Without Fear

by Col. David Hunt

  The marine colonel leaned back slowly and lowered his glasses before pointing at the screen.

  Monica and Harwich turned to take a look, and suddenly froze. She was staring at the image of three men sitting at one end of a conference room.

  The first was George Tenet, director of Central Intelligence. The second was Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of defense. And they flanked the forty-third president of the United States, George W. Bush.

  32

  Straight From The Horse’s Mouth

  THE WHITE HOUSE. WASHINGTON, DC.

  President George W. Bush thought he had seen a lot, first as governor of Texas, where he served after defeating incumbent Ann Richards in 1994, followed by his bid for the presidency in 1999 and his controversial victory over Al Gore in November of 2000.

  And then came the unprecedented strikes on September 11, 2001.

  On my watch, he thought, forever changing America—as well as his vision for his first term in office.

  The nation had been attacked in the most cowardly and infamous of ways, and President Bush made it his life’s mission to bring those responsible to justice while setting up the covert and overt mechanisms to prevent another such attack.

  Ever.

  And certainly irrespective of how the media or the public viewed those decisions.

  His job was to protect America through any means possible, clandestine or otherwise, even if part of the population criticized the very manner in which he protected them from another September 11.

  But doing so had required some thinking outside the box. After all, the last time America had been attacked that way was in Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941.

  President Roosevelt had taken painful but necessary steps to ensure our nation’s survival, entering World War II. And so had President Bush, taking unprecedented, bold, and quite controversial measures, blazing new trails—this was the reason the United States Secret Service had given him the code name Trailblazer.

  The past four years had been some of the most tumultuous in American history, with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Plus, there was that search for those nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and the creation of agencies such as Homeland Security, the enactment of the Patriot Act, and the bolstering of military forces, law enforcement, and intelligence services domestic and abroad. Names like al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Osama bin Laden suddenly became known to every American as the face of the enemy in his administration’s well-publicized war on terror.

  President Bush thought he had indeed seen quite a lot in his years, until he regarded the two individuals who had apparently crashed the closed briefing that Secretary Rumsfeld had set up for him this morning.

  That’s definitely a first.

  Leaning back, legs crossed, hands on his lap, the American commander in chief actually didn’t mind the break in the monotony of his day, especially if what the bald-headed man with the unkempt beard said was true. The last thing his White House needed was more dead marines to feed the media frenzy against him during his second term, as his ratings continued to drop.

  On the other hand, those two characters had interrupted a very critical meeting that strongly indicated, for the first time since he took office, that there might actually be a weapon of mass destruction somewhere in that region. Granted, it wasn’t Iraq, as he had announced as his reason for invading that country and deposing Saddam Hussein in 2003.

  But I’ll take it, Bush thought.

  Director Tenet leaned over and whispered, “That’s the guy who put it together, Mr. President, CIA officer Glenn Harwich.”

  The president glanced over at Rumsfeld, who slowly nodded.

  Although he was born in Connecticut and educated at Yale and Harvard, President Bush considered himself a Texan through and through. And as such, he’d spent more than his fair share of years among ranchers and horses. One of the key life lessons he’d learned while growing up didn’t come from either of those Ivy League schools. It came from an old hired hand at a west Texas ranch who showed him the best way to tell a horse’s age: by looking at the animal’s teeth.

  Straight from the horse’s mouth.

  He had heard the term before, of course, but never gave its origin much thought until that day. The advice, however, stuck, serving him well through the years, as he made a conscious effort to dig through the layers of bureaucracy—as governor and then as president—to get to the truth of an issue. By going to the source, to the horse’s mouth, he could bypass levels of interpretation and “spin” before reports reached his desk. Whenever someone like a military or intelligence chief briefed him on an issue, the president had the habit of picking up the phone right there and then and speaking directly with the individual responsible for the report. Oftentimes he’d even summoned that source for a private chat, to stare directly into the horse’s mouth. And the times when he had been unable to do so, such as with the reports of weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s arsenal, the very same horse had kicked him hard in the ass.

