Patrick McLanahan Collection #1 Read Online Free Page B

BMPs, they righted themselves, then fired copper-sheathed, high-explosive, hollow-charge warheads up into the crew compartment. The molten copper blew through the ten-millimeter armor underneath and spattered molten copper throughout the crew compartment, instantly killing any soldiers inside. The BMP died quickly and messily—and, Zarazi hoped, all on board did, too.
    His men, emboldened by the success of this first attack, streamed out of their hiding places and went on the attack, hitting the other vehicles in the convoy with small-arms fire. To Zarazi, the company commander of the guerrilla forces that surprised this small United Nations detachment, the apparent success of the hastily planned ambush was unexpected. His men had been on the move for months in some of northern Afghanistan’s worst weather; they were cold, tired, starving, and low on ammunition, morale, and courage, continually hounded by American and United Nations air forces.
    Maybe they had such clear success because starving men made fiercer fighters—if they didn’t succeed, they were dead.
    Their intelligence said this detachment, moving west from Andkhvoy since just yesterday to set up a communications relay site somewhere along the border, would have better security. Zarazi’s unit was well below full company strength, but they hurried to be in position to make this ambush anyway because of the chance to capture some superior weapons and vehicles to use in their guerrilla war against the Northern Alliance. Zarazi was disappointed at the small size of the detachment—he was hoping for more weapons and more captives. He might get only fifty captives and a few weeks’ worth of food and supplies out of this convoy. Still, it was better than nothing.
    Zarazi was suspicious, too—a quality that had kept him alive for most of his thirty-eight years, twenty-two of them as a Taliban freedom fighter. Zarazi was born in northwest Afghanistan near Sheberghan. Originally members of the Mujahidin guerrilla fighters that battled the Russians, Zarazi’s tribe refused to join the so-called Northern Alliance, composed mostly of ethnic Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Pakistanis, and instead took large numbers of Russian weapons and vehicles and moved back to the tribe’s historic provinces in the northwest. Zarazi became a provincial commander of the Hezbollah, or “Army of God,” a radical and fundamentalist sect of the Taliban regime, and continued to harass the Northern Alliance forces at every opportunity.
    This substantial and apparently important detachment, moving thirty kilometers west of Andkhvoy toward the northeastern edge of the Bedentlik wastelands on the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan border, presented the perfect opportunity to make a major strike against the Northern Alliance and its Western puppet masters. Still, it was strange they had no heavy armor or helicopter support anywhere nearby. The closest helicopter base camp was twenty minutes away; the closest large military base was over an hour away by helicopter. And with some bad weather closing in—a sandstorm, most likely—help would take even longer to arrive.
    The intelligence data was remarkably detailed and timely as well—maybe too detailed and timely. Although the Northern Alliance forces, aided by the United States, had effectively wiped out the Taliban militias in this area, Zarazi thought it strange that the United Nations would dare send such an important detail so far away from their strongholds without support. The Taliban still had a large and for the most part well-equipped and viable guerrilla force, especially near the Uzbekistan and Tajikistan frontiers, where friendly forces were more plentiful and the terrain more hospitable. The Turkmenistan-Afghan frontier was nothing but desert for a thousand kilometers—obviously the United Nations forces never thought they would encounter any resistance out here in the wastelands.
    The