| |
Just before noon, Lieutenant Mikhail Khalatsyn watched them through binoculars. He lay on his belly hidden beneath a white blind at the top of the hill. In single file eight Afghan borzois (dogs) trudged up the slope. The lead five moved cautiously, their squinting warrior eyes on alert while their heads slowly swiveled from side to side. They puffed hot breaths into the cool, damp air. Soon enough their precious wisps would end. Not one would ever reach the top of this hill.
The lieutenant knew the closer the borzois got to the summit, the more relaxed and less vigilant they would be. He’d already observed the Mujahedeen leader’s tight movements begin to loosen. The scruffy Afghan began to pay greater attention to what was going on behind him rather than what might be waiting above. When the borzois were close enough for him to see shock and awe on their ugly, hairy faces, only then would he give the signal to open fire.
Death from above.
When the borzois were less than ten meters from the summit, the leader stopped and turned around. About three meters behind the first five Mujahedeen followed a fighter who carried a young child on his shoulders. Mikhail did not like killing children; he had two of his own. But he reminded himself that when that child became an adult, he or she would be a mortal threat to his children.
Such are the cruel truths of war.
An old man and a woman brought up the rear. There would be no mercy for them either.
The leader halted again to let the column tighten up. He must have been thinking the worst was over. When he turned towards the summit again, he smiled proudly as if his band was about to conquer Everest. Lieutenant Khalatsyn sighted him in the cross hairs and fired off a three round burst. That was the pre-arranged signal. At the sound of the shots, suddenly eight phantoms clad in white camouflage jumped up from beneath white tarps. The Mujahedeen had walked right into a Spetsnaz L ambush. Led by Sergeant Vladislov Karmalov, four Spetsnaz advanced from the right, while Lieutenant Khalatsyn and three others came down upon them from the front. The Russians fired with their AK-47s on semi-automatic. Lieutenant Khalatsyn had trained his men well; they were cool, calm, and deadly accurate. Bullets thudded into bodies while jets of blood, guts and brains erupted like flares from the enemy. In seconds, heaps of Afghans lay sprawled in slowly growing patches of red snow. The enemy had been so taken by surprise that not a single shot had been fired at his men.
Good kills.
Lieutenant Khalatsyn signaled cease fire. He walked downhill towards the bodies, but his tracks pointed uphill because of the special, reverse heel-toe boots Spetsnaz wore in Afghanistan. Acting on a tip from an Afghan traitor in Barkah, his team had moved into position just before dawn this morning. Pulling back his white hood, the lieutenant grimly surveyed the slaughter. Senior sergeant Karmalov joined him. When they spoke to each other privately like this, out of hearing of the other men, it was always as Mishe and Vlad.
“Moodaks (assholes) walked right into our trap,” said Lieutenant Khalatsyn. “I almost feel sorry for them.”
Grinning, “Almost but not quite; right, Mishe? I imagine these borzois have never seen our special boots.”
Lieutenant Khalatsyn replied in English: “Ain’t that the truth.”
Mishe and Vlad watched as the men checked Afghan bodies.
Grinning, “They’ll be so disappointed when they get to Paradise,” Vlad said. “Spetsnaz will have all the virgins.”
Lieutenant Khalatsyn gave his friend a deadpan look. “There are no Spetsnaz in Paradise, Vlad... No virgins either.”
Mikhail’s Spetsnaz were hard, grizzled men in their thirties. They were brave, loyal, and possessed sharp minds; not a single teenage conscript among them. A soldier named Kulikov came back to report that a few of the Mujahedeen were still alive.
“Our orders are no prisoners,” said Lieutenant Khalatsyn. “Finish them.”
“We should leave them here to die of exposure, Comrade Lieutenant,” Kulikov griped. “That’s what they would do to us. With our balls stuffed in our mouths.”
“We are not them, comrade.”
The Black Russian truly wanted to believe that Russians were a civilized people while Afghans “ate” their own young. But after what had just happened, more a slaughter than a battle, yet one more Jenga had been pulled out of the stack upon which his humanity was delicately balanced. But what happened next shoved that piece right back in again.
