The Avatari (46 page)

The chief looked around at his men. Among them were those who had lost a limb or two to mines, been burnt by napalm or no longer had homes to go back to. He knew they had all paid a terrible price. And he was not even counting the thousands of
shaheeds
they had buried in the hard, rocky earth, in the very clothes they had worn as they died, soaked in their own blood, commending their souls to Allah.

Gaffar Khan’s men had followed him staunchly up the Panjsher Valley and to the Amu Darya – the border with Russia. He was their chief and he would decide how, where and for whom the tribe fought. He was also responsible for the tribe’s welfare and for ensuring it got its fair share at the end of the conflict. The chief was an old man, well aware that this might be his last winter. He had spoken to the other chiefs and realized that no common vision united them over the kind of government that would be set up once the war was over. While certain factions were keen on restoring the monarchy, others favoured a secular republic. Yet others swore by an Islamic state that would be governed by
shariah
. The hated Russians might leave the country, but Gaffar Khan could not foresee the prevailing anarchy giving way to peaceful coexistence nor hope for some improvement in the lives of his people. Unless what he was doing was right, Inshallah!

He heard a buzz in the sky that grew louder. Almost simultaneously, there was a murmur from the assembled men. It was his bodyguard, the young boy, who spotted it first and pointed at the small helicopter glinting in the sky, shouting and grinning with excitement. Gaffar Khan wondered at the simplicity of his people. He had taken the boy in from a village near Khost, where he had found him searching the rubble for what remained of his family following a heavy round of shelling. At a command from the chief, the boy now fired two smoke-generating canisters which let off a plume of orange and green smoke, indicating the location of the helipad to the helicopter pilot. As the helicopter circled and descended, the men watching from below recognized it as a French Alouette, a type of aircraft usually chartered by the aid agencies that had mushroomed in Afghanistan since the beginning of the war. The Alouette had lifted off two hours ago from a particular section of the heavily guarded US airbase on the outskirts of Islamabad that was used exclusively by the CIA and closed off even to US military personnel.

As the tribesmen watched, the helicopter landed in front of them, the downwash raising dust and forcing the squatting men to screw up their eyes. The door opened. Presently, a woman emerged. Although she was modestly dressed in a shalwar kameez, both tailored from the same thick fabric and picked up from the streets of Islamabad, and had a chador wrapped around her head, her appearance in the doorway immediately raised a murmur of male disapproval and dissent. Either the woman hadn’t heard it or, having worked for years in the country, remained quite unperturbed by it, for she approached the group without hesitation. She came up and stood directly in front of the chief, who had resolutely remained seated. He feared that should his men witness him rising to greet a woman, he would risk losing face in his community. But given the woman’s importance as the main protagonist in this strange meeting that had been organized, he probably should have.

‘Salaam waleikum,
janab
,’ she greeted him in Urdu which, though dissimilar to their native Pushtu, was understood by most of the men present.

The woman stood with one hand cupped over the other in front of her chest and half-bowed.

‘Waleikum salaam,’ the chief responded in kind.

‘You know what is to be done?’

‘Yes. We will look after the birds once they come. They will go into that cave, where they will be safe from the weather and the enemy search parties. And we will look after the pilots too.’

The woman went back to the Alouette to fetch a briefcase which she handed over to the chief.

‘It’s all here,’ she told him. ‘The balance will be paid when the birds fly off.’

The chief handed the briefcase to the boy.

The assembled men whispered among themselves and swayed on their haunches as their eyes travelled from their chief to his visitor, but the woman shrewdly discerned that the hostility directed at her had subsided considerably from the time she had first stepped out of the helicopter. There was now a certain degree of curiosity in its place, laced with a mild lasciviousness, understandable in men who hadn’t set eyes on a woman in months. She gazed right back at them, her eyes meeting theirs without flinching.

If anyone had asked her, she would have said she represented Companions of Kabul, a humanitarian organization which organized relief work for those rendered homeless by the war. But no one had bothered to ask her any questions. The base commander in Islamabad had long given up trying to establish the identity of all the people who would land and take off from the restricted area. There were just too many spooks around.

