"The Afghan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Forsyth Frederick)

CHAPTER 5

The young Pashtun stared at the stranger. He did not seem to have understood what Nuri Khan had said.

“Is he Afghan?” he asked.

“No, he is Angleez.”

Izmat Khan was staggered. This was the old enemy. More, he was what the imam in the madrassah had condemned with constant venom. He must be kafir, an unbeliever, a Nasrani, a Christian, destined to burn for all eternity in hell. And he was to escort this man over a hundred miles of mountainside to a great valley in the north? To spend days and nights in his company? Yet his father was a good man, a good Muslim, and he had called him friend. How could this be? The Englishman tapped his forefingers lightly on his chest near the heart. “Salaam aleikhem, Izmat Khan,” he said. The father spoke no Arabic, even though there were now many Arab volunteers farther down the mountain range. The Arabs kept themselves to themselves, always digging, so there was no cause to mix with them and learn some of their language. But Izmat had read the Koran over and over again; it was written in Arabic only, and his imam had spoken only his native Saudi Arabic. Izmat had a good working knowledge. “Aleikhem as-salaam,” he acknowledged. “How do you call yourself?”

“Mike,” said the man.

“Ma-ick.” Izmat tried it. Strange name.

“Good, let us take tea,” said his father. They were sheltering in a cave mouth about ten miles from the wreckage of their hamlet. Farther inside the cave, a small fire glowed, too far inside to let a visible plume of smoke emerge to attract a Soviet aircraft.

“We will sleep here tonight. In the morning, you will go north. I go south to join Abdul Haq. There will be another operation against the Jalalabad-to- Kandahar road.”

They chewed on goat and nibbled rice cakes. Then they slept. Before dawn, the two heading north were roused, and left. Their journey led them through a maze of linking valleys where there would be some shelter. But between the valleys were mountain ridges, and the sides of the mountains had steep slopes covered in rock and shale but with little or no cover. It would be wise to scale these by moonlight and stay in the valleys by day.

Bad luck struck them on the second day out. To speed the rate of march, they had left night camp before dawn, and just after first light they found themselves forced to cross a large expanse of rock and shale to find cover on the next spine of hills. To wait would have meant hiding all day until nightfall. Izmat Khan urged that they cross in daylight. Halfway across the mountainside, they heard the growl of the gunship engines.

Both man and boy dived for the ground and lay motionless, but not in time. Over the crest ahead, menacing as a deadly dragonfly, came the Soviet Mi-24 D, known simply as the Hind. One of the pilots must have seen a flicker of movement or perhaps the glint of metal down there on the rock field, for the Hind turned from its course and headed toward them. The roar of the two Isotov engines grew in their ears, as did the unmistakable tacka-tacka-tacka of the main rotor blades.

With his head buried in his forearms, Mike Martin risked a quick glance. There was no doubt they had been spotted. The two Soviet pilots, sitting in their tandem seats, with the second above and behind the first, were staring straight at him as the Hind went into attack mode. To be caught in the open without cover by a helicopter gunship is every foot soldier’s nightmare. He glanced round. One hundred yards away was a single group of boulders; not as high as a man’s head, but just enough to shelter behind. With a yell to the Afghan boy, he was up and running, leaving his hundred-pound Bergen rucksack where it was but carrying one of the two tubes that had so intrigued his guide. He heard the running feet of the boy behind him, the roaring of his own blood in his ears and the matching snarl of the diving Hind. He would never have made the dash had he not seen something about the gunship that gave a flicker of hope. Its rocket pods were empty and it carried no underslung bombs. He gulped at the thin air, and hoped his guess was right. It was. Pilot Simonov and his copilot Grigoriev had been on a dawn patrol to harass a narrow valley where agents had reported that muj were hiding out. They had dropped their bombs from a higher altitude, then gone in lower to blast the rocky cleft with rockets. A number of goats had pelted from the crack in the mountains, indicating there had indeed been human life sheltering in there. Simonov had shredded the beasts with his 30mm cannon, using up most of the shells.

