by Eric Blehm
“These guys are coming with us,” said Casper, motioning toward three Delta Force soldiers unloading rucksacks and weapons from the Humvee. “They’re a recon team that’s spotting for emerging al-Qaeda targets. We’ve got to come up with some seats in the helicopters. Task Force Sword* isn’t going to let us fly without them.”
Every seat in the helicopters, every ounce of weight, had been scrupulously allotted. Now, minutes before the team was to board the Pave Lows waiting on the tarmac, was the worst possible time to reshuffle.
“They expect us to bump our men to make room?” asked Amerine. “This is ridiculous.”
“You’re free to take it up with your boss,” said Casper. “He can hash it out with Task Force Sword, but we don’t have time to argue it now. We’ll have to scrub the mission for tonight.”
Amerine thought through his next move. He doubted Casper’s story about being ordered to take the three Delta Force soldiers, and questioned his motives: Was he attempting to bring along bodyguards for Karzai? But if they postponed the infiltration, Amerine’s commander, who had voiced reservations about the mission in the first place, might cancel it entirely. Maybe that was Casper’s agenda: gum things up enough to scrub the mission and keep Karzai stranded in Pakistan.
All that really mattered was getting Karzai into Afghanistan.
“What’s going on, sir?” JD asked Amerine as he joined them.
“SNAFU,” said Amerine. “We’ve got those guys coming along.” He pointed to the newly arrived soldiers loitering by the Humvee with their piles of gear. “We’ve got to lose some weight.”
“I can leave two guys and you guys leave one; we’ll split the loss,” said Casper.
“We don’t leave our guys alone,” said JD; the Special Forces buddy system dictates that a Green Beret never leaves another Green Beret alone, even at a secure location. JD knew that whoever was left behind would be joining the team soon enough, and that meant another flight into bad-guy country. If that aircraft were to go down behind enemy lines, the buddy system was crucial. ODA 574 was already short one man, however, and losing two more would sap nearly 20 percent of the team’s already less-than-optimal combat strength.
JD and Amerine made the decision to leave behind their engineer, Victor, and junior weapons sergeant, Brent—since Mag, the intelligence sergeant, was also a trained engineer, and they had two senior weapons sergeants, Mike and Ronnie. They knew the reorganization wouldn’t sit well with anybody on the team, but it was the only alternative.
Casper strode off toward one of his fellow spooks, and Amerine walked in the opposite direction to greet the Delta Force soldiers. “I don’t want to ruffle things up,” one of them quietly told Amerine, “but you should know that Task Force Sword had nothing to do with putting us on this mission.” He pointed his chin toward Casper. “He wanted us here.”
As ODA 574 and the CIA team loaded into the cavernous cargo holds of the two Pave Lo helicopters, JD paused for a moment beside Amerine. “Sir,” he said, “you know, I’ve never been a big fan of some of the people in this part of the world—and warlords in general, the lack of respect for human life, we saw that in Somalia. Hell, sir. What those fanatics did to all those people in New York City and the Pentagon, those passengers on the airliners…it’s hard to think about it still.”
Stroking his beard, JD gathered his thoughts, then continued. “Karzai is either feeding us a load of bullshit or he is something different from the warlords up north. This is a good mission. Feels right.”
They were interrupted when Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Steve Hadley approached. “You two are the last to load.”
JD slapped Amerine on the shoulder and walked up the ramp and into the second Pave Low.
“Thanks for the ride,” Amerine said while shaking Hadley’s hand. “Sorry you’re not taking us all the way in.”
“You’ll be in good hands with the 160th,” said Hadley. “We’ve got your back, though. Just call if you need us. Anytime. Anyplace.”
Over the noise of the engines powering up, Amerine yelled, “I’ll remember that.”
The two helicopters hugged the rolling hills of the Pakistani desert for an hour before coming upon an airstrip just south of the Afghan border, which appeared like a mirage on the horizon. They landed when it was still light enough to see squads of Army Rangers patrolling the perimeter. When the helicopter ramps dropped, some of the Rangers ran over to help the teams unload their gear, then the Pave Lows immediately lifted off, blanketing everyone in dust.