The US State Department and the CIA were not, after all, the only ones keen on the war in Afghanistan. The seven years of fighting had cost the US approximately three billion dollars, but most of it had been given to the Afghan mujahideen in kind. Every big-time arms corporation, media group and aid agency was fighting for a toehold so that they too could have a finger in the pie.

The Afghans on the hillside now turned as one and looked in the direction of the sound that was clearly audible to them, a sound every one of them had recognized instantly. The woman saw their grip tighten on their AKs and a hard, taut look suddenly appeared on the very faces which, until a moment ago, had suggested by their expressions that the war was the least important thing in the world. The steady whup-whup-whup of the rotor blades indicated the presence of an enemy they had learnt to dread, an enemy which reduced the advantage of terrain they had held through the centuries over every invader, from Alexander’s Macedonian pikemen to the British.

‘What is this?’ the other minor tribal chiefs now asked, already on their feet and dispersing in their search for fire positions.

The men with the rocket launchers already had their weapons to their shoulder, although they couldn’t spot the helicopters.

‘We have been betrayed!’ came a ragged shout from one of the men, followed by, ‘Death to the kafirs!’

It was met by a chorus of ‘Allah hu Akbar!’

Gaffar Khan alone appeared unmoved by the developments. In fact, he was secretly enjoying the drama of the unfolding event of which he was, in part, an architect.

‘My brothers, remain calm and resume your seats! Do
not
fire! These are not the enemy, but our guests!’ he thundered in a voice which rang out across the ridges.

Inwardly amused, he observed the expression of shock on the men’s faces and listened to the excited chatter which followed. The woman, who was also watching the men closely, noticed that while their stance was now more relaxed, their weapons were still at the ready. No one was taking any chances.

* * *

The four helicopters which had appeared – Mi-8s that NATO had code-named Hip – were from the 181st Independent Helicopter Regiment at Jalalabad. Manufactured at the Mil Moscow Helicopter Plant in Kazan, the capital of Soviet Tartarstan, these were arguably the best and, more importantly, most rugged transport helicopters in the world, capable of operating in an armed helicopter role in the battle zone and protected from small-arms fire by armour plates fitted in the front. These helicopters were the prototypes of a new series, the Mi-8 MTV – the ‘V’ standing for
Vistonyi
or ‘high altitude’ – originally designed to operate in the Tajik Mountains at altitudes of 5,000 metres and now, serendipitously, in Afghanistan. They could carry four tonnes of load – the equivalent of sixteen fully armed soldiers – along with an armament of machine guns and rockets fitted on external pods.

Each of the four helicopters carried three men: a pilot, a co-pilot and a technician. Eleven of the men were Afghans, fighting for the pro-Soviet government. The twelfth was Major Igor Upanov, lately of the 5 Spetsnaz Battalion and recently reassigned as a flight commander in the helicopter regiment.

Upanov had opted for officers training for the army, mainly to get away from dreary Moscow, but also for some reprieve from his parents who were bent on realizing their own ambitions through their son. In the training academy, he had proved to be a bright student, with an aptitude for readily adapting to different environments. He had picked up English and was one of the few permitted to listen to Voice of America and the BBC to improve his accent. On being commissioned, he had joined the cream of the Russian army – the elite Special Forces or Spetsnaz. As it turned out, however, cadets of lower merit would pass out of the academy and join tank regiments, with few of them serving in Afghanistan. The Spetsnaz, on the other hand, was worked hard and mauled badly. The only other units to be similarly flogged were the helicopter regiments.

When war broke out in Afghanistan, Upanov’s unit was one of the first to be sent in. Initially, there was a great deal of optimism and much talk of getting back home by the end of the year. He lost twenty men in his company that year and the figures just kept rising with every year that passed, until they found themselves speculating
if
they would get back home at all, instead of
when
they would do so. The turnover was, in fact, so rapid that Upanov hardly knew anyone in the company who had been around at the time he joined. There was, however, a more pressing need for helicopter pilots. Someone in Moscow had stumbled on the fact that Igor Upanov had cleared a pilot aptitude test as a cadet. As a result, he was sent for a crash course in flight training. Igor then applied for and obtained some leave and went home to find his ailing mother seriously ill. She would die and be buried while he was still at home. He spent some time with his father who was now stooped and smelt of vodka, but still regularly attended Party meetings.

