by Doug Stanton
Now, after about an hour of flying, Hippy could barely move his arms. His gloved hands, clenched on the gun handles, felt like they’d hardened in that position. As he looked down at the countryside, he wondered how in hell anybody ever managed to live in this country. Just rows of mud houses and mud fences. Not one damn light burning on the face of the earth. Midnight in Armageddon. It sure sucked being here in Afghanistan, he thought, but at least he didn’t have to get off the helo like the soldiers in back and fight in this terrain. Hippy didn’t know any of their names, but he guessed he’d probably bumped into some of them on Friday nights with their families back home, going into a Chili’s or the Outback Steakhouse on Exit 4 off the interstate. He wished them well and hunkered down in his parka, scanning the ground for gunfire.
The other soldiers on Spencer’s team were looking at him nervously, and for a second time he made a show of fluffing up his poncho liner and getting comfy atop the frozen nylon ribs of his seat and going to sleep. Spencer figured it’d take them about two or more hours to fly the several hundred miles to Dehi. Essex was already asleep—he could sleep through anything. Diller too was passed out, snoring. Spencer figured racking out for shut-eye was the only sensible thing to do. He lay out in the seat listening as the rotors overhead bit into ever-thinning air and the aircraft strained upward with a terrible clatter.
From his seat up front, Nelson looked down and saw why the pilots had named the mountain the Bear.
Below him was an eye, what looked like a deep, cold lake, winking at him. The broad, stony snout was lifted west, into the wind. The high, steep forehead was sloping down from the north…Nelson said it again, The Bear. Amen.
Up in the cockpit, lead pilot Alex McGee was straining at the controls as they entered, or he feared they were entering—the hypoxic zone. Going hypoxic was a possibility when you entered airspace above 9,000 feet and your brain started screaming for oxygen. The effect was like shotgunning Champagne and hitting yourself in the head with a ball-peen hammer. Only the results could be a lot more dangerous.
The Nightstalker pilots had been going hypoxic regularly on early missions ferrying supplies and CIA officers to General Dostum’s camp. It had become a routine part of flying. The term in use was that lately the missions had become awfully “sporty.” As in: “Sporty means you come back to base and you get off the ramp and you kiss the ground for a while. You just take off your helmet, and stare. Whew. That’s sporty.”
The pilots were a hale and hearty lot—instead of growing glum thinking that they would be killed on these missions, they became world-class goofs. One of the crew chiefs, a thirty-six-year-old fellow named Will Ferguson, had brought his golf clubs along, a sand wedge, an eight-iron, and a three-iron, and a gym bag of balls. One night, bored out of his mind after having watched Joe Dirt one too many times back at the hangar—the unit’s favorite after-hours flick—Will had gone out to the berm lining the camp and stood in the moonlight and surveyed the wasteland. Piles of toxic dirt oozing chemical waste. Pine trees gently swaying in the breeze.
Will set the ball on the berm, ready to send it into the gloom on the other side, where supposedly Islamic militants were lurking, sniper rifles in hand. To hell with them, thought Will.
He fired.
The ball soared, a white orb sinking in the dirty pond of the night sky. Well, I came, I fought, I golfed, and he slid the club back down in the bag and returned to the Quonset.
The pilots’ quirky sense of humor was second only to their regard for the danger of their missions, especially when it came to going hypoxic. The problem was with the oxygen system on board the Chinook. It was in need of repairs, but the war had spun up so quickly that there hadn’t been time to make them.
The crew had landed at K2 on October 6 with the Chinooks and Black Hawk helicopters broken down neatly inside the dimly lit belly of the C-17 transport planes, and they’d had just forty-eight hours to reassemble them. One Army observer described this chaotic, anxious task as resembling “ants attacking a Twinkie.” No one had slept on the journey overseas, and when they finished tightening the last bolt and nut, they literally passed out on the oil-stained concrete next to the newly born behemoths. By then, they’d not slept in a week. Garfield walked into the hangar and barked, “Wake Up! We have a mission to do!” Within eight hours, they were ferrying supplies and CIA officers into scattered camps around the country, in preparation for the arrival of Nelson and his team.