“Now we wait,” JD said to Mag as the men settled on their rucksacks.
As the sun disappeared behind the mountains, they heard the thump, thump, thump of rotors beating against the wind, announcing the arrival of their next ride: five Black Hawks to carry the men in groups of four and five on a western heading into Afghanistan. The Rangers helped move the gear onto the helicopters, which lifted off into the night sky in a tight combat formation—staggered, with a distance of one rotor disk between them. Two more Black Hawks beefed up with heavy weapons flew on the flanks. Thousands of feet above, heavily armed jets escorted the formation. At the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan, the flock turned north. If all went well, they would cover close to two hundred miles before setting down on Afghan soil for a few seconds to unload their passengers.
In pitch darkness, the SOAR pilots used only their night vision goggles, known as NODs,* to fly ODA 574 deeper behind enemy lines than any U.S. team currently in Afghanistan. The ground signal the helicopter pilots would be looking for in the mountains was a configuration of wood fires: the same “all clear” signal that Allied pilots had often relied upon when inserting their Jedburgh teams into Nazi-occupied France.
In the third helicopter, Communications Sergeant Wes McGirr—new to ODA 574 and at twenty-five its youngest member—was electric with anticipation. Looking down at the rugged mountains of Afghanistan, he realized that he was experiencing the same combination of euphoria and fear that the Jeds had felt when they’d crossed over the English Channel. It’s dark, and I’ve got more gear than I can possibly run with, he thought. Once we get dropped off, we’re on our own. God, this is awesome. This is a war and we’re live and we’ve got ammo and anything can happen from here on out: We’re in enemy country.
The flight held a northerly course toward the Hindu Kush mountains. Two hours in, during a midair refueling, Amerine’s helicopter—first in the formation—filled with jet fuel fumes and, strangely, the scent of flowers. It wasn’t the right season for poppies, and Amerine didn’t know what poppies smelled like anyway, but the thought of flowers in the midst of all this firepower and modern military might brought a smile to his face.
A few moments later, the Black Hawk bucked and jerked in an evasive maneuver, and its right gunner squeezed off a burst of gunfire. Amerine looked at the SOAR mission commander, who shrugged. Whatever it was, they were apparently okay.
“What happened?” Ken asked, tugging on Amerine’s sleeve. “What just happened?” Even in the darkened interior of the helicopter, Amerine could see fear in his medic’s eyes.
Putting up his hand, Amerine waited for the mission commander to update him through his headset, then told Ken that the gunner had apparently mistaken the infrared laser-aiming beam* from his own mini-gun for ground fire.
“Sir,” said Ken. “You need to keep us informed right away.”
Amerine said nothing, but he thought, I hope this isn’t how he’s going to react in combat.
A half hour out from the landing zone, surveillance aircraft flying ahead reported no signal fires. Although Karzai had been confident that the landing zone was both remote and void of Taliban activity, no fires were to be lit if the enemy was thought to be nearby.
“Remote” was relative. The landing zone was only a couple of miles east of the Helmand River, where villages were regularly patrolled by the Taliban. Because of the anti-aircraft artillery known to be in the area, the Black Hawks could not deviate from the ro
ute or circle around for another pass: If the fires were not spotted soon, the team would have to cancel the mission.
The mission commander asked Amerine what he wanted to do.
“Press on,” replied Amerine. “Let’s give it another five minutes.”
After five minutes, there was still nothing. Amerine shook his head and was about to tell his pilot to turn back when the pilot from the surveillance plane came on the radio.
“We see four fires. Say again—we see four fires.”
The landing zone was in a small valley as long as a football field and slightly narrower—a cleft atop one of the taller broad-backed peaks in the region. As the helicopters swooped down into the rugged mountains, the fires marking the four corners of this smooth, barren patch of earth were extinguished so as not to blind the pilots through their NODs.
Less than two hundred feet above the ground, the five Black Hawks drifted gracefully into a straight line. Amerine’s helicopter descended first, with the others following close behind like boxcars tethered to a locomotive. As the helicopter dropped, its powerful rotors stirred up fine sand and dust that billowed into the air like a volcanic eruption, creating a brownout that shrouded the landing zone and threw the tightly synchronized formation into disarray. Amerine’s helicopter set down gently, its crew and passengers unaware that they were now invisible to the pilots above. Amerine, Alex, Ken, and a spook jumped out, dragging their rucksacks with them as the helicopter lifted off.