Kulikov took out his knife and went to join his comrades to carry out the grim business of mercy. Suddenly an ill wind blew down from the hilltop; jeers and shouts of two Afghan scouts attached to their unit. They bounded through the snow waving the only weapons Lieutenant Khalatsyn allowed them, long knives. Now that the fight had ended, they must have felt it safe to emerge from their white tarps. Lieutenant Khalatsyn hated the scouts. They knew it and feared him. The Mujahedeen he begrudgingly respected; like he and his men, they fought and died for a cause greater than themselves. Thugs like these scouts, and the traitor back in Barkah, only cared about being paid and how much booty they could loot from the bodies of fellow Afghans.
The scouts fell upon the first body they saw, the Mujahedeen leader. After rummaging the dead man’s personal affects, they cut his pants away with their knives. Apparently they also intended to loot the corpse of its most private parts.
“Fucking Pashtun animals,” grumbled Lieutenant Khalatsyn. “Comrade Sergeant, tell them if they remove anyone’s package, I shall personally stuff it down their throats.”
Vlad winked. “You offer our brave Afghan brothers an early lunch, Comrade Lieutenant? Are you growing soft?”
Sergeant Karmalov went over and yanked them off the corpse. One protested, but the other spotted something further down the hill. He pointed, and then the two of them scurried off in that direction.
While the Spetsnaz slit the throats of all Afghan bodies, both living and already dead, a woman shrieked. Lieutenant Khalatsyn, Sergeant Karmalov, and the other Russians turned in that direction. The Afghan scouts were tossing a child back and forth between them. The boy was naked from the waist down. Streaks of blood ran down his tiny legs and dripped onto the snow from a wound on his upper body. With such a tiny torso the bullet hole must have been huge; no way was the child still alive.
The woman stumbled from one to the other trying to grab her son back. Then one scout dropped his pants down around his ankles and motioned for the other one to toss him the boy. As Lieutenant Khalatsyn stomped through the snow, he passed two soldiers. He overheard an alarmed younger Spetsnaz named Tamarov asked an older comrade, “What is that borzoi going to do?”
“The Afghans call it bacha bazi,” the older one snickered. “We call it child rape. Our esteemed commanders back in Moscow call it, ‘A cultural matter that does not concern us.’ ”
“But the child is dead!” said Tamarov.
The older soldier shrugged and went back to business.
When the scouts saw a raging lieutenant headed their way, they immediately began to curl within themselves as if to hide inside their own skins. Khalatsyn motioned for Sergeant Karmalov to take the child. After examining the small body, Vlad’s sad eyes signaled the boy was dead.
“Give him to his mother, Comrade Sergeant,” ordered Lieutenant Khalatsyn. Then he slipped his own knife out of a sheath attached to his boot. He turned on the nearest scout, shorter than himself, the one with the dropped pants, and plunged the blade into the top of the man’s forehead. The Afghan’s eyes immediately crossed, and he sank to his knees. Blood gushed from the hole when he pulled the blade out. The scout looked like a wedding fountain that ran blood instead of chocolate. The other scout began to run away, but a smiling Tamarov put two rounds in the man’s back.
“He gets no mercy,” ordered Lieutenant Khalatsyn. “Leave him where he is. If he still lives, let the cold and the wolves take him.” Then he turned to the Afghan kneeling in front of him. The man’s blood flow had stopped; he was quite dead. Mikhail looked into the man’s lifeless crossed eyes and snickered at the thought that those eyes would watch each other for all eternity. The lieutenant walked over to the tiny woman; his hulking figure cast her in shadow. He noticed she was pregnant. She clutched her dead child and cooed comforting words to him as if he was still alive. Mikhail got down on one knee and reached out to her. She recoiled. In broken Pashto he told her the child was dead.
Then in Russian he added, “I’m sorry. Do you understand what I’m saying? The boy is dead.”
She may not have understood the words, but she knew exactly who had done what to whom. Her eyes spit fire at him as she shrieked hatred and defiance. Vlad came over and placed a hand on the lieutenant’s shoulder.
A distressed, “She is not wounded, sir. What shall we do with her?”
“Stay here, Comrade Sergeant.”
