Agent 6

Greater Province of Kabul City of Kabul Karta-i-Seh District Soviet Embassy Darulaman Boulevard

Captain Anton Vashchenko woke at five o’clock, getting out of bed at the first sound of the alarm, not allowing himself a moment’s delay, throwing his feet out from under the covers and pressing them against the cold floor. He found satisfaction in such discipline and in the dark found his steel water bottle, containing strong cold coffee brewed last night. He took a long gulp before getting dressed in the dark, putting on running gear, jogging pants, sweatshirt, trainers and a holster, which held his semi-automatic Makarov pistol tight near his shoulder. His route was approximately five kilometres, along Darulaman Boulevard, crossing the Kabul River into the centre of town. It had been suggested that if he wanted ecise he could run at the heavily guarded airport, laps of the runway. He’d dismissed the idea. He would run where he lived, as he had always done. In Stalingrad, where he’d grown up after the Great Patriotic War, he’d run past ruined buildings and unexploded bombs, scampering over rubble – devastation had been the backdrop to his childhood. Here in Kabul, his run took him past slums and bullet-chipped ministries. He refused to live in protected isolation, in the secure military garrisons outside the city. Causing some inconvenience, he’d insisted upon modest temporary accommodation in the embassy despite several protests that it was inappropriate. From his point of view, he’d been tasked with the security of Kabul so living outside the city made little sense. Losing control over these streets would hand their enemy a psychological victory. It was essential that they act and behave like this was their city. Indeed, Kabul was their city now, whether the Afghans liked it or not.

Captain Vashchenko left the gates of the embassy, jogging in the direction of the city centre. Normally, running in Russia, for the first kilometre his muscles would be heavy with sleep, a sensation he’d shake off as he eased into the rhythm of the run and the caffeine took hold. But in Kabul he was alert from the first step, his heart beating fast not because of the exertion or the speed, but because there was a chance someone might try to kill him.

Within a couple of hundred metres gunfire sounded. He suppressed his instinct to stop and duck since the noise had come from far away, a distant neighbourhood. Sporadic bursts of machine-gun fire were a regular feature of city life, along with the pungent smells – cooked food and raw sewage only metres apart. Even as his hand flinched towards his gun, he didn’t long to be somewhere else. The captain flourished in extreme conditions. Life in Russia with his wife and children was of little interest to him. After only days at home he became irritable. He was not a good father and he accepted that – it was a skill he would never master. He needed to be tested every day: that was the only way he felt alive. There was no military duty open to a Soviet soldier more dangerous than Afghanistan and for that reason alone there was nowhere else the captain would rather be.

A member of the elite Spetsnaz troops, he’d arrived three months ago, the vanguard of an invasion force sent to save the year-old Communist Revolution from falling apart under ineffectual rule. There were Soviet advisers already based in the city, but they were no more than diplomatic guests of an independent Afghan state. The captain was part of the Soviet Union’s first foreign invasion in two decades, a complex logistical operation across a vast terrain. Quick success had rested on the gambit that the Afghan Communist regime would not recognize that they were being invaded by their allies, a bold military premise and one that the captain embraced. On Christmas Eve 1979 he’d flown into Kabul airport at the same time as other Spetsnaz troops were flown into Bagram airbase in the north, pretending to be an extension of the substantial military aid already provided to the regime. The first test occurred at Kabul airport when the captain and his men disembarked from the planes that landed without permission in violation of international law, approaching the Afghan government troops stationed there, troops with no warning of their arrival. Several Afghans had raised their weapons, cocking their Soviet machine guns at their Soviet allies. In this moment the invasion had rested on a knife-edge and the captain had been the first to react, dropping his gun, running forward, arms high in the air as if greeting a much-loved comrade. He’d expected a chest full of bullets. No shots were fired and the invasion continued er the guise of a military aid programme. New ammunition was promised for the Afghan 7th and 8th Divisions, neutering their guns as shells were neatly lined up in the sand waiting for replacements that would never arrive. Afghan tank units were told they’d be receiving new tanks and ordered to drain their fuel to power them. With the fuel in cans, taken away, the heavy armour sat useless as Soviet tanks crossed the border.

The captain had watched the deception play out with mixed feelings. There was only one interpretation of the events – the Afghan soldiers were inexperienced, the disciplines of a modern army were not natural to them. They were gullible because they’d been organized according to Western military concepts, indoctrinated to being told how to behave. They did not recognize when an order seemed out of place. These were the soldiers he and his comrades would be relying upon to defeat the uprisings, inheriting men who had rolled over in muddled disarray as motorized rifle divisions entered Afghanistan from Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, soldiers who hadn’t fired a shot as fifty thousand foreign troops took control of their country. He was not troubled by the Afghan troops’ strength, he was troubled by their weakness. The invasion had been intended to capture the Afghan military machine, funded and built up over the years by lavish subsidies. The purpose of the Soviet soldiers arriving in Afghanistan was not to fight the war but to direct it using the Afghan military. But even before the desert dust kicked up by the invasion had settled it was apparent that there was no war machine to capture. As a ring of Soviet troops spread around the country taking the major cities, Herat, Farah, Kandahar and Jalalabad – a near-perfect loop of successful tank and troop manoeuvres – the Afghan forces melted away. On New Year’s Day, the Afghan 15th Division revolted in Kandahar. When the Soviet 201st Division entered Jalalabad the 11th Division of the Afghan army simply deserted, a whole division lost in less than a few hours. It was clear to the captain that the real war was only just beginning.

He had never been one of the more bullish officers who considered the resistance to a Communist state primitive, fragmented and disorganized – a tribal opposition equipped with mismatched rifles, some dating back fifty years, and led by squabbling factions. Such an assessment, though accurate in its material analysis, overlooked one key advantage the enemy possessed. This was their home. Superior weapons did not guarantee victory in this mysterious landscape. Smitten with the mystique of this country, the captain had spent many hours reading about the history of resistance in Afghanistan, the defeat of the British and their pitiful retreat from Kabul. One fact above all else had struck him, that since expelling the British: The Afghans have never lost a war.

What better opponents to carve a brilliant career from? He entered this war from a position of supreme respect for his adversaries but also supreme confidence that he would become the first soldier that these mighty warriors would be defeated by, or, if they preferred, they could die fighting.

Coming to the end of his run, there were the first cracks of sunrise in the sky. Some of the shops were open: new fires in back rooms were burning tinders and twigs. The captain stopped dead in his tracks, drawing his gun and spinning around. The barrel of his gun came level with the forehead of a child directly behind him, a boy running in imitation to impress his all audience of friends. Seeing the gun they stopped laughing. The boy’s mouth hung open, terrified. The captain leaned down and gently tapped the barrel of his gun against the boy’s front teeth as though knocking on a door.

A scrawny wild dog scampered into the middle of the street, eyes glowing in the last moments of darkness, before running away. Captain Vashchenko’s day had begun.