Operation Dark Heart

by Anthony Shaffer

  Yeah, right.

  We had to pull our warlord before the CIA’s assets ran into him. Although he had seen them, they hadn’t spied him—yet—because he stayed at a distance and was in a Ranger uniform. Because of that, he was indistinguishable from the Rangers at a distance. “We have to get our scout out,” I told Colonel Keller, “and it has to be immediately.”

  He looked at me as if I had a third eye growing from my forehead. “We can’t. We planned for your guy to guide the Rangers.”

  “CIA has co-opted the Ranger company you forward-based in Asadabad. They have decided to go with the two scouts the CIA sent forward. Our guy’s in trouble.”

  Colonel Keller was annoyed.

  “Have you spoken to the Ranger 2?” he asked. **** ** ******** *** *** ******** ************ ********

  “Sir, I just came from there,” I said. “There is nothing he can do at this point.”

  “Before you do anything, Tony, let me make a call and get to the bottom of this,” he said.

  “No problem,” I lied. My blood pressure had reached Olympian heights.

  Colonel Keller made several calls and finally ended up talking to the Ranger element forward. I was sitting with my feet up on a desk and my chair back on two legs, when Colonel Keller finally looked over at me.

  “They want to stick with the CIA assets.” He wasn’t thrilled. “So there is nothing your guy can do?” Colonel Keller was an intelligence guy, but more of a generalist. He didn’t get HUMINT operations very well—the slow and delicate work of burrowing into the human psyche until you unearth vulnerabilities that can be exploited to your advantage. Still he at least realized the warlord needed to be handled carefully. Getting him machine-gunned by a rival tribe during his first week on the job was not good business. Tribal rivalries go back thousands of years, and they are not to be trifled with. “No,” I said. “As much as we hate to throw away a week of planning and coordination, there is nothing we can do. We need to protect our warlord’s identity from them. He can be used to shut the back door, using his personal army, as the Rangers push through the mountains.”

  “The old man is not going to like this,” Colonel Keller warned, referring to General McChrystal.

  “Sir, I understand,” I said, “but there is nothing we can do. Your guys have decided to go with the CIA and, unless you overrule them, our guy is out.”

  It took twenty-four hours, a helicopter, and an extremely cooperative 3rd Army military intelligence captain I borrowed to extract the warlord while we hammered out a new mission.

  I wanted to just pull out the whole Defense HUMINT team—three case officers and a debriefer—but Colonel Keller nixed that. They were the main battle effort. The team had to stay with the Ranger Recon unit. It still needed intel.

  With no native scout on hand, my DIA team of case officers would have to go into the villages and do it themselves.

  Using highly trained, national-level assets in a tactical mission, I knew Clarendon would soon be screaming about it. And, for once, they’d be screaming about the right thing. This was a misuse of resources—eating up the time of four American officers and keeping them from doing what they should be doing, running current assets, and looking to recruit new ones in areas outside of the Rangers’ advance of movement. And, most important, our case officers, except for Asad, would have to rely on translators; chatting up the natives would be kinda difficult. I lost the argument, though. The case officers’ new mission was hammered out.

  Still, someone had to deliver it to them. The team’s sat phones couldn’t go secure, so I couldn’t phone them. I went in to see the Ranger G2. **** ** ********. He smirked when I asked him what transport was available to get me up to the front to link up with my guys—the smirk turned to a smile, then to a grin. “We’ve got an air assault going out in an hour,” he said with some irony in his voice. “You’re going to be on it.”

  It was the only way to get to the team. A Ranger assault team had arranged a staging area in the mountains to hook up with the 10th Mountain before sweeping through a village north of Asadabad that the CIA guys had assured them held Hekmatyar’s top lieutenants. My team could meet me at the staging area, and I’d give them their new mission and supplies and head off on the air assault.

  What a pleasant way to spend an evening: hook up with a few friends, chat about current events, and hope that the snipers were very bad shots in the middle of the night.

  Lovely.