‘You should start a family,’ his father had suggested.

It was a change from his usual monologue about how to win the war in Afghanistan and drive out the decadent imperialists. Igor had looked around the matchbox apartment, cold even in summer, on the seventh floor of a building where the lift didn’t work, and chosen not to respond.

The Afghan War was something the Soviets would want to forget after it was over. It was a war where the enemy remained elusive. Or, as Mao had put it, ‘The guerrilla is a fish swimming in a sea of support.’ The Soviets would try to empty the sea with firepower and find that the battlefield had shifted from the urban centres to the hills. Apart from snipers, malaria, cholera and dysentery would take a heavy toll on the Russian soldiers. It was a covert war, in one sense. During the first two years of the conflict, the Soviet press would report the death of some two dozen of the country’s servicemen; in reality, thousands had been killed. Whenever Afghanistan was mentioned in the Soviet press, the accompanying clips showed cheerful Soviet servicemen building orphanages; the commentators simply neglected to mention their role in filling them. Families back in the Soviet Union were handed the bodies of their loved ones, casualties of the war, for burial, only after being sworn to secrecy.

Igor Upanov worked hard and diligently in the helicopter regiment. After a tour of two years’ duration, he was rewarded with a good ‘staff’ assignment back home as an interpreter in Leningrad with visiting military delegations, a tenure he thoroughly enjoyed. He remembered the easy-going US Army colonel he had been assigned to, who kept chivvying him whenever he could.

‘Goddamn, Igor,’ he would say, after consuming copious quantities of cherry brandy in his room after dinner, ‘don’t tell me you don’t like money? Everyone does. It’s what makes the world go round.’

While the observation was far from original and Igor refrained from volunteering an opinion, he could not but agree with the American. The man had bought three formal dresses for his wife at one shot; Igor had known his mother to make do with only one all her life. When he left, after spending three weeks in the Soviet Union, the colonel had handed Igor a small wood and brass memento bearing the US Army insignia on which his visiting card was pasted.

‘Thank you, Major,’ the American had said formally and, as they shook hands, added casually, ‘there’s a number here you might want to use some day.’

Igor found a telephone number scrawled in pencil on the back of the visiting card. He copied it down and erased it from the card, before handing it over, along with the gift, to intelligence, as required by protocol. He had made out that the phone number was a civilian one in Moscow, but refrained from mentioning this during the mandatory debrief session that followed the colonel’s visit.

Even before Soviet troops had received official orders to pull out, Igor knew the war was over and began considering a way out. When he was next on leave, he made a call to the number the American colonel had given him; it turned out to be that of a hospital. He identified himself and apologized to the receptionist for dialling the wrong number. A week later, when he was sitting in a coffee house, an old man came in and joined him at his table. The contact had been established; he was told someone would get in touch with him.

It wasn’t as if defections from the Afghan army to the mujahideen hadn’t been taking place since the war broke out, but the early ones had primarily involved ground troops. The CIA had made repeated attempts to get the Afghan air force and helicopter units to defect as well by offering incredibly large sums of money through their covert channels. These efforts had just begun paying off, with two Afghan pilots flying their Mi-24s into the Miram Shah Air Base in Pakistan in mid-1985. This had proved to be a serious setback for Soviet propaganda. They had subsequently tightened up their security, ensuring that every sortie which took off had at least one Soviet pilot in command. That was how Igor Upanov came to be on board one of the Mi-8s that had originally taken off on a routine administrative mission to Herat, before veering off course to land on this remote Afghan hillside. When the Russian had first been contacted, he couldn’t believe the deal. But the contacts had paid cash upfront – green dollars, which he carried in his flight satchel. The balance of his flight crew – all Afghans – came readily enough once they were assured that this was no trap.