Kara Kush, Page 3

  ‘Walk, ride, live off the land. Trust no stranger! Get to The Eagle! Give him the message!’ Juma had said. Well, he could and would. He would obey orders. ‘Obedience is the path to command.’

  What had he learnt, from the last act of Captain Juma? First, remember the value of a ruse. Second, make any sacrifice. Third, he, Shahrdar Haidar, had thought that his master, the Noyon, could have sought healing from the enemy, or might even join them, out of gratitude. Don’t be mistrustful. Trust Kara Kush, The Eagle.

  ‘Silah-Dar Mojud!’ How long had it been since the ancient war cry had echoed here! ‘Here am I, the Weapon-Bearer going into battle to help save the people whom my forebears, the Mongols, once came to conquer …’

  *

  There were five villages, in each of them no more than two hundred souls, whose people looked to Tiger’s Fort as the centre of their community. With the Battle-Lord dead and the mayor trudging southwards to find the shadowy leader Kara Kush, the villagers returned to their fields and flocks. Kara Kush, after all, might not even exist. If he did, what could he do for Turkestan? Shikast-i-kufar – Defeat to the Infidel! was still the cry of the suicidal young, reared on tales of long ago, as they went out to die, riddled by Russian bullets, trying to destroy at least one truck from a convoy of perhaps dozens, as the invaders tightened their hold on northern Afghanistan.

  And Soviet Northern Afghan Command did not forget the loss of their helicopter, even though they never discovered the real cause.

  Two weeks after Captain Juma’s death, four low-flying aircraft made three passes each, over the five villages. Instead of bombs, large metal canisters landed in the midst of the people, and a yellowish mist filled the village streets. According to the few survivors, those people or animals who were in the open and who breathed the vapour died almost at once. Anyone who touched the powdery deposit which settled on the ground, on walls and plants, also died.

  Persistent rumours – and the direct accusation of the United States government – had claimed, for over two years, that the Russians were experimenting with ‘yellow rain’ in Laos, Vietnam and Afghanistan. According to the reports, this chemical warfare was based on a fungus, the deadly Fusarium. Although the Russians hotly denied the charge, it was noted that their scientists had recorded and described cases of accidental Fusarium poisoning in the USSR. Many people wondered if it was a coincidence that, after a mysterious substance was dropped by Soviet aircraft, illiterate Asian villagers could accurately report the symptoms of death through the ingestion of mycotoxins of the trichothecene group. They were hardly likely to have read the scientific literature.

  The agent was extremely effective: almost everyone who was in contact with the mist died in great agony. It was worse than the plagues of typhus which had claimed so many lives before the Afghan Ministry of Health had stamped out the disease.

  The Russian convoys were safe, at least for the time being.

  BOOK 2

  The Gold of Ahmad Shah

  Soviet military units appear to have failed to develop strong primary-group attachments among the soldiers and between leadership elements and their men. This represents a potential for instability and fragmentation under combat stress. Therefore the effectiveness of Soviet military units in prolonged battle, when quick victories are not forthcoming … is open to question. Soviet military units could well begin to unravel if pressed hard enough in a conventional battle environment. From this perspective, Soviet units contain a great systemic weakness.

  Professor R A Gabriel:

  The New Red Legions

  1 Ura Pobeyda – Hail Victory!

  Kalantut Village

  North-West of Kabul

  Afghanistan

  APRIL 23

  In Afghanistan, someone who was six foot tall, with grey-green eyes and dark hair – if he spoke a local language perfectly – was almost certainly an Afghan. Adam Durany fitted that bill, having been born in the American-built town of Lashkargah, a hundred miles from the Pakistan border, where his father had been an engineer working on the great Kajakai Dam.

  Following his father’s bent, Adam had studied engineering in America; but, drawn to the land of his birth and its passion for modernization, he had returned to Afghanistan. Armed with a doctorate and understanding the people so completely, he soon acquired the Chair of Technology at the University of Kabul.

  But the great transformation of the country, dreamed of since the war, had not come. Communist infiltration, intrigue and ultimately the Soviet invasion from the north to ‘restore order and support the socialist government’ had seen to that.

