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

CHAPTER 6

The Parachute Regiment accepted him back and asked no questions, because that was what it was told to do, but he was already acquiring a reputation as a bit of an oddity. Two unexplained absences from duty, each for six months, inside four years, causes raised eyebrows over breakfast in any military unit. For 1992, he was sent to the Staff College at Camberley, and thence back to the ministry, but as a major.

This time, it was to the Directorate of Military Operations again, but as a Staff Officer 2 in Department 3, the Balkans. The war was still raging, the Serbs under Milosevic were dominant, and the world was sickened by the massacres known as “ethnic cleansing.” Chafing at the lack of any chance of action, he spent two years commuting in a dark suit from the suburbs to London. Officers who have served in the SAS can return for a second tour, but only by invitation. Mike Martin got his call from Hereford at the end of 1994. It was the Christmas present he had been hoping for. But it did not please Lucinda. There had been no baby; there were two careers heading in different directions. Lucinda had been offered a big promotion. She called it “the chance of a lifetime,” but it meant going to work in the Midlands. The marriage was under strain, and Mike Martin’s orders were to command B Squadron, twenty-two SAS, and take them covertly to Bosnia. Ostensibly, they would be part of the United Nations’ UNPROFOR peacekeeping mission. In fact, they would hunt down and snatch war criminals. He was not allowed to tell Lucinda the details, only that he was leaving again.

It was the last straw. She presumed it was a transfer back to Arabia, and she quite properly put to him an ultimatum: You can have the Paras, the SAS and your bloody desert or you can come to Birmingham and have a marriage. He thought it over and chose the desert.

Outside the seclusion of the high valleys of the White Mountains, his old party leader, Younis Khalis, died, and the Hizb Islami Party was then wholly in the control of Hekmatyar, whose reputation for cruelty Izmat loathed. By the time Izmat’s baby was born in February 1994, President Najibullah had fallen but was alive, confined to a UN guesthouse in Kabul. He had supposedly been succeeded by Professor Rabbani, but he was a Tajik and so not acceptable to the Pashtun. Outside Kabul, only the warlords ruled their domains, but the real master was chaos and anarchy.

But something else was also happening. After the Soviet war, thousands of young Afghans had gone back to the Pakistani madras-sahs to complete their educations. Others, too young to have fought at all, went over the border to achieve an education-any education.

What they got was years of Wahhabi brainwashing. Now they were coming back, but they were different from Izmat Khan.

Because the old Younis Khalis, though ultradevout, had possessed some residual moderation in him, his madrassahs in the refugee camps had taught Islam with a hint of temperance. Others concentrated only on the ultra-aggressive passages from the Sword Verses to be found in holy Koran. And old Nuri Khan, thought devout also, was humane, and saw no harm in singing, dancing, sports and some tolerance of others.

The returnees were ill educated, having been taught by barely literate imams. They knew nothing of life, of women-most lived and died virgins-or even of their own tribal cultures, as Izmat had learned from his father. Apart from the Koran, they knew only one other thing: war. Most came from the deep south, where Islam had always been the most strict in all of Afghanistan. In the summer of 1994, Izmat Khan and a cousin left the upland valley for Jalalabad. It was a short visit, but long enough to witness the savage massacre inflicted by the followers of Hekmatyar on a village that had finally refused to pay him any more tribute money. The two travelers found the menfolk tortured and slain, the women beaten, the village torched. Izmat Khan was disgusted. In Jalalabad, he learned what he had seen was quite commonplace. Then something happened in the deep south. Since the fall of any semblance of a central government, the old official Afghan Army had simply reassigned itself to the local warlord who paid the best. Outside Kandahar, some soldiers took two teenage girls back to their camp and gang-raped them. The local preacher in the village where they came, who also ran his own religious school, went to the Army camp with thirty students and sixteen rifles. Against the odds, they trounced the soldiers, and hanged the commandant from the barrel of a tank gun. The priest was called Mohammad Omar, or Mullah Omar. He had lost his right eye in battle.

The news spread. Others appealed to him for help. He and his group swelled in numbers, and responded to the appeals. They took no money, they raped no women, they stole no crops, they asked no reward. They became local heroes. By December 1994, twelve thousand had joined them, adopting this mullah’s black turban. They called themselves the students. In Pashto, “student” is talib, and the plural is taliban. From village vigilantes, they became a movement, and when they captured the city of Kandahar, an alternative government. Pakistan, through its forever-plotting ISI, had been trying to topple the Tajik in Kabul by backing Hekmatyar, but he had failed repeatedly. As the ISI was deeply infiltrated by ultraorthodox Muslims, Pakistan switched support to the Taliban. With Kandahar, the new movement inherited a huge cache of arms, plus tanks, armored cars, trucks, guns, six MiG-2l ex-Soviet fighters and six heavy helicopters. They began to sweep north. In 1995, Izmat Khan embraced his wife, kissed his baby farewell and then came down from the mountains to join them. Later, on the floor of a cell in Cuba, he would recall that the days on the upland farm with his wife and child had been the happiest days of his life. He was twenty-three.

