The Ghost War

by Alex Berenson

  Wells checked his watch. 1655. Five minutes to takeoff. Then the rotors slowed. Inside the cockpit, the pilots hunched over the Black Hawk’s instrument panel.

  The blades dribbled to a stop, and the helicopter’s crew chief hopped onto the tarmac. With his green flight helmet and black goggles, he looked like the love child of a palmetto bug and a Green Bay Packers punter. “Warning light on the hydraulics,” he yelled. “Take a few minutes to check.” He scrambled back inside the cabin.

  Any delay was bad news, Wells thought. They needed to be in the air soon to hit the campsite at dusk. Sweat prickled his chest, though he wore only a faded green T-shirt under his bulletproof vest. He reached for a bottle of water from the cooler at his feet and sucked it down in one long gulp.

  Around him, men in Kevlar vests squatted over topo maps and double-checked their radios. A and B Companies of the 3rd Battalion. Twenty Special Forces soldiers in all. Two squads of the best-trained fighting men anywhere, about to head into the Hindu Kush.

  Wells unholstered his pistol, checking that its slide was smooth and its magazine full. As he finished, he noticed Greg Hackett staring at the 9-millimeter Makarov. Hackett was the youngest member of B Company, a short man whose head seemed to rise directly out of his massive shoulders. He had a heavy brow and a thick nose, the face of a half-finished marble bust that a sculptor had decided not to finish.

  “Mr. Wells, sir. Permission to ask a question.”

  “If you promise to stop calling me sir, Hackett.”

  “Yes, sir—I mean John.” Hackett looked at the pistol. “Is that the one you used?”

  Wells didn’t know what Hackett meant, and then he did. “On Khadri, you mean.”

  Hackett nodded. He couldn’t keep his eyes off the weapon.

  “Since you ask. Yeah.” Wells handed the Makarov to Hackett. The sergeant cradled the pistol like a newborn.

  “No need to fetishize it, Sergeant. It’s just a gun.”

  Hackett handed the pistol back. “Can I ask one more question, sir? How does it feel to be back here?”

  “Sergeant, don’t you have something to do?”

  WELLS HAD COME TO AFGHANISTAN years before September 11, when most Americans had never heard of Osama bin Laden. He’d fought alongside Qaeda and Taliban guerrillas for almost a decade. He had even become a Muslim during those years. Eventually, the guerrillas had accepted him as a believer.

  But Wells was happy to hunt his former allies today. He didn’t count himself as Muslim anymore. He couldn’t honestly say whether he believed in God after everything he’d seen. And even during the years when he had accepted Islam as the one true faith and prostrated himself to Allah five times daily, he had hated bin Laden’s nihilistic vision of the religion. The Taliban and Qaeda gloried in encouraging teenagers to become suicide bombers. They were unworthy of Islam.

  And they were unworthy of Afghanistan. Afghans were tribal to a fault, splintered into narrow sects whose hatreds dated back centuries. The Taliban had taken advantage of Afghanistan’s internal fractures to impose a vicious dictatorship in the 1990s. Seemingly out of spite, they had undone what little progress Afghanistan had made during the twentieth century, destroying the country’s hospitals and schools. During the American invasion after September 11, the planners at the Pentagon joked that the United States would bomb Afghanistan up to the Stone Age.

  The American attack had forced the Talibs out of power. Now Afghanistan was stumbling toward modernity and democracy. But the Taliban hadn’t gone away. The guerrillas were trying to turn tribal leaders against the United States and its allies. They had a real chance of succeeding, because in any crisis Afghans turned inward. Wells understood why they depended on themselves. For hundreds of years, outsiders had come and gone, most often leaving the country in worse shape than they found it in. But—

  A hand on his shoulder interrupted his thoughts.

  “Goggles!” Captain Steve Hughley, the commander of B Company, yelled.

  Wells had been so busy figuring out Afghanistan’s future that he’d missed the Black Hawk starting up again. He tucked in his earplugs and pulled down his goggles as the helicopter’s rotors reached full speed, kicking up dust and pebbles from the tarmac.

  “Ready?” Hughley yelled.

