The imams of these
madrassah
s were in the main provided, salaried and funded by Saudi Arabia and many were Saudis. They brought with them the only version of Islam permitted in Saudi Arabia: Wahhabism, the harshest and most intolerant creed within Islam. Thus within sight of the sign of the cross dispensing food and medications, a whole generation of young Afghans was about to be brainwashed into fanaticism.
Nuri Khan visited his family as often as he could, two or three times a year, leaving his
lashkar
in the hands of his elder son. But it was a harsh journey and Nuri Khan looked older each time. In 1987 when he arrived he looked lined and drawn. Izmat’s elder brother had been killed ushering others towards the safety of the caves during a bombing raid. Izmat was fifteen and his chest nearly burst with pride when his father bade him return, join the resistance and become Mujahid.
There was much weeping from the women, of course, and mumbling from the grandfather who would not survive another winter on the plain outside Peshawar. Then Nuri Khan, his remaining son and the eight men he had brought with him to see their families turned west to cross the peaks into Nangarhar Province and the war.
The boy who came back was different and the landscape he found was shattered. In all the valleys hardly a stone bothy was standing. The Sukhoi fighter-bombers and the Hind helicopter gunships had devastated the valleys in the mountains from the Panjshir to the north, where Shah Massoud had his fighting zone, down to Paktia and the Shinkay Range. The people of the plains could be controlled or intimidated by the Afghan army or by the Khad, the secret police taught and stiffened by the Soviet KGB.
But the people of the mountains and those from the plains and cities who chose to join them were intractable and, as it later turned out, unconquerable. Despite air cover, which the British had never had, the Soviets were experiencing something like the fate of the British column cut to pieces on the suicidal march from Kabul to Jalalabad.
The roads were not safe from ambush, the mountains 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 for their fire-power to be accurate – or risk being hit. The Soviet losses were relentlessly mounting, with further manpower reductions due to wounds and disease, and even in a controlled society like the USSR morale was dropping like a falcon on the stoop.
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; if taken alive, they could be pegged out in the sun with a small cut in the stomach wall so the entrails would burst out 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 favourite was of course the Kalashnikov – the infamous AK-47. It was a supreme irony that this Soviet weapon, the favourite 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; every Afghan could replenish his ammunition from the packs on a dead Russian, which saved carrying compatible ammunition across the mountains.
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 wild goats through their own terrain, legs seemingly immune from exhaustion, breathing unlaboured 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 grey woollen 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.’
CHAPTER FIVE
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 further down the mountain range. The Arabs kept themselves to themselves, always digging, so there was no cause to mix with them and learn any 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. Further 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 were steep slopes covered in rock and shale 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 found themselves forced to cross a large expanse of rock and shale to find the cover of the next spine of hills. To wait would have meant waiting 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 Mil Mi-24D, 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 towards 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 footsoldier’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 100-lb 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 under-slung bombs. He gulped at the thin air and hoped his guess was right. It was.
Pilot Simonov and his co-pilot 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 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 30-mm 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.
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 infra-red beam. These are the beam-riders. Others are heat-seekers, whose nose cones ‘smell’ the heat of the aircraft’s own engines and home towards 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 ensure 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 non-automatic, it now required his control to rise or drop, turn left or right. He estimated the range at 1,400 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 towards 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 road, 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 jettisoned 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 in weight and the Hind is immensely strong. But even that size of warhead at a thousand mph is a terrific punch. It cracked the base armour, entered and exploded.
Drenched with sweat on the icy mountainside Martin saw the beast lurch with the impact, start to stream smoke and plunge towards the valley floor far below.
When it impacted in the river bed 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 Martin 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 K-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.