  But this morning, and thanks to the unscheduled interruption, the president was staring directly at one such horse: Glenn Harwich.

  “General Lévesque?” Bush said.

  “Yes, Mr. President?”

  “I don’t wish to keep you from doing whatever it is you need to be doing right now to prevent another ambush of my marines.”

  The NATO chief blinked, realizing he was being excused.

  “I’m on it, Mr. President,” Lévesque said, and promptly left the room.

  The president didn’t dislike the KAF leader appointed by the NATO secretary general, but he didn’t like him, either. If he had his way, however, he would have appointed the man still sitting at the table, Colonel Paul Duggan.

  “Well, Mr. Harwich,” Bush continued, staring at the surprised eyes of the CIA man in the high-resolution image, who was standing next to a feisty-looking Hispanic woman wearing an FBI T-shirt and desert camouflage pants. “Please tell us what it is that you need to find that damn Russian bomb.”

  33

  Let Them Come

  COMPOUND 57. SULAIMAN MOUNTAINS. SOUTHERN AFGHANISTAN.

  “How am I supposed to fulfill my obligation when you can’t seem to keep me safe long enough to do so?” Dr. Khan asked, his hands holding a pair of probes connected to a digital oscilloscope as he took measurements from one of the printed circuit boards he had removed from the weapon.

  It was a very fair question, but one that Akhtar did not feel like answering at the moment.

  “This is a project of immense technical finesse. It’s not one of your stupid machine guns!” the scientist added, the steady drone of the air conditioner and recirculation unit mixing with the heavy breathing of Akhtar’s men as they made the final preparations to leave.

  “We don’t have a choice. Pack what you need. My men will haul it.” Akhtar turned away to catch up with Pasha at the other end of the lab, by the hall connecting to the stairs leading to the main floor. The Americans were coming. Despite all of his precautions, despite the altitude, the thick canopy of stone pines, and the camouflage scheme painted on all roof surfaces, the enemy had somehow located this long-abandoned Soviet bunker.

  It was time to go higher and deeper into the mountain.

  To a place beyond the reach of their planes and helicopters.

  As he walked off, Akhtar was pleasantly surprised to hear the professor ordering his men to crate up the device, minus three hundred pounds of armored plates and other unnecessary components. The technicians responded immediately, moving about the lab efficiently, gathering all of the required gear to secure the bomb to a carrier resembling an ambulance stretcher, easily carried by four men.

  Akhtar approached Pasha, who was gearing up.

  Placing a hand on his shoulder, he said, “Hold them back, brother.”

  “They have no idea what’s coming their way,” Pasha replied, staring at Akhtar’s narrow and heavily lined face beneath a dark turban.

  Gra
bbing his Remington sniper rifle, he rushed outside the compound, where his force of 150 well-trained and heavily armed men waited for his command. Another eighty men protected the compound and would escort Akhtar through a system of tunnels and hidden trails up the mighty Hindu Kush mountains, where the Taliban had a secret headquarters nestled in its snowy peaks.

  There, Akhtar would wait for bin Laden’s courier.

  There, at an altitude over twelve thousand feet, his brother would be safe, beyond the reach of NATO helicopters and troops operating primarily in the Helmand River valley.

  But to get there, Akhtar first needed to get away from here.

  And that’s where I come in.

  Pasha stepped beyond the protection of the heavily fortified gate. His plan was simple: hit the incoming force hard and fast from the front while killing any escape route. Keeping two-thirds of the warriors with him, Pasha ordered the rest to move quietly around the advancing American soldiers and take offensive positions by the clearing a mile down the mountain, where one of his scouts had observed a pair of Chinook helicopters unload precisely forty-four soldiers an hour ago.

  Let them come, he thought, confident that the math was in his favor this afternoon, climbing up the nearest stone pine to get a clearer picture of the incoming team marching single file up an old trail rigged with IEDs.

