by David Poyer
The night went green and black, granular and disorienting with one eye split into two. The night vision picked up heat so that past the gunner the other 53 orbited with comets of aventurine light that were the tips of the main rotors, and above them the top cover, swift, small blurs of radiance, fast movers. He was glad they were there. He unbuckled, struggled to his feet, and felt his way toward the gunner’s station as the man charged the weapon. Looked over his shoulder as the starlit sky gave way to the darkness of the ground. Only not absolutely dark. Here and there queer patches of phosphorescence glowed, speckled by pinpricks of light. Heat sources? He couldn’t make sense out of it. It wasn’t anything you’d see on night ops in Southern California.
He straight-armed the last SEAL in line and the wake-up call went on down the line and across the aisle. Men stretched and shook out muscles. Gloves crawled around gear like starfish disassembling a cadaver. He returned a thumbs-up from Oz and nodded to Lieutenant Dollhard. A lot of people. He hoped it didn’t turn ugly, on the ground.
Five minutes, the crewman’s spread fingers signaled. Then he laid a belt of 7.62 into the minigun.
The helo banked and Obie grabbed a handhold as they plunged, executing some sort of sudden evasive maneuver. Up out of the darkness swam a cluster of the small, hot lights. The huddled village not far from Omar’s compound, he guessed,
From the lead 53 a wire-straight intermittent ray reached out. It searched the ground, and where it touched, dust boiled and iridescent light rippled and flashed. A second stream licked out from the gunner on his side. To a hellish burst of noise the rotating barrels of the minigun glowed bright emerald, spinning around their axis as bright hot bars of light darted down and burst into fragments of hot green fluorescence that bounced high into the air. At the same instant more hot bright points, fluctuating rapidly, burst from the sides of the lead bird and shot at incredible velocity out and up and then down into the night. They ricocheted off the hillside, suddenly revealing buildings and vehicles below.
The helicopter was banking hard, corkscrewing out of the air. IR flares burst from either side, trailing billows of glowing green smoke that twisted in the rotorwash. Beams of intermittent light traced down. Explosions flicker-lit the hillsides like strobes at a rock concert. The two escort Pave Lows, empty of operators but ammo-heavy, were lending a hand with suppression, along with a much heavier series of detonations from the AC-130 gunship farther off. Teddy kept an eye on Swager. He figured Knobby as the problem child, the dude who’d be shaking in his shit if anybody was. The kid was hunched over his butt-grounded weapon. What little Teddy could see of his camo’d face was blank. They all looked inhuman, with the goggles, the green and black paint, bulky and overloaded with weapons, magazines, grenades, explosives, trauma kits.
The air crewman pointed. Teddy levered himself up against sudden g’s and lurched toward the ramp, bracing himself on the line of shoulders along the way.
The ramp jerked and began coming down on an immense panorama, like some National Geographic giant-screen special in full 3-D. Forces of War, or Apocalypse in Afghanistan. Across the blackness tracers searched like the finger of God. Answering balls of flame leapt skyward, burning so brilliantly they haloed in his goggles, then slowed, declined, fell away into guttering death. The mountains pulled forward and back as they illuminated, went dark, illuminated, as if they were stage sets. A mile away something exploded, leaping skyward and tumbling end over end with terrific force and blinding light. He had to admire the production values even as his gut writhed and he kicked the heavy coils of fast rope down the ramp into the blackness below. Jesus God, the wind was freezing. The blackness seethed as the chopper settled, and the dust he’d feared boiled up and rolled out in a curtain that rose all around as they dropped into it. Just before they did, he caught the wink of muzzle flashes to the left. Bigger than AKs, and his guts compressed again.
Yeah. Way better than surfing.
“Let’s go! Go, go!” he shouted, though he knew they couldn’t hear him through the combined roar of straining turbines and both miniguns. Bullets bit the fuselage with a pa-clunk, pa-clunk like sheet aluminum being hit with a rivet gun combined with the whiplash crack that meant whoever was shooting at them was so close the bullets were still supersonic. Dollhard was first down the rope, grabbing it and swinging out like a kid at a swimming hole before vanishing into the murk. He was followed at one-second intervals by Tatie, Oz, Smeg, Bucky, Scooper, Steff, Vaseline, Harley, Moogie, Tore, Dipper, Mud Cat, and the Air Force air combat controller. Hospitalmen, enginemen, boatswains, gunner’s mates, quartermasters, IC men, torpedomen. Flung out into the chill air that whistled through the holes. More bullets clattered around the interior. With total relief Teddy clamped his gloves on the rope and dropped after them.