Mikhail moved on to where the radioman, with a radio and long antenna on his back, crouched on one knee. He ordered the man to call in that they were ready for pickup. “Tell Comrade Captain that our courageous Afghan brothers ran away at the first shot. Tell him we have room for a woman prisoner.”
The radioman reported the scouts’ cowardice, grinned, and held out the receiver so Lieutenant Khalatsyn could hear the captain’s ridicule. When he held the receiver back on his ear, suddenly, all bright lights on his face went out.
“Comrade Captain says no prisoners, sir,” the radioman said. “He says kill her or leave her behind.”
Lieutenant Khalatsyn grabbed the receiver from the soldier’s hand. “Comrade Captain, sir. The woman is pregnant. Certainly we can’t...” He dropped down on one knee, closed his eyes, and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
An acquiescent, “Yes sir.” Lieutenant Khalatsyn thrust the receiver back to the radioman. As he stomped away he grumbled in English, “Asshole.”
The Spetsnaz waited on top of the hill for the Mi-4A helicopter to extract them and fly them back to the Soviet airbase at Bagram.
About twenty meters downhill from where the Soviets were gathered, the woman rocked and sobbed, clutching her dead child. Occasionally, she would look wildly at the Russians as if someone might come to steal the precious corpse. Lieutenant Khalatsyn ordered Sergeant Karmalov to leave the woman a bundle of food, but when the big man tried to give it to her she kicked at him and screamed.
“Stupid woman, if you die it’s not our fault!”
A flash of temper, “Leave her be!” Lieutenant Khalatsyn yelled in English. Then, in a subdued tone, he added in Russian: “We’ve done all we can for her, Comrade Sergeant.”
We’ve killed her son, and — a quick glance at the body who had been carrying the child on his shoulders — her husband.
The dead, cross-eyed scout kneeled in the snow, his body tilted back on its haunches. His arms were extended out at his sides. His head was even more skewed to the rear, practically sitting between his shoulder blades. A bare throat exposed a small bump of an Adam’s apple, and his mouth hung open. The scout looked like he was begging God for forgiveness.
The bodies of seven dead men, all pious believers in Him, lay like offerings on patches of red snow that reminded the lieutenant of Muslim prayer mats. And meters away, the other scout still clung to life. He crawled on his stomach as if he really had somewhere to go. Mikhail Khalatsyn mused that if there really was a God, no doubt He looked down upon His stupid creatures and their pitiful dramas with indifference.
In the far off distance came the faint sounds of beating rotors.
Lieutenant Khalatsyn watched the woman finally struggle to her feet still holding her dead child. When she trudged uphill passed the Russians, she shrieked curses at them.
“Where are you going?” Tamarov called to her. “Drop the child! He’s dead!”
“So is she,” muttered Comrade Kulikov. “I doubt she’ll make it more than a kilometer.”
Tamarov made the Russian Orthodox Sign of the Cross.
“Her God is not your God,” Kulikov reminded him.
He is not my God, either, thought Mikhail. Then he glanced over to where the wounded scout was crawling. The man finally stopped moving. Above him, his steaming breath dissipated into a mist that continued upward like a soul leaving its earthly remains.
The helicopter got closer and closer until it finally hovered above them. It descended into the snow. Its rotors whirled round and round while the men looked to the Black Russian for an order to board. But the Lieutenant continued to watch the woman struggle down the hill’s back slope. She stumbled and fell a few times, but she got right back up again. After a short walk on level ground, she began to ascend the next hill, one even steeper but not as high as this one.
“Sir?” said Sergeant Karmalov.
Mikhail finally gave the order and the men jumped onto the chopper. As it lifted off, the tiny woman, still clutching her dead son, grew smaller and smaller until she was swallowed by a vast expanse of the purest white.
The image of the woman’s futile struggle as she climbed that hill, along with the words, “Kill her or leave her,” would indelibly stain the soul of Lieutenant Mikhail Khalatsyn. Should he have had the courage to grant the pregnant woman the tender mercy of a quick death? Wouldn’t it have been kinder to slit her throat?
Cold is a cruel death, he thought.