  Settling on a wide branch and breaking up his silhouette with a camouflage poncho, he brought the front end of the American platoon into focus on his Leupold scope. Below him and spreading across the front of the compound, a force of almost one hundred battle-hardened warriors prepared for battle, the business ends of their mixed weaponry pointed at the enemy.

  Let them come.

  34

  Six Six Zulu

  COMPOUND 57. SULAIMAN MOUNTAINS. SOUTHERN AFGHANISTAN.

  The only sound Captain John Wright could hear was that of his boots crushing leaves and fallen branches, and the ever-present crickets chirping in the midday sun, which was broken into jagged streaks of light by the canopies of towering stone pines. He filled his lungs with the pine resin fragrance infused in the cold and dry mountain air.

  Wright, like his father and grandfather before him, believed in leading from the front. And as such, he was with the point element today, carrying on the distinguished military legacy of a family defined by their actions, not their words.

  First Lieutenant Elias John Wright had led a platoon through the killing fields of France and Germany in World War II, before falling during the winter of 1944–1945 at the brutal Battle of the Bulge, in the Ardennes. Surrounded by a German division making a last-ditch effort in the waning months of the war, Lieutenant Wright had made the ultimate sacrifice, choosing to remain behind to man a machine gun emplacement. In doing so, he gave his retreating platoon enough time to reach Allied lines so a counterattack could be mounted. But by then it had been too late for the twenty-three-year-old officer, whose frozen body was found a week later, bayoneted to death, overrun after firing his last bullet.

  Lieutenant Wright never got to see the baby he had fathered during his very short married life in Manhattan, Kansas, before his deployment. But the boy, Samuel John Wright, grew up staring at the folded American flag on the mantelpiece, next to a shadow box housing his father’s ribbons, a Silver Star and two Purple Hearts. So he had followed in his father’s footsteps, graduating from West Point as a second lieutenant before getting deployed to Vietnam, where he distinguished himself in the Battle of Binh Gia in December of 1964. Like his father before him, the young lieutenant found himself and his men cut off from their infantry division as the Vietcong closed in for the kill. The hot jungle of Binh Gia may have been a world away from the frozen Ardennes, but the fight was the same, as was the determination of the young Wright to honor his oath to his country.

  Shot in the leg, unable to move without help, and realizing he was just slowing down his platoon, Lieutenant Sam Wright had also made the ultimate sacrifice. Remaining behind while armed to the teeth, he had made one hell of a last stand, a dogged defense, Custer style, fighting to his last round while keeping the enemy away from his retreating team. Days later, a recon platoon found his mutilated remains surrounded by more than thirty dead Vietcong rebels—the last dozen blown up with his final grenades.

  Captain John Wright also had grown up staring at those military awards, on that same mantelpiece in his Manhattan, Kansas, hometown. The American flags folded side by side, the numerous medals and ribbons, had fueled his desire to join in his family’s military tradition. Graduating first in his class at 29 Palms, Wright had jumped straight into the fray, twice in Iraq and now on his third tour in Kandahar.

  Wright forced the images of his ancestors to the back of his mind, surveying the terrain ahead on this goat trail while providing cover for three specialists trained in the use of IED detecting equipment. He would rotate back to the platoon, checking as he went, accomplishing two things: he could let his men see him sharing the danger, and he could see how they were holding up.

  Two of his specialists were armed with the Vallon VMC1 “Gizmos,” extremely lightweight pulse induction metal detectors, similar to those people use on the beach, but on steroids. They flanked a third technician, who was using the larger Vallon VMR3G Minehound, basically a Gizmo enhanced with a powerful ground penetrating radar. The GPR feature was the U.S. military’s response to the insurgents constructing some IEDs with less metal by using plastic containers, foam rubber, and wooden boards, challenging traditional metal detectors. The trio swept the path immediately ahead of Wright, who was followed by the rest of the rifle platoon, forty men marching single file.

  Armed with a Heckler & Koch UMP45 submachine gun in .45 ACP, Wright scanned the winding path along the side of a mountain, which the intelligence briefing claimed led to Compound 57.

