Before the colonel could answer, Tarik had ripped open the canvas curtain of the mobile command post. The colonel threw down the microphone and jumped up, his Makarov handgun at the ready.
Tarik shot him dead, and wrecked the radio set with his rifle butt.
As he rushed from the vehicle, the rocket batteries were beginning to go up.
The attack group reached the cover of the rocks before any Russian unit could decide what had happened, let alone make any response.
Hearing the tremendous roar, Adam, sitting in his bunker, briefly wished that he was a nail biter. That might have given him some relief from the grinding in his stomach. Would he ever see the suicide group again?
Half an hour later, Captains Tarik and Miskiny ran up, saluting, with their ‘Mission a hundred per cent accomplished, Kara Kush!’
The Eagle clapped them on the back. ‘Well done, well done!’ He was about to ask details, when a runner came up with a message from Azambai, in charge of intelligence. ‘Kara Kush, the Russians have set up a field command post six hundred yards from our frontline position. It’s located on top of the airport water-tower and will be hard to dislodge.’
‘What’s it there for?’
‘Artillery observation. They’ve a radio transmitter. They’ll be sure to use it for spotting, to direct howitzer fire, the captain thinks.’
Adam turned to Captain Tarik. ‘Does that mean they’re bringing up guns?’
‘I’d say so, sir. Probably a battery of four one hundred and twenty-two millimetre field howitzers. They have high-explosive, as well as chemical shells.’ Tarik looked worried. ‘They have a range of nearly ten miles.’
‘So they’ll send over ranging shots, and have them corrected by the spotters on the water-tower?’
‘That’s right. We can get a group ready to demolish the tower, but they might get some shells into us first. I could send some men to try to locate the guns as well. But in the meantime …’
‘In the meantime we take a lot of casualties.’
‘The howitzers are deadly.’
The Eagle said, ‘Right. Attacks, as soon as possible, on both tower and guns.’
Azambai had brought out his Soviet Army radio, and was spinning the dials. Suddenly he gave a thumbs-up sign. ‘Adam, I’ve got the signals from the water tower spotters. They are arranging code-signals. Their call-sign is pirazhuk,“small pie”.’
‘How’s that going to help us?’
‘We take over if the tower goes up.’
‘Yes, if the howitzers don’t start first, then ask for ranging directions.’
Tensely the two men waited. Five minutes, ten, twenty.
Had the attack group reached the tower? Adam was going to send a man to find out, when the Tarik appeared, as if from nowhere, and squatted down beside him. ‘Finished.’
‘Finished?’
‘The tower is down. Hardly a sound. We knifed the guards and put explosive charges on the supporting struts. There’s no spotter left.’
Azambai grinned, and turned to his radio.
‘Pirazhuk calling Ananas …’
He paused, listened, and then grinned. ‘Report your artillery capability. Yes. I repeat, four howitzers. Good. Now, battalion, obey only my signals. Division here. We have a special unit reporting from the front line. Yes, airborne. That’s why you don’t know them, yes, they’re right among the bandits. You mustn’t fire without my signal, or you’ll wipe out our own forward units. Understood? Yes, good. Never mind my rank and location! Do you think I’m an Afghan savage talking to you? Of course not! I’ve taken over “Small Pie”. Stand by for divisional firing orders …Small Pie out.’
Azambai turned to the others. ‘This should give our people time to sneak up on them. In the meantime I’ll get them to use up some ammunition and keep them busy so that they’ll make a better target for the storm-party.’
He flicked a switch.
‘Small Pie to Ananas. I shall now give you traverse and elevation …’ His voice droned on, almost hypnotically. ‘Prepare to fire ranging shots airport direction, all four howitzers, rapid fire, semi-automatic operation.’
He gave the range and stipulated high-explosive shells.
Then: ‘Ananas, countdown: five, four, three, two, FIRE!’
From a distance of three-quarters of a mile The Eagle and his men first saw the flashes, then heard the whirling roar, as if four express trains were passing above them, and then saw the crash like thunder as the forty-eight pound shells exploded, far beyond their position. They threw up great geysers of black dust, as they carved huge craters in the tarmac, well within the airport perimeter.