Too late, he learned there was a dark side to the Taliban. In Kandahar, even though the Pashtun had been devout before, they were subjected to the harshest regimen the world of Islam has ever seen.

All girls’ schools were closed at once. Women were forbidden to leave the house save in company of a male relative. The all-enveloping burqa robe was decreed at all times; the clacking of female sandals on tiles was decreed forbidden as being too sexy.

All singing, dancing, the playing of music, sports and kite flying-a national pastime-was forbidden. Prayers were to be said the required five times a day. Beards on men were compulsory. The enforcers were often teenage fanatics in their black turbans, taught only the Sword Verses, cruelty and war. From liberators they became the new tyrants, but the advance became unstoppable. Their mission was to destroy the rule of the warlords, and as these were well hated by the people, the people acquiesced to the new strictness. At least there was law, order, no more corruption, no more rape, no more crime; just fanatic orthodoxy.

Mullah Omar was a warrior-priest but nothing more. Having started his revolution by hanging a rapist from a gun barrel, he withdrew into seclusion in his southern fortress, Kandahar. His followers were like something out of the Middle Ages, and among the many things they could not recognize was fear. They worshipped the one-eyed mullah behind his walls, and before the Taliban fell eighty thousand would die for him. Far away in Sudan, the tall Saudi who controlled the twenty thousand Arabs now based in Afghanistan watched and waited.

Izmat Khan joined a lashkar of men drawn from his own province, Nangarhar. He was quickly respected because he was mature, had fought the Russians and been wounded.

The Taliban arm was no real army; it had no commanding general, no general staff, no officer corps, no ranks and no infrastructure. Each lashkar was semi-independent under its tribal leader, who often held sway through personality and courage in combat, plus religious devotion. Like the original Muslim warriors of the first caliphates, they swept their enemies aside by fanatical courage, which gave rise to a reputation for invincibility-so much so that opponents often capitulated without a shot fired. When they finally ran into real soldiers, the forces of the charismatic Tajik Shah Massoud, they took unspeakable losses. They had no medical corps, so their wounded just died by the roadside. But still, they came on.

At the gates of Kabul, they negotiated with Massoud, but he refused to accept their terms and withdrew to his own northern mountains, whence he had fought and defied the Russians. So began the next civil war, between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance of Massoud, the Tajik, and Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek. It was 1996. Only Pakistan, who had organized it, and Saudi Arabia, who paid for it, recognized the new, weird government of Afghanistan. For Izmat Khan, the die was cast. His old ally Shah Massoud was now his enemy. Far to the south, an airplane landed. It brought back the tall Saudi who had spoken to him eight years earlier in a cave at Jaji and the chubby doctor who had pulled a chunk of Soviet steel from his leg. Both men paid immediate obeisance to Mullah Omar, paying huge tribute in money and equipment, and thus securing his lifelong loyalty.

After Kabul, there was a pause in the war. Almost the first act of the Taliban in Kabul was to drag the toppled ex-president Najibul-lah from his house arrest, torture, mutilate and execute him, hanging his corpse from a lamppost. That set the tenor of the rule to come. Izmat Khan had no taste for cruelty for its own sake. He had fought hard enough in the conquest of his country to rise from volunteer to commander of his own lashkar, and this, in turn, grew, as word of his leadership spread, until it became one of the four divisions in the Taliban army. Then he asked to be allowed to go back to his native Nangarhar, and was made provincial governor. Based in Jalalabad, he could visit his family, wife and baby.

He had never heard of Nairobi or Dar es Salaam. He had never heard of anyone called William Jefferson Clinton. He had indeed heard much of a group now based in his country called Al Qaeda, and knew that its adherents had declared global jihad against all unbelievers, especially the West, and most of all against a place called America. But it was not his jihad. He was fighting the Northern Alliance to unite his homeland once and for all, and the alliance had been beaten back to two small and obscure enclaves. One was a group of Hazara resistants, bottled up in the mountains of Dara-i-Suf, and the other was Massoud himself, in the impregnable Panjshir Valley and the northeastern corner called Badakhshan.

