The Great War for Civilisation (15 page)

A Soviet officer approached the bus from the right-hand side and his eyes met mine. Then a man inside the bus—an Afghan with another thin moustache— pointed at me. He marched down the aisle, stood next to my seat and raised his finger, pointing it straight at my face. Betrayed. That was the word that went through my mind. I had watched this scene in a dozen movies. So, no doubt, had the informer. This man must have been working for the Afghan secret police, saw me climb aboard in Kabul and waited until we reached this heavily guarded checkpoint to give me away. Another young Afghan jumped from the bus, walked down the right side of the vehicle and then he too pointed at me through the window. Doubly betrayed. We were a hundred miles from Kabul. If I had cleared this last major
barrage
, I would have been through the tunnel and on to Mazar.

The Russian officer beckoned me to leave the bus. I noticed a badge of Lenin on his lapel. Lenin appeared to be glowering, eyes fixed on some distant Bolshevik dream that I would be forbidden to enter. “Passport,” the soldier said indifferently. It was like the ghastly telegram Sue Hickey had sent me, further proof of my dastardly role in Afghanistan. In the 1980s, the covers of British passports were black, and the gold coat of arms of the United Kingdom positively gleamed back at the Russian. He studied it closely. I half expected him to ask me for the meaning of “
Dieu et mon droit
” or, worse still, “
Honi soit qui mal y pense
.” He flicked it open, looked at the face of the bespectacled, tousled-haired Englishman on the third page and then at the word “occupation.” The word “journalist” does not obtain many visas in the Middle East, and so the British Passport Office had been obliging enough to write “representative” in the space provided. The Russian, who could read about as much Latin script as I could Cyrillic, tapped his finger on the word and asked in painfully good English: “What do you ‘represent'?” A newspaper, I owned up. “Ah, correspondent.” And he gave me a big knowing smile. I was led to a small communications hut in the snow from which emerged a half-naked paratroop captain wearing shades. Captain Viktor from Tashkent showed no animosity when he was told I was a journalist, and his men gathered round me, anxious to talk in faltering but by no means poor English. There was a grunting from the engine of my bus and I saw it leaving the checkpoint for the tunnel without me, my betrayer staring at me hatefully from a rear window.

Private Tebin from the Estonian city of Tallinn—if he survived Afghanistan, I assume he is now a proud citizen of the European Union, happily flourishing his new passport at British immigration desks—repeatedly described how dangerous the mountains had become now that rebels were shooting daily at Soviet troops. Captain Viktor wanted to know why I had chosen to be a journalist. But what emerged most strongly was that all these soldiers were fascinated by pop music. Lieutenant Nikolai from Tashkent interrupted at one point to ask: “Is it true that Paul McCartney has been arrested in Tokyo?” And he put his extended hands together as if he had been handcuffed. Why had McCartney been arrested? he wanted to know. I asked him where he had heard the Beatles' music and two other men chorused at once: “On the Voice of America radio.”

I was smiling now. Not because the Russians were friendly—each had studied my passport and all were now calling me “Robert” as if I was a comrade-in-arms rather than the citizen of an enemy power—but because these Soviet soldiers with their overt interest in Western music did not represent the iron warriors of Stalingrad. They seemed like any Western soldiers: naive, cheerful in front of strangers, trusting me because I was—and here in the Afghan snows, of course, the fact was accentuated—a fellow European. They seemed genuinely apologetic that they could not allow me to continue my journey but they stopped a bus travelling in the opposite direction. “To Kabul!” Captain Viktor announced. I refused. The people on that bus had seen me talking to the Russians. They would assume I was a Russian. No amount of assurances that I was British would satisfy them. I doubted if I would ever reach Kabul, at least not alive.

So Lieutenant Nikolai flagged down a passing Russian military truck at the back of a convoy and put me aboard. He held out his hand. “
Dosvidanya
,” he said. “Goodbye—and give my love to Linda McCartney.” And so I found myself travelling down the Hindu Kush on Soviet army convoy number 58 from Tashkent to Kabul. This was incredible. No Western journalist had been able to talk to the Soviet troops invading Afghanistan, let alone ride on their convoys, and here I was, sitting next to an armed Russian soldier as he drove his truckload of food and ammunition to Kabul, allowed to watch this vast military deployment from a Soviet army vehicle. This was better than Mazar.