* * *
HE hit in total blackness unrelieved even by the goggles. The cold air gritted his teeth like chewing on sandpaper. It smelled like shit and kerosene and burned-out firecrackers. Buffeted by rotorwash, crouching as he jogged, he blundered into another bulky shadow and caromed off; looked up to catch the elongated blackness of the helo roaring like an enraged father above them, already shrinking; he oriented and jogged forward again. They’d walked through the actions on the objective in rock drills in the bomb bay, then run it live on the flight deck, so everybody knew where to go and what to do when he got there. He glanced at his diving compass as a fresh gust of sand and dust surfed over them. Mountains, left. Something angular ahead, sparkling green in his electronic vision. The Air Force had vetoed going in covert; the Taliban had heavy machine guns around the compound and station, and these had to be suppressed. Which the AC-130s were still doing, reaching down from the darkness all around the horizon but most particularly directly ahead. And the tracers weren’t all going one way.
“Bound forward! Go, go, go!”
He pushed through the dust and caught up to Dollhard, who was signaling a bounding advance in three-man wedges. They leapfrogged over a sloping field corrugated with dry furrows. The dirt felt loose and crumbly beneath his boots when he leapt up and ran, and his balls drew up inside his groin. A minefield? But it didn’t seem to be. At least, none went off. Thirty yards away rubble walls stretched across his field of vision. Just high enough he couldn’t see over. Past them a stand of stunted trees marked what he guessed was the wadi. Past it was Objective Cottonmouth. Cross the stream, move rapidly uphill toward the compound. He’d have preferred to land right in the compound, just plaster it with the minigun, then fast-rope down inside the walls. But again, the 160th had veto power; too much danger of a rocket grenade up the kilt. So they had 150, 200 yards over more or less open ground.
Up again, a dash forward, then sinking to a knee. M4 aimed, but not firing yet. The tracers were still flying down ahead of them into the compound beneath the buzz-saw drone of the Spectre, but no one seemed to be firing back. Up and forward, a fast jog, lengthening the pace, concentrating on getting across that open field. A man tripped and went down, arm shooting out before he hit in a puff of dust. Teddy couldn’t make out who, but yanked him to his feet and slapped his back. “Sporty, eh?” he yelled through a steel-wooled throat.
Suddenly he felt like Superman. Invulnerable. The C4 was heavy as sin, but he liked having it there. The stuff absorbed bullets like wet clay. With it and Kevlar he felt as if he were in a tank. He coughed sticky dust into his glove, snorted it out a running nose, and flicked it off. “Let’s get in there and kick some … kick some Tali ass.”
“You got it, Chief.”
The lead wedge hit the wall and went over, clumsily but fast, two men throwing the first over, then being hauled up themselves. Down, then up, then forward. The walls clattered apart as they vaulted them; just rough, irregular stones the size of shoeboxes stacked between concrete-block pillars. Nothing on top, no wire or glass. So far he hadn’t seen any wire at all, which seemed odd for a headquarters compound. Could they have the wrong one? The whole floor of the valley had been co
vered with the rectangular outlines of walled fields, walled homes. The GPS readings checked, but intel had been known to finger the wrong buildings before.
Another stone fence, then a short road no one had briefed and he hadn’t noticed from the imagery. “Set up here,” Tatie, the Echo One squad leader, yelled to the 240 gunner, slapping the top of the wall. “Fire ’em up. Put a belt over our heads, then overwatch.”
Mud Cat yelled, “Copy.” Teddy looked both ways, observed the field of fire, approved. He slid down a slick short chute into the wadi. At the bottom mud, but no water. Bushes looming black in the green of the heated earth. He floundered ankle deep, stepped in a discarded tire and nearly went down, but recovered and careened on as the 240 began ripping out rounds, the projectiles hissing overhead and whacking into what sounded like mud on the far side of the wadi.