Adam cheered, while Azambai calmly touched the switch to transmit and reported, ‘Good shot, Ananas! Now increase range by thirty metres and raise elevation twelve degrees.’
He turned to the others. ‘I’m going to try to get them to blot out some of the administrative buildings.’
Three more salvoes and several of the airport buildings were reduced to twisted girders and a pile of dust.
Adam clapped Azambai on the back. ‘Yusuf, you’re completely crazy! Using the enemy’s artillery to shell his own strong point!’
‘If I were not so modest,’ said Azambai, ‘I’d quote you the Pashtu proverb that’s current hereabouts. About right action as an art.’
Then the guns stopped. ‘What’s up?’ Adam asked; ‘I suppose they’re onto us …’
Azambai whipped off his earphones. ‘Not on your life! They’re screaming blue murder. Our lads have got to them and the howitzer radioman tells me they’ve killed at least twenty of the twenty-eight men operating those guns. Now they’ll spike them, and I don’t suppose they’ll bother us any more …’
‘Let’s change the old proverb,’ said Adam, ‘from “A ruse is worth a tribe” to “A ruse is worth almost anything”.’
‘Less succinct,’ said Azambai; ‘but I admit it’s more accurate. Like those Russian gunners. They’re certainly well trained, excellent shots. I wonder how many of their own people they killed in the airport?’
Even deprived of their rockets and heavy artillery, the Russians were sure to attack again. Soviet military texts, rigidly adhered to at all times, harped on the necessity of attacking and ‘dealing crushing blows’, using every man and every machine available. They still had their infantry, and their battle-tanks, and they had a schedule to fulfil. Adam knew that, short of an order from Moscow, the Russians would be upon his men within minutes.
It was indeed only minutes after the destruction of their guns that the Soviet tank commander made his move. Two formations of guerrilla advance guards, rolled back by the tremendous pace of the Russian armour, came running from their advanced positions. The T-62s, all three hundred of them, with infantry following, had left their start-points in massed formation, dead on time and at full speed.
3 The Tanks must not get through
1436 hours
The huge, squat, low-profiled tanks came on, grinding and clanking, at thirty miles an hour. Smoke, fragmentation shells and super-high-explosive missiles poured from the long snouts of the 115-millimetre smooth-bore guns.
The shells dug deep into the sand, reaching the hard rock below, exploding and then throwing up millions of murderous rock-chips. Or, when the gun was set for a higher trajectory, the deadly cargoes spread far and wide from the air-bursts. First came the roar, then the explosion, a sound which rang like a demonic bell through the head and screamed in the ears, on and on, until men thought that they must soon go raving mad.
Rising to face the tanks, from shallow holes scooped in the sand, the guerrillas threw their grenades; sometimes at the tracks – sometimes at the fuel tanks, sometimes just below the rounded, flattened turrets, where the rivetting had made the armour-plating marginally weaker than elsewhere.
One grenade, lobbed at the main gun of an attacking tank, went straight into its mouth, rolled down and exploded just as it struck the HE shell which the gunner had slammed i
nto the breech a moment before. The tank went up like a single bomb. Jabir Khan, whose triumph this had been, repeated the performance three times before he was cut down by machine-gun fire. Few heard or understood his cry of ‘Howzat?’ as he did it. He had played cricket for his university when he was studying in Pakistan.
Hundreds of Muhjahidin, unable to get out of the way in time, were crushed to death under the relentless caterpillar tracks. Some discovered that if they lay flat, exactly between the broad tracks, the machine would run over them and they would be unharmed.
Many were blown to pieces where they stood, when they miscalculated the power of their own grenades: or were torn in half by the bullets from the two heavy machine-guns on each tank, whipping among them in a blazing lash of fire. Those guerrillas who lacked training or combat experience were most often the ones who died.
