THE POINT TEAM: COBRA STRIKE

Book 3: The Point Team

by J.B. Hadley

Genres: Action & Adventure; Literary Fiction; War & Military

Synopsis

Three Americans are trapped in Afghanistan. Their only hope--The Point Team. The pulse-pounding action continues in book 3 of J.B. Hadley's thrilling Point Team series,

Release date: October 31, 2009

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 232

Sample

Their only warning was a burst of machine-gun fire. The door gunner had opened up on them too early, giving them all a chance
to dive for cover before the helicopter gunship swooped low over their position and strafed the ground. The chopper had appeared
out of nowhere and disappeared again in seconds over the steep wall of the valley.


“Keep down!” Aga Akbar yelled in English to the three Americans. He had no need to warn his fellow Afghan tribesmen. They
knew how the Russians operated.


In a few seconds more they saw a pair of jet fighters rise over the back rim of the valley, drop into it, and skim over the
terrain. A white vapor trail squirted ahead of the lead plane, seeming to come right at them. A missile slammed into the ground
one hundred and fifty feet from the prone, unmoving men, deafening them with its explosion and showering down stones on them
like hail. A second missile hit maybe thirty feet closer to them than the first, and they felt the ground under their bellies
tremble from its impact before the dirt and stones scoured by its explosion thumped down on their backs to tell them it had
missed and they were
still alive. The men waited a couple of slow, suspenseful seconds for the other plane to deliver its pair of missiles. They
landed off the mark but close enough to shower their loads of stones on the prostrate men. Then the jets were gone. Silence
returned to the valley.


“Everyone all right?” Aga Akbar shouted, but meaning only the three Americans, since he spoke in English. It was only after
hearing that they were unharmed that he checked with his own men. No one was hurt.


“You see their accuracy?” Aga Akbar said to the Americans. “Those MIGs aimed their missiles exactly on the position where
the helicopter door-gunner opened fire. If they had not made that mistake about our position, they would have nailed us for
sure. All the same, the Russians are stupid—they do the same thing all the time. If the helicopter clears off after only one
strafing run, you know it has called in MIGs. If the gunship comes back at you again, there are no planes close by.”


“Won’t the chopper come back?” one of the Americans asked anxiously, looking around the sky.

Aga Akbar shrugged. “Why should they? It will be easier for them to report us all as destroyed. If they come back, they might
have to report that their attack was not a complete success. Why would they want that? We might even fire on them—if we had
the weapons to do it. We don’t, but they can’t be sure of that. America might have sent us weapons. You haven’t. But you might
have. Someday maybe you will.”


The Afghan tribesmen were standing again, readjusting the loads on their backs, which had become awkwardly positioned after
their sudden dive to the ground. Dust raised by the four missile strikes still hung in the air, and four fresh gouges in the
stony earth stood out like wounds in flesh. The tribesmen spoke among themselves and laughed, obviously at the unsuccessful
Russians, then moved out in a long line on the path halfway up the valley’s steep side. Aga Akbar gestured to the Americans
to stay near him, about midway in the line of men, and they obediently fell in behind him.


Having spent eight years in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which
resulted in a doctorate in physical chemistry from the University of Michigan, Aga Akbar spoke very good English with a distinct
Midwestern accent. Though the three Americans had known him almost a week now, they still found themselves startled from time
to time to hear a home-grown American accent from this tall, skinny man with bronze skin, fierce dark eyes, and a flowing
black mustache, who wore at all times an Afghan headdress that looked like two cloth pancakes flopped on top of his hair and
a Kalashnikov automatic rifle hanging by its strap from his right shoulder.