The covering fire cut off as they reached a wall twice as high as a man at the top of the other side of the depression. As drilled, the demo men peeled off and the others faced outboard and upward, covering the top of the wall, as they went to work. The first iteration of the plan had had them going through the front gate. Teddy had pointed out everyone always went through the front gate. This time, why not go in the back? Even if the enemy was alerted by the helos and Spectre, no one would expect them from that direction.
He crouched as the two smaller charges went in at an arm’s stretch either side of him. DEVGRU had a manual on how to blow practically anything, including mud-brick walls. The shaped charges would drill in to break it up milliseconds before the main charge blew it in. On the other hand, since the explosions would startle out a world of bad guys, who’d rush to the area as quickly as possible, there was no room for hanging around after they went off. The rest of the op had to go like clockwork; neither the SEALs nor their extraction helos wanted to be around when said bad guys arrived.
He pushed up his goggles and turned them off. There was enough light now from the tracers and flares to see by. He placed the haversack carefully, screwing in a steel hook and hanging the heavy sack of C4 from it at chest height. Then pushed the detonators into the depressions he’d already rammed into the malleable explosive and handed the det cord off to either side. Just as he did this, someone from inside shoved a barrel over the wall and fired off a magazine of 7.62, spraying and praying, right over their heads.
“Fire in the hole!” All three peeled off and pelted for everything they were worth. When Teddy counted ten he threw himself full length and covered his ears.
The detonations came so close together they were one, like a lightning bolt hitting an oak forty feet away, shaking every filling he had and coating the air with a fresh layer of grit and dust mixed with the ammoniacal tang of nitrates. He was on his feet as soon as the shock wave passed, yelling, “Go! Go!” and sprinting back toward the wall. Without the forty-pound burden of the haversack, he felt as light on his feet as a high school running back.
From the darkness above, those pencil-thin beams searched again. The drone of the Spectre underlay the growing crackle of small-arms fire, the deeper booms of the 105 shells going off. It all echoed off the mountains, deepened and lengthened to a thunderstorm. The flutter-pulse of the orbiting helos throbbed like the heartbeats of malevolent dragons. Teddy laughed, trotting toward the dusty breach, air sawing in and out of a scratchy throat. He crouched, M4 to his shoulder, holo sight on, left hand tight on the vertical grip, not firing yet but ready to. The entry team formed up, then charged through, Dollhard yelling at them, Verstegen’s too-tall form jumping up and charging ahead as the 240 gunner behind them cut loose a burst at something down the wadi. The tracers flew down there but nothing came back. That was okay. No ammo resupply, but he’d rather the Louisianan put out a few unnecessary rounds than let someone up that excellent avenue of approach. Come to think of it, he should have put out claymores to secure the flanks.
The second team hit the gap and Teddy took a last look back—left, right—scrutinizing the night. Hit the bone mike. “Mud Cat, Tore, you on this? Got our backs?”
“Got it” and “Secure on your right” came back. He clicked off and followed the second team though the blown wall.
Cored with rock, apparently, but still fiftysome pounds of explosive had flattened and blown it inward and across the courtyard that hearted most residences in this part of the world. No sight of the shooter who’d fired at him; either under the rubble or somewhere on the roof, whole or in parts. Along with the tac lights some of the guys had lasers on, and the dust in the air swirled through the needle-thin beams as they darted from door to door. He counted six doors, some open, others closed. The clearance teams were going through them. A flash-bang jerked glaring light into existence for a microsecond within badly fitted rock walls, and someone screamed. A woman’s cry, or a child’s.
Teddy caught Dollhard in the center of the courtyard. He was moving up to the lieutenant when two doors slammed open and muzzle flashes chattered. He wheeled and returned fire, but the twist threw his aim off, and for a moment he was left standing in the open returning fire from whoever was invisible inside, not a good setup. Dollhard was firing too, both of them on full auto, pouring it in the way you did to convince whoever was in there to quit. The tracers came up at the bottom of their mags, and they both hit the releases and swapped out at the same moment. The second 240 gunner was firing too, a ripping burst that chewed smoke and dust up, but when he stopped whoever was in there fired again. “We’re not making an impression on these guys,” Dollhard grunted.