He had gone back to a safe altitude and was heading home to the Soviet base outside Jalalabad when Grigoriev had spotted a tiny movement on the mountainside below and to the port side. When he saw the figures start to run, he flicked his cannon to fire mode and dived. The two running figures far below were heading for a cluster of rocks. Simonov steadied the Hind at two thousand feet, watched the two figures hurl themselves into the rock cluster and fired. The twin barrels of the GSH cannon shuddered as the shells poured out, then stopped. Simonov swore as his ammunition ran out. He had used his cannon shells on goats, and here were muj to kill and he had none left. He lifted the nose and turned in a wide arc to avoid the mountain crest and the Hind clattered out over the valley.

Martin and Izmat Khan crouched behind their pitiable cluster of rocks. The Afghan boy watched as the Angleez rapidly opened his sheepskin case and extracted a short tube. He was vaguely aware that someone had punched him in the right thigh, but there was no pain. Just numbness. What the SAS man was assembling as fast as his fingers would work was one of the two Blowpipe missiles he was trying to bring to Shah Massoud in the Panjshir. It was not as good as the American Stinger, but more basic, lighter and simpler. Some surface-to-air missiles are guided to target by a ground-based radar “fix.” Others carry their own tiny radar set in the nose. Others emit their own infrared beam. These are the beam-riders. Others are heatseekers, whose nose cones “smell” the heat of the airplane’s own engines and home toward it. Blowpipe was much more basic than that; it was styled command to line of sight, or CLOS; and it meant the firer had to stand there and guide the rocket all the way to target by sending radio signals from a tiny control stick to the movable fins in the rocket’s head.

The disadvantage of the Blowpipe was always that to ask a man to stay still in the face of an attacking gunship was to secure a lot of dead operators. Martin pushed the two-stage missile into the launching tube, fired up the battery and the gyro, squinted through the sight and found the Hind coming straight back at him. He steadied the image in the sights and fired. With a whoosh of blazing gases, the rocket left the tube on his shoulder and headed blindly into the sky. Being completely nonautomatic, it now required his control to rise or drop, turn left or right. He estimated the range at fourteen hundred yards and closing fast. Simonov opened fire with his chain gun.

In the nose of the Hind, the four barrels hurling out a curtain of finger-sized machine-gun bullets began to turn. Then the Soviet pilot saw the tiny flickering flame of the Blowpipe coming toward him. It became a question of nerve. Bullets tore into the rocks, blowing away chunks of stone in all directions. It lasted two seconds, but at two thousand rounds per minute some seventy bullets hit the rocks before Simonov tried to evade and the bullet stream swept to one side.

It is proven that in a no-thought instinctive emergency a man will normally pull left. That is why driving on the left of the highway, though confined to very few countries, is actually safer. A panicking driver pulls off the road into the meadow rather than into a head-on collision. Simonov panicked and slewed the Hind to its left.

The Blowpipe had lost its first stage and was going supersonic. Martin tweaked the trajectory to his right just before Simonov swerved. It was a good guess. As it turned out, the Hind exposed its belly, and the warhead slammed into it. It was only just under five pounds weight, and the Hind is immensely strong. But even that size of warhead at a thousand miles per hour is a terrific punch. It cracked the base armor, entered and exploded.

Drenched with sweat on the icy mountainside, Martin saw the beast lurch with the impact, start to stream smoke and plunge toward the valley floor far below. When it impacted in the riverbed, the noise stopped. There was a silent peony of flame as the two Russians died, then a plume of dark smoke. That alone would bring attention from the Russians at Jalalabad. Harsh and long though the journey might be overland, it was only a few minutes for a Sukhoi ground-attack fighter.

“Let’s go,” he said in Arabic to his guide. The boy tried to rise but could not. Then Marin saw the smudge of blood on the side of his thigh. Without a word, he put down the reusable Blowpipe launch tube, went for his Bergen and brought it back.