  “Yeah!” Wells screamed back. His enthusiasm was real. He hadn’t flown in a Black Hawk since his days as a Ranger in the mid-nineties. He’d forgotten how magnificent these helicopters were up close. And how loud. Even with his earplugs in, he was nearly overwhelmed by the screech of the Black Hawk’s 1,800-horsepower turbines.

  The ten-ton helicopter bounced slightly off the runway in its eagerness to take flight. The crew chief waved B Company forward. Down the tarmac, A Company was boarding its own bird. Wells pulled a windbreaker over his vest and grabbed his pack. Inside the cabin, he settled into his seat—designed to collapse to the floor of the cabin if the Black Hawk crashed—and clicked on his harness.

  “Comfy?” The crew chief tugged the six-point harness tight and offered Wells headphones. Wells took them gratefully. Insulation was wasted weight for combat helicopters, so the Black Hawk wasn’t soundproofed. Inside the cabin, the roar of the turbines was overwhelming, a scrum of white noise that made conversation or even thinking nearly impossible.

  The crew chief hooked in. When he and the gunner on the other side were set, the helicopter’s frame began to rattle as the turbines spun at peak power for takeoff. The Black Hawk burned three gallons of fuel a minute, so pilots didn’t waste time once the crew strapped in.

  The copilot pulled back the Black Hawk’s collective and the helicopter rose effortlessly off the tarmac. Wells knew that the Black Hawk had the aerodynamics of a brick and would plummet if its engines failed. Yet the copter seemed to belong in the air. As soon as it took off, its frame stopped shaking and the scream of the turbines lessened. It banked right and kept climbing, leaving Bagram’s stubby huts behind.

  WELLS LOOKED AROUND the Black Hawk’s cabin at B Company, an impressive group, even by Special Forces standards. Three of the soldiers spoke Pashto, a fourth Dari. Their sniper team had finished third in the Army’s shooting competition two years back. Hughley, the company captain, was one of the few black commanders in the Special Forces. He was six-three, with arms that seemed to be carved from oak. At West Point, he’d played defensive tackle. And somewhere along the way, he had picked up fluent Arabic. A few Saudis still lingered in the mountains, fighting alongside the Taliban, and at dinner the night before, Brett Gaffan, the company radioman and unofficial comedian, had told Wells how one Saudi they’d captured had refused to believe that Hughley spoke his language:

  “So Abdullah—he’s sitting on the ground, see—he’s peeking over his shoulder, looking all scared. Captain’s like, ‘Calm down, dude. You’re not getting whacked.’ How do you say ‘whack’ in Arabic, Cap?”

  “You don’t.” Hughley’s tone was deadpan.

  “How ‘bout ’dude‘? They gotta have a word for ’dude,‘ right?”

  “You believe the crap I have to listen to every day?” Hughley said to Wells.

  “Anyway, this camel jockey, ‘scuse my French, starts looking around harder than Jeff Gordon on turn four, trying to see who’s really talking to him.” Here, Gaffan craned his neck from side to side, imitating the Saudi, before jamming a forkful of mashed potatoes into his mouth. “So Cap gives him some more mumbo jumbo.”

  “Finish your dinner, Gaffan.” Hughley turned to Wells. “I told him it was no trick, I was the one talking.”

  Gaffan dribbled a glass of lemonade into his mouth and swallowed mightily. “Then Abdullah says something back, and Cap nods at him and tells us to stand him up. Then it gets weird, ‘cause Abdullah gets real close to the captain, like he’s getting ready to give him a kiss.”

  “He wasn’t that close.”

  “All due respect, sir, he was. Wasn’t he?”

  Nods around the table.

  “And we’re all confused, won
dering if we’re gonna be whacking Abdullah after all. And you know we try not to kill our captures, even though damn sure the other side ain’t showing us the same courtesy.”

  More nods.

  “But then we’re thinking, maybe Cap wants a kiss. Since he hasn’t seen his wife in six months, and the dude was kinda cute.”

  “Now you’re scaring me,” Hughley said.

  “Nah, he was cute. Wasn’t he?” Gaffan looked around the silent table. “I know y‘all thought so too, so don’t deny it . . . anybody?” Pause. “Okay, then. Let’s make like I never said that.”

  “Too late,” said Danny Gonzalez, the company’s medic.

  “Moving on. Then Cap starts singing—”

  “Praying.” Hughley looked at Wells. “The first sura.”