The Russian crews, too, suffered terribly. The modern tanks of the USSR, like the old Churchills, Tigers and Shermans, were little better than death-traps in a fiercely fought battle. Although most of their Warsaw Pact allies had already given up the T-62s, the Russians, relying upon enormous quantities of expendable crews, still favoured them. The Afghans, using at best, grenades, a few heavy Dashka machine-guns and one or two captured Russian AA guns, clearly demonstrated how obsolete the T-62 had become. Even updated with laser firing, with schnorkel tubes and improved guns, these machines would be sitting ducks for the powerful rocketry or air assault capability of any modern army.
When a tank was hit, flames spurted from the 1,000 litres of diesel fuel, then came the blaze of the thick lubricating oil, then the hell of the exploding shells inside. Glowing red-hot, the tank exploded, torn to shreds, almost as easily, it seemed, as if it had been a tin can.
So fierce were the flames, so rapid their spread, that the crew often could not get the turret or escape hatch open in time to get out. Sometimes, in any case, either or both had been hit and buckled by a shell, a rocket or a bomb. Sometimes, as the guerrillas stopped their firing to fall flat on the ground, they would see orange fire belching, at first from the gun-ports, then from holes punched by continual explosions of some of the two or three hundred shells still stored inside.
Long after a tank’s crew were dead, the thick, black oily smoke would rise, slowly, into the sky, finally to be joined by the acrid smell of burning rubber and the stench of roasted flesh.
Usually, when they did get out, the men would soon be picked off by the guerrilla marksmen or killed by the indiscriminate fire of their own side.
Those few who did escape from the wrecked T-62s that day were often shocked and deafened, wounded, burned. Weeping, raving, arms flailing, they staggered about in the choking clouds of smoke and the yellow-red dust churned up by the explosions and the tank-tracks.
Some lay down and sobbed, others screamed, again and again, ‘pomash!’ – seeking a medical orderly who was not there. Most of them would die in minutes, in any case, from the most terrible wounds.
A few, but very few, having snatched up grenades or automatic carbines before they jumped from their crippled chariots, fought the Afghans like furies, leaping and whirling in the fountains of sand and showers of sparks, unknowing, uncaring whether this was life or death, whether or not they were in a nightmare or had gone completely mad.
These men, ‘beetles’ as the Afghans called them, from their black, shiny combat suits and ribbed, cowl-like padded canvas helmets, were roaring from the combined effect of the half-bottle of vodka which they were issued, and the fenamin, amphetamine tablets, which each tank carried.
Military doctrine, as taught in every country in the world, held that infantry could not fight tanks. Yet out of the three hundred, one hundred and twenty of the T-62s were totally destroyed or on fire. The rest, sound or damaged, turned tail. Fifteen hundred guerrillas lay dead, a thousand or more were wounded. In Afghanistan, reversing the usual ratio, there were more fighters killed than there were wounded, in almost every action.
The supporting Soviet infantry now came in. Wave after wave of them, fresh and well-armed, hurling grenades and firing the latest assault rifles, were slaughtered by the Muhjahidin. Without the protection of the tanks, they had no hope. In twenty minutes the attack was abandoned.
BOOK 15
Zoo-Bear
During the Russians’ invasion of Afghanistan they were first thought to have pulled off a masterful land operation. Soon afterwards first-person reports began to surface, indicating that they had misinterpreted their intelligence data on the Afghans. Over-optimism, a common problem with intelligence gathering, caused the Russians to go on charging into combat situations in which they found themselves more disadvantaged than their analysis had predicted. They are still trying to analyse, or fight, their way out of Afghanistan.
James F. Dunnigan:
How to Make War
The Super-Redeyes
Almas Fort
The heights near
Kandahar Airport
1600 HOURS
Colonel Farran, his unit safely laagered in the sprawling ruins of Almas Fort, two miles west of Kandahar Airport, lay stretched out like a lizard in the heat of the desert afternoon. His orders at the Pentagon briefing had been unequivocal, precise. ‘Destroy the surface-skimmers. We have to show the Soviets that they are vulnerable. But on no account, repeat, no account, are you to engage Russian troops.’
Easier said than done, Farran thought. His men had been in concealment here for a day, watching since the dark before dawn, a spectacle of attack and counter-attack, of classic tank assault beaten back by a hoard of Afghan warriors. Fingers itching on triggers, they had seen blood, fire, death and destruction. Even nature, with the raging Black Wind, had shown its fury.
