Duel of Assassins (18 page)

He was too weak to do anything else as the silenced
submachine gun stitched a lethal swath across the room, ripping into flesh and
bone, spattering the mud walls.

The stuttering gunfire ceased, but continued outside. Taras
was plucked off the floor and heaved across somebody’s shoulder—a powerful man
who ducked low through the doorway and sprinted into the night. Taras, dangling
head down, heard Russian shouts, agonized screams, the approaching thrash of
rotors. A second later he felt the windblast and sand flurries as a chopper
settled near on its retractable landing gear. His carrier rushed toward it,
bent low.

He was deposited into the belly of an Mi-24 Hind. Several
others crowded in after them, filling the cabin. Then the voice of Marcus Jolly
boomed over the banshee whine of twin turboshafts: “Get all the
muj?”

“Every fucking one!” came the shout.

“How many?”

“Maybe thirty, sleeping in paradise!”

“Allah Akbar!”
shouted another
Spetsnaz,
mocking the Islamic battle cry, “God is great!”

Then the five-bladed main rotor bit and they were lifting
and tilting into the night. Marcus brought his face close. In the faint red
glow from the cockpit instruments, Taras could see only the gleam of eyes and
teeth in black-mask camouflage. “Hang on, Cossack,” he yelled, “we’re going
home. Hell, you knew I’d come and get you, didn’t you?”

Taras looked at his friend, but his mind was filled with the
horror below. The still-bleeding bodies of Nazar and his little band of
mujahideen
cut down before they could reach their weapons. The pitiful remnant of Kunar
villagers, strewn alongside their meager possessions for the final flight to
Pakistan.

And little Aziza, rescued this morning from a cruel fate—but
oh, how briefly! If there were a paradise, surely she would be on her way
there. But Taras could grapple no more with dreadful things. He slumped against
his avenging friend and lapsed into insensibility.

“Did you have to take my damn beret off?” Taras asked.

“Yeah, I couldn’t resist it.” Marcus horse-laughed and
gunned the Soviet UAZ-469 “jeep” through an opening in the frenetic warp and
weave of downtown Kabul’s afternoon traffic. “Come on, did you see her face
when she saw that scar? The señorita damn near choked on her champagne. Up
until then, I think she was really taking a liking to you, Cossack.”

“Mandavoshka!”

“Careful who you’re calling a cunt-louse. Remember, I’m the
guy who saved your life.”

“So you keep reminding me.”

The incident had occurred at a striptease joint they’d just
left—the Blue Club—where Marcus had taken his friend for a drink directly upon
discharge from the sweltering and overcrowded confines of the Soviet military
hospital. The “señorita” was a vivacious cocoa-skinned Cuban girl who could
kick higher than her head, among other talents. She had been perched in Taras’
lap when Marcus had reached over and unceremoniously lifted his friend’s blue
Spetsnaz
beret, revealing the freshly unbandaged scar. It was not an edifying sight—a
saucer-sized circle of angry pink skin cross-hatched with rows of
black-threaded sutures, forty-nine in all.

“You know what you look like with all those shoelaces in
your scalp, Cossack? An American football. Damn, it’s almost as ugly as
Balavadze’s saber slash.”

“I’m so glad it amuses you.”

“Well, it does, I’m sorry. I forgot. I’m not supposed to
make you laugh, right? With your head stitched tight like that, it must hurt
like hell.”

“Yeah, it hurts. It hurts to smile, it hurts to talk. It
even hurt back there bugging my eyes at all those tits on parade. But you
notice I never complained once.”

“No, I give you that.”

“You know why, Cowboy? Mostly, it’s real nice just to be
alive. And when my hair grows out, if I part it on the other side, no one will
notice. Unless you fucking tell them.”

“Hey, I’m glad you’re alive, too, Cossack. In fact, I’m glad
we’re both alive, and I aim to get us the hell out of Kabul and safely back to
base and keep it that way.”

Base was Bagram Airbase, in the Shomali Plain sixty-five
kilometers north of Kabul, where they were temporarily stationed. Marcus’
ice-blue eyes flicked ceaselessly side to side as he drove, seeking out
possible threats in the kaleidoscopic maze that choked the streets—pedestrians,
Soviet and Afghan soldiers, bicycles, motorcycles, taxicabs, military trucks
and jeeps like theirs. In five and a half years of war, the population of the
Afghan capital had swollen from 750,000 to nearly two million. Some of this
influx had come from the Soviet Union and its client states, of course, but
most was from internal Afghan refugees. And a high percentage of these, Taras
and Marcus were convinced, utterly despised their Slavic “liberators.” Despite
the four Soviet divisions garrisoned in the city, with frequent military
checkpoints and a strict curfew, danger lurked everywhere.