As we began our descent of the gorge, the Russian driver beside me pulled his kitbag from behind his seat, opened the straps and offered me an orange. “Please, you look up,” he said. “Look at the top of the hills.” With near disbelief, I realised what was happening. While he was wrestling the wheel of his lorry on the ice, I was being asked to watch the mountain tops for gunmen. The orange was my pay for helping him out. Slowly, we began to fall behind the convoy. The soldier now hauled his rifle from the back of the cab and laid it between us on the seat. “Now you watch right of road,” he said. “Tell if you see people.” I did as I was told, as much for my safety as his. Our truck had a blue-painted interior with the word
Kama
engraved over the dashboard. It was one of the lorries built at the American-funded Kama River factory in the Soviet Union, and I wondered what President Carter would have thought if he knew the uses to which his country's technology was now being put. The driver had plastered his cab with Christmas cards.

At the bottom of the pass we found his convoy, and an officer—tall, with intelligent, unnaturally pale green eyes, khaki trousers tucked into heavy army boots— came to the door on my side of the truck. “You are English,” he said with a smile. “I am Major Yuri. Come to the front with me.” And so we trekked through the deep slush to the front of the column where a Soviet tank was trying to manoeuvre up the pass in the opposite direction. “It's a T-62,” he said, pointing to the sleeve halfway down the tank's gun barrel. I thought it prudent not to tell him that I had already recognised the classification.

And I had to admit that Major Yuri seemed a professional soldier, clearly admired by his men—they were all told to shake my hand—and, in the crisis in which we would shortly find ourselves, behaved calmly and efficiently. With fractious Afghan soldiers, whom he seemed privately to distrust, he was unfailingly courteous. When five Afghan soldiers turned up beside the convoy to complain that Russian troops had been waving rifles in their direction, Major Yuri spoke to them as an equal, taking off his gloves and shaking each by the hand until they beamed with pleasure. But he was also a party man.

What, he asked, did I think of Mrs. Thatcher? I explained that people in Britain held different views about our prime minister—I wisely forbore to give my own— but that they were permitted to hold these views freely. I said that President Carter was not the bad man he was depicted as in the Moscow press. Major Yuri listened in silence. So what did he think about President Brezhnev? I was grinning now. I knew what he had to say. So did he. He shook his head with a smile. “I believe,” he said slowly, “that Comrade Brezhnev is a very good man.” Major Yuri was well-read. He knew his Tolstoy and admired the music of Shostakovich, especially his Leningrad Symphony. But when I asked if he had read Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, he shook his head and tapped his revolver holster. “This,” he said, “is for Solzhenitsyn.”

I squeezed into Major Yuri's truck, his driver and I on the outside seats, Yuri in the middle; and so we set off for Kabul. “England a good country?” he asked. “Better than Afghanistan?” No, Major Yuri did not want to be in Afghanistan, he admitted. He wanted to be at home in Kazakhstan with his wife and nine-year-old daughter and planned to take a return convoy back to them in three days' time. He had spent thirteen of his thirty years in the army, had not enough money to buy a car and could never travel abroad because he was an officer. It was his way of telling me that life in the Soviet Union was hard, that his life was not easy, that perhaps Comrade Brezhnev was not that good a man. Had not Brezhnev sent him here in the first place? When I asked questions he could not answer, he smiled in silent acknowledgement that he would have liked to be able to do so.

Amid a massive army, there is always a false sense of comfort. Even Major Yuri, his pale eyes constantly scanning the snowfields on each side of us, seemed to possess a dangerous self-confidence. True, the Afghans were attacking the Russians. But who could stop this leviathan, these armoured centipedes that were now creeping across the snows and mountains of Afghanistan? When we stopped at an Afghan checkpoint and the soldiers there could speak no Russian, Major Yuri called back for one of his Soviet Tajik officers to translate. As he did so, the major pointed at the Tajik and said, “Muslim.” Yes, I understood. There were Muslims in the Soviet Union. In fact there were rather a lot of Muslims in the Soviet Union. And that, surely, was partly what this whole invasion was about.