On August 7, bombs exploded outside the American embassies in two African capitals. He knew nothing of this. Listening to foreign radio was now banned, and he obeyed. On August 21, America launched seventy Tomahawk cruise missiles at Afghanistan. They came from the two missile cruisers Cowpen and Shiloh in the Red Sea, and from the destroyers Briscoe, Elliot, Hayler, Milius and the submarine Columbia, all in the Arabian Gulf south of Pakistan. They were aimed at the training camps of Al Qaeda, and the caves of the Tora Bora. Among those that went astray was one that entered the mouth of an empty, natural cave high in the mountain above Maloko-zai. The detonation deep inside the cave split the mountain, and an entire face peeled away. Ten million tons of rock crashed into the valley below.

When he reached the mountain, there was nothing to recognize. The entire valley had been buried. There was no stream anymore, no farm, no orchards, no stock pens, no stables, no compounds, no mosque. His entire family and all his neighbors were gone. His parents, uncles, aunts, sisters, wife and child were dead beneath millions of tons of granite rubble. There was nowhere to dig and nothing to dig for. He had become a man with no roots, no relatives, no clan. In the dying August sun, he knelt on the shale high above where his dead family lay, turned west toward Mecca, bowed his head to the ground and prayed. But it was a different prayer this time; it was a mighty oath, a sworn vendetta, a personal jihad unto death, and it was against the people who had done this. He declared war on America.

A week later, he had resigned his governorship and gone back to the front. For two years, he fought the Northern Alliance. While he was away, the tactically brilliant Massoud had counterattacked and again caused huge losses to the less competent Taliban. There had been massacres at Mazar-e-Sharif, where first the native Hazara had risen in revolt and killed six hundred Taliban; the avenging Taliban had gone back and butchered over two thousand civilians.

The Dayton Agreement had been signed; technically, the Bosnian war was over. But what had been left behind was nightmarish. Muslim Bosnia had been the main theater of war, even though the Bosnians, Serbs and Croats had all been involved. It had been the bloodiest conflict in Europe since World War II. The Croats and the Serbs, far and away the better armed, had inflicted most of the brutalities. A thoroughly and rightly ashamed Europe set up a war crimes tribunal at The Hague in Holland and waited for the first indictments. The problem was, the guilty ones were not about to come forward with their hands up. Milosevic would offer no help at all; indeed, he was preparing fresh miseries for another Muslim province, Kosovo.

Part of Bosnia, the exclusively Serbian third, had declared itself the Serb Republic, and most of the war criminals were hiding there. This was the task:

Find them, identify them, snatch them and bring them out to stand trial. Living mainly in the fields and forests, the SAS spent 1997 hunting down what they called the “PIFWICs”-persons indicted for war crimes. By 1998, he was back in the UK, and back in the Paras, a lieutenant colonel and instructor at Camberley Staff College. The following year, he was made commanding officer, First Battalion, known as I Para. The NATO allies had again intervened in the Balkans, this time a little more speedily than before, and again to prevent a massacre big enough to cause the media to use the overemployed term “genocide.”

Intelligence had convinced both the British and American governments that Milosevic intended to “cleanse” the rebellious province of Kosovo, and to do so thoroughly. The medium would be the expulsion of most of its 1.8 million citizens westward into neighboring Albania. Under the NATO banner, the Allies gave Milosevic an ultimatum. He ignored it, and columns of weeping and destitute Kosovans were driven through the mountain passes into Albania. The NATO response was no invasion on the ground but bombing raids instead, which lasted seventy-eight days and wrecked both Kosovo and Serbian Yugoslavia itself. With his country in ruins, Milosevic finally conceded, and NATO moved into Kosovo to try to govern the wreckage. The man in charge was a lifelong Para, General Mike Jackson, and I Para went with him. That would probably have been Mike Martin’s last “action” posting had it not been for the West Side Boys.

On the ninth of September 2001, news flashed through the Taliban army that had the soldiers roaring “Allahu-akhbar,” Allah is great, over and over again. The air above Izmat Khan’s camp outside Bamiyan crackled with the shots fired in a delirium of joy. Someone had assassinated Ahmad Shah Massoud. Their enemy was dead. The man whose charisma had held together the cause of the useless Rab-bani, whose cleverness as a guerrilla fighter had caused the Soviets to revere him and whose generalship had carved Taliban forces to pieces, was no more.

