‘We feel love, just like you. Love for Russia. Recently, as I heard on the radio, a Russian spaceman in the Salyut vehicle pined for the Motherland, Rossya. And we hate, we hate dirty imperialists, like you. Unlike you, we know about higher duty. The duty of the guiding role of the Party of our country, to help the working class of all peoples …’
‘God help you!’ shouted Noor.
The Russian ignored her. ‘Kill me now, bandit,’ said the Russian, ‘since you are too superior to torture me.’ He was not a coward.
Adam signalled to two of his warriors. ‘Take this prisoner to the city with the others, and don’t harm him. Captives are protected by God.’
To Noor he only said, ‘God help the human race.’
7
Pendergood’s Army
Kandahar Airport
0800 hours
The Pashtuns had now broken through the Russian defences at the airport three times. At dawn, ravenous, they had attacked the food storage area en masse, and taken away large quantities of canned goods, before being driven off by concentrated machine-gun fire. They lost fifty men, but, as Pendergood said, ‘That’s evidently the price of breakfast in this damned war.’ The Pashtuns’ food trucks had been blown up in the fighting.
Five-man hala-zumras, assault groups, kept getting through the Soviet lines, now the sun was up. One struck at the oil-fired electricity generators, another cut the twenty-five mile long high-tension cable bringing power from the small Arghandab turbines, not realizing that they could have destroyed the supply as it ran through their own lines. The diesel supply for the airport’s service vehicles went up, creating a fireball which melted the thick soundproof windows at a hundred feet.
The greatest successes were when the Pashtuns tackled the aircraft. There were more than fifty reconnaissance and fighter-bomber planes on the ground. Using hand-grenades or two-kilogramme high-explosive demolition charges, the attack groups wrecked cockpits, destroyed the air-intakes of the jets and blew off landing gear. Callil and Pendergood themselves took part in several of these actions. The airport was so huge that the Russians could either control the perimeter or guard the aircraft, but not both.
By now, talking by radio to Kandahar, the Pashtun commanders knew that the Russian attack on the city itself had been beaten off.
Callil eventually got through to The Eagle, briefly explaining how he’d accompanied the Pashtuns from the Yusufzai country.
‘Kara Kush! May you never be tired! We’re holding them here at the airfield. But we can’t finish them off ourselves, and now it’s daylight they can have strafing planes here from Shindand airfield within an hour or so. If you have men and materials enough, how about coming over and lending a hand? Nothing’s happening at the moment: complete silence.’
‘We’ll be with you by eight-thirty – in half an hour – but we haven’t much in the way of anti-aircraft guns.’
‘Never mind, we have some, and every little helps.’
‘Right – understood.’
‘See you in half an hour.’
Adam turned to Qasim. ‘Get every man and every vehicle, ours and the Kandaharis, out to the airport. It’s eighteen miles north-east, along the signposted road. We’ve got to stop the Monsters before the Nikolai army or airforce comes back.’
At the airport, Pendergood called his group commanders together. ‘Help is coming. From The Eagle in Kandahar. Prepare to attack the Sea Monsters, those things that just came in. It’ll soon be time for the real saza, the retribution.’
The great Afghan strategic airbase at Shindand, headquarters of the West and South Air Commands, seventy-five miles south of Herat, was packed with Russian warplanes. The Ninth Air Fleet had been receiving confusing and contradictory reports and orders about Kandahar, via Kabul, since the night before. Now, finally getting through on the Air Force’s own radio network to Command Headquarters at Bagram, north of Kabul, the Shindand’s commanding general, Kowalski, was ordered to put every suitable plane into the attack.
‘Ignore Kandahar City. Destroy bandits besieging the International Airport. Protect the secret craft, surface-skimmers located there.’ The first wave were the Mikoyan MiG-23 fighters, the type called ‘the Flogger’ in the West. Carrying over six thousand pounds of bombs, their Tumanski R29B engines could attain Mach 2.3 at high altitudes – almost two and a half times the speed of sound. Kandahar was three hundred and fifty nautical miles from Shindand. The operational radius of the Flogger was only five hundred miles. And that was without using dust filters, or gunning the engines. The pilots knew that if they switched on the afterburners to gain maximum speed, their fuel consumption would rise so much that they wouldn’t make it home. Fuming, they nursed their engines as they made for Kandahar.