But they had not been able to get near the skimmers, shielded so resolutely by Russian defenders that they had not left their task even to help repulse the Afghans when the airport seemed on the point of being overrun.
Farran stiffened. There was a flurry of sudden activity around the mass of great ships. Preparations were being made for takeoff. If the transports got away, the mission would be a failure, like the disastrous one in the deserts of Iran, trying to rescue the American hostages held by Khomeini’s men. Black smoke rose from sixty huge exhaust vents as the final engine testing began.
The mission might be only minutes away from failure. Sixteen hundred hours. Farran cursed. If it hadn’t been for those crazy Afghan guerrillas, whom he hadn’t even been able to help, the Ekranoplans would be destroyed by now, and he would be on his way home.
Farran’s thoughts drifted back to the landing of the Lockheed C-5 Galaxies of Airlift Command, on the hard-packed sand of Baluchistan, three hundred miles to the south, less than eight hours before. Then the decanting of the ten loaded heavy trucks and their dash across the godforsaken wilderness to this spot, with the skimmers sitting almost within reach. Before that, the flight from Arizona to the Arabian Sea, at more than five hundred miles an hour: the magic carpet from the Special Training Camp. Every man a volunteer, knowing little more than that Uncle Sam wanted them ‘to help save freedom’. Men of Afghan or other Central Asian descent, the sons of immigrants.
Zubeir (‘pronounce it “Zoo-Bear”’) Farran was one of the few regular soldiers among them: but at the camp they had had three months of the toughest training America could offer. The CIA had discovered that the skimmers would be used to extend the Soviet empire by rushing in thousands of troops to support coups like the Afghan one, where a handful of determined communists could seize temporary power – almost anywhere.
Kill the Ekranoplans, don’t tangle with the Russians. And afterwards? ‘You will be evacuated by appropriate United States transportation from the Arabian Sea coast.’
Kill the Ekranoplans …
In the Muhjahid camp, Adam, Pendergood and the other leaders ran from the caravan at the sentry’s shout. Shielding their eyes against the setting sun, they saw the thirty great ships, black and menacing, belching smoke, th
eir multiple jets roaring, rise slowly to operational height.
They looked at one another, helplessly. No AA shells left: and the craft were now too far away to be reached by Dashka fire. The greatest fortune in the world, floating away.
Adam shook his head. The gold was on its way to Russia: the Soviets had won. Unless there was a miracle.
At Almas Fort, Colonel Farran raised his arm and jerked it down. Then, as each group, guerrillas and Americans, unknown to each other, watched, the very sky seemed to explode.
The American Super-Redeye missiles, streaking within seconds to a thousand feet, locked onto the skimmers’ engine-heat and struck, a millisecond apart. Each fearsome weapon tore into the vitals of its victim, the explosion of the fuel turning the belly of the monster into a volcano.
Some of the stricken machines lumbered out of control, spewing liquid fire; men fell like broken dolls, amid the showers of glittering coins which, themselves counterfeiting sunbursts, obscured the sun.
The Ekranoplans were dead.
Halzun, watching the takeoff in Moscow on the television monitor linked to the geostationary satellite above the scene, clutched his head in his hands as the holocaust unfolded before his eyes. Total annihilation, catastrophe, defeat. For a long moment he sat stockstill, head bowed. Then he sat back in his chair. No billions to compete with the West. But the War faction’s power was wiped out as the skimmers had so unaccountably been. Halzun was Chairman, and would soon be declared President, of the USSR. Half a loaf was better than no bread.
Colonel Farran’s truck screeched to a halt at the Muhjahid command post, and the Colonel, in full guerrilla kit, jumped down and called out in Dari, ‘Who’s your commander?’
Adam held out his hand. ‘Welcome, Ghazi, hero,’ he said, ‘but who are you, where are you from?’
‘Just some guys who couldn’t let the old country down,’ said Farran. ‘Sorry we can’t wait. We’ve got to meet some guys down at the Arabian Sea.’