“I said be quiet,” Zarazi snapped.
“We’ll take two hundred thousand now, and three hundred thousand when we reach Mukry!” Turabi shouted to the Russian. “All in gold bullion. If we see anyone but you, the deal is off and we will lay siege to Chärjew.”
“I warned you, Turabi…!”
“Done!” Rizov shouted back. “I have fifteen kilos of gold bullion on board right here. Stand by, and I will unload it.” Rizov motioned to someone inside the armored personnel carrier, and soon a young soldier carried what looked like a steel footlocker out of the APC and started walking toward Zarazi’s vehicle.
Orazov was visibly shaking in excitement. “General, let me go get the money,” he said. “When I bring it back, let’s kill that bastard and take his APC.” He leaped off the APC and headed for the steel case.
“Stay where you are, Orazov,” Turabi said. “Can’t you smell a trap?”
“A trap?”
“Do you really think the Turkmen carry fifteen kilos of gold around in military vehicles, you fucking idiot?” Turabi asked. “It’s a trap.”
The Turkmen soldier carried the steel case several meters in front of his APC, then laid it on the highway, undid the latch, opened it, and stood up. Turabi could see something sparkly inside. “There’s your down payment,” Rizov shouted, “and that is also the line over which you may not cross. The deal is off if you move past that box.” He gave an order, and the soldier started heading back to his APC.
“Thank you, Captain,” Turabi said. “Now, if your man there would be so kind as to dump the contents of the box on the pavement?”
“Excuse me, sir?” Rizov asked. He barked another order, and the soldier started running back to the APC.
Turabi reached over to the twenty-three-millimeter cannon beside him, cocked the action, aimed, and pulled the trigger. The steel box jumped and danced on the pavement — and then a gush of thick white gas began to stream out of the shattered steel box.
“Gas!” Orazov screamed. “They booby-trapped that case!”
“Get us out of here!” Zarazi shouted. As Turabi laid down machine-gun fire on the Turkmen APC, the driver threw the transmission into reverse, and they roared backward. The gas was spreading quickly, probably with some sort of aerosol propellant to disperse it faster.
The Turkmen soldier was hit in the leg by Turabi’s machine-gun fire, and he pitched forward, screaming in pain. Rizov’s APC was in full reverse by now, too. Soon the white gas reached the soldier — and within seconds he was flopping and writhing on the ground like a fish caught in a gill net. Just when Turabi thought he was going to break his neck with the force of his convulsions, he lay still. “Allah have mercy…!”
“I don’t think we’ll be facing any untrained Turkmen border guards or conscripts from here on out,” Wakil Zarazi said as they roared away from the area. “The Russians play to win.”
They soon found out that the artillery batteries set up at Khodzhayli Airport southeast of Chärjew were not fakes when the barrage started, just after midnight. The attack was initiated with strings of starburst illuminators over their positions, followed by rounds that appeared to miss them by very wide margins. “Good thing the Turkmen can’t shoot,” someone remarked.
“Have you never seen an artillery attack before?” Zarazi said. “The illuminators were dead-on. If they fired standard rounds, we’d have been chewed up pretty bad. The rounds that are falling short are not high explosives — they are seeding the area with mines.”
“Mines?”
“Antivehicle and antipersonnel mines,” Zarazi said. “They are surrounding our positions very well, even to our rear. If we panic and move without sweeping our escape paths, we’ll blow ourselves up. The shelling will start within a few minutes, and they’ll be very accurate, I assure you.”
“I hope Turabi is in position,” Aman Orazov muttered. He had volunteered for the mission that Turabi had been sent on. He was still in shock from being duped so easily by the Turkmen, and now he was smarting from not being chosen to lead this raid. “If he fails, we’re going to have a very, very long night.”
Turabi and his light-infantry platoons had departed immediately after the attempted Russian nerve-gas attack, driving light vehicles across the rocky sands toward Chärjew, spread out on either side of the highway.
They first investigated the small airfield at Chauder, but it had been recently abandoned — no doubt the Russians thought it would be the first to fall — and moved back to a more defensible position. Turabi ordered a second security company to move forward, search for mines and booby traps, and take the airfield.
Their first firefight was with a Turkmen security platoon at a power substation northeast of Sayat, and it was here that the Taliban fighters first learned what the Turkmen army was really made of. Although outnumbered three to one, the Turkmen held on to that tiny five-acre substation as if it were the birthplace of the prophet Muhammad. The fighting lasted almost a half hour. Turabi lost five men and had three wounded, including himself — a ricocheting bullet, mostly spent, hit him on the cheek, causing him to momentarily lose vision in his left eye.
He could not afford to take any more losses like that tonight, Turabi thought ruefully. He left the remnants of one decimated platoon behind to tend to the wounded, called for replacements, slapped a fresh bandage on his cheek, and moved on.
They quickly approached the airfield at Khodzhayli, skirting the village of Sakar and then fanning out for their assault. Turabi stationed mortar squads east and west of the airport, then split up his platoons, forming a semicircle southwest of the airfield. The plan was to have his mortar platoons start walking in mortar rounds and then have his rifle and machine-gun platoons pick off any security teams and any other targets of opportunity. Turabi knew he was outnumbered, so his objective wasn’t to attack the artillery-battery security forces; all he had to do was prevent the security teams from closing in to the mortar teams until they could knock out or disrupt the fire batteries and then cover their escape.
Like most plans, Turabi’s didn’t survive first contact.
The eastern mortar platoon managed to set up just a few dozen meters from a Turkmen machine-gun squad that was either sleeping or just not paying attention, so as soon as the first mortar was launched, the platoon was under fire. Instantly, Turabi was laying in only half the number of rounds he thought necessary to take out the artillery site, and his team was under attack. His men started engaging the Turkmen security forces right away, and soon the mortar platoon was able to resume firing, but just thirty seconds into their operation the entire Turkmen army was converging on them. The Turkmen defenders were using troops in “spider holes” to spread their forces out more and keep them out of the line of fire — as soon as a soldier reported contact, a nearby machine-gun nest behind him opened fire over his head. As long as the soldier did not stick more than his head, shoulders, and rifle out of the hole, he was safe.
“Use your smoke! Use your smoke!” Turabi shouted on the radio. Their smoke grenades were very effective — the smoke hung close to the ground, obscuring the Turkmen’s sight. Finding the spider holes turned out to be relatively easy: The Turkmen had dug them in an almost perfect circle, so once one of Turabi’s men made contact, all they had to do was search left and right for another hole. But the machine-gun fire, although not accurate — the gunner could not see his target, although he knew they were out there — was devastating. One by one his men were going down, usually clipped in the upper thigh or near the waist by big twenty-three-millimeter shells. The screams of his own men, dying and maimed, started to engulf him. Surrounded by smoke, sand, stones, and dead comrades, Turabi felt disorganized, disoriented, and helpless — but he kept on moving forward.