He used his Ka-bar knife to slit the trouser leg of the shalwar kameez. The hole was neat and small, but it looked deep. If it came from one of the cannon shells, then it was only a fragment of casing, or maybe a splinter of rock, but he did not know how near the femoral artery it might be. He had trained at Hereford Accident and Emergency Ward, and his first-aid knowledge was good; but the side of an Afghan mountain with the Russians coming was no place for complex surgery.

“Are we going to die, Angleez?” asked the boy.

“Inshallah, not today, Izmat Khan. Not today,” he said. He faced a bad quandary. He needed his Bergen and everything in it. He could carry either the Bergen or the boy, not both.

“Do you know this mountain?” he asked as he rummaged for shell dressings.

“Of course,” said the Afghan.

“Then 1 must come back with another guide. You must tell him where to come. I will bury the bag and the rockets.”

He opened a flat steel box and took out a hypodermic syringe. The white-faced boy watched him.

So be it, thought Izmat Khan. If the infidel wishes to torture me. let him. 1 will utter no sound.

The Angleez pushed the needle into his thigh. He made no sound. Seconds later, as the morphine took effect, the agony in his thigh began to diminish. Encouraged, he tried to rise. The Englishman had produced a small, foldable trenching tool and was digging a furrow in the shale among the rocks. When he had done, he covered his Bergen and the two rocket tubes with stones until nothing could be seen. But he had memorized the shape of the cairn. If he could only be brought back to this mountainside, he could recover all his kit. The boy protested that he could walk, but Martin simply hoisted him over one shoulder and began to march. Being all skin and bone, muscle and sinew the Afghan weighed no more than the Bergen at about a hundred pounds. Still, heading upward into ever-thinner air and against gravity was not an option. He made course sideways across the scree and slowly downward to the valley. It turned out to be a wise choice.

Downed Soviet airplanes always attracted Pashtun eager to strip the wreck for whatever might be of use or value. The plume of smoke had not yet been spotted by the Soviets, and Simonov’s last transmission had been a final scream on which no one could get a bearing. But the smoke had attracted a small party of muj from another valley. They saw each other a thousand feet about the valley floor. Izmat Khan explained what had happened. The mountain men broke into delighted grins and started slapping the SAS man on the back. He insisted his guide needed help and not just a bowl of tea in some chaikhana in the hills. He needed transportation and a surgical hospital. One of the muj knew a man with a mule, only two valleys away. He went to get him. It took until nightfall. Martin administered a second shot of morphine.

With a fresh guide and Izmat Khan on a mule at last, they marched through the night, just three of them, until in the dawn they came to the southern side of the Spin Gahr and the guide stopped. He pointed ahead. “Jaji,” he said. “Arabs.”

He also wanted his mule back. Martin carried the boy the last two miles. Jaji was a complex of five hundred caves, and the so-called Afghan-Arabs had been working on them for three years, broadening, deepening, excavating and equipping them into a major guerrilla base. Though Martin did not know it, inside the complex were barracks, a mosque, a library of religious texts, kitchens, stores and a fully equipped surgical hospital.

As he approached, Martin was intercepted by the outer ring of guards. It was clear what he was doing: He had a wounded man on his back. The guards discussed among themselves what to do with the pair, and Martin recognized the Arabic of North Africa. They were interrupted by the arrival of a senior man who spoke like a Saudi. Martin understood everything but thought it unwise to utter a word. With sign language, he indicated his friend needed emergency surgery. The Saudi nodded, beckoned and led the way.

Izmat Khan was operated on within an hour. A vicious fragment of cannon casing was extracted from the leg.

Martin waited until the lad woke up. He squatted, local style, in the shadows at the corner of the ward, and no one took him for anything other than a Pashtun mountain man who had brought in his friend.

An hour later, two men entered the ward. One was very tall, youthful, bearded. He wore a camouflage combat jacket over Arab robes and a white headdress. The other was short, tubby, also no more than midthirties, with a button nose and round glasses perched on the end of it. He wore a surgical smock. After examining two of their own number, the pair came to the Afghan. The tall man spoke in Saudi Arabic.

“And how is our young Afghan fighter feeling?”