  According to Duggan, the intel had reached Lévesque’s desk a few hours ago via some link between the CIA and NATO, and the general had then assigned the job to the U.S. Marines.

  The target, a well-hidden compound and suspected IED factory, stood a few miles north and almost nine thousand feet above the vast fields of poppy fields surrounding Lashkar Gah.

  And since Wright had not yet been able to replace the lieutenant he had loaned to another rifle platoon, he’d had to step in and lead this mission—something he had not done in a couple of months. Feeling a bit rusty, he was relying heavily on Master Gunnery Sergeant Jim Bronkie, a three-tour veteran, who was following right behind him, also armed with a UMP45.

  As he watched the specialists sweep their gadgets over the rocky terrain, Wright momentarily thought of the late Lieutenant Wiley and looked at his own two legs. Sighing, he shifted his gaze back to the trio working their combined gear in a low and precise manner designed to detect metallic or low-metallic IED components in the ground.

  What made the Gizmos and Minehounds special was their portability and adaptability to any type of soil. The units shared a feature called Mineralized Mode, an automatic soil compensation that adapted the detector to soil conditions anywhere in the world. But for it all to work properly, for the detector heads to detect metal, the detectors had to be in motion—thus the name “dynamic detector” and the constant back-and-forth action of the operators. And while the pulse detectors scanned the ground, the Minehound’s GPR provided additional value, with its color screen displaying everything hidden in the ground, irrespective of composition.

  One of the Gizmo operators suddenly stopped, an action that made Wright pause and lift his left hand to signal the platoon.

  Slowly, the Minehound technician shifted his unit to the left and just ahead of the Gizmo specialist pointing at the ground in front of him. Upon looking closer, Wright noticed that the color of the soil on that spot was a dash darker than the surrounding dirt. And he would have never noticed it if it weren’t for the specialist, who now swept his unit in a circle to help the GPR paint a crisper picture on its seven-inch LED display.

  “IED,” the G
izmo tech said. “Metallic.”

  After thirty seconds, the Minehound tech confirmed it with his GPR and produced a can of bright orange spray paint. He circled a suspect area about five feet in diameter before marking it on the GPS map of a small tablet computer. The system was linked to the U.S. military’s explosive ordnance disposal unit, who would eventually deploy technicians to confirm the presence of an IED and either unearth it or detonate it on site. But for now the problem area was identified for the platoon.

  The trio stepped around the potential bomb and continued their sweep. Wright gave the signal to move forward, after passing down the line the order to keep clear of the orange circle. But about a hundred feet later, all three specialists stopped again when the Minehound GPR began to beep wildly near a section of terrain flanked by two walls of moss-slick boulders.

  Wright paused again while the Minehound tech checked his screen several times. Pinging the area with the GPR to obtain a full image, he turned and said, “Nonmetallic mines. Four, sir. Daisy-chained.”

  “What do you think, Gunny?”

  Bronkie, a strapping man in his midthirties from Hyannis, Massachusetts, said, in an accent and a voice that reminded him of John F. Kennedy, “Go around the boulders, sir. Safer that way.”

  “All right,” Wright said, while the Gizmo guys marked off the path. “We go around.”

  The technique was becoming more popular with the Taliban: setting up an easy-to-find metallic IED followed by the difficult-to-detect nonmetallic mines.

  A mind fuck and frustratingly slow, but necessary for sound tactical movement, thought Wright, going around the narrow path for roughly fifty feet before returning to the goat trail, where they continued up the side of the rocky hill until they reached a vantage point directly east of their target.

  Wright produced a pair of binoculars and focused them on the large facility. Unlike the mud and stone buildings down in the valley, this place was quite the citadel, with tall walls of reinforced concrete surrounding a two-story concrete and steel building. A pair of faded red stars on the far corner of the wall signaled that it was built by the Soviets during their occupancy in the 1980s. He counted at least a dozen men up on watchtowers, four of them armed with Russian RPD light machine guns. The site, built into the side of a rocky mountainside and shaded by a thick canopy of stone pines, explained why the only surveillance available had come from infrared imagery.