Frederick Forsyth - The Afghan

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.