By now the Americans were used to his bitter references to the scarcity of sophisticated weapons from the West, chiefly of
rocket and missile launchers capable of downing choppers and jets. Indeed, Western countries had been very stingy with all
weapon supplies while at the same time being very generous in verbal support for the rebels, words being cheap. Communist
China gave the rebels as much aid as any Western country, so the rebels liked to point out. They knew that Peking was not
helping them out of any real sympathy but only to irritate Russia, yet aid was aid and a helping hand still a helping hand,
no matter what the real motive behind it was. The only trouble with aid from Peking was that the Chinese themselves did not
have the surface-to-air missiles the Afghan rebels so badly needed. Without these weapons in the hands of the Afghans the
Russians ruled the skies and selected their prey on the ground beneath without much fear of counterattack.


The line of men moved laboriously along the narrow path. In a little while they came to a ruined village. The mud-brick walls
of the one-story houses were half collapsed, and their corrugated zinc roofs were stove in. Nothing moved in the single street
lined by the tumbledown houses, and weeds grew knee-high in the middle of it.


“Only a year ago,” Aga Akbar explained, “this was a busy village. Women kept their houses clean, their children played here
in this street, the men worked the fields on the valley slopes. Today the ones not killed by Russian air strikes live as refugees
in tent cities across the border in
Pakistan. The younger men still come back to fight as guerrillas. So long as any still live, they will fight”


The Americans listened sympathetically and tried to picture in their minds what daily life in the valley was once like for
these colorful mountain people before the Russian communists reduced it to a desolate ruin. The Americans knew about the new
“scorched-earth” Soviet policy in Afghanistan, by which the invaders hoped to destroy the food supply of the mountain guerrillas
who resisted them so successfully and to break the fighting spirit of these brave warriors. Those they could not kill, they
hoped to drive into exile. The Russians were determined to add this territory to their empire, with or without the people
who lived there. And yet these hardy mountain tribesmen continued to defy the Soviet Union’s massive war machine with mostly
antiquated weapons and with hardly any outside help.


“This place looks deserted,” Aga Akbar informed them, “but it is not. The Russians are meant to think that all the men have
gone forever.” He laughed contemptuously at the stupidity of such a notion.


Then he turned and shouted several times up the overgrown street between the two lines of mud-brick houses that were now mostly
rubble. A thin form appeared from behind a heap of rocks and stopped, covering them warily with a rifle. Aga Akbar shouted
some more, and the thin figure came forward again, only to stop once more and measure them with his rifle sights. Only when
the lone villager was quite close did the Americans see that he was a boy hardly more than twelve. His rifle had a bolt action
with a heavy wood stock, of World War II vintage at the very latest. Aga Akbar spoke with him and pointed to four goats high
on a rocky slope above the village. There was much arguing between the two of them for some minutes as they pointed first
at one goat and then another. Finally Aga produced a wad of Pakistani rupees, peeled off some notes, and handed them to the
youth, who immediately raised the heavy rifle to his puny shoulder and picked off the second goat from the right in a single
shot. The boy then went back up the village street toward the pile of rocks whence he had come.


“We’ve just bought our evening meal,” Aga told the
three Americans. He added with a sly smile, “I hope you like goat. The boy says the men are all away attacking a government
garrison two days march from here. He was left to guard their possessions. At first he thought we might want to rob him.”


They climbed the hill to recover the carcass of the goat. None of the Afghans seemed to find it at all remarkable that the
twelve-year-old with the cumbersome rifle almost half a century old had hit the goat in the eye and brain with his single
bullet. The Americans had a feeling that this had not been just a lucky shot.


They waited till dark before lighting a fire in one of the wrecked houses so the smoke would not give away their presence
to planes. They roasted and ate the goat, along with dry, hard bread they had to soak in water to make chewable. Then they
slept deeply on the stony floors of several houses, their weariness so great and the comfort of warm food in their guts so
strong, they were untroubled by the cold of the mountain night or the rough surfaces on which they slept. They woke before
dawn, ate more bread soaked in water, drank warm tea. The three Americans walked a little distance away to watch the sun rise.


“I got to be the only preppie in Afghanistan this morning,” David Baker said, massaging a stiff shoulder.

