Duel of Assassins (17 page)

And he made his—one that went against all his training—and
hurled himself forward over the ravine.

Through a midair blur of cliffside he saw a turbaned torso
shouldering a rifle—someone thought Taras was attacking the child.
Too late
now!
The rocky ledge below, bright green bird, reaching child, all rushed
toward him. He was going to land right on the damn thing, detonate it himself!
But his body would take the blast, shielding the girl.

Taras never heard the full-auto racketing of the AK-47, nor
felt the swarming hail of steel-core slugs that tore through his turban. There
was only exquisite, exploding joy as his sneakered feet landed just beyond the
hideous toy and his body crashed down on the tiny, terrified child. Joy—and
nothingness.

*

When he dared fire no more for fear of hitting his niece,
Nazar Khan also leaped, plunging recklessly ten meters down the sheer cliff
face. He landed badly on the narrow ledge, twisting his ankle, but ignoring it
in his panic to free the still screaming child. She lay trapped now under the
corpse of the madman who had tried to kill her.

He tore at the body, fingers slithering in the warm, viscid
fluid that gouted from the turban. Blood was everywhere, soaking the
patou
,
half-masking the face of the strange
mujahid
as Nazar struggled to pull
the terrified child free. Finally he held her precious weight safely in his
arms.

“My little Aziza, yes, you are safe,” he whispered,
caressing her dust-and-tear-grimed cheeks with his calloused fingers. Then,
using the toe of his sandal, he prodded the corpse again, studying what he
could see—through the gore—of the mustached visage, the bronzed skin now ashen
beneath, for a clue as to tribe. The mad fellow had clearly not been a fellow
Pushtun. Perhaps a Nuristani, then, or a Tadjik or Kirghiz from even farther
north.

Then Nazar saw something else, beneath the man’s
kameez
—a
sun-glint off oxidized metal. It was the radio, dropped by Taras when he’d
grabbed for the child. Nazar kicked at the dust again, exposed faded Cyrillic
letters, a rubberized antenna, knurled knobs.
Badal
—vengeance—flamed in
his heart. Nazar unslung his AK-47, letting the swinging muzzle impact the dead
man’s jawbone. The mujahid prayed there were enough rounds remaining in the
clip to shred the despised thing at his feet.

He fitted his finger to the trigger and spat out his curse:
“Mordabad
Shuravi!”
Death to the Soviets!

Then Aziza wailed in his eardrum. He cocked his head, took
in her stricken gaze, her tearful, wretched pout, her arm pointing imperiously
down. She wanted something.

Nazar looked down and saw the bright green plastic object.

And understood at once what had happened. The Russian had
risked—and lost—his life to save the child.

Others now came forth from the caves. Nazar waved them back
urgently, turned round on the path to protect his niece, then slowly
sidestepped along the narrow ledge away from the mine. When he judged that he
had retreated far enough, keeping tiny Aziza well behind him, he took careful
aim with his assault rifle and detonated the plastic bird.

It was good to kill Russians, especially one of the feared
night raiders. But a Russian with a radio just outside their caves, this was
very bad. That meant more of the accursed infidel invaders might be coming
soon, and they would surely come in their Village Killers from Jalalabad. These
big brown-and-yellow mottled
halikoptars
could hover for an hour,
raining death and destruction with all the fires of hell.

They had witnessed such terrible things, all of them, and
there were thirty who now dotted the cliff face in the aftermath of the
explosion. Fourteen were
mujahideen
, who used the caves as their camp.
These intrepid young mountaineers scuttled over bare rock and dropped from
ledge to ledge with casual aplomb to look upon the dead Russian disguised as a
mujahid
.
The rest were veiled women, children and old men, equally curious, but clinging
gingerly to the narrow footways and reluctantly releasing each handhold. They
were the pitiful remnant of a once-thriving village farther up the Kunar, a
village whose mud-brick homes now lay in rubble and whose terraced wheat fields
and fruit orchards were withered and weed-choked. They eked a bare subsistence
from a few sheep and goats, and from collecting the spent casings from Soviet
BM-21 rockets, packing them on donkeys fifty kilometers across the mountains to
the Pakistani border and selling them for scrap, fifty rupees apiece.

As the warriors crowded around the corpse, Nazar described
briefly how he’d shot a strange
mujahid
attacking Aziza, only to
discover the man was an enemy soldier trying to stop the child from picking up
the toy bomblet. The incredible tale, of course, could not dilute one drop of
their cherished hatred of the foreign devils. The Russian, after all, had not
come on an errand of mercy, but to destroy them; a fact brought instantly home
when a shout from above announced the discovery of Qasim, butchered beside his
machine gun.

But there was no time to mourn the martyred boy. The dead
Russian must be hidden at once, so he could not be seen from the air. Then they
must?abandon the caves forever, taking Qasim’s body for later burial. The holy
warriors would find a new hiding place from which to carry on the fight for
their valley, while the villagers must flee across the frontier.

At Nazar’s direction, two men bent to lift the Russian. The
next instant both yelped and leapt back as if scalded, dropping the corpse onto
the ledge, and nearly off the cliff. The thing had groaned—was groaning still!

