The Road To China

I ran up the slope, dodging between the loose rocks and boulders.  This was an old game for me.  For years, I had run up and down the mountains of northwestern Alaska.  I had outrun rebels in Mongolia.  Now, I was in a footrace with Mujahideen insurgents in Afghanistan. 

 

Running uphill is brutal.  Without a trail, a moment of lost concentration can easily produce a broken ankle.  I focused on breathing and the ground below me.  The adrenaline surging through my veins helped.  The thought of killing those who had just killed my mates was a powerful motivator.  I wanted to see the look on their faces when we shot them down.

 

From the ridge, I had a good view of the trail.  I stopped every few minutes to survey the slope.  We could not be sure the men would keep running.  They might pick a spot and make a stand.  I sent reports to Kashuba via radio whenever I paused.  After 15 minutes, I had caught up to them. 

 

I could see them on the trail, 150 meters below me.  They were still moving, but I could tell they were winded.  I was breathing hard myself.  I took a deep breath, and cleared my head.  Another surge of adrenalin hit me.  I ran even faster up the slope.

 

After another ten minutes, I was well ahead of the men.  I scanned the trail below my position.  I noticed a slight cliff, with a flat top.  I could shoot at the trail from various points along the edge of the cliff.  I radioed my intentions, then ran down to the spot.

 

As I took up my position, I considered strategy.  If I let the men get close to me before my first shot, I could theoretically take out all of them.  But that would be risky.  In all likelihood, I would be able to shoot the first man, and maybe a second.  That would leave two men with automatic rifles against one man with a pistol, at close quarters.  Not a good gamble.

 

My best bet was to shoot the lead man, at as great a distance as possible.  Then, lay down enough fire to keep them from advancing up the trail.  Long enough for the rest of my men to catch up.  When they are in position, the ring of fire they create will be inescapable.

 

On my belly, with my elbows and the butt of my pistol resting on the ground, I waited.  A relaxed, two handed grip.  You could draw a line from my eyes, down the pistol sights, to the point on the trail where I expected a man to appear.

 

The first bullet was low and hit him in the groin.  The second hit him in the chest.  A third sailed over his head as he fell to the ground.

 

The rest of the men could avoid my line of sight by staying low to the ground.  That also limited their ability to move or to fire back.  One of them popped up to the right.  I got off a couple of quick shots before I ducked.  The hail of bullets that went over my head indicated I had missed.  I crawled to the other side of the cliff, popped up, and fired off three quick shots before I hunkered down again. 

 

The loud scream and the cursing indicated a non-fatal hit.  I assumed the last bullet caught the man in the shoulder or arm.  That was enough to discourage the men from firing at me again.

 

I had been listening to the chatter over the radio and was expecting it when the bullets began flying.  Our men had them covered on three sides, and were in protected positions.  The battle was over in a matter of seconds.

 

That would be the only combat we saw in Afghanistan.  The incident brought a lot of attention to our training program and soon we had a backlog of requests.  We expanded our team with some of the more experienced students.

 

Our lives fell into the routine of three weeks in the field, one week off.  During the off week, I would spend time with Irina. 

 

Her office was at the end of the hall, on the top floor of the base hospital.  When the weather was mild we would sneak up on the roof.  We made a game of naming stars and constellations.  And incoming aircraft.  We learned to identify every type of airplane and helicopter at the base by their running lights.

 

We talked for hours.  Despite her insistence that I was no longer her patient, she was not capable of turning off the psychiatrist.  It was her nature. 

 

“Evan, do you ever think about what you will do after the military?”

 

“No.  What do you think I should do?”

 

“You will have to decide that for yourself.  But I know you are not an ordinary man.  A wife, a job, and two kids in school is not the life for you.  You will find your future, in due time.  Or perhaps, it will find you.  If Eastwood did one thing for you, he taught you how to adapt yourself to your environment.  That is a rare skill.”

 

“Being around Eastwood always involved cuts and bruises.  I like your lessons better.”

 

We were like teenagers hoping we didn’t get caught, while parking at the scenic overlook.  It made what we did downstairs in her office that much sweeter. 

 

Being an officer gives you certain privileges.  I had no idea how Irina got the albums.  Dark Side Of The Moon, Sgt. Pepper, Who Are You, among others.  Those were for me.  She would play my favorites early in the evening.  When she put on Anna German or Valentina Tolkunova, I knew what that meant.

 

There is nothing inside you so dark or hard that it cannot be melted, at least for a little while, by the touch of a woman like Irina.  There are other places, aside from this world lit by the sun.  But we cannot stay.

 

Afterwards, she slept in my arms.  I listened to her breathe.  The warmth of her flesh made the snow covered mountains seem a million miles away.  But this was the truth.  No matter how much I wanted to be here, I knew belonged out there. 

 

Two years in Afghanistan went by in a blur.  Back in Mongolia, the rebels began to rear their heads again.  Their activity had dropped off after we had killed a number of them.  When they realized we were gone, they gradually resumed their bad habits.

 

Colonel Kashuba gave us the overview of our next mission.  We would assemble a force of some of the best men who had gone through our training, and do some rebel hunting on our old stomping grounds, along the Chinese border.

 

This time, we would have a very fast police car ready to drop us at the scene of the next crime.  An Ilyushin Il-76 aircraft, powered by four large turbofan engines.  At a top speed of 900 km/hr, we could get to anywhere on the border in a matter of hours.  The plane was designed with the rugged Siberian climate in mind.  It can fly in poor weather and land on runways as short as 450 meters.

 

For attack support, we had three Hind helicopters stationed at bases along the border.  Regardless of where the rebels struck, we would have close air support.  Another new feather in our cap was the ability to parachute from the Il-76.  Our team went to jump school at the 11^th Guards Airborne Brigade school in Mogocha, not far from our old outpost at Ushmun.