  Since there was no way back from there, I would have to accompany the Ranger assault team and the 10th Mountain on their assault on the village as they sought to scoop up the bad guys the CIA had assured them were there.

  Going into combat for the first time wasn’t my favorite option. I was a spook, not a door-kicker. We usually move in and out before the bullets and the bombs have a chance to go off, but it was the only way to get to the team.

  I phoned Mr. Pink, our code name for the forward team leader, and let him know I was on the way with new orders and gave them the arrival time of the assault force at the staging area. They were nearby with the larger Ranger Recon team with which they had traveled onto the mountain and could meet me there. Mr. Pink, however, was disbelieving. He asked me to repeat the last transmission.

  “Yeah, you heard me right,” I said. “I’ll be there in about four hours. Look for me on the LZ. I will be flashing a blue light. Come grab me. We will not have much time to chat. I’ll have cash and new mission orders.”

  Then I kicked it into overdrive.

  I had just forty-five minutes before the convoy left for the aircraft. I had already been on the phone to Randy for the better part of the afternoon, and he knew I was going to lose the battle with Colonel Keller, so as soon as I got word of my going on the air assault to link up with the team, I called him and asked him to bring the cash out. Randy had already warmed up the cars, and they were ready to leave the house.

  To make it in time, which he did, he had to be doing 100 miles per hour the whole way. He had pulled $10K in cash, in hundreds and twenties, out of the house’s safe and stuck it into a black plastic bag just slightly bigger than a bowling ball. The team would use this money as “payments” to loosen lips and buy goodwill from the Afghan villagers. Considering what the average Afghan made in a year, the funds should go a long way. Randy had the foresight to put candy and other sweets into the bag for the team to use with kids. Nice move.

  Normally I would have put on a real uniform; I had a DCU assault uniform for us to accompany combat forces into shit like this, but no chance for combat gear this time. This was going to be a come-as-you-are event for me.

  Weapons. I already had my 13-round M-11 SIG on my hip. Racing to my tent, I grabbed my M-4 with optics out from under my cot. Randy had given it to me from a special stash of weapons he received for another secret mission. I grabbed a black army issue fleece, Nomex green/gray gloves, along with my body armor and my ammo vest.

  Helmet. Where was my helmet? I dug through my stuff. Damn. No sign of it. Soft cap it was …

  Then it was out of the tent and a dead run to the Ranger tent.

  “Where do I go?” I said, wiping sweat off my brow as I approached Ranger 2.

  He motioned to a young soldier.

  “Sergeant Harold will get you to the vehicle. Go!”

  The sergeant walked briskly toward the opposite end of the Death Star complex. I saw Randy and Maj. Chris Medford look at me as I sped by. I couldn’t quite make out their expressions. Envy? Fear? Better you than me, brother? A case officer rarely goes off on a real firefight.

  “Good luck, Tony,” Randy shouted.

  “Thanks,” I said between breaths, hoping I’d be back to have coffee with them the next morning.

  Once outside in the dark, the young sergeant motioned me to a Toyota with the motor already running.

  “Sir, you’ll be riding out with the regimental commander. Please hop in the back.”

  Wow … Col. James Nixon himself was leading this
assault. Pretty cool.

  Too bad his intel was probably shit.

  I stuffed myself into the back of the 75th Ranger Regiment commander’s vehicle. My breathing had just returned to normal when Colonel Nixon walked up to the vehicle and sat down in the front passenger seat.

  “Who is in my vehicle with me tonight?” he called back, unable to make out who was sitting behind him.

  “Sir. Major Shaffer—DIA—going out to link up with my team forward.”

  The other NCO said his name and duty, a senior E-7 going on the air assault as a communications guy.

  “Great,” Colonel Nixon replied. “Let’s go,” and the driver moved out, leading the convoy of Rangers from the 1099 compound to the airfield.

