A Very Private Plot by William F. Buckley Page B

mujahedin completed their ambush. Nikolai shouted at his men to take cover. It seemed only seconds before Nikolai heard a bullet’s thud a few yards ahead of him. And it was only minutes later that he discerned that the heavy rifle fire was coming not only from ahead of him, from the southern flank of the mountain, but from behind. The mujahedin had descended from their mountain crevices, taking positions to the rear of the Soviet regiment, which now was taking concentrated fire from ahead and behind. Belinkov’s voice came in over the radio to Nikolai. “ The bastards are everywhere. Dig in. I am radioing to the artillery to head back and give us cover .”
    Soon after midday, Soviet artillery began to pepper the northern flank. The withering fire from the rear gradually decreased and the order came to the Soviet commanders to turn about and make their way back to where they had come from. Nikolai shouted out the order for his platoon to retreat. Platoon B provided cover from the front. At this moment, standing to shout out his commands, Nikolai felt the bullet in his thigh. He dived down and began to crawl. He could no longer run, though he’d have felt no safer doing so.
    It was midafternoon before there was anything like a reassembly at the regimental station from which the offensive had begun. Thirty-five men in Nikolai’s platoon were checked in, ten of them wounded. Twenty-five were not accounted for. The casualties in the other platoons were comparable.
    Colonel Dombrovsky did not appear, and no one came forward to testify to what had happened to him. It was not until nightfall that the military radio from Kandahãr brought them the news: a radio intercept of the enemy revealed that Dombrovsky had been taken prisoner.
    Andrei Belinkov made it back with a dozen survivors of his own platoon. He went to the field hospital and found Nikolai. Only penlight flashlights were permitted and it was with a pen-light trained on his thigh that Nikolai saw the scalpel dig into his flesh to bare the cavity in which the bullet lay. He did not remember the yank that dislodged it, feeling only the intense pain and hearing the voice of Andrei (“Easy, Nikolai Grigorovich, the worst is almost over …”), who held a second flashlight for the pharmacist’s mate officiating. He remembered hearing the voice of another officer saying hoarsely to Belinkov, “A bloody ambush. The whole thing. Including two weeks ago—no Stingers—whole thing—bloody ambush.”
    Nikolai woke the next day in a truck in which he and a half-dozen—a dozen?—other soldiers lay, some of them moaning, all of them freezing in the cold as they made their bumpy way back to the division headquarters fifty kilometers away. Every day for four days Andrei would come and exchange a few words with him. They spoke about every subject except the war, except the killing. Nikolai spoke of his childhood, ascribing his orphan status to a local plague, and then about his college years. Andrei spent relaxing moments describing the sports he had so much enjoyed, the karate lessons he had mastered, and the friends in boyhood who joined him in attempting to eke some pleasures from their drab lives. Where-were-you-when-Stalin-died did not work for them, since neither had been alive in 1953, but they did recall the great Olympic triumphs of the gymnast Nikolai Andrianov in Montreal in 1976. Neither of them brought up the American boycott of the Moscow Olympics in 1980. That had been a reaction to the Soviet Afghan offensive that had brought them here, an engagement they would not willingly evoke.
    On the fourth day, using crutches, Nikolai made his way to the canvas-covered army theater, where movies and documentaries were shown. Three hundred men and officers were assembled there, under regimental orders, to view a documentary flown in from Moscow. Andrei Sakharov had denounced the Afghanistan war from his exile in Gorky,