Russian civilians had been stabbed in the back while
shopping in bazaars. The Soviet Embassy was shelled regularly, and its first
secretary gunned down recently in broad daylight. As a consequence, the Russian
colony remained mostly within its heavily guarded, sandbagged enclaves, and
diplomats in general were restricted to a ten-kilometer radius in the city
center. For further security, all the villages ringing Kabul had been leveled
to create a
cordon sanitaire
ten-kilometers wide—beyond the range of the
mujahideen
’s 107mm rockets.

So Taras appreciated Marcus’ vigilance, and maintained his
own as their jeep was waved through a checkpoint by two Afghan soldiers in tan
tunics and pillbox hats. When he had arrived in Afghanistan from his London
assignment at the tender age of twenty-four, Arensky had been armored in all
the invulnerability of youth. But two years had stripped most of it away, and
that last day in the Kunar Valley had pretty much finished the job.

Taras had been incredibly lucky to survive, and knew it. Had
Nazar been a hairbreadth quicker tracking his AK-47 along the arc of Taras’
leap before triggering his fusillade, the steel-core rounds, at a velocity of
over seven hundred meters per second, would have burst Taras’ skull like a
sledgehammered walnut. As it was, only two bullets had struck him, both
tangentially, merely furrowing his scalp and peeling a patch back to the bone.
He had escaped with a minor concussion, a slight edema, tiny hemorrhages and a
great deal of blood loss.

But the Army surgeon—a middle-aged and wonderfully droll
Jewish woman from Leningrad—assured him there had been no skull fracture, no
infection, no damage to the brain case. It was she who had reassured him about
the scar, saying if he was determined to let his hair grow out and hide her
lovely needlework, he would be as tediously handsome as ever. She also strongly
cautioned him against single-handedly storming any rebel strongholds in the
future.

Despite all this good fortune, and his bantering tone with
Marcus, Taras knew the experience had not left him unscathed. He was no longer
the same soldier, or man, he had been. And the world he saw now, on leaving the
hospital and the dingy burlesque club, had also undergone subtle change. As if
brightness and contrast knobs had been turned up. Edges were sharper, and Taras
seemed a half-step slow and slightly out of registration, impersonating himself
for the benefit of this old friend beside him, but not getting it quite right.

Every once in a while, without warning, his mind would slip
its gears, and he’d be back in London, haunting an old bookstore on a drizzly
Sunday with black umbrellas passing outside on Charing Cross Road. Or back in
Khabarovsk that fateful night, trying to stay sober and awake long enough to
save Eva Sorokina from the demented trapper.

And too often in his reveries he’d find himself again the
captive of the
mujahideen
. Listening to the ranting of Nazar. Waiting
for Aziza to smile at him, or the ragged young warriors  to leap and carve him
into
shashlik
. Other times he found himself trying to imagine the kind
of mind that had thought up the plastic toy-bomb, or put it into production.

To her credit, Dr. Lazareva had sensed something troubling
him, and on her rounds had tried several times to get him to talk about it. But
Taras had kept things light, feeding her straight lines, insisting he was fine.
As far as he was concerned, she could stitch the outside of his skull, but he
didn’t want her—or anyone else—poking around on the inside.

But something was indeed going on in there.

It began to coalesce two weeks later. He and Marcus were
summoned from Bagram to the 40th Army’s Operational Command in Kabul for a
special briefing. It had nothing to do with the Kunar Valley offensive. That
had been going well without them; though mainly, it had to be said, because the
mujahideen
bands had run out of ammunition, especially 107mm rockets and
RPG-7 anti-tank grenades. In any case, the Soviet mechanized thrust had now
reached Barikot on the Pakistani border.

No, the two
Spetsnaz
officers were being recruited
for a special operation.

The briefing officer was an overfed, heavy-lidded colonel of
KHAD, the Afghan state security force. As he rose to speak, his pudgy hands
tugged downward on his neatly pressed gray tunic, in a hopeless attempt to stop
it flaring over his matronly hips.

But the attention of Taras and Marcus was drawn elsewhere,
to the Soviet officer seated rigidly in the corner. He was a large-boned man of
around sixty, with huge, gnarled hands, a lean, craggy face under a bristly
crewcut, and the baleful glare of a loitering buzzard.

In singsong, serviceable Russian, the colonel began to
introduce the older officer as the recently appointed deputy commander of the
LCSFA, the Limited Contingent of Soviet Forces in Afghanistan. But Taras had
already recognized the man—by the unique features, shoulder-board stars and
full pectoral of combat ribbons—as Lieutenant General Rodion Marchenko.

And, of course, Marcus already knew the general. Marchenko,
Taras recalled, was the GRU officer who had taken a shine to the Cowboy and
gotten him into
Spetsnaz.
Marchenko was also the man who, two decades
earlier, had helped revive the Strategic Rocket Forces from the ignominy of the
Cuban missile withdrawal. And, Taras thought, the old man must certainly be the
reason why Marcus and he had been summoned to this briefing.