‘First wave off, fifteen aircraft,’ Kowalski reported to Bagram HQ.
‘Total organic aviation – essential to break the siege of Kandahar Airport,’ Bagram answered. Kowalski reached for his book of Soviet military definitions. ‘Organic aviation,’ he read, ‘means aviation units supporting major army field forces, in direct support of their combat activities.’ The general looked at his resources.
There were sixty Mi-23s on the apron, as well as ten Mi-17s. Lacking auxiliary fuel tanks, neither type of craft had the range to reach Kandahar, to carry out bomb and strafe missions and to return to Herat or Shindand. Kowalski ordered them off the operational zone.
That left three waves, each of five aircraft, with the necessary range. The general asked for the situation report.
‘Fifteen aircraft, Comrade General. Ten operational, the rest under servicing.’
‘I want more than ten! Recheck the five, tell the mechanics to get at least another three into service. This is a war, not a picnic!’ Kowsalski had been in the Air Force long enough to know that Russian mechanics could always do better than they said.
The Floggers, fighters being tested in Central Asia for their possible use against NATO’s fighters in the West, roared on at fifty thousand feet, each armed with over three thousand kilogrammes of death-dealing ordnance.
As they came down to six thousand feet, over the rectangular American-built town of Lashkar-Gah, eighty nautical miles west of Kandahar, the great wind hit them. The Black Wind, the Wind of a Hundred and Twenty Days, blows for as long as four months during the summer. Starting from the Iranian border near Hamun Lake in Seistan, it roars up to the mountains north and east of Kandahar. Carrying huge quantities of sand as fine as dust, positively ionized and causing madness, this wind is one of the most fearsome natural forces in the world. It blows up to one hundred and ten miles an hour – hurricane force – burying everything in sand, stripping trees, choking people and animals, filling and obliterating vital wells.
The air-intakes of the Russian jets were protected by extra filters, but nothing could keep out the dust of the Black Wind. Just before they reached the airport, six of the Floggers were in deep trouble. The mighty Tumanskis coughed and roared, afterburners were slapped in to clear the thick dust sucked into the engine nacelles. But Flogger afterburners take six seconds to attain maximum combustion. Moments after the wind hit them, the six ‘all-weather’ MiG-23s were heaps of burning wreckage in the Registan, the Sea of Sand. Flogger pilots carry no parachutes.
The nine surviving aircraft, wobbling from the wind’s punishing force, made their first pass across the airport, which their pilots could hardly see. Clusters of anti-personnel bombs, each containing thousands of steel or plastic needles and ball-bearings, burst in the dunes. The sandstorm had hit the Pashtuns two or three minutes before the MiGs arrived, covering them and their vehicles, blotting out the rising sun, piling up banks of sand which acted as protection against the attack. Designed to explode on impact, under these unusual conditions the bombs burrowed deep into the soft dunes before the triggering mechanism worked. The sand baffled their effect, and the main force of the explosions was spent, uselessly, into the air.
When they had heard the whine of the approa
ching wind, and seen the dust-devils – swirling pillars which rose a hundred feet into the air-the guerrillas had covered their guns as best they could. But, although they could hear the attacking planes, even above the wind, they could not see them, much less stand up in the blast to load their six anti-aircraft guns.
The army of the Muhjahidin lay there, huddled, waiting for the worst of the shigatupan, the screaming storm, to pass over.
The Eagle’s convoy, with every available man from Kandahar aboard, was three miles from the airport when the wind struck. As the blanket of sand hit them, the men jumped from their trucks and lay to the leeward of the wind, covering their noses, shielding their faces as best they could from the millions of stinging particles. Adam wondered, as he tried to keep his eyes shut against the burrowing grains, whether the engines would ever start again. Three miles meant nearly an hour’s march and that might be too late …
The planes made three more passes before the red winkers on their fuel dials signalled danger level. The pilots could now see nothing of the ground below. They could not land at Kandahar: its radio beacon was out of action. Reporting to Shindand, they got Kowalski’s order to return. Above the howl of the wind, The Eagle’s men and the Pendergood-Callil force heard the last screams of the Turmanskis as the MiGs climbed, steeply, out of the dust curtain and back to base. Clogged with dust, their engine speed had dropped by twenty per cent.