The on-board breathing system was made up of a series of oxygen bottles, feeding a series of tubes leading to the kind of black rubber breathing masks you see in jet fighter pilot movies. As the oxygen thinned, you placed the rubber mask over your mouth and took a hit.
Garfield discovered the break in the breathing system when he looked over during one flight and saw his copilot acting goofy, making strange faces and pointing at the helo’s windscreen at imaginary shapes in the air. Then the guy took the helo’s stick and tried steering, threatening to crash them all. Garfield looked in back and saw that the rest of the crew were acting similarly strangely, and one by one they started passing out, murdered shapes lying on the deck of the helicopter. Garfield tapped the lead pilot on the shoulder and told him that he was shutting off the air to all of the masks except his, and that he, Garfield, expected to pass out any minute. The pilot would be flying alone.
While he waited to be knocked out, Garfield found a disc-shaped gadget in his pocket he called a “Whiz Wheel”—it worked like a slide rule—which the pilots used to make flight computations. He handed the Whiz Wheel to the goofy copilot and told him that the gadget was actually the controls to the aircraft, and that if he wanted to fly, he would have to use the Whiz Wheel.
The guy sat in his seat whapping away at the gadget, making strange, childlike noises. Every once in a while, he would come to, sit bolt upright, throw the Wheel at Garfield, and lunge for the helo’s stick. Garfield would have to slap his hands away and hand him back the Whiz Wheel. This went on until the guy finally passed out and Garfield went unconscious himself. The lead pilot successfully completed the mission alone, sucking all the available air through the only workable oxygen mask on board. It was a terrifying experience. As they descended below 9,000 feet, the crew awoke as if summoned by a hypnotist’s hand clap. They were groggy for a few hours and their heads rang with the most excruciating headaches. They didn’t do this just once—the discovery of the breathing problem was only the beginning. There was no easy, quick fix of the air leak for reasons having to do with the complicated layout of the aircraft. They had to live with it. They went hypoxic on every long-range, high-altitude cruise. Every flight had started to feel like an execution.
As Alex McGee sat at the controls, enclosed in the small booth of the cockpit, it was absolutely dark, except for the faint, sealike glow of the computer screens in front of him, an arm’s length away. He was wearing a heavy helmet, Kevlar vest, gray gloves, and night vision goggles, the optic light of which leaked around his eyes, dusting his cheeks an electric lime. Every few minutes he reached up with gloved fingers and methodically paddled over gardenlike rows of switches.
Other than that—the tick tick tick of McGee turning switches—there was no sound in the cockpit (if you discounted the turbine’s choppy roar). The environment inside was what the pilots called “sterile.” Completely quiet. No talking allowed.
The physical strain of flying was constant. McGee’s equipment, in total, including the insulated, fire-retardant garment called a Mustang suit, weighed sixty pounds. The pressure of just sitting in the chair and flying the ship was enormous. It was like having a bag of cement sitting at the back of your skull, atop your brain stem. Even folding yourself into the chair was a gymnastic matter. This meant that if you had to piss, you did so in your chair. There was no way to fly the machine and urinate at the same time. The ship’s maintenance custodians were always complaining that the pilots were pissing all over the chairs. Jim Zeeland, the copilot, had life a little better. H
e could urinate into a screw-top liter soda bottle. But the problem was that at high altitude the bottle froze. Now you had a rock-hard bottle of urine rolling around the deck, crashing into people. So, as a rule, they threw these out the open doors of the helicopter. They called them “piss bombs.”
Mounted in the console, about three feet from McGee’s face, sat a six-inch video screen. Nested deep in the helicopter lay something called the multimode radar. When you flew using the MMR, which McGee was now doing, it was usually because you were flying at twenty feet above the face of the earth at 160 mph, skimming the sand, which was also very sporty flying. Tonight, McGee was flying MMR to make sure that nothing unexpected rose up to meet them in the night. They were nearly 12,000 feet above sea level.
As the radar sniffed the air, it sent signals back to the ship that were expressed on the MMR’s video screen as two tiny white triangles, one inverted atop the other.