Teddy was already sprinting left, though, and snap-aimed and fired the grenade from his 203 through the door. It clanged into something not only solid but metallic, a strangely artificial sound in this world of rock and mud, and instead of going off bounced back out into the courtyard and hopped a couple of times in the dust and rolled to a halt. Dudded.
Dollhard was yelling in what Teddy guessed was Pashtun. Telling them to surrender, probably. All he was getting from inside was what sounded like catcalls, jeers. “Allahu Akbar”—he knew that one. “Jesus fuck,” he snarled, reloading on his belly behind some kind of low wooden … water trough? Hadn’t seen any animals, though the shit stink was overpowering where he was lying. If it was animal shit. He was shivering, even geared up and layered. Nobody’d told him it would be like the fucking Arctic. He fired another grenade. This one went off in there but didn’t reduce the volume of return fire. He kept seeing hints of something each time a muzzle flashed. Angular and fairly big, by its shadow. A renewed stutter from a 240, behind them. Distant thuds of the howitzer shells coming down from the Spectre. Breaking up any attempt at reinforcement, he hoped.
“Covering,” the lieutenant yelled, and Teddy stuck his barrel over the trough and let go. Dollhard leapt up, took four strides, and overhanded a pitch through the double doors. A burst flickered at the same moment, and the stubby OIC staggered and went down.
The incendiary blasted fire all through the interior of what immediately became evident was a garage. Screams burst out, but two men kept firing even as they burned, hunched over the treads of what Teddy, yelling for someone to help him get the lieutenant out of there, realized was a bulldozer. No wonder their bullets had ricocheted. As he dragged an unresponsive Dollhard into cover, secondary explosions shot renewed showers of sparks up through a ruptured roofline. Where did these sheep-fuckers get a fucking bulldozer? Then the roof fell in, illuminating a peeling red star on the machine’s flank just before flaming beams and debris covered it.
The corpsman took over, propping Dollhard’s head up and getting his gear off. Teddy left them and followed Echo One, which had plunged into the warren on the left, continuing to take rooms down. When he left the now fully firelit courtyard, coughing and spitting into the chickenshitty dust, he found them mustering prisoners in a hallway. The Talibs sat with legs crossed and heads bent, custody bags over their heads, hands zip-tied behind them. The SEALs threw weapons clattering onto a pile in a front room. “Any of these fucker
s Omar?” Teddy asked the squad leader over the bone mike.
“Nah. They all got two eyes, Chief.”
“Fuck. How many more rooms?”
“Two more, Chief. Then we’re up to the front gate.”
“Get it done. Make sure that gate’s locked and barred. We don’t want anybody at this rodeo we didn’t invite.” He switched back to Echo Two, which had followed Lieutenant (jg) Verstegen around the burning garage toward the antenna. Petty Officer Wasiakowski said he was setting demo on it and the transmitter, plus they had a lot more ordnance. Teddy told them they could thermite the weapons in place, but he wanted the ammo carried out into the wadi before they nuked it. “Tell Verstegen we want all male EPWs back in the courtyard for extract. Get some fire in your ass! There’s always gonna be more weapons. We can’t stick around here fingering each other’s buttholes.”
The roar-whine of a 53 going over, as if reminding them to enplane and get the hell out of here. Already in the distance AKs crackled and a higher-pitched rattle might be an RPK. Intel had doubted the locals would back up Johnny Taliban if foreign infidels fell out of the sky. Teddy wasn’t so sure. He shoved the hooded captives along, ignoring the wailing of the women. Little kids sobbed, clutching their fathers. This left him unmoved. He didn’t mind hate-filled looks. A lot of kids in New York City would never see their parents again. “Wait a minute! Where you think you’re going with that?”
“Souvenir, Chief.”
“Fuck that. Find a pistol, you can keep that. But no AKs. On the pile.”
“Roger that, Chief.”
He figured one or two would go back anyway, but if they were smart, they’d keep them out of his sight. He didn’t think much of the Kalashnikov. It was for people who had to be told not to shit where they drank.