Frederick Forsyth - The Afghan

The roads were unsafe from ambush, the mountain unapproachable save by air. And the deployment in muj hands of the American Stinger missile since September 1986 had forced the Soviets to fly higher-too high to be accurate-or risk being hit. The Soviet losses were mounting relentlessly, with further manpower reductions due to wounds and disease, and even in a controlled society like the USSR the morale was dropping like a falcon on the swoop. It was a savagely cruel war. Few prisoners were ever taken, and the quickly dead were the lucky ones. The mountain clans especially hated the Russian fliers, and, if taken alive, they could be pegged out in the sun with a small cut in the stomach wall so the entrails would burst forth and fry in the sun until death brought release. Or they could be given over to the women and their skinning knives.

The Soviet response was to bomb, rocket and strafe anything that moved: man, woman, child or animal. They seeded the mountains with untold millions of air-dropped mines, which eventually created a nation of crutches and prosthetic limbs. Before it was over, there would be a million Afghans dead, a million crippled and five million refugees.

Izmat Khan knew all about guns from his time in the refugee camp, and the favorite was, of course, the Kalashnikov AK-47. It was a supreme irony that this Soviet weapon, the preferred assault rifle of every dissident movement and terrorist in the world, was now being used against them. But the Americans were providing them for a reason: Ever)’ Afghan could replenish his ammunition from the packs of a dead Russian, which saved carrying time across the mountains if the ammunition had been noncompatible.

Assault rifle apart, the weapon of choice was the rocket-propelled grenade, the RPG-simple, easy to use, easy to reload and deadly at short-to-medium range. This, too, was provided by the West.

Izmat Khan was big for fifteen, desperately trying to grow a fuzz round the chin, and the mountains soon made him as hard as he had ever been. Witnesses have seen the Pashtun mountain men moving like mountain goats through their own terrain, legs seemingly immune to exhaustion, breathing unlabored when others are gasping for breath.

He had been back home for a year when his father summoned him. There was a stranger with him; face burned dark from the sun, black-bearded, wearing a gray woolen shalwar kameez over stout hiking boots and a sleeveless jerkin. On the ground behind him stood the biggest backpack the boy had ever seen, and two tubes wrapped in sheepskin. On his head was a Pashtun turban. “This man is a guest and a friend,” said Nuri Khan. “He has come to help us and fight with us. He has to take his tubes to Shah Massoud in the Panjshir, and you will guide him there.”

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.