 

My first parachute lessons were at an airport in Anchorage, many summers ago.  The tiny Cessna I jumped out of was nothing like the Il-76.  Emil was quite entertaining on his first jump.  The instructor almost had to push him out of the plane.  He screamed like a child on his way out of the cargo bay.  By the time I landed, he was folding up his chute, calm, and ready to do it again. 

 

Our new game of cat and mouse had its share of successes and failures.  We were not able to intercept the rebels every time they attacked.  Particularly when they timed their attacks during inclement weather, one of their favorite tactics.  That often ruled out parachutes or a helicopter insertion.  When we had to do a lot of foot travel, we tended to find their trail after they were already across the border.

 

When we did pick up a hot trail, it turned out badly for them.  Many died from the barrel of a Yak-B Gatling gun.  Others at the hands of the Spetsnaz forces that hunted with us.  When we caught up to them, we always made them pay.

 

The interest in our high altitude survival training followed us back to Mongolia.  We started teaching abbreviated classes in Ulaanbaatar.  Ten kilometers east of the base is Choybalsan Uul, a 2400-meter-high mountain.  The rugged slopes were snow covered year round and a perfect place for training.

 

We would find out that any game one can play, two can play as well.

 

It happened, of course, in the middle of the night.  We were hunkered down in a snowstorm on the slopes of Choybalsan Uul.  I was awakened from a dead sleep, in my quinzhee, by gunfire, screams, and shouting, not all in Russian.  Reflexively, I grabbed my rifle, and tried to crawl out of the snow cave.  A boot to the side of the head greeted me before I got halfway out.

 

When I regained consciousness, my wrists were handcuffed.  A shackle locked to my ankle was connected by a chain to the ankle of a Mongolian.  The man grinned and pointed to the brass knuckles on his fist.  Our captors had made sure I was not going anywhere on my own.

 

A second man approached me and spoke in Russian.  I was stunned when he pulled out a photograph and pointed his flashlight at it.  It was me.  I was aiming my pistol at the young man in Charikar, when I jacked his motorcycle.  He said, “Is this you?  All Americans look alike to me.”

 

I was stunned again, when he showed me a black and white photocopy of my Alaska driver’s license.  The 16-year-old version of me in the photograph looked like he was from a different century.

 

“Are you Evan Anthony?  You better be, or we will kill you along with the rest of these men.  My employer will only pay for Anthony.”

 

I said, “Yes, that is me.”  He nodded to the man I was chained to.  He stood and motioned for me to follow.  We began walking down the trail.  Gunfire rang in my ears a few moments later.  I knew what that meant.  The rest of my crew, those that survived the initial attack, were dead.  In the blink of an eye, my best friend Emil was gone, forever.

 

We marched in silence through the snowfall.  It took all my concentration to focus on the trail.  The shock of losing Emil and the others pounded in my head. 

 

We made it to the road in a couple of hours.  An old military truck was waiting.  They threw me in the back.  I felt a stab of pain as a man stuck my thigh with a hypodermic syringe.  After a few minutes I became nauseated and light headed.  Before we made it off of the mountain, I was unconscious. 

 

I could tell I was underground when I woke up.  The smell of stale basement air is unmistakable.  A sense of déjà vu overtook me.  For the second time in 5 years, I was a captive, with my ankle shackled to a chain.  This time, the chain was attached to a post, embedded in the concrete floor.

 

The post was in the middle of the room.  The short chain kept me from reaching the door or the walls.  I could lie on the old mattress, or use the metal bucket for bodily functions.  That was the limit of my new universe.

 

The same man who had shown me the pictures was now my guard.  He told me his name was Zaya.  He brought me food and water in the morning and evening, and replaced the bucket.  He didn’t say much in the mornings.  It did not take long to figure out, the man liked his alcohol.  I noticed he became more talkative when I could detect the smell of beer on his breath. 

 

After a few days, he started bringing the beer down in the basement.  The beer loosened his tongue.  I was a willing listener.  I had nothing better to do.  He told me we were east of Ulaanbaatar.  In a remote farming community.  We would stay here a few weeks.  Right now, the Soviet Army and the local authorities were looking for me.  There were roadblocks everywhere.  The slaughter of nine soldiers in the middle of a supposedly allied country was a big deal.  Since they did not find my body, they assumed I had been taken hostage.

 

Zaya told me the Chinese were behind the attack and my kidnapping.  They had an extensive network of spies and informants, here and elsewhere.  Apparently, if you trespass in China, kill eleven men, and cut off their fingers, that gets their attention.

 

I was astonished they had figured out who I was.  Since I had nothing better to do with my time, I thought it through.  There were civilian employees all over the base in Ulaanbaatar.  People talk, even soldiers.  The nearly invisible men and women who wash dishes and haul garbage hear things.  These people can pass on what they hear to a man who carries a wad of rubles in his pocket.

 

There would have been a story in the Nome newspaper, years ago when I disappeared.  My acts of vandalism and theft on Little Diomede Island would have been noticed, as well as my footprints leading to Siberia.  That sort of thing doesn’t happen every day.  And, as Kashuba had let me know, Eastwood had quite made an impression on the Chinese, during his tours in Korea and Viet Nam.  So, all the information was out there, for anyone who had the resources and a reason to go looking.

 

I asked Zaya, “Why am I still alive?  What do the Chinese want with me?”

 

He laughed.  “You are a mercenary.  A very effective one.  The Chinese want to hire you.  They will pay you much better than the Russians.”

 

“When the roadblocks go away, my men and I will take you to China.  General Jiang will make you an offer.  If you say no, he will let me kill you then.”