The wind raged for two hours more, darkening the sky until one could see only inches ahead. But now it was dropping, bringing less and less sand by the minute.
Within the airport’s perimeter, the coughing, retching Russians staggered about, not knowing what to do in a storm such as this. Because the surface was hard-packed, the sand did not pile up into dunes, and the troops could not dig in. The sand scoured them like sandpaper pulled across their bodies. Their weapons were clogged, and many had their uniforms torn ragged, even ripped off, by the Black Wind.
Three miles away, Adam and his men tried to start the motors of their trucks, and found that only half of them would work. Abandoning the useless vehicles and double-loading the others, they reached the caravan which Pendergood and Callil had made their headquarters, in a quarter of an hour.
Pendergood had shovelled the sand out of the caravan and patched the windows through which it had poured. Red-eyed and coughing, he, Callil and Maryam came forward.
They shook hands and embraced.
‘Kara Kush! Welcome.’
Adam interrupted him. ‘Pendergood: we’re in the middle of a battle. Let’s get ready to face the next Russian attack, shall we? Or work out how to overcome the resistance at the airport. We could easily be surrounded, if they bring up enough fresh forces, and I doubt if we’d ever fight our way out of that.’
‘Let’s get right down to it,’ said Pendergood.
BOOK 14
The Secret Weapon
The Russian Army is an undisciplined shower – an oafish army who abandon their weapons, loot civilian cars at roadblocks, sell their equipment for hashish, and leave the wretched Afghan Army to do all the dirty work. The Muhjahidin fed me on Soviet Army rations sold on the black market.
Col. Colin Mitchell in Sunday Telegraph
1. Stand to Arms!
North of Kandahar Airport
SEPTEMBER 16, 1000 hours
Divisional General Zagarov, sitting in his air-conditioned caravan trailer thirty miles north-west of Kandahar Airport, looked at his maps again. ‘Captain Miskiny, this is quite irregular. I suppose you want a decoration for heroism in the field?’
‘No, sir! With the General’s permission, Captain Miskiny only desires to call for volunteers to close the gap and pull tight the noose on the bandits infesting the airport, sir!’
Zagarov did not know much about Miskiny: generals, after all, did not waste their time with captains, and especially in active service conditions. He looked steadily at the young man, a scowl masking his indecision. Miskiny was not a Party member, but he was a good officer, keen and efficient. But his idea sounded as reckless as a Siberian’s.
‘What is your nationality, Miskiny?’
The captain maintained the formality, speaking in the third person, required of a very junior officer replying to a general. ‘Beg to report, gospodin General: Captain Miskiny is from Krasnovodsk, Caspian Sea, Turkmenistan.’
‘So you understand these people better than we do, eh – you’re their little cousin?’
‘The Soviet Fraternal Limited Contingent is in Afghanistan to help the legitimate government of socialist Afghanistan against bandits and foreign interventionists, sir!’
Zagarov nodded. ‘Very well, Captain. Let’s go into your plan, and if I agree, you can call for volunteers. As I see it, striking southwards along the motorway – here – you can occupy the ruins and dunes – here – and enfilade the flank of the bandits …’
In the end, the captain got his permission.
1115 hours
The Afghan guerrillas and their Pashtun allies surrounded the airport. To the north, however, the main body of Russian tanks and the 346th Motor Rifle Division’s uncommitted troops stood by, ready to crush the Afghans on the open ground. The guerrillas encircled the airport’s defenders, but they were spread thinly, and their main hope of reinforcements or escape lay to their east. This was the area which Captain Miskiny had proposed to seal off.
Adam shrugged as the scouts, one by one, came in with the story. Russian infantry, packed in armoured personnel-carriers, were rushing to seal the escape gap.