“lnshallah, I am much better. Sheikh.” Izmat spoke back in Arabic, and gave the older man a title of reverence. The tall man was pleased. “Ah, you speak Arabic, and still so young.” He smiled.

“I was seven years in a madrassah at Peshawar. I returned last year to fight.”

“And who do you fight for, my son?”

“I fight for Afghanistan,” said the boy.

Something like a cloud passed across the features of the Saudi. The Afghan realized he might not have said what was wanted. “And I also fight for Allah, Sheikh,” he added. The cloud cleared, and the gentle smile came back. The Saudi leaned forward and patted the youth on the shoulder.

“The day will come when Afghanistan will no longer have need of you, but the all-merciful Allah will always have need of a warrior like you. Now, how is our young friend’s wound healing?” He addressed the question to the Pickwickian doctor.

“Let us see,” said the doctor, and peeled back the dressing. The wound was clean, bruised round the edges but closed by six stitches and not infected. He tutted his satisfaction and redressed the suture. “You will be walking in a week,” said Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri. Then he and Osama bin Laden left the ward. No one took any notice of the sweat-stained muj squatting in the corner with his head on his knees as if asleep.

Martin rose and crossed to the youth on the bed. “I must go,” he said. “The Arabs will look after you. I will seek to find your father and ask for a fresh guide. Go with Allah, my friend.”

“Be careful, Ma-ick,” said the boy. “These Arabs are not like us. You are kafir, unbeliever. They are like the Imam in my madrassah. They hate all infidel.” “Then I would be grateful if you would not tell them who I was,” said the Englishman.

Izmat Khan closed his eyes. He would die under torment rather than betray his new friend. It was the code. When he opened his eyes, the Angleez was gone. He heard later the man had reached Shah Massoud in the Panjshir, but he never saw him again.

After his six months behind the Soviet lines in Afghanistan, Mike Martin made it home via Pakistan, unspotted and with fluent Pashto added to his armory. He was sent on leave, remustered into the Army and, being still in service with the SAS, was posted to Northern Ireland again. But this time it was different. The SAS were the men who really terrified the IRA, and to kill, or, better still, capture alive, torture and kill what they called a Sass-man, was the IRA’s greatest dream. Mike Martin found himself working with the 14^th Intelligence Company, known as “the Detachment,” or “the Det.” These were the watchers, the trackers, the eavesdroppers. Their job was to be so stealthy as never to be seen, but to find out where the IRA killers would strike next. To do this, they performed some remarkable feats. IRA leaders’ houses were penetrated via the roof tiles and bugged from the attic downward. Bugs were placed in dead IRA men’s coffins, for it was the habit of the godfathers to hold conferences while pretending to pay their respects to the casket. Long-range cameras caught images of moving mouths, and lip-readers deciphered the words. Rifle-mikes recorded conversations through closed windows. When the Det had a real gem, they passed it to the hard men. The rules of engagement were strict. The IRA men had to fire first, and they had to fire at the SAS. If they threw down their guns at the challenge, they had to be taken prisoner. Before firing, both SAS and Paras had to be immensely careful. It is a recent tradition of British politicians and lawyers that Britain ’s enemies have civil rights but her soldiers do not. Notwithstanding, in the eighteen months Martin spent as an SAS captain in Ulster he participated in the dark-of-night ambushes. In each, a party of armed IRA men was caught by surprise and challenged. Each time they were foolish enough to draw and point weapons. Each time, it was the Royal Ulster Constabulary that found the bodies in the morning.

But it was in the second shoot-out that Martin took his bullet. He was lucky. It was a flesh wound in the left bicep, but enough to see him flown home and sent for convalescence at Headley Court, Leatherhead. That was where he met the nurse, Lucinda, who was to become his wife after a brief courtship. Reverting to the Paras in the spring of 1990, Mike Martin was posted to the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall, London. Having set up home in a rented cottage near Chobham so that Lucinda could continue her career, Martin found himself for the first time a commuter in a dark suit on the morning train to London. He ranked as a Staff Officer 3, and worked in the office of MOSP, the Military Operations, Special Projects Unit. Once again, it was to be a foreign aggressor who would get him out of there.