  That was why Adam Durany was a rebel, a wanted man, an Afghan guerrilla operating from the stark fastnesses of the Paghman range of mountains to the north of Kabul. Dressed in the roughest of clothes, shirt and baggy trousers, he carried a Kalashnikov slung across his back.

  When, on that December day, the huge Russian Antonov transports had landed at Kabul, and the tanks had rolled south along the Great Circle of all-weather roads the Russians had built for that very purpose, Adam stayed at his post – but not for long. Peasants tried to attack the tanks with sticks and stones; soldiers with only five rounds of ammunition tried to resist, air force men crashed their planes onto the teeming invaders: many others simply fled or resigned themselves to oppression.

  But a plan was forming in Adam’s mind. One day there would be a resistance movement: that was inevitable in a fiercely independent mountain land with a powerful military tradition. At first it would spring up locally, people rallying to their accepted chiefs. Thousands, however, would die, lacking the skills and the weapons needed to fight this new kind of war. There would have to be impregnable bases within Afghanistan, and friends outside. There would have to be exploits, too, to fire the people’s imagination; and there would have to be scientific and technical knowledge.

  When he reached this point in his reasoning, Adam remembered – Paghman.

  His family were friends of the princely Sirdar Akbar of Paghman, and as a lad Adam had spent his summer vacations in the cool sun of the Paghman uplands. He had fished and skied, gone horse-riding and rambled all over the sprawling mountain ranges, so near to Kabul and yet so cool – bliss indeed after the summer heat of the ‘Desert of Death’ near his native Kandahar.

  It was at the Paghman castle that he had met little Noor Sharifi, the daughter of the house. He had taught her to ride, to shoot, and to catch trout. One summer, though, Noor had suddenly seemed to be a child no longer. He remembered how he had thought that it was absurd to send a beautiful woman, his Noor, away to school. But that was the Sirdar’s wish: a school in London, England. And so they had lost touch.

  One day, in that last summer before she left, Adam had been on a particularly long hike deep in the mountains when he noticed a long, rather regular, shadow in the rocks just above him. The shadow turned out to be a slit which continued horizontally into the mass of the mountain. Scrambling along it, Adam found that the slit widened. He was in a man-made tunnel.

  After making two or three turns, Adam entered an enormous cavern, with caves running in all directions from it. Astonishingly, the mountain hall was lit by daylight. Fissures, protected from view by the high spurs, ran into the cave’s roof, each in turn catching the sun in its passage across the sky. A dim but adequate light suffused this extraordinary natural cathedral.

  He understood at once that he had found one of the lost Buddhist cave-monasteries, abandoned a thousand and more years ago when the monks had emigrated, after the Islamic conquest.

  He told nobody. The secrecy which had protected the place for so long seemed to capture him, too. Adam was no occultist, but something said to him that the monastery was sleeping: and that its time would come again.

  Twenty years later, the realization came. The cave-monastery could be a virtually impregnable fortress from which a rebel army, thousands strong, could challenge the Red occupation. When the Russians moved into Afghanistan, the Paghman heights were
snowbound. Adam waited four months, making preparations. In April he returned to the monastery to make quite sure. This time he found that there was another way in, which could be used by trucks and horses: skilfully concealed and easy to defend.

  As he stood at one of the creeper-covered entrances to the smaller caves, Adam saw, high in the sky, a tiny flying figure. It swooped, then flew up again and hovered: Kara Kush, The Eagle. His old nurse had called him that when he was small, and it had become a pet name in the family. ‘My little eagle, Kara Kush’, she used to say. She was a Turkestani, and Kara Kush was a Turki word.

  Adam remembered how the Persian-speaking boys at school had laughed when, foolishly, he had confided his pet name. ‘Kara Kush, the eagle, ha, ha, ha!’ A bully had come up to him, a boy three years older and very tough. ‘Who’s a stupid little Turkestani, then? Kara Kush, Kara Kush! Want a fight?’