“Just what the poor Afghan mothas need right now—a fucking preppie from Yale,” Clarence Winston said with a grin. He had once
told David that Yale had turned him down on a football scholarship, which was about the only way the son of a black clergyman
in Mississippi could hope to go there. Football hadn’t worked out for him, anyway, and he ended by taking a doctorate in political
science from Howard University. He had worked in the unsuccessful election campaign of a black Republican candidate for the
House of Representatives before joining the Nanticoke Institute, which described itself as a nonprofit defense research foundation
and which had sent all three of them to this part of the world.


The third American, Don Turner, as usual said nothing. He was more than twice the age of the other two, fifty-four,
a retired Marine Corps sergeant who saw no reason not to be freshly shaved and neatly turned out even though they were thousands
of feet up in the Hindu Kush Mountains. He was the last man anyone would have expected to find in a Washington think tank
like the Nanticoke Institute. He explained his role there by saying: “All the clever shitheads here think everything they
dream up is gold. Me, I’m strictly copper or lead. I graduated in Korea and did two tours of postgraduate work in Nam, and
I just love to hear bright ideas from curly-headed children.”


“You know, it’s just beginning to occur to me,” David Baker said. “That was a real Soviet gunship yesterday, those were real
MIGs, that was the Red Army we were messing with. You ever find it hard to believe, Don?”


Turner nodded. “All the time, and it stays that way. Worse things get, the harder it is to believe what is going on in front
of your eyes. That’s what gets to a lot of men in the end. They can take it up to a certain point, then one day they wake
up and they’re not able to tie their bootlaces.”


“And if that happens to me?” Baker asked.

Winston put a forefinger to his own head and fired an imaginary shot. “We’ll have to put you out of your pain.”

Turner nodded in agreement in the gray light now leaking through the cloud cover. There was going to be no splendid sunrise
this morning, only gradual daylight in which they could first of all make out the tumbledown houses in the village, then the
fields at the bottom of the valley, then the valley’s far wall, finally the snowcapped peaks to the north and south of them.


“Yesterday I thought all this was beautiful,” Baker observed ruefully. “Amazing how sore feet and a stiff shoulder interfere
with one’s enjoyment of scenery. You think we can trust Aga Akbar? I don’t like the way he keeps harping about his people
not getting any missiles while he knows damn well that his men are carrying missiles and that they are going to a rival rebel
group.”


“I think Aga sees the big picture,” Winston disagreed. “He knows these weapons are needed more in the interior, where the
Russians won’t be expecting them, than here,
close to the Pakistan border. I think we can depend on him. We don’t have any other choice now.”


Turner said nothing, but it was clear from the look on his face that he was placing his trust in no one—certainly not in Baker
and Winston. Turner had been overruled back in Washington on this weapons business. He had willingly volunteered to accompany
Baker and Winston on an information-gathering mission into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan and knew that he was being sent along
to keep the other two from doing something dumb. It had been Baker who suggested that since they were going in, why go in
empty-handed? Bring in armaments, bring out information. No point in wasting the first leg of the mission when they could
be doing something useful. Turner had pointed out that reconnaissance and delivery of matériel were two different aims and
that if you tried to combine them, one would interfere with the other—the end result being that you would neither deliver
the weapons nor gather much information. For reconnaissance you needed mobility, which you lost if you were loaded down with
a weapons delivery. For delivery of matériel you needed a secured supply route, which they obviously did not have into the
interior of Afghanistan. Turner’s solution was to bring the weapons across the border from Pakistan and leave the distribution
to the Afghans themselves.


This made good sense, except that Turner was not allowing for one thing—the Nanticoke Institute, now that it had decided to
deliver weapons, was not going to deliver the weapons to any old Afghan rebels. The think-tank intellectuals had their own
star rebel, and no one else would do. This was a young tribal leader named Gul Daoud, who had proved himself less a Moslem
fanatic and more a pro-Western anticommunist.