The second helicopter, descending quickly on top of Amerine’s group, nearly collided with the cleft’s rocky right wall. The men squinted up in disbelief as the mechanical monster seemed about to crush them—then it suddenly lurched to the left, regained stability, and landed gently as well.
The third helicopter dropped rapidly through the dust, its pilot determined to land despite zero visibility. The Black Hawk hit the ground hard. While Karzai, Casper, another spook named Charlie, and two of the Delta operators scrambled out, a gunner crawled underneath to inspect the landing gear. It was undamaged, and the helicopter lifted back into the air.
The fourth helicopter dipped into the enormous cloud. Inside, Mag, Mike, Ronnie, and a spook named Zepeda were choking on dust. The main rotor blades, throwing sparks from the static created by their proximity to the sides of the cleft, looked like giant sparklers to Mike, and he braced for a collision with the ground. Instead, he felt his stomach flip as the Black Hawk powered up and out of the brownout, banked away, and disappeared into the night.
Undeterred, the pilot of the fifth helicopter, carrying JD, Dan, and two spooks, set down without a problem.
Had the Black Hawk pilots been able to land in a row as planned instead of putting down wherever they could, the men would have dropped to the ground and remained in place, forming a single, cigar-shaped defensive perimeter about forty yards long.
Instead, they were scattered in small groups around the valley, each setting up its own defensive perimeter. And there was movement: a half-dozen armed Afghans milling next to a string of undersized donkeys a hundred yards away, near the eastern edge of the valley, and a solitary figure striding through the dust toward them.
Hamid Karzai, who was to make the initial linkup with the Pashtun tribesmen, had immediately sprung forward to meet them, the white leather tennis shoes he’d been given by the CIA in Pakistan practically glowing beneath his shalwar kameez and looking as if they were walking themselves through the darkness. The Americans aimed their carbines at the tribesmen, the beams from their lasers invisible to the Afghans.
If there are spies or assassins within the ranks, this is when they’ll have his ass, thought Wes as Karzai reached the reception party. To Wes, Karzai’s lengthy greeting of each man took an eternity. Finally, Karzai called out to the Americans: “Hello, hello! It’s okay. It’s fine. Come to me. Come to me.”
Standing up, Amerine ran to Karzai, leaving the rest of the men lying prone beside their rucksacks, weapons still trained on the Afghans. “Friends of yours?” he asked.
“Yes, yes,” said Karzai, “these are good men. We are safe.”
Amerine radioed JD: “Get the men moving. Have them bring their rucks to the pack animals.”
After the men from the ODA and CIA had dropped their rucks next to the donkeys, JD set them all in a tight perimeter, with every man lying prone and facing outward to form a circle half the size of a basketball court, with Amerine and Casper alongside Karzai at its center. Then he approached Amerine. “We’re missing four men: Mike, Mag, Ronnie, and one CIA. Their helicopter must have headed to an alternate landing zone.”
“What does that mean?” asked Karzai.
“Means we have men lost in the mountains,” Amerine said.
“I’m going to need to get to higher ground to reach them,” said Dan, holding up his radio’s hand mic. “I’m not getting anything here.”
Any Taliban patrols in the area would have heard the helicopters and would already be en route to the landing zone. They had to get moving.
“We need to find our guys,” Casper said to Amerine, who then told Karzai, “We need to leave this valley and get to higher ground so we can reach our lost men.”
Karzai rattled off something in Pashto to the tribesmen. They switched on flashlights, alarming the soldiers, who felt safer under the cover of darkness, and led their animals away. The men followed fifty yards behind the glow of the flashlights south for a quarter mile, then Amerine and Karzai guided the column of Americans a few hundred vertical feet up a steep slope and onto a ridgeline that rimmed the western side of the valley. On a small hillock that offered little cover but was the highest ground in the area, JD formed another security perimeter around Dan, who sat down on the hard dirt, assembled the sections of an antenna, and screwed it into his radio. The Afghans remained in the valley at the bottom of the ridge with the pack animals.