On August 2 that year, Saddam Hussein of Iraq invaded neighboring Kuwait. Once again, Margaret Thatcher would have none of it, and U.S. president George H. W. Bush concurred. Within a week, plans were in furious preparation to create a multinational coalition to counterinvade and free the oil-rich ministate. Even though the MOSP office was at full stretch, the reach and influence of the Secret Intelligence Service was enough to trace him and “suggest” he join a few of the “friends” for lunch.

It was a discreet club on St. James’s Street, and his hosts were two senior men from the Firm. Also at the table was a Jordanian-born, British-naturalized analyst brought in from GCQH at Cheltenham. His job there was to listen to and analyze eavesdropped radio chatter inside the Arab world. But his role at the lunch table was different.

He conversed with Mike Martin in rapid Arabic, and Martin replied. Finally, he nodded at the two spooks from Century House. “I’ve never heard anything like it,” he remarked. “With that face and voice, he can pass.” With that, the man left the table, clearly having performed his function. “We would be so damnably grateful,” said the senior mandarin, “if you would go into Kuwait and see what is going on there.”

“What about the Army?” asked Martin.

“I think they will see our point of view,” murmured the other. The Army grumbled again but let him go. Weeks later, passing himself as a Bedouin camel drover, Martin slipped over the Saudi border into Iraqi-occupied Kuwait. On the plod north to Kuwait City, he passed several Iraqi patrols but they took no notice of the bearded nomad leading two camels to market. The Bedouin are so determinedly nonpolitical that they have for millennia watched the invaders sweep hither and thither through Arabia and never intervened. So the invaders have mostly let them be.

In several weeks inside Kuwait, Martin contacted and assisted the fledgling Kuwaiti resistance, taught them the tricks of the trade, plotted the Iraqi positions, strong points and weaknesses, and then came out again. His second incursion during the Gulf War was into Iraq itself. He went over the Saudi border in the west and simply caught an Iraqi bus heading for Baghdad. His cover was a simple peasant clutching a wicker basket of hens. Back in a city he knew intimately, he took a position as a gardener in a wealthy villa, living in a shack at the end of the garden. His mission was to act as message collector and passer; for this, he had a small, foldable, parabolic dish aerial whose “blitz” messages were un-interceptable by the Iraqi secret police but which could reach Riyadh.

One of the best-kept secrets of that war was that the Firm had a source, an “asset” high in Saddam’s government. Martin never met him; he just picked up the messages at preagreed dead-letter boxes, or “drops,” and sent them to Saudi Arabia, where the American-led Coalition HQ was both appreciative and mystified. Saddam capitulated on 28 February 1991, and Mike Martin came out, only to be Very nearly shot by the French Foreign Legion as he came through the border in the dark.

On the morning of 15 February 1989, General Boris Gromov, commander of the Soviet 40^th Army, the army of occupation in Afghanistan, walked alone back across the Friendship Bridge over the Amu Darya River into Soviet Uzbekistan. His entire army had preceded him. The war was over.

The euphoria did not last long. The USSR ’s own Vietnam had ended in disaster. Her restive European satellites were becoming openly mutinous, and her economy was disintegrating. By November, the Berliners had torn down the wall, and the Soviet empire simply fell apart.

In Afghanistan, the Soviets had left behind a government that most analysts predicted would last no time as the victorious warlords formed a stable government and took over. But the pundits were wrong. The government of President Najibullah, the whiskey-appreciating Afghan the Soviets had abandoned in Kabul, hung on for two reasons. One was that the Afghan Army was simply stronger than any other force in the country, backed as it was by the KHAD secret police, and was able to control the cities and thus the bulk of the population.

More to the point, the warlords simply disintegrated into a patchwork quilt of snarling, grabbing, feuding, self-serving opportunists who, far from uniting to form a stable government, did the reverse: They created a civil war. None of this affected Izmat Khan. With his father still head of the family, although stiff and old before his time, and with the help of neighbors, he helped rebuild the hamlet of Maloko-zai. Stone by stone and rock by rock, they cleared the rubble left by the bombs and rockets and remade the family compound next to the mulberry and pomegranate trees.