There was nothing much he could do. Messages had been sent to all the towns and villages for fifty miles around, asking for volunteers for the great battle which was surely to come soon. Callil and Pendergood could hold the main road from Herat in the west against tanks, since they had enough men, guns and mortars. To the south, partly defended by the river, the Kandahar volunteers, now well armed with captured weapons, could prevent the airport’s defenders from breaking out: but that was the most they could do. Northwards, the bulk of the Afghan and Pashtun irregulars were dug into sand bunkers, awaiting the attack. If the eastern gap were sealed by the Russians before any sizeable support came from the villages – it would mean stand, fight and die. What he really needed now, Adam knew, was more men and vehicles.
He sent for the Afghan lieutenant. ‘Take as many trucks as you can, Tura, grenades and automatic rifles. See if you can occupy the eastern ruins before the Nikolais get there. Reports say there’s about two hundred of them, in APCs. If you can keep that area open, well and good. If not, retreat to our perimeter and we’ll let you through. God be with you.’
The Afghan saluted and sprinted away, calling to his men – ‘Haraka, haraka! Let’s go!’
It was then that Adam saw the convoy approaching. White flags fluttered from the whip-aerials of the Soviet armoured personnel-carriers, nine of them, as they came bounding down the road from the east. This looked like a surrender: there would not be so many men, some two hundred in all, if it were a parley party. On the other hand, it could also be a trick, and a dangerous one.
Adam ordered the guerrillas to wave down the vehicles while he positioned grenade squads and marksmen on both sides of the feeder-road leading to the airport. ‘Don’t trust them,’ he told the fighters. ‘Any sign of treachery and you kill.’
The APCs came on, slower now. They were camouflage-painted in desert colours, with the red star, national insignia of the USSR, on their front mudguards. No weapons were in sight, but all the men were wearing steel helmets with the coarse mesh netting and the summer uniforms of the Soviet Army: brown battle-dress top, breeches and black jackboots. They were in full battle-kit, with water-bottles, pouches and leather harnesses.
A young officer, tall and handsome, with helmet and smoked goggles, stood up in the first carrier and held up his hands, palms outwards, as if in surrender. He had the star and wreath insignia of the Soviet Motor Rifle Troops on his collar-patches. The thin red stripe and four stars on hi
s shoulder-straps showed that he was a captain.
Jumping down, he called, in Dari, to the motley crowd of guerrillas standing under a stunted tree at their makeshift roadblock. ‘Where is your leader?’
Adam stepped forward. ‘I am Kara Kush, in charge here.’
The Soviet officer saluted. ‘Captain Kurt Miskiny, 346th Division, with two hundred and fifteen men, lieutenants, ensigns, NCOs and privates, reporting, sir!’
‘Reporting? You mean surrendering, don’t you?’ Adam asked him.
‘Reporting for military duty, komondon!’
Adam looked at the line of vehicles, with the men sitting silently in them.
‘You are deserters, all of you?’
‘We are defectors, beg to report, sir!’
‘Are you all Russians?’
‘I am from Krasnovodsk. Most of the others are Russians, though we have several other Soviet nationalities, komondon.’
What a remarkable thing, Adam thought. Most of the Soviet soldiers captured at Kalantut field armoury, The Eagle’s first big exploit, had wanted to go home. These, however, were changing sides. There must have been quite a shift in the outlook of the occupation troops to make this happen.
He thought rapidly. ‘Captain Miskiny, you are most welcome, since as you will know we are likely to be attacked by tremendous tank forces before long. But you will understand that we have to guard against treachery. Come to my bunker.’
Adam led Miskiny to a culvert. Once inside, he said, ‘How do you propose that we can use you and your men most effectively?’
‘First,’ said the captain, ‘please tell your people to allow us to disperse our vehicles and cover them with their camouflage nets. Then I shall explain myself.’
When Adam had given the order, he continued. ‘We are a volunteer detachment, three companies. Two lieutenants and I have been planning this for months. Briefly, we found out which men from our regiment wanted to defect: then we informed them that we would organize it when opportunity offered. Their instructions were to volunteer for a special mission when we gave them a code-word. Then we did it!’