Neither had spoken for the best part of a half hour before Shinwari stretched languidly, saying, The Iranians have been strangely standoffish lately, na?
Mmm, Orakzai said. They need time to complete their preparations.
They are almost Western, Shinwari complained. They do things in careful phases, moving like donkeys picking their way through mud.
We need not worry about how many months or years they take, Orakzai said. You must keep in mind that we are no longer harassed by their soldiers when we carry the prepared opium powder through the north.
That is an advantage, I admit, wror, Shinwari agreed, addressing him as brother. But it takes the excitement out of the journey. There is no chance to kill anybody, and the young men now come back bleary-eyed from boredom. He grinned over at his chief and best friend. I am surprised by your calmness. You have always thirsted for action.
Orakzai put another match to his tobacco. I admit some impatience with this waiting around.
YAMA Orakzai was sixteen years old in 1980 when the Soviet Union invaded his native Afghanistan. He had been a schoolboy in Kandahar after being plucked from his native village during a campaign to bring Pashtun youths into the cities for education. The idea was to return them to their people as intellectual superiors who would lead their people to modern civilized ways. Ironically, this was part of a Communist program, and the courses of instruction were heavy with political indoctrination.
The trouble started when the Soviet Union became furious when their handpicked leader of Afghanistan, Mohammed Daoud, began easing out of their sphere of influence toward neutrality. The local Khalq Communist Party was also seriously concerned. They sought Soviet aid and support to organize a coup. The Khalq won the short, vicious rebellion and executed Daoud. The new leader, Nur Mohammad Taraki, took the country back into a Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist way of life. However, because of the now-strong presence of the Soviets in all levels of government, the population, particularly the Pashtuns, became convinced the regime was being run by foreign infidels.
Armed revolt broke out in several provinces, and the Afghan Army responded. However, because of the unpopularity of the government, mass desertions soon plagued the officer cadre as the holy war expanded, making their effectiveness fade at a rapid rate. Within a short time, what the Soviets feared the most began to happen. A Communist government was going down the tubes. They began moving troops into Afghanistan to put a halt to the revolution. From that point on, the situation escalated into an all-out, deadly guerrilla war.
Orakzai, like many of the schoolboys scattered throughout the national education system, ran away and headed for his home village to melt into the craggy mountains. He joined a mujahideen group that was typical of the resistance. Young boys and men from adolescents to graybeards started out with privately owned weapons, gradually building up more state-of-the-art arsenals by looting the dead Soviets who fell victim to their style of fighting. These mujahideen gave battle only when they had the advantage, and withdrew when they were outgunned and outnumbered. The American CIA came on the scene and began giving more weapons, ammunition, clothing, medical supplies, rations, and anything else the mujahideen needed to carry on their insurgency. The CIA also saw to it that these separate groups quickly began affiliating in spite of political and religious differences. The mujahideen united under the single mission to push the Soviet Army out of Afghanistan.
Orakzai proved to be an able fighter and valuable to his commanding officer because of his education. He could do math, work out distances and routes on maps, and thanks to his schooling, he had a working knowledge of the Russian and English languages that gave him the ability to read captured Soviet technical manuals. Within a short time, he went from fighter to small-unit leader, planning and leading raids and ambushes. By 1985, he was twenty-one years old and a senior officer with over two hundred fighters under his direct command. When the UN mediated an agreement that was signed on 14 April 1988, the twenty-four-year-old Yama Orakzai was the overall commander of his mujahideen group.
After the Soviet Army pulled out, fighting between moderates and the fundamental Islamics of the Taliban broke out. Orakzai was a moderate in this civil war, and when the Tal-iban won control over ninety percent of the country in 1998, he took his band and all his people up into the Gharawdara Highlands.
Orakzai and his people did not stagnate in this self-imposed isolation. They easily got into the opium trade as smugglers, taking the illegal cargo to the markets in rural Turkey for sale to European crime organizations. The money was excellent, providing items of survival, comfort, and war. When the Taliban was beaten down, Orakzai saw it as an opportunity to take over the western part of Afghanistan for the Pashtuns. But the events of 9/11 caused his plans to hit a difficult snag. Armed forces of an international coalition were roaming the country, tracking down Islamic terrorist groups. Their various operations and missions made it difficult for him to organize any sort of revolution. After a couple of years, it began to look impossible.
Then he came into contact with hard-ass Special Forces soldiers of the Iranian Army.
Chapter 11
OPERATIONAL AREA
THE AFGHAN-IRANIAN BORDER
20 APRIL
0400 HOURS
LIEUTENANT William Brannigan planned the ambush carefully. The grid coordinates of the road through the salt marshes where Iran and Afghanistan blended together were clearly marked on the map by Lieutenant Commander Ernest Berringer. The Skipper used his GPS to find the exact location. He would have liked to cross the international border and make a quick recon, or even send Assad and Leibowitz a couple of kilometers down the route for a close look and evaluation of the terrain features. Better yet, he would have preferred loading up the DPVs for bear and charging down the road straight into the frontier post marked on the satellite photo for an old-fashioned ass-kicking raid. But explicit direct orders from the SFOB denied him any chance of entering Iran.
It was the old story: Go into the fight with one hand tied behind your back.
Now Lieutenant Junior Grade Jim Cruiser and his two DPVs were in a carefully selected position close to the salt marshes. The vehicles were a hundred meters from where anyone from the Iranian side would cross into Afghanistan, and Cruiser, with Gutsy Olson, Pete Dawson, Doc Bradley, and Garth Redhawk, were arranged in a formation that allowed them to keep the location under constant surveillance. Their job was to alert the Skipper when and if the armored cars appeared, then run to their vehicles to form up to follow the bad guys. The Bravo vehicles' combat assignment was to hang back out of sight, ready to hem the enemy in when the ambush was sprung. If any enemy Tail-end Charlies decided to cut and run, Cruiser and his guys would make short work of them.
The Skipper had the Alpha and Charlie vehicles arranged in a wide vee. The idea was to let the enemy get in between them while the locations of the individual DPVs would allow the Brigands to fire into the bad guys without having to worry about hitting each other.
As soon as Brannigan felt the armored cars were the most vulnerable, he would order the SEALs to cut loose with Javelins and the armor-piercing rounds from the M-2s with their heavy .50-caliber slugs. Additionally, this ammunition was tracer to help the gunners accurately direct their fire into the targets.
The four M-60 gunners Devereaux, Assad, Miskoski, and Puglisi would handle the Javelins. Each had a tube attached to a CLU, with two more loaded and ready to snap on and fire. If one of the eighteen-and-a-half-pound warheads hit an enemy vehicle, it would go through the armor like a lightning bolt through a cardboard box. The resultant explosion would turn anything in the interior metal, plastic, rubber, or human flesh into charred, ripped, and melted debris.