  “And Abdullah leans in close, making sure Cap’s really the one talking—How was his breath, by the way, sir?”

  “Lemme put it this way, Sergeant. I wouldn’t have kissed him even if I did play on your team.”

  “Sir. Uncalled for and untrue. I believe that’s harassment, sir. Anyway, he gets in real close.” Gaffan stood up and leaned so close that Wells could count his pores. “Looking up, because Cap’s maybe a foot taller than he is.”

  “Sergeant, did you put Tabasco on your burger?” Wells said, getting a laugh from the table. “‘Cause it sure smells that way.”

  Gaffan sat down. “Guess I’ll be brushing my teeth when dinner’s done,” he said sheepishly. “Anyway. Abdullah gets this scared look on his face, like, ‘Damn. It’s no joke. This black dude talks my language. Not only that, he talks it better than me.’ Looked like somebody stole his pet camel.” Gaffan stuck out his lower lip in an exaggerated expression of sadness. Everyone at the table laughed now, Wells too, harder and harder, some pent-up emotion in him pouring out.

  “The kicker is, ‘bout ten minutes later, old Abdullah starts blabbing to Cap and won’t shut up. True?”

  Hughley nodded. “He was our best source last year.”

  JOINED BY TWO APACHE ATTACK HELICOPTERS, the Black Hawks turned east, diving as they left the base. When they leveled off, they were just two hundred feet above the ground, low enough that Wells could see the dust kicked up by a rusty jalopy as it rolled down the two-lane road that angled away from the base. Staying low made them harder to hit with rocket-propelled grenades or surface-to-air missiles.

  To the south, a road dead-ended at a massive garbage pile, a hundred-foot-tall monument to Afghanistan’s poverty. No fires were visible on the pile, but a haze of black smoke drifted from the trash. The stench of sewage filled the cabin as the Black Hawk flew through the smoke’s inky tendrils. Women and children trudged over the smoldering debris, looking for rags or scrap metal, anything they might trade for dinner.

  In a field nearby, scrawny boys played soccer with a makeshift ball. Wells could see a breakaway develop even before the players did. A kid in a raggedy blue T-shirt cut past his defender, awaiting a pass from the midfield—

  But before Wells could see what happened next, the game faded behind him. These Black Hawks cruised at 150 miles an hour. Wells decided to imagine that the kid had scored, in keeping with his newly optimistic outlook. Maybe he should write a self-help book. The power of positive thinking. And shooting first.

  The fearsome mountains of the Hindu Kush jutted ahead of the helicopter. The peaks, capped with snow even in summer, stretched hundreds of miles to the northeast. Near Afghanistan’s border with China, they rose above 20,000 feet. Around here they were closer to 15,000 feet, still higher than any in the continental United States. The CIA and the Pentagon believed that bin Laden was hiding in the Kush or just south, in Pakistan’s Peshawar Province. But without solid intelligence, finding anyone in the Kush was impossible. The range was an endless maze of valleys and caves, among the most difficult places on earth to search. Snow fell by October. By December the dirt tracks that the Afghans optimistically called roads were impassable. The guerrillas holed up in tiny villages and waited for spring, knowing that even the best-equipped American units could not touch them. In the summer, the Talibs moved between the mountains and Kabul, planting bombs, hijacking supply trucks, and generally wreaking havoc.

  And they were getting more dangerous. A month before, fifty Taliban had attacked a police station east of Kabul. When a rapid-reaction team from Bagram responded, a second band of guerrillas ambushed it. Eight American soldiers died.

  Then mortar fire hit the 10th Mountain Division at Camp Blessing, an outpost near the Pakistani border. Six men died. Mortar attacks weren’t uncommon in Afghanistan, but attacks this accurate were. So two squads from camp had hiked into the mountains to talk to the villagers who lived north of the base. Everywhere they went, the soldiers offered gifts: medical supplies, pens and paper, and candy—Afghans loved Tic Tacs, for reasons no one could figure. The idea was to keep the locals friendly, or at least neutral, and get information about the source of the mortars. In most villages, the squads were met with tea, suspicious looks, and little else.