  Soon I was standing in the northern flight line, in the queue to walk out to the designated 47, the giant Chinook chopper used by the Night Stalkers, 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne), the special operations unit of the army that provides aviation support for Special Operations Forces. The Chinooks used by the Night Stalkers were made for night missions, with dual rotors and extra gear and air-refueling capacity. I was informed by one of the 160th’s guys there that I was to go on the CSAR—Combat Search and Rescue—for all intents and purposes the medical/first responder chopper.

  As I waited, the NCO in charge of the manifestation approached me.

  “Maj. Shaffer, sir?”

  “Yeah, here,” I replied, standing in the thin evening Bagram air. The sky was pitch-black above, with only a few low-level lights throwing highlights on the hangar and choppers.

  “Could you do us a favor?”

  “Sure, be happy to do so,” I said, wondering what favor I could do a bunch of armed commandos getting ready for an air assault.

  He wrote the name of a Ranger from the recon unit that had headed out in the Toyotas on the top of a five-pound red plastic container of Folgers coffee in thick, black Magic Marker, and handed me the container. “Can you deliver this to him up front?”

  “No problem,” I said. It wasn’t exactly what I had expected. “But how am I going to find him?”

  The NCO just grinned. “Oh, he’ll find you.”

  So, with an M-4 slung across my front, $10,000 cash in one hand, and the coffee in the other, I moved off toward the bird along with everyone else, marching out single file to our respective aircraft.

  I was greeted by an air force combat controller, the U.S. Air Force’s most highly skilled commandos. “Sir, you will be on our bird. Have you had any medical training?”

  “Only what I have gotten from being in the army.”

  He stopped and spoke into his radio for a second and looked up at me.

  “No problem. We may call upon you to help us out should we have a helicopter go down. Are you willing to help?”

  “Absolutely,” I responded. God. I’d probably kill more guys than I’d save with my army training.

  “Stand by here for a second. We need to run you through a drill.”

  As the other helicopters completed loading, I was walked with the combat controllers through some motions of where they’d want me to be if we had to go down and secure a crash site and assist the survivors. In this situation, rank meant nothing. If you were there, you would help, and you would help in any way you could.

  Off we went, with me having the best, and only, seat in the house: a gray folding chair set directly in the center of the chopper, just behind the gunners.

  After the flight and the landing, a mystery Ranger approached me out of the dark for the coffee and I met with my pissed-off team—***** **** ******** *** * *********—and promised to somehow pull them out so they could work with the SEALs. Along with working with the Rangers, we had been developing intelligence to assist a SEAL on an upcoming raid on a suspected *** senior lieutenant in a village to the north. ** **** *** ****** ****** *** ***** ** **** *** *** **** ******* **** *** ***** **** ** ******* *** ************ ** ******** ***** ******* ** ******** Although they had to get out of this Ranger mission they would need someone ****** ** *** ******* who would direct them to the suspected compound containing the *** senior lieutenant. Then I climbed back aboard the CSAR bird for the next stop: the assault.

  We set down just outside the village and moved out of the CSAR, leaving Mr. White, who had accompanied me out of the field when we met there, on the chopper since he hadn’t been trained or rehearsed. I left my seat and stepped between the folks—about a dozen—who were now sitting on the floor in the Chinook as I followed one of the CSAR guys out the back, once again into the hot rotor downdraft that made the transition into the below-freezing air more stark.

  I assumed I’d be helping the CSAR guys out with something—no words were exchanged—so I followed. Just as we had walked outside of the rotor wash, I could make out in the ambient light a mountain ridge about 200 meters northwest of us, with a village of grayish buildings in four or five chaotic rows embedded in it. The Rangers had gotten there earlier while the CSAR was waiting for me to talk to my team in the field. I couldn’t tell if the Rangers were firing; they were in the village. If there were casualties, I assumed they would move them to our landing zone for evacuation.

  I had moved halfway up a tan berm that looked to be next to a road. As I did, I could see the steam from my breath as I exhaled with renewed exertion under my body armor.

  The CSAR troop was about to say something to me. Then things went into Twilight Zone mode in a hurry.