  The answer had come to him in a flash. ‘In Turki it may mean “eagle”, but in Dari-Persian, it can be said as “instant kill”. Get away or I’ll knock you down!’ The other boys had cheered and then turned on the bully, who never troubled Adam again.

  Kara Kush. He’d take that name, to beat the Red bully. It symbolized the Afghan people.

  Back in Kabul, Adam had drawn his money, gradually, from the bank, and sold everything of value. Food, scientific equipment, all kinds of tools and materials, were bought and carried, by him and his close friend, Qasim, to the Caves.

  Then, subletting his apartment and giving out that he was going to attend a conference for a few weeks, he bought a return air ticket to nearby Pakistan.

  Adam stayed only three days in Pakistan, before returning on horseback along the smugglers’ route. It was also called the Rahi Gurez, the Road of Flight, and ran through the mountains south of Chitral. The people of Nuristan, a wild, untamed country, helped him reach Paghman and safety. Qasim was waiting: ‘Victory – Kara Kush!’

  Since then, Girdbad, the Whirlwind Battle-Group led by The Eagle, had grown from its original two men to a strength of some sixty-five would-be warriors. Each one had been double and triple-checked and tested for reliability even before he was allowed to visit the Caves. In rural Afghanistan, security was not difficult to operate: everyone seemed to know everyone else. And the information channels to Kabul, even to the highest quarters, were excellent. Nobody liked the puppet government.

  Training and arms were the first priority. The ancient rifles, Lee-Enfield .303s from British Indian days, were next to useless, almost as bad as muzzle-loaders when faced by really modern weapons.

  Yet around the country, in dozens of places, were dumps of the latest guns, mines, rocket-launchers which had been stockpiled by the Russians.

  Over sixty men and only five guns. And the men, tired of training with dummy weapons, needed both guns and a successful exploit, something to raise their spirits. The Eagle cast an envious eye on the Russian supply centre near the village of Kalantut, some ten miles from his Paghman eyrie.

  He planned to raid it now, reconnoitring with a patrol of five men.

  Qasim called it an Attack Group. Whatever it was called, it consisted only of Adam, Qasim, old Khizrhayat who was seventy but an uncannily skilful tracker, Tirandaz, a levelheaded local peasant and crack shot – and young Aslam Jan, fifteen years old but from a warrior family.

  First, Adam decided, they would go into Kalantut village itself, to collect information and if possible, operate from there when evening came.

  As they came near the first house they realized that something was disastrously wrong. There was no sound of village life: the smell of death hung in the air.

  On the wall of a burnt-out stone barn they saw the words, whitewashed in Cyrillic, the Soviet war cry Ura pobeyda! Hail Victory!

  All the cottage roofs were down, and blackened windows showed where the firebombs had done their work. The little mosque had been blasted by high-explosive shells, and the schoolhouse was still smouldering. Row upon row of machinegun bullets had patterned the flimsy walls of a vine-covered teahouse under the solitary tree – the only one left from a row of eight graceful poplars.

  More than fifty corpses, of old men, women and children, lay inside what was left of the houses. The bellies of the corpses were already swelling in the heat. Some of the faces looked strangely peaceful: some people had died contorted, burnt with flamethrowers or riddled with bullets from automatic rifles. For good measure, the village well had been wrecked by high-explosive grenades and the minute grocery shop looted. As was another, pitifully small, general store.

  There was one survivor of the massacre: an old man, bleary-eyed with advancing cataract, who had been lying ill behind a stone-built cowshed when the attack began. He had crawled, painfully, to shelter, hardly knowing what he was doing: obeying even in his last hours, the imperative to survive. He had reached a depression in the ground, a culvert which had once fed a pond, now long since dry and partly filled with rubbish. This had shielded him from the bullets.

  His name was Haji – ‘pilgrim’ – Abdurrashid. He said he was seventy-eight years old, but he looked much older than that. When Qasim found him, he had just dragged himself from his hiding place in search of water. It was obvious that he did not have long to live: and The Eagle wanted desperately to know any fact about the massacre, anything that might help to understand how it could have come about.