Nazar knelt in the bloodied dust, found a feeble pulse in
the carotid. The Russian lived—but there was no way to determine the extent of
his injuries under the red-drenched turban and blood-matted hair. He might be
merely stunned, or in deep coma, his brain dead. Either way, they must leave
him in the cave. If he had radioed his position, he might be found in time by
his comrades. If he hadn’t radioed, he’d die, like young Qasim.

The Russian moaned again, a child’s plaintive call for
comfort. Nazar stood to give his brusque order, heard himself alter the words
at the last instant: “We take the
feranghi
—the foreigner—with us.”

There came the expected cries of outrage, most passionately
from Qasim’s cousin, Mirbad, who ached to avenge himself at once with the
Russian’s own knife. But Nazar calmly invoked his authority as commander. If
the
feranghi
died of his wounds, so be it; but as a war prisoner he
would not be killed. And this, he reminded them, was not decreed not only by
Koranic law, but was the express order of the chief of staff of the National
Islamic Front of Afghanistan—one of the seven principal resistance groups, and
the one which supplied their weapons. If the Russian survived his wounds, he
must be turned over to NIFA.

A stretcher was improvised from rifles and blankets, and the
refugees moved off single file along the ledge, vanishing one by one into the
shadowed ravine.

Fifteen minutes later the cliffside echoed the thunderous
vibrato of turbo-driven rotors. Five Mi-24 combat helicopters swept down the
valley, their gun blisters flaring in the sun, their huge insectile shadows
flitting over the turbid river.

*

His mother was frying up his favorite supper—potatoes and
mushrooms. The savory smell was carried along with the woodsmoke through the
stark winter woods to where Taras and his big retarded friend, Ulyan, were
gleefully destroying an entire German Panzer division with accurately thrown
snowballs. Identifying the cooking aroma, the two boys broke off the engagement
and raced homeward through the evening-dark slashes of alder and birch boles.
Their snowshoes squeaked over the crusted surface; their breath-clouds vapored
in the frosty air, eyes watering, woolen underwear sweat-sopped under their
coats and scarves. In sight of the cabin and frantic to be first, Taras surged
ahead and burst across the threshold...

…And was shoved upright by a strong hand. His head was
reeling, a sick, bloated throb, but he was too feeble to care. His pain-sealed
eyes recoiled from lancing light. His body contained not a gram of strength,
tried to fall back, could not. A steaming cup of tea was held under his
nostrils, metal scalded his lower lip. He sipped, braced as sweet medicinal fire
cauterized the back of his throat and chest. Finally he opened his eyes, saw
blue sky filtered through a lattice of palm fronds. Ragged Afghan youths, slung
with cartridge belts, hunkered against mud walls, assault rifles propped beside
them.

Suddenly a bearded warrior, face thrust close, exhaled hot
sour breath, dark eyes probing his.

Taras flung sideways, tearing at his
kameez
for the
cyanide capsule in its pouch. Only the elite battalions had been issued these
bite-or-swallow-and-recycle suicide pills, but all Soviet soldiers had been
thoroughly dosed with horror stories of what to expect if they were ever
captured by, or defected to, the Russian-hating
mujahideen
. They would
be chained up in caves, they were assured, ingeniously tortured, finally executed,
their corpses dumped for wolves and vultures. Like his comrades, Taras had no
wish to authenticate these lurid tales.

But his fingers fumbled uselessly at the blood-crusted
kameez
,
then his sinewless arms slid to the ground. Sick with fatigue, Taras slumped
back, staring skyward as the rubbled room began slowly to wheel around him. He
had nearly slipped through the doorway to the void when a strong voice snared
him and held him back:

“Russki, Russki, muy nye ubivayem vas.”
In
rudimentary Russian, he was told he would not be tortured or killed. If he
lived, he would be interned in a prisoner-of-war camp run by the National
Islamic Front of Afghanistan, visited by the Red Cross. “We are not savage
beasts,” the voice insisted. “But to live, first you must eat, drink. You are
very weak.”

Again Taras was propped up, fighting waves of dizziness and
pulpy sickness in his head. The room was like an oven. The
mujahideen
leader leaned close, sitting cross-legged. His fierce, twisted face was
elongated by a squared-off black beard, which flowed down into a black vest
worn over a khaki shirt. Taras tried to assemble his mind, but it was scattered
into rubble, strewn all over the vast, bombed-out countryside. Then he
remembered a girl, a bright plastic bird, a leap across a ravine. Nothing
after. What had happened to him?

He must have been shot in the head, the part where memory
was. What else was gone? He was still too weak to reach up there and feel
around, too afraid he find parts of his brain missing.

He was being asked something. “The radio, Russki, did you
use this radio?” The
mujahid
was waving the portable transceiver at him;
it didn’t belong in strange hands. “Did you tell Jalalabad where you were?”

Again Taras tried to remember, but there was nothing there,
an empty room. The man shook the radio angrily. “Did you? Tell me!”

“I don’t remember,” Taras answered listlessly.