The snow was blurring the windscreen of our truck, almost too fast for the wipers to clear it away, but through the side windows we could see the snowfields stretching away for miles. It was now mid-afternoon and we were grinding along at no more than 25 kilometres an hour, keeping the speed of the slowest truck, a long vulnerable snake of food, bedding, heavy ammunition, mixed in with tanks and carriers, 147 lorries in all, locked onto the main highway, a narrow vein of ice-cloaked tarmac that set every Soviet soldier up as a target for the “terrorists” of Afghanistan. Or so it seemed to the men on convoy 58. And to me.

Yet we were surprised when the first shots cracked out around us. We were just north of Charikar. And the rounds passed between our truck and the lorry in front, filling the air pockets behind them with little explosions, whizzing off into the frosted orchards to our left. “Out!” Major Yuri shouted. He wanted his soldiers defending themselves in the snow, not trapped in their cabs. I fell into the muck and slush beside the road. The Russians around me were throwing themselves from their trucks. There was more shooting and, far in front of us, in a fog of snow and sleet, there were screams. A curl of blue smoke rose into the air from our right. The bullets kept sweeping over us and one pinged into a driver's cab. All around me, the Soviet soldiers were lying in the drifts. Major Yuri shouted something at the men closest to him and there was a series of sharp reports as their Kalashnikovs kicked into their shoulders. Could they see what they were shooting at?

A silence fell over the landscape. Some figures moved, far away to our left, next to a dead tree. Yuri was staring at the orchard. “They are shooting from there,” he said in English. He gave me a penetrating glance. This was no longer to be soldiers' small-talk. I listened to the crackle of the radios, the shouts of officers interrupting each other, the soldiers in the snow looking over their shoulders. Major Yuri had taken off his fur hat; his brown hair was receding and he looked older than his thirty years. “Watch this, Robert,” he said, pulling from his battledress a long tube containing a flare. We stood together in the snow, the slush above our knees, as he tugged at a cord that hung beneath the tube. There was a small explosion, a powerful smell of cordite and a smoke trail that soared high up into the sky. It was watched by the dozen soldiers closest to us, each of whom knew that our lives might depend on that rocket.

The smoke trail had passed a thousand feet in height when it burst into a shower of stars and within fifty seconds a Soviet MiG swept over us at low level, dipping its wings. A minute later, a tracked personnel carrier bearing the number 368 came thrashing through the snow with two of its crew leaning from their hatches and slid to a halt beside Major Yuri's truck. The radio crackled and he listened in silence for a few moments, then held up four fingers towards me. “They have killed four Russians in the convoy ahead,” he said.

We stood on the road, backed up behind the first convoy. One row of soldiers was ordered to move 200 metres further into the fields. Major Yuri told his men they could open their rations. The Tajik soldier who had translated for the major offered me food and I followed him to his lorry. It was decorated with Islamic pictures, quotations from the Koran, curiously interspersed with photographs of Bolshoi ballet dancers. I sat beside the truck with two soldiers next to me. We had dried biscuits and large hunks of raw pork; the only way I could eat the pork was to hold on to the fur and rip at the salted fat with my teeth. Each soldier was given three oranges, and sardines in a tin that contained about 10 per cent sardines and 90 per cent oil. Every few minutes, Major Yuri would pace the roadway and talk over the radio telephone, and when eventually we did move away with our armoured escorts scattered through the column, he seemed unsure of our exact location on the highway. Could he, he asked, borrow my map? And it was suddenly clear to me that this long convoy did not carry with it a single map of Afghanistan.

There was little evidence of the ambushed convoy in front save for the feet of a dead man being hurriedly pushed into a Soviet army van near Charikar and a great swath of crimson and pink slush that spread for several yards down one side of the road. The highway grew more icy at sundown, but we drove faster. As we journeyed on into the night, the headlights of our 147 trucks running like diamonds over the snow behind us, I was gently handed a Kalashnikov rifle with a full clip of ammunition. A soldier snapped off the safety catch and told me to watch through the window. I had no desire to hold this gun, even less to shoot at Afghan guerrillas, but if we were attacked again—if the Afghans had come right up to the truck as they had done many times on these convoys—they would assume I was a Russian. They would not ask all members of the National Union of Journalists to stand aside before gunning down the soldiers.