Men ran, pushing each other away like children on a playground, and cringed as the long swords came down, across throats, through uniform jackets, deep into their vitals.

  ‘Hala, Hala, Hala! – Attack, Attack, Attack!’ The battle group Tufan, the Storm, caught the main body of the Soviet infantrymen as they tried to scramble up a sheer rocky hillside, urged on by the distorted call to the assault which came from Malik Ramazan Khan’s loud-hailer, snatched from the hands of a dying Russian sergeant.

  The men of the Storm battle group were, for the most part, almost giants, all of them over six feet tall, and broad in proportion. Before the partition of India they used their size to good effect, wandering all over the country and managing their mysterious affairs, intimidating the people of the subcontinent, it was said, simply by looming over them.

  ‘Hala, Hala, Hala – Attack, Attack, Attack!’ the guerrillas roared. ‘Nikolai: it is time to be afraid!’

  The Russian helicopters were there too: but, as on that day in Paghman, the choppers were unable to drop their bombs, use their guns even, for to do so would have been to destroy, together with their enemies, their own men, inextricably mixed with the Afghans in the whirling death-dance below.

  ‘Hala, Hala, Hala!’ The partisans now had the Russians penned in, crushed in their hundreds against the rocks of a gully with no exit, into which they had dashed like lemmings, scrabbling at the rocks, desperate to get away from their tormentors.

  As the first gleam of the false dawn appeared from behind the mountains where far-off Kabul lay, the surviving Russians surrendered. The guerrillas tied up the three hundred who were still alive, allowed the pomashes to attend to the injured, and set up a camp of their own, to rest and to assess the situation.

  It was broad daylight before all the reports were in: Haidar, Roman Zelikov and three Nuristanis, as well as fifty of the Afghan defectors of Lieutenant Tura’s group, were dead.

  Adam, Noor and the others sat, slumped listlessly on ammunition boxes, numbed by this bitter news. Good friends who had fought side by side, who had survived the glaciers of Kara Dagh, who had laughed and sung with them, now lay, inert bodies covered with sacking, waiting merely for their hole in the ground: food for the earth.

  An irrational, savage urge to kill the prisoners, or to make them suffer and to watch it happen, came over Adam. Noor read what was in his eyes. All she said was, ‘Don’t.’ The moment passed. Adam looked at the terrified prisoners. Some were gibbering. They were suffering enough.

  Adam lifted the pieces of rough cloth covering the faces of his dead friends, one by one, and looked at them for the last time.

  ‘Kara Kush, they have tasted martyrdom, and they have found it sweet,’ said Karima; perhaps, he thought, because she saw the tears running down his cheeks, making furrows in the orange sand-dust which covered them. Then she said, ‘I have killed seven men today, komondon. And this I know: I have had enough of killing.’ She didn’t cry, but she was trembling. Noor put an arm around her. ‘Karima Jan, we did not ask for this. God knows. We must not let it change us. Now we must forget.’

  ‘Not yet.’ Karima stiffened. ‘We have to cleanse the land.’ Very quietly she said, ‘Mr Zoltan, why does the world not help us? Have we done wrong? I wish that you were here to explain it all to me.’

  The guerrillas had laid the Russian wounded in rows, waiting for whatever medical aid might be forthcoming from the city. Suddenly Noor saw a very small, neat Russian KGB officer walking freely along the lines of groaning men, himself unwounded and unrestrained.

  As he reached each man he stooped, placed his handgun to the nape of the man’s neck, and killed him with a single shot. The automatic’s nose had a long black extension, a silencer, and made only a dull thud as it was used.

  The Russian had a pouch full of Makarov magazines slung at his side. When he had killed eight men, and the gun was empty, he reached for the bag and, with a practised movement, changed magazines. He even put the empty cassettes tidily back in the pouch.

  Noor screamed and ran at him, head down, from a dozen yards away. The little man raised his gun as he stepped aside.

  ‘Stoi! Stop!’ There was murder in his voice.

  In a moment, h
e was on the ground, felled by a karate chop from Adam’s hand. The weapon fell into a sand-drift.

  Adam picked him up and shook him like a dog worrying a rat.

  ‘I have to shake him anyway,’ he explained to Noor. ‘The blow has paralysed him.’

  To the Russian he said, in Dari, ‘Give me your belt.’

  He spat on the Soviet star shining from the buckle as he tied the Russian up. For some reason he mumbled to himself in English.

  The Russian, recovered now, spoke in English too. ‘Capitalist, fascist, lackey! Angliski, English, interventionist!’

  Adam said, ‘If anyone in the entire world were told of what you have done, murdering your own men, they wouldn’t believe it. They’d think we’d made it up.’

  The Russian screwed up his face in fury. ‘You’d have tortured and killed them, anyway!’

  ‘No we wouldn’t. It’s you people who do that. You cultured people of the new civilization.’ He spat.

  ‘Extreme conditions, extreme solutions.’ The Russian was calmer now. Polemic suited him. He went on, ‘If they got back to the Red Army, they’d be shot, anyway.’

  ‘Shot?’

  ‘Yes, for violating their written undertaking to commit suicide if captured, whether wounded or not.’

  Noor looked wildly around, wondering if she was dreaming. The words ‘I don’t believe that this is happening,’ went through her mind, but she rejected them. It was happening all right.

  ‘Are you quite mad?’ Adam picked the little man up by the hair and put him down again. His hair, he noted, was unusually long, unlike that of the ordinary soldiers, which was close-cropped. Perhaps this was an affectation, or a privilege, of the political police.

  ‘No, Afganski bandit, or Englishman, whatever you are: we are not mad.’ The Russian was sneering.

  ‘Huh!’ Adam couldn’t find the right word.