Something struck his shoulder. He turned too quickly,
triggering excruciating pain through his skull. Close behind him a little girl
was squatting on the ground. She wore a dirty smock and embroidered cap. Her
tiny hands held a soiled turban cloth. Their eyes met, and Taras felt something
touch his heart.

“I told her what you did,” said the voice of the
mujahid
,
momentarily relinquishing its anger. “Her name is Aziza. She is very grateful.
She has been keeping the flies away from you.”

Taras held the child’s luminous gaze. A second later he was
rewarded with a cautious, gummy smile. She was missing several baby incisors,
top and bottom.

“I also must thank you for saving her from the little bomb,”
the
mujahid
said, and gave his own name as Nazar. “Aziza is very
precious. She is the daughter of my only brother. Ismaiel and his wife and
their two sons were all killed by shrapnel when our village was bombed last
week.”

Taras could not evade the man’s eyes. Neither could he
answer. He was too weak, and there was nothing to say. Against the wall, one of
the young warriors spat and made a low, growling noise. Nazar explained it was
the brother of the boy he had killed this morning at the Dashika gun. At once
Taras recalled the throttled scream, the bright, arterial gush; but again could
offer no reply.

The
mujahid
motioned, and a woman, cloaked from head
to toe in dark taffeta, came forward, placed a tray of food beside him, then
looked at his head. For the first time Taras realized he had been bandaged. He
found he was able to sip some sugary green tea, even to swallow bits of goat
jerky, but he could not chew the
nan,
the flat, unleavened Afghan bread.
It was hard and stale. Nazar apologized for it. He had permitted the women to
boil only a little water for tea, he said, but not to bake fresh
nan
for
fear the smoke would reveal their presence to the Russians. Taras finished the
tea and fainted.

When he woke again, the mountain sky was tinged with evening
lilac, and people were moving about. Across the room a teenage warrior was
dipping a safety razor into hot tea, then shaving himself while squinting into
the tiny metal mirror of his snuffbox. Beside him another
mujahid
was
filling AK-47 magazines with bullets.

Nazar appeared suddenly, squatted down, explained that the
old men, women and children were waiting for darkness to leave for the
Pakistani frontier. They are the last, he said. Before the war, the Kunar
Valley had “many many thousand” people—Nazar did not know the Russian word for
such a high number. There were rich farms—”hundreds and hundreds”—on both sides
of the river, and along the hillsides. They grew many, many things. Nazar
groped for Russian words to name the wonderful crops—wheat and potatoes; many
fruits—
abrikos, appelsin, limon
; even
mindalyi
, almonds.

Then came the war. Many, many thousand Russkis, with Migs,
tanks, rockets, helicopters, bombing villages and farms, dropping butterfly
mines and yellow gas that burned the eyes and skin. Death was everywhere, whole
families and towns full of death—women, babies, old ones. Those who lived ran
away as the tanks rolled over the rubble left by the bombs.

Nazar’s eyes were feverish now, inflicting his story on his
captive listener just as the ghastly events had been inflicted on his
tribesmen. His words, and the nightmare images they conjured, were in bizarre
counterpoint to the Soviet version given Taras by his briefing officer on
arrival in Kabul. The Kunar Valley, Captain Arensky had been told, had been
targeted for one of the first mechanized sweeps of the war, in the spring and
summer of 1980. The purpose, crisply pointed out on the pulldown map, was to
interdict guerrilla supply lines—here, here and here—from the northern
provinces. As such, it was considered one of the more successful operations of
that year.

But the Afghans would never give up, Nazar stressed. Many
had dared to return to their devastated valley, rebuilding their homes from
rubble, reclaiming their farms from wasteland. And many had survived, despite
occasional shelling. Now, five years later, it was all happening again. The sky
rained death every day from gunships and fighter-bombers, and the tank armies
were rolling on the river road.

Taras felt the intense hatred kindled around him. Why didn’t
they kill him and have done with it? A nod from their leader and they’d all be
on him with their knives. If they spared him, he foresaw only a miserable
existence. But perhaps he would die soon anyway. His head wounds were probably
infected under the filthy bandages. He felt his consciousness ebbing, while the
darkness deepened and the
mujahid
leader ranted on in a futile attempt
to exorcise the horrors of war.

Blessings of Allah be on you all
, he thought,
for
all your sufferings. May your people escape to Pakistan and a new life. I can’t
fucking help you
. Dizziness was closing in. He fell back, no longer hearing
Nazar’s words, staring at tiny points of starlight through the palm ceiling.

My war is over,
he thought
, one way or another.
And I don’t really care which way it is.
He moaned and rolled sideways,
curling up into his pain, waiting for unconsciousness.He shut his eyes, opened
them again. He had seen something. Outside, silhouetted against the dusk, the
top of a head had protruded for a split-second into the doorway at ground
level—precisely the way
Spetsnaz
were trained to look around corners.
Then it had vanished.

Taras felt an adrenalin surge. But before he could react,
the room exploded in a blinding-white flash. A stun grenade, Taras realized in
the ear-splitting aftermath. Then, through choking smoke, his name was yelled:
“Taras,
stay down!”