With his leg fully healed, he had returned to the war and taken command of his father’s lashkar in all but name, and the men had followed him, for he had been blooded. When peace came, his guerrilla group seized a huge cache of weapons the Soviets could not be bothered to carry home.

These they took over the Spin Gahr to Parachinar in Pakistan, a town that is virtually nothing but an arms bazaar. There they traded the Soviet leftovers for cows, goats and sheep to restart the flocks.

If life had been hard before, starting over was even harder, but he enjoyed the labor, and the sense of triumph that Maloko-zai would live again. A man must have roots, and his were here. At twenty, he both uttered the call and led the prayers at the village mosque on a Friday.

The Kuchi nomads passing through brought grim tales from the plains. The Army of the DRA, loyal to Najibullah, still held the cities, but the warlords infested the countryside and they and their men behaved liked brigands. Tolls were arbitrarily set up on main roads, and travelers were stripped of their money and goods or badly beaten.

Pakistan, in the form of its ISI Directorate, was backing Hekmat-yar to become controller of all Afghanistan, and in areas he ruled utter terror existed. All who had formed the Peshawar 7 to fight the Soviets were now at each other’s throats, and the people groaned. From heroes, the muj were now seen as tyrants. Izmat Khan thanked the merciful Allah that he was spared the misery of the plains.

With the end of the war, the Arabs had almost all gone from the mountains and their precious caves. The one who by the end had become their uncrowned leader, the tall Saudi from the cave hospital was also gone. Some five hundred Arabs had stayed behind, but they were not popular, were scattered far and wide and living like beggars.

When he was twenty, Izmat Khan was visiting a neighboring valley when he saw a girl washing the family clothes in the stream. She failed to hear his horse because of the sound of the running water, and before she could draw the end of her hejab across her face he had made eye contact. She fled in alarm and embarrassment. But he had seen that she was beautiful. Izmat did what any young man would have. He consulted his mother. She was delighted, and soon two aunts had joined with her in happy conspiracy to find the girl and persuade Nuri Khan to contact the father to arrange a union. Her name was Maryam, and the wedding took place in the late spring of 1993. Of course, it was in the open air, full of blossoms being blown off the walnut trees. There was a feast, and the bride came from her village on a decorated horse. There was playing of the flutes and attan dancing under the trees, but of course only for the men. With his madrassah training, Izmat protested at the singing and dancing, but his father was rejuvenated and overruled him. So for a day, Izmat rejected his strict Wahhabi training, and he, too, danced in the meadow, and the eyes of his bride followed him everywhere. The delay between the first glimpse by the stream and the marriage was necessary, both to arrange the details of the dowry and to build a new house for the newlyweds inside the Khan compound. It was here that he took his bride when night had fallen and the exhausted villagers returned home, and his mother forty yards away nodded in satisfaction when a single girl’s cry in the night told her that her daughter-in-law had become a woman. Three months later, it was clear she would bear a child in the snows of February. As Maryam carried Izmat’s child, the Arabs came back. The tall Saudi who led them was not among them; he was somewhere far away called Sudan. But he sent much money, and by paying tribute to the warlords was able to set up training camps. Here, at Khalid ibn Walid, Al Farouk, Sadeek, Khaldan, Jihad Wai and Darunta, the thousands of new volunteers from across the Arabic-speaking world came to train for war.

But what war? So far as Izmat Khan could see, they took no sides in the civil war among the tribal satraps, so who were they training to fight? He learned that it was all because the tall one, whom his followers called the Emir, had declared jihad against his own government in Saudi Arabia and against the West. But Izmat Khan had no quarrel with the West. The West had helped with arms and money to defeat the Soviets, and the only kafir he had ever met had saved his life. It was not his holy war, not his jihad, he decided. His concern was for his country whose situation was devolving into madness.