  20

  UNDER FIRE

  AGAIN, that distinctive hacking of Kalashnikovs. Bullets whizzed and pinged by us. The sudden violence startled us all. What was going on? I had assumed this was the “safe” side of the village. We had landed here to pick up any wounded Rangers or detainees, out of the line of fire.

  I froze, trying to get my bearings, but I was pulled back by one of the combat controllers. “Get down!” he shouted. I fell back, flat on my ass. So much for grace under fire. I could just make out the CSAR team going into a crouch.

  Somehow, time seemed to slow down. Maybe my luck has run out, I thought. I’d already had a near miss with that ambush in Bagram. I’d been mortared a couple of times. I’d survived dozens of convoys back and forth between Kabul and Bagram, with gun battles and IEDs.

  No time to think. I low-crawled up to the top of the berm. The Chinook was behind us maybe 80 meters, apparently below the line of fire coming off a nearby ridge across the road from us. Bullets slammed into the dirt that shielded us—for now. I judged whoever they were to be about 100 meters away. Too close to us for the attack helos still loitering nearby in the air to get a good bead on them without risking hitting us, and the Minnie guns on the 47 behind us did not have the right angle. The Rangers and 10th Mountain were on the other side of the mountain in the village proper, within the rows of buildings that lined the far ridge. I had no freakin’ clue of what I was supposed to do. Yeah, I was a soldier deep down inside and more than able to fight, but I wasn’t part of the assault team.

  “Do you want me to return fire?” I shouted to the nearest CSAR guy.

  “Hell, yes!” he shouted back as he fired back toward the target.

  I didn’t have night goggles, so I tried to catch a glimpse of their muzzle flash and then fire in that general direction, making sure not to hit our guys. There is a difference between the sounds of an AK-47 and an M-16, still, in the heat of battle, it was hard to figure out where the bullets were coming from. So I rose to one knee, keeping low, and aimed at the light on the ridge, getting off two to three rounds every five seconds and ducking back down. I could feel the bullets hitting the dirt in the berm in front of me. Oh, this is friggin’ fun, I thought.

  The shooting went on until the Rangers had secured the village and were headed in our direction—at least, that was the impression I got from the radio chatter I could pick up on the CSAR guys’ headsets when they were close enough to overhear.

  One of the combat controllers tapped me on the shoulder and motioned for me t
o come with him. I could now hear suppressive fire on the far side of the perimeter coming from the Rangers or 10th Mountain guys now moving our way, until everything stopped. There was just this eerie silence. All I could hear was the whoosh of the helicopter blades behind me.

  We loaded back into the CSAR. Before I was able to sit down, I would feel the MH-47 lift off with a vengeance. I could understand why. Small-arms fire close in to helicopters is never a good thing, and it was clear that the village was not as secure—or safe—as you’d want for landing helos.

  I later learned that there were no HVTs found in the village, and it was never clear who was shooting at us: the Taliban, the HIG, or military-aged men who feared being captured simply because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time.

  The bottom line, though: The CIA “scouts” didn’t do anything except nearly get us shot. The enemy, if there were any, had gotten away. The “scouts” had given the Rangers inaccurate information on where to set up blocking positions. So the bad guys had escaped toward us, who were on the CSAR.

  I was thoroughly pissed off and bone tired as the CSAR began its winding flight to a refuel point.

  Since I hadn’t been briefed on the flight plan, I didn’t know where we were going for refuel until we arrived at the base. So it was even more of a surprise to see we were flying along a river with a long bridge across it. On the bridge were rows of modern electric lights. This was not Afghanistan. It couldn’t be. There was no power grid in Afghanistan. We were in Pakistan.

  We set down, and they performed a “hot” refueling in which the motors continue to run and the fuel is carefully pumped into the aircraft.

  I was beyond freezing at this point. It was a winding three-hour ride back while I fumed. I had to get our guys out of this freakin’ disaster of a mission before they got killed. They would be more of use with the SEALs.

  I could just make out the first dim light of dawn as the Chinook’s tires touched down on the flight line at Bagram. There was no one around, so Mr. White and I had to walk about a mile from the tarmac to the 1099 compound.