In fact, he had been assassinated by two suicide bombers, ultra-fanatical Moroccans with stolen Belgian passports pretending to be journalists, and sent by Osama bin Laden as a favor to his friend Mullah Omar. The Saudi had not thought of the ploy; it was the far cleverer Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri who realized that if Al Qaeda did this favor for Omar, the one-eyed mullah could never expel them for what was going to happen next. On the eleventh, four airliners were hijacked over the American east coast. Within ninety minutes, two had destroyed the World Trade Center in Manhattan, one had devastated the Pentagon, and the fourth, as its rebellious passengers invaded the flight deck to rip the hijackers from the controls, had crashed in a field.

Within days, the identity and inspiration of the nineteen hijackers had been established; within a few more days, the new American president had given Mullah Omar a flat ultimatum: Yield up the ringleaders or take the consequences. Because of Massoud, Omar could not capitulate. It was the code.

In the West African hellhole of Sierra Leone, years of civil war and barbarism had left the once-rich former British colony a vista of chaos, banditry, filth, disease, poverty and hacked-off limbs. Years earlier, the British had decided to intervene, and the UN had been prevailed upon to ship in fifteen thousand troops, who, broadly, just sat in their barracks in the capital, Freetown. The jungle beyond the city limits was regarded as simply too dangerous. But the UN force included an element of the British Army, and they at least patrolled the backcountry.

In late August, a patrol of eleven men from the Royal Irish Rangers were lured off the main road and down a track to the village which acted as the headquarters of a rebel band calling themselves the West Side Boys. They were, in effect, out-of-control psychopaths-they were relentlessly drunk on pure alcohol native hooch; they rubbed their gums with cocaine, or cut their arms to rub the dope into the cuts to get a faster “hit.” The horrors they had inflicted on the peasantry over a wide range were unspeakable; but there were four hundred of them, and they were armed to the teeth. The rangers were quickly captured and held hostage.

Mike Martin, after a stint in Kosovo, had brought i Para to Freetown, where they were based at Waterloo Camp. After complex negotiations, five of the rangers were ransomed, but the remaining six seemed destined to be chopped up. In London, the chief of Defence staff, Sir Charles Guthrie, gave the word: Go in there and get them out by force.

The task force was forty-eight SAS men, twenty-four from the SBS and ninety from I Para. Ten SAS men in jungle camouflage were dropped in a week before the attack and lived unseen in the jungle round the bandit village, watching, listening and reporting back. Everything the West Side Boys said and did was overheard by the SAS men in the bush a few yards away and transmitted. That was how the British knew there was no further hope of a peaceful exfiltration. Mike Martin went in with the second wave after an unlucky rebel mortar had injured six, including the commander of the first wave, who had to be evacuated without ceremony.

The village-or, in fact, the twin villages of Gberi Bana and Magbeni-straddled a slimy and stinking river called Rokel Creek. The seventy SAS took Gberi Bana, where the hostages were located, rescued them all and fought off a series of manic counterattacks. The ninety Paras took Magbeni. There were, at dawn, about two hundred West Side Boys in each.

Six prisoners were taken, trussed and brought back to Freetown. A few of them escaped into the jungle. No attempt was made to count the bodies, either in the wreckage of the two villages or the surrounding jungle, but no one ever disputed the figure of three hundred dead.

The SAS and the Paras took twelve injured, and one SAS man, Brad Tinnion, died of his wounds. Mike Martin, having lost the CO of his first wave, arrived in the second Chinook, and led the final wipeout of Magbeni. It was old-fashioned fighting, point-blank range and hand-to-hand. On the south side of the Rokel Creek, the Paras had lost their radio to the same mortar blast that hit the attack leader. So the circling helicopters overhead could not report on the fall of their own mortar shells, and the jungle was too thick to see them drop. Eventually, the Paras just charged, blood pumping, screaming and swearing, until the West Side Boys, happy to torture peasants and prisoners, fled, died, fled again and died, until there were none left.

It was six months almost to the day that Martin was back in London when breakfast was interrupted by those unbelievable images on the TV screen of fully loaded and fueled airliners flying straight into the twin towers. A week later, it was plain the USA would have to go into Afghanistan in pursuit of those responsible, with or without the agreement of the Kabul government. London at once agreed that it would provide whatever was needed from its own resources, and the immediate requirements were air-to-air refueling tankers and Special Forces. The SIS head of station in Islamabad said he would also need all the help he could get.

That was a matter for Vauxhall Cross, but the Defence attache in Islamabad also asked for help. Mike Martin was taken from his desk at Para HQ^Aldershot, and found himself on the next flight to Islamabad as Special Forces liaison officer. He arrived two weeks to the day after the destruction of the World Trade Center, and the day the first allied attacks went in.