“What we can’t allow ourselves to forget,” a bald-headed professor with rimless spectacles and manicured fingernails said,
“is that the Afghans are Moslems and that some of their leaders are pro-Khomeini and others grow poppies for opium. Those
are not the ones we want to see with our weapons.”


“What the hell does it matter who he is, so long as he
aims the thing at the Russians?” Don Turner wanted to know. “It makes no difference to a missile who fires it up some Russian
asshole.”


Turner was the only one who used impolite words in the sacred precincts of the Nanticoke Institute, a privilege allowed the
battle-hardened veteran. But the thinkers had it all thought out—the weapons had to be delivered to Gul Daoud in person, with
the compliments of the Nanticoke Institute! Turner could go along or he could stay home. Put that way, Don Turner had no choice.
What they were going to do was foolish, but a fifty-four-year-old retired soldier doesn’t get too many offers, so of course
he went. And here he was. With two college twerps who had read all the books but couldn’t hit a barn door with a shotgun at
twenty yards.


At first Baker and die others could see nothing. Aga Akbar pointed at some place invisible to the Americans, at something
he could see near the top of a boulder-strewn hill to the northwest. Aga laughed at their bewilderment. The rest of the Afghans
also seemed highly pleased that the Americans could discern nothing on the scrubby rocky hillside. They climbed the hill slowly,
breathless from the thin mountain air. Patches of old gray snow lay like litter among the stones, even as new grass sprouted
greenly in the valleys only a few hundred feet below. Massive cloud banks lay pressed against distant jagged peaks. The sky
was blue and empty, but all of them knew, as they humped their loads up the steep hill, that in a matter of seconds a gunship
or jet might catch them in the open with only a few boulders for shelter on a barren hillside.


Baker and the other two saw nothing that stood out from anything else until they were almost on top of the perimeter of the
fortifications and armed men emerged out of the ground practically in front of their noses. At first sight the trenches, breastworks,
and bunkers looked carelessly and haphazardly built, but it was all to avoid a pattern easily seen from the air. The men were
unsmiling and watchful, making no effort to welcome Aga’s men. There seemed to be only a barely concealed friction between
them, as if they had no liking for each other but hated the Russians more.



Aga spoke to a tall, heavy man with a bushy beard, dressed in three or four coats of different colors. He reminded Baker of
a middle-aged hippie.


“This one’s a real shifty-looking bastard,” Baker said to Winston. “See the way he keeps taking sneaky looks in our direction.”

“Man’s only sizing us up. Can’t blame him for that.”

Aga parted with two sizable bundles of Pakistan rupees, and the big man handed the money to others, who immediately squatted
down and rapidly counted the notes. Aga came across to the three Americans.


“This is Sayad Jan, headman of this place,” Aga said. “I have bought six asses to carry the weapons—no more back-breaking
work for you. He will send three men with you to the next stage. I am sorry but no one speaks English. But they understand
everything. You will stay here tonight and leave at dawn. Now I and my men must go. From here we can reach a border crossing
by nightfall and reach safe territory in darkness—it’s a shortcut we could not take with the weapons. We must go now. I hope
I will see you again. May Allah watch over your journey.”


Aga watched the Americans shake each of his men’s hands in turn. Allah would need to be very merciful if they were ever to
see freedom again. Aga had done his best to try to make them less conspicuous, but they had not cooperated. Now that Baker
had grown a dark beard, if he had worn the local costume, he might not have attracted immediate attention wherever he went.
But what was he, Aga, to do with a big brawny black man and the other one who kept his head uncovered, his hair clipped short,
and his face shaved clean? Those two might as well carry little American flags on sticks so they could wave them at the Russian
helicopters.


Baker strode back and forth, back and forth. “Fucking asses. Donkeys, no less. What do we do when a Soviet gunship comes?
You know what we’re going to look like standing on some bare hill with six asses loaded down with missiles? What do we do?
Shout at them to sink to their knees?”



“That’s camels,” Winston clarified.