Taras turned his attention to the lumpish colonel and,
somewhere along about the second or third sentence of his spiel, knew it was to
be a “wet affair”—an assassination. The target, it turned out, was a key Afghan
resistance officer who had started a
mujahideen
combat training school
outside Peshawar, Pakistan. Taras felt conflicting reactions—revulsion and
excitement—in almost equal intensity.

“This is Brigadier General Jalil Muhammad Raza,” the Afghan
colonel said, pointing to an image rear-projected onto a foldout desktop
screen. Taras and Marcus moved closer to the ground-glass viewing area and saw
a gaunt, bald-headed old man in a gray pajama shirt. His eyes were sunken, his
mustache droopy. Around his scrawny neck hung a sign, hand-lettered in
Dari-Persian. It was obviously a prison photograph.

“Raza commanded the bodyguard of King Zahir Shah, but when
Zahir was overthrown by Mohammed Daoud in 1973, Raza was sent to Pul-i-Charki
prison for several years. Unfortunately he was released in 1976. Here is an
earlier picture.”

The projector now showed a younger, more vigorous Raza. The
eyes were piercing, the mustache sleekly groomed. What struck Taras, however,
was his uniform, that of a captain in the Soviet VDV. Then, in the background,
Taras recognized the familiar barracks of Ryazan Higher Airborne Academy.

“Yobany v rot!”
exclaimed Marcus beside him. “You’re
telling us this guy is
Spetsnaz?”

“No, but he went through a lot of the training.” This from
Marchenko.

The Afghan colonel went on: “That photograph was taken in
the late 1950s. Later, he also trained with the British Special Air Service and
Green Berets in America, Fort Bragg. We have no pictures from those years.”

What the colonel did have, Taras and Marcus learned, was
reliable information on the brigadier’s current activities, which he regarded
as most disturbing. Not only was Raza drilling thousands of young Afghan men
from the Pakistani camps in the proper handling of modern weapons and the
tactics of mountain warfare. At the same time, according to the colonel, he was
attempting to coordinate the various groups of “counter-revolutionary bandits”
into a “grand alliance against the DRA”—the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.

To Taras, this seemed a futile undertaking, with the
mujahideen
factions irrevocably split between Sunni and Shia and along regional and tribal
lines. NIFA, Jamiat-i-Islami, Hezb-i-Islami and Harakat, for instance, were
often at each other’s throats; and each had its own internal rivalries. It was
hard to imagine anyone imposing a coordinated command and operational structure
on them.

But Raza was undaunted by the challenge, they were assured,
and beginning to have some success. Recent rebel offensives in the Helmand
Valley and in the Panjshir showed definite evidence of coordinated attacks by
several resistance commanders. Altogether a most alarming development.

The colonel turned to Marchenko. “General, do you have
something to add?”

Marchenko nodded. “Raza is a hell of a soldier. He says he
wants to professionalize the jihad. If anybody can weld that bunch of scrawny
bandits and schoolboys into an efficient guerrilla army, he can. He’s a serious
threat. But if anybody can      neutralize that threat, it’s you two.”
Marchenko flashed his stainless-steel grin. “I want you lads to kill the
bastard. The colonel will fill you in on the details. Proceed, Colonel.”

Marcus punched Taras in the right biceps while the colonel
clicked to the next slide. It showed a rough diagram map of the brigadier’s
training compound thirty-five kilometers west of Peshawar in the Tribal Areas,
a region also known for its excellent cannabis and opium crops and many heroin
refineries. Raza was well guarded, they were told, and never slept in the same
place two nights running.

“Kadafi’s technique,” Marcus said.

“And he got it from Castro,” chuckled Marchenko.

The specifics of the plan were to be left up to
them—specifically to Major Arensky, who, if he agreed, would be in charge of
the operation. He and Lieutenant Jolly would go in disguise to Peshawar, where
they would be joined by a highly qualified grade-six officer of the KHAD, who
would serve as liaison.

To Taras, this had sounded as if they would be back in baggy
pants and turbans, riding double-humped camels over the Khyber Pass—exactly as
he and Marcus had joked about doing years before on Wrangel Island. In fact,
they were “disguised” in Western clothing as Canadian journalists and flew out
of Kabul International Airport with a dozen other passengers in a little Yak-40
of Bakhtar Airlines, the Afghan international carrier.

Arensky, clean-shaven with a Harris tweed cap covering his
scar, was supposedly from Edmonton, a recent Ukrainian émigré, Marcus from
Vancouver. Both carried passports and supporting credentials forged by the
master “shoemakers” in Department D of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate.

They checked into Dean’s, one of Peshawar’s three main
tourist hotels, favored by journalists because its gardens and British
Colonial-style bungalow rooms permitted unobserved access and egress by
mujahideen
contacts. In their case, it permitted access that evening to a Captain Fareed
Qadir, their KHAD advisor and guide, who had been in Peshawar for several
months in the guise of a Pakistani taxi driver. “Azib,” as they were to call
him, boasted of having been involved in several “direct actions” during that
time, including the bombing of the Shan Hotel, which had killed several
mujahideen
while wounding a score of others.