  But in a nameless village twenty miles north of Camp Blessing, the soldiers got a surprise. Bashir Jan, the village’s headman, told them about a guerrilla outpost to the west. Besides fifty Taliban, the camp contained several “white fighters,” he said. And why had he given up this precious information? The guerrillas were stealing the village’s goats and refusing to pay, he said.

  “The guys said he was furious,” Holmes told Wells. “Couldn’t have been madder if they’d taken one of his wives.”

  “Never look a gift goat in the mouth,” Wells said.

  Bashir’s report was the one that had spurred Exley to get the satellite photographs. Now the mercenaries, whoever they were, were about get a call from Companies A and B. Two companies from the 10th Mountain Division, including the unit that had first discovered the camp, would provide tactical support. The plan didn’t make the 10th Mountain happy. Their guys were the ones who’d died in the mortar attack, and they had developed the original intel. As far as they were concerned, they deserved the kill.

  But the terrain demanded an air attack, as Wells had realized immediately when he’d seen the satellite photographs. Armored vehicles couldn’t get through, and an assault on foot was impossible. The camp-ground was hundreds of feet above the valley. Guerrilla snipers would devastate attacking infantry. Plus the mountains in this part of the Kush were riddled with tunnel networks. If they got advance warning, the guerrillas would disappear into their underground labyrinth before they could be destroyed.

  Thus the 10th Mountain had been pulled back like a rottweiler on a choke chain, and the Special Forces ordered in. The helicopters would strike at dusk, destroying the camp before the Talibs could respond. Speed would be key. If the operation worked as planned, the guerrillas would panic. The Special Forces would cut off the caves. With that route blocked, the guerrillas would flee down the mountain, into the unfriendly arms of the 10th Mountain, whose men would wait at the base of the valley.

  A high-risk operation, Wells thought. But the soldiers in these helicopters had the best chance in the world of pulling it off. And they had a secret weapon.

  THE SUN WAS LOW as the four-helicopter convoy reached Jalalabad, one hundred miles east of Kabul. From here, they would fly northeast along the Pech River and into the mountains. One of the Apaches had briefly flown over the valley two days before, the only live visual recon of the campsite. More overflights might have spooked the guerrillas.

  Wells looked at his watch. 1840. They should be at Chonesh in less than an hour, assuming nothing went wrong. An hour after that, they’d know where they stood. If they hadn’t broken the camp by then, they would probably be stuck in a firefight, with little chance for reinforcements until the morning.

  Afghanistan was eight and a half hours ahead of Washington, so Exley was probably at work right now, Wells thought. He pictured her in their suite in Tysons Corner, sipping coffee from the ridiculous mugs that Shafer had bought. She knew
this mission was happening tonight, and though she hadn’t asked for details, she had to know it wouldn’t be easy. Yet she’d given him her blessing to go, encouraged him even. Because she’d known he needed the action, needed to feel useful.

  In truth, the Special Forces were doing him a favor by letting him participate in this mission. Technically, Wells was replacing B Company’s second medic, who had been shot in the leg two weeks earlier and was recovering in a military hospital in Germany. But Special Forces units were often short a soldier or two. Initially, Wells had worried he might distract the other men in the unit, who’d fought together long enough that they knew one another’s moves instinctively.

  The night before, he’d told Holmes he’d sit out the attack if Holmes thought he didn’t belong. “No hard feelings if you don’t want me, Glen,” Wells said.

  “You kidding?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You gonna make me say it out loud? These guys love you. You’re better for morale than the Cowboys cheerleaders.”

  “Really?” Despite himself Wells had felt a flush of pride.

  “John, look, we’ve got some history. I don’t pretend to know you all that well, but it’s obvious, what happened in New York is all twisted in your head. Put aside the politics for a minute and think on what you did. The people you saved. That’s what these guys see. Believe me. Hughley wants you out there tomorrow. I do too.”

  1910. THE PECH RIVER FLOWED shallow and fast beneath the Black Hawk, its clear water reflecting the gold of the sun’s dying rays. Two children stood beside the river, waving their thin brown arms metronomically as the helicopter roared by.

  The Black Hawk banked left, turning north into a narrow valley, hidden from the sun by a crumbling rock ridge. In the sudden darkness, the helicopter’s gunners hunched intently over their 7.62-caliber mini-guns.