  He got no explanation. The Haji lived for only an hour more. All he could say was that the men of the village, whose ages ranged from fourteen to sixty-five, had fled six days ago, to escape conscription, and had thought that their families would be safe enough. None of them had been guerrillas.

  Then, that morning, only a few hours before, Russian soldiers from the camp four kilometres away, heavily armed and riding armoured troop carriers, had surrounded the place and done all this, without provocation. ‘Baz faisala shud,’ he said, ‘Then it was over.’ After the killings, the old man had heard the Russians rushing round the village streets, throwing explosives and fragmentation grenades, shooting and laughing. Women were screaming; some so badly hurt that they pleaded with the Russians to kill them quickly. This, he said, made the soldiers laugh all the louder.

  ‘They were like madmen. They were madmen. This is not soldiers’ work. I know, I have been in the Army, I have served my King.’ He had no more to say and died soon after.

  Aslam Jan found some spades but Adam knew that five men could not dig fifty graves in the time he had. They cleared the rubbish from the culvert in which the old man had taken refuge and carried the bodies there. They laid them side by side in a long, grotesque row and covered them with earth scooped out from the sides of the culvert.

  Now the five men moved to the cover of a clump of bushes half a mile away, on an incline from which they could watch the Russian camp.

  Three days before, Adam and his partisans had descended upon a Russian truck which had broken down and thus been separated from its convoy. There was no resistance from the soldiers guarding it, and the Afghans fell upon the tarpaulins with sharp knives, eager for loot, for guns. They found – a load of military bugles.

  They belonged to a Russian parade-formation of musicians who doubled, as in other armies, as pomashes, medical orderlies, in active service conditions. Adam had distributed the instruments among the unarmed men of the Caves, and told them to get on with bugle practice.

  Although he had not been able to arm the majority of the men, Adam was still determined to get into the camp – and get away with what loot he could obtain. The sixty would be itching to join the fight: but, armed or otherwise, such a large party would be seen quite easily if spotter planes were about.

  Adam went over the plan once again making sure that his men understood. Qasim, speaking for the others said: ‘We joined you in order to learn to obey, Eagle. What we have seen today may help to teach us. But for myself, I seek your permission to use, as my war cry when we attack the Rouss, the words Ura Pobeyda! Hurrah for Victory!’

  ‘Yo
u have permission,’ The Eagle said, ‘and note this: for the purpose of this foray, we have a new name, the name of the dead village. We are now Mujahid Battle-Group Kalantut.’

  From where they lay in the bushes they could see the Afghan flag, the black-red-green tricolour, hanging in the still air over the central administration building, a large square hut in the centre of the compound. Close to the barbed-wire perimeter fence, they identified a guardhouse and several low prefabricated huts. The camp itself was built on a hillside, with a brick building, probably an ablutions block, to one side. There was a great deal of scrub around, useful cover for an observer, and it was obvious that nobody had bothered to clear the ground for years. Even The Eagle, still a novice in guerrilla war, realized that the place was suffering from the slackness which poor organization and fifty years of peace had allowed to creep into the once efficient Afghan Army.

  His information seemed accurate enough. This was undoubtedly the field armoury of the Afghan Eighth Infantry, now taken over by the Soviets. Too many modern weapons had been finding their way, through desertions and sympathy, into guerrilla hands and for some time now the Soviet Army had been steadily disarming the crumbling Afghan forces. Inside this camp, he felt sure, there would be no more than two or three Afghans acting as liaison officers and interpreters – in spite of that Afghan national flag.

  The armoury, if The Eagle’s Intelligence was right, contained mortars, machine-guns and rocket-launchers – in quantities enough to equip a division for war. And that was not to mention rifles and grenades, flame-throwers even. Adam and his friends, gazing at this prize, were the only members of his band who had any weapons at all: five Kalashnikov automatic assault rifles, some pistols and grenades, a flare or two for the signalling pistol, and a stick of dynamite. And in the Caves, now, three hundred and fifty of The Eagle’s men and women, aching for action, were waiting for him to bring them arms.