“They would like to keep the donkeys moving,” Karzai said to Amerine.
Amerine looked at JD, who shrugged and said, “I wouldn’t want to get in a fight in the middle of that pack.”
Nodding, Amerine told Karzai, “Let them go. We’ll meet up with them at the village.”
Karzai called out in Pashto, and the tribesmen continued on into the night while Dan attempted to reach his missing teammates using ODA 574’s call sign: “Any Texas element, this is Texas One Two, over…”
From a rucksack between Dan’s legs an obscenely long antenna stuck up into the starlit sky. His bearded face was almost hidden beneath a black beanie pulled low to battle the cold wind that chilled his hands as they worked the radio’s knobs. “I can hear them now—they’re trying to reach us, but they can’t hear me at all,” he growled. “They need to get to higher ground.”
“Keep trying,” said Amerine.
The absence of gunfire was encouraging, but three of Amerine’s nine men and a CIA spook were lost in the night, and until they too got to higher ground, there was little Amerine could do to find them. Then JD’s rapid footsteps announced the arrival of more ominous news.
“Casper and Charlie sneaked off to try to find the missing men,” he told Amerine angrily.
“If we don’t have commo with our guys, they sure as hell don’t,” Amerine said. “Did they tell anyone their plan?”
“They left their commo guy behind and took only handheld radios, so they aren’t going to be able to talk to anybody,” said JD, looking out into the night. Distinguishing between friend and foe is often difficult during the daytime; at night it’s nearly impossible, even with clear communications and a well-devised set of signals. The two spooks had neither.
“C-I-A, Children In Action,” Dan said.
“Oh, it gets worse,” JD said. “They took Karzai with them.”
There was a pause as the men realized they had lost their guide, their only translator, and the one man whom Amerine trusted to muster the local Pashtun fighting force and, in doing so, possibly avert a civil war.
“We are so fucked,” sai
d Dan.
The fourth Black Hawk had drifted more than two miles west from the landing zone as its pilot searched for a suitable place to set down. In desperation, he briefly flicked on his spotlights, flooding the valley below in white light and prompting a resounding “What the fuck!” from the back of the helicopter.
“We better not fucking land right there!” yelled Mike.
As the Black Hawk crisscrossed the terrain for what seemed like forever, Mag, the highest-ranking sergeant present, went from being nervous about announcing their arrival with spotlights to being nervous that they weren’t going to land at all. Finally the pilot said, “I’m putting it down right here.”
He dropped the helicopter like a rock, determined to land before the dust storm could swallow the Black Hawk. They bounced hard, then settled on a massive shelf with mountains rising to the east. To the west, the flat terrain rolled off into either a sloping hillside or a cliff—it was impossible to tell which. Before Mag jumped from the helicopter, he told the pilot, “Radio my team with these coordinates so we can link up.” The crew chief practically shoved Mag out as the pilot nodded mechanically and lifted off.
Squatting with his gear, Mag gripped his rifle as the engine noise from the departing Black Hawk faded away. He reviewed the situation: nighttime, foreign land, behind enemy lines, separated from the main group, no cover except low brush. Oh God, he thought. Then he flipped on his NODs, bathing the high desert terrain in familiar green hues.
The four lost men—Mike, Mag, Ronnie, and the spook Zepeda—had just set up in a 360-degree security formation when a light appeared in the distance. They hadn’t been on the ground for more than two minutes.
“We’ve got movement,” said Ronnie.
Unfuckingbelievable, thought Mag.
A couple hundred yards northwest, someone was sweeping a flashlight beam back and forth across the ground, slowly and steadily, as if searching for something. Leaving Ronnie and Mike with instructions to head for the mountains to their east if they weren’t back in fifteen minutes, Mag took Zepeda and crept east in a straight line, searching for better cover. About eighty yards out, they practically fell into what would suffice as a fighting position: a depression at the base of a slight embankment. They hurried back to get the others, and the men concealed their gear as best they could in the bushes, then relocated to the depression with their go-to-hell packs.