“Right. Asses don’t do anything except move their ears. They’re too stupid.” Baker looked at Turner. “I’m beginning to see
that you were right, Don, when you said the weapons will weigh us down too much and restrict our movements. You might also
have mentioned that they will make clay pigeons out of us.”


Turner ignored him.

Winston said, “Don warned us, all right. Fact is, he was right and we were wrong. What do you want us to do, Don? David is
right about it being crazy for us to drag asses loaded down with shit across these mountains.”


“If we run into trouble,” Turner said in an unconcerned voice, “we can always give the stuff away. We won’t have no trouble
getting them missiles off our hands. Donkeys and weapons is all the style here.”


The three slept that night at the mouth of a bunker with the weapons inside. Like Aga’s men, Sayad Jan’s troops looked greedily
at the mysterious six-foot-long cylinders and square boxes shrouded in camouflage nylon casing. That these weapons were being
given by the Americans to another tribe, rather than their own, was probably an added annoyance. When Baker suggested that
they take turns at keeping watch during the night, Turner told him that he wasn’t going to lose any sleep over the weapons
and that if Sayad Jan tried to take them, he was not going to stop him. Baker and Winston were too tired to really care anymore
at this point, and they, too, sacked out for the night.


Yet it was Turner who slept light enough to hear, over the snores of the other two, the rasp of a footstep in the darkness.
He did not move. Holding his head still, he darted his eyes back and forth to try to see something. He heard another rasp
of a boot on soil—and nearly leapt up when something moved directly above him. But Turner checked himself and didn’t move
a limb. He saw now what was happening. Sayad Jan’s men were quietly stepping over their sleeping bodies, going into the dugout
and sneaking back out again with the missiles. When the Americans woke next morning, everything would be gone, and of course,
no one would have seen anything. Maybe they’d blame the Russians
for it. Turner silently pulled the zipper down inside his sleeping bag and reached for his Marine Corps combat knife….


An Afghan toting a four-foot-long missile in his arms stepped carefully over Turner on his way out of the bunker. Turner shot
his arm up and pressed the point of the blade into the Afghan’s groin—not hard enough to cut flesh but with sufficient enough
force to let him know that the message was urgent. The tribesman froze in midstep over the prone American. The other Afghans
could not see Turner’s extended arm and the threatening knife. Not able to make any sound in case they would wake the sleeping
men, they quietly tried to push their way past their immobilized comrade.


Turner snapped on his flashlight inside his sleeping bag, and keeping the beam covered, he eased out of the bag fast so that
he stood alongside the Afghan holding the missile. He switched the combat knife from the man’s groin to his throat and kicked
back the top of the sleeping bag from over the flashlight. The beam caught the flash of steel across the tribesman’s throat.
Turner knocked the man’s headdress off and yanked back on his long, greasy hair to expose his throat in a sacrificial offering
to the knife. The other Afghans could see everything clearly in the flashlight beam.


“You mountain motherfuckers, you put back all that stuff where you found it, y’hear?”

The Afghans did not need anyone to translate what Turner meant. They hustled back into the bunker with weapons they had been
removing. In his hurry one of them stood on Baker’s hand. All Baker did was moan and roll over. At least it stopped his snoring.


Turner had one of them take the missile from the hostage’s arms and replace it in the bunker. He figured that although everything
seemed to be there, they may have managed to sneak off some of the pieces before he woke up. There was nothing he could do
about that. He could see the Afghans grinning at him in the flashlight beam. No doubt they regarded anything they had gotten
away with as hard-earned and were not about to return it because he said so. He released the blade from the tribesman’s throat
and let go
of his hair. The man scooped up his headdress and slapped it over the top of his head, as if he were covering something indecent
and obscene. Then he smiled politely at Turner and left, along with the other tribesmen.


Baker was snoring again. Winston had never stopped. Turner thought about savagely kicking them but only laughed quietly to
himself instead. Both of the younger men had been patronizing to him on the climb here. “You making out okay, Don?” and. . .