Whatever he thought or whatever the hell was going on, one thing was certain: Wakil Zarazi was marching on Mary, the largest and most important city in eastern Turkmenistan — and their destiny.
Zarazi’s army of about ten thousand soldiers had reached the outskirts of the Turkmen city of Bayramaly, about thirty kilometers east of Mary. This area was part of the expansive Merv oasis, one of the largest oases in Central Asia and an important stopover on the ancient Silk Road that ran between Istanbul, Turkey, and Shanghai, China. The city itself was in the center of the oasis, fed by a number of natural and man-made irrigation ditches that connected the Kara Kum Canal, a large irrigation project completed by the Soviets, and the Murgab River that flowed south.
Turabi had never seen anything like it: cotton everywhere, as far as the eye could see. Thousands upon thousands of acres of white plants dotted the landscape on either side of the highway ahead of them, which made it look as if an immense, fluffy white blanket had been laid across the harsh desert. “My God — they can hide an entire corps in those fields,” Turabi said, studying the terrain with field glasses. “It looks like tough maneuvering in that stuff besides. We’re too accustomed to maneuvering in the desert.”
“God will show us the way to victory,” Zarazi said woodenly.
Turabi looked at his former friend and tribal leader with an exasperated expression. Then, sensing he was being watched, he turned — and saw Aman Orazov staring at him. That rat bastard was constantly hovering around when he was with Zarazi, watching — and surely reporting — Turabi’s every word, action, or expression to Zarazi.
“Do you not believe that it is God’s will we should be victorious, Colonel?” Orazov asked suspiciously.
Turabi ignored him. “Even so… I’ve deployed the Fifth and Ninth Motorized Rifles and the Second Air Mobile to reconnoiter those cotton fields north and south. I asked for a report on soil conditions and any problems they encounter driving through that stuff. The last thing we want is for a ton of unpicked cotton jamming up our tracks.”
“Very well, Jala,” Zarazi said. “All good precautions.”
Turabi looked at Zarazi with faint surprise. “Thank you, sir,” he said. He hesitated before speaking his mind, then said, “You know, Wakil, that’s the first time in weeks you’ve called me by my first name. It felt good. Just like in our youth.”
“Our youth,” Zarazi said with a chuckle. “It seems like centuries since we played in the corrals and fields of our youth.”
“It seems like centuries since we crossed the border into this godforsaken country,” Turabi said.
Zarazi looked at Turabi with a serious expression. Turabi thought he was going to get chewed out again for using God’s name disrespectfully — but instead Zarazi said, “I know what you mean, Jalaluddin.”
Well, this was certainly a change in attitude, Turabi thought. “It’s a shitty business, Wakil. We’re far from home, far from our wives and children.”
“I feel my life is changing here, Jalaluddin,” Zarazi said. “I… I don’t know what it means. I have felt the hand of God on my shoulder before — but I don’t feel it now. I don’t think He has abandoned me, but… but I don’t hear His voice right now. We stand here, on the threshold of the enemy, and I can’t hear Him. I don’t know if this is a test of my faith or if He thinks we can do this task using our own poor mortal brains.”
“It’s called precombat jitters, Wakil,” Turabi said. This was amazing, a relief, wonderful—for the first time in many days, Zarazi wasn’t talking like some kind of religious zealot. He sounded like a regular guy, like any other military commander ready to step onto the field of battle and face the enemy. It was a welcome and heartening change. “We’ve done everything we need to do. We’ve deployed our scouts, deployed troops to our rear to guard against flanking maneuvers and protect our best escape route, and set up reserve forces. We’ve got pretty decent intelligence, and we’re still getting good recruits coming forward to join our army, even though we’re closing in on Mary. We’ve done everything we need to do.”
“Will it be enough?”
“That’s something I can’t answer, Wakil,” Turabi said. He paused for a moment, then said, “Wakil… my friend… listen to me. Why don’t we pull back to Chärjew? If you feel there’s something we missed in our planning, let’s fall back, regroup, get some fresh intelligence reports, build our forces a bit more, and plan it again.”
“You mean… you mean retreat?”
“Wakil, running away in a disorganized fashion is a retreat. Pulling back in an orderly fashion with three full companies as our rear guard is not,” Turabi said. “Chärjew is ours, Wakil — that’s undisputed. We have our hands on the taps of fifty thousand barrels of oil and five million cubic meters of natural gas per day there. We have the twelfth-largest company in America paying us thousands of dollars a day to ‘guard’ their pipelines. We’re in control in Chärjew, Wakil. Out here we’re not in control of anything, not even what’s sticking to our tank treads. The apprehension you feel is a soldier’s sixth sense. It tells you when danger is nearby. Listen to it.”
Wakil looked at Turabi — then, to Turabi’s joy, looked behind him, back to the northeast, toward Chärjew. It was such a slight movement, such a casual thing, but to Turabi it spoke volumes.
They had marched almost two hundred kilometers from Chärjew in less than a week across the barren, burning Kara Kum Desert to get here, fighting off attacks to their flanks by Turkmen guerrillas, chasing away scouts, burying their dead, taking captives and executing spies, and planning their final assault — and not once in all those days had Wakil Mohammad Zarazi ever looked backward. He hadn’t looked backward once since getting jumped by American bombers in northern Afghanistan, since he’d first heard the word of God and set out on this quest.
“We can set up the rear guard in Ravnina. We found good water supplies there, the terrain is a bit higher, and we’re far enough away from the canal so we don’t have to set up security posts there,” Turabi said quickly, excitedly. He had been working out the details in his head for days — but for an escape, not for a withdrawal. This was better than he could ever have hoped. “We leave Second Battalion and Second Air Mobile there, and we pull back — a little at a time, so the Turkmen don’t realize what’s happening. The two units deploy along the Halach oil fields east and west — we know we can hide a battalion-size force among all those wells. In three days we can be back in Chärjew, and we fortify the ten-kilometer perimeter I set up after leaving Chauder. As we pull back, we pull the rear guards in. They’ll pull back to a safe, secure perimeter and be relieved. Once they’re rested and rearmed, we push the perimeter out to twenty kilometers. Now we control everything east of the sixty-third meridian. Solid as a rock.”
Zarazi was silent for a long moment. Turabi looked at Orazov and saw nothing but hatred and loathing in his eyes. Keep quiet, you asshole, Turabi said silently. Keep quiet or I’ll kill you….
“We do not need to pull back, General,” Orazov said. “Mary Airport is less than thirty kilometers right in front of us. We haven’t seen more than a few helicopter probes come our way since we moved into position. We can take Mary, sir, just as easily as we took Chärjew.”
“We didn’t take Chärjew, Orazov—I took it,” Turabi snapped. “And there was nothing easy about it. I lost a lot of good men, one out of every five of my force. But Chärjew will be nothing compared to the battle that awaits us in Mary. The Russians will be waiting with their close-air-support fighters and—”