The position of the triangles on the screen told McGee whether or not the helo could fly over the next rock spire, the next ridge, the next mountaintop. That was always the question: at this speed, at this altitude, at this level of pitch in the rotors, do we have the ability to go higher if a hunk of rock suddenly steps out of the night?
When the triangles touched and formed an hourglass shape on the screen, they were said to be “satisfied.” If they were satisfied, you knew that you automatically had enough power, lift, and speed to make it over the next hill. The key to not crashing was in keeping the cues satisfied.
McGee was accomplishing this by nudging the rudder stick between his legs in micromovements, or by pushing at the silver pedals beneath his feet, which helped steer the aircraft, or by reaching down with his gloved right hand and pulling more power in the engine by raising, maybe only one quarter of an inch, the lever located on the floor in the muted darkness of the cockpit. Every once in a while he would also have to reach over and finger a black dial to adjust the pitch of the rotors. At the same time, Zeeland, the copilot, was looking at something called the E2 Page, which was another video screen that relayed what the terrain looked like ten miles in front of the helicopter.
The mood was complicated by the fact that, in the words of John Garfield, the ground beneath them resembled “flying over dinner plates set in a drainer.” At one moment, you had 15,000 feet of nothing beneath the ship; in the next, the helo was suddenly 100 feet above the flinty edge of a mountaintop. And because no one had ever flown a helicopter this high, no one had considered the inherent problem in the multimode radar system. Namely, that it shut down whenever the helo rose above 5,000 feet.
The device shut down under the assumption that above 5,000 feet, the sailing would be clear. The engineers had never imagined this flight in Afghanistan over this frozen dish drainer. So, as you flew over one ridge and another, with the radar system shutting on and off, you got this annoying red blinking BAD DATA signal on the console. And after the system shut down, it took several minutes to reboot. In those moments you were flying truly blind, brother, which was very sporty. The pilots found this more unsettling than getting shot at it in combat. In combat, at least you could shoot back.
They’d flown about thirty minutes when McGee aimed the frozen nose of the helo at a notch up the mountaintop, at 12,000 feet. Along each side of the notch, the mountain face soared another 5,000, 6,000 feet into the night sky. Threading through this piece of rock was the only way McGee was going to get over. To go any higher would be to trespass even more deeply in the hypoxic zone, the temperature plummeting further, well below zero. Luckily, tonight, if they made it through this notch, they wouldn’t be loitering in the danger zone—maybe twenty minutes, tops, before dropping altitude.
McGee could look up in the rearview mirror mounted in the overhead console and barely make out the shapes of the soldiers in the back, black lumps of clothing, lying motionless. Zeeland told him that the soldiers in back were sleeping. That was good news.
McGee reached forward and hit a switch, and aviation fuel started dumping from the outboard tanks, which were fastened on the craft, one on each side, like two long, metallic hot dogs. As the fuel drained and the load lightened, the whine of the rotors sweetened in pitch. If they were going to make it over the mountain, they had to drop fuel. At 12,000 feet, every ounce on board counted. It was conceivable you could fly up a snow-draped valley in total darkness and reach a point where you had neither the power in the engine nor the lift left in the blades to go farther. You had essentially flown to the dead end of a physics equation. If you were lucky, you had just enough room to hover the craft and turn exactly on its axis and retreat down the invisible stair-step in the air to K2.
The helicopter, as long as a freight car, entered the slot in the mountain and soared through and punched out the back side. It began sliding down the ragged, frozen carapace of the world, toward the Afghan border.
Ten miles out from the border, after about two hours of flying (they’d thus far flown a circuitous route of about 220 miles), lead pilot McGee got ready to do an inflight refuel. He was running low on gas after dumping the tanks on the way up the mountain. McGee had radioed for a fuel tanker, an AC-130, to come on station after they had cleared the Bear. Now the plane came roaring in.
McGee was clattering ahead fast at 5,000 feet when the plane raced up from behind and passed overhead. It cast a shadow—a looming presence—even in the dark. Essex woke up immediately, as if somebody were staring at him. He looked out the window and could see the cold, dimpled side of the plane, its wings silently bouncing out there in the dark as it went by. Essex felt an oily mist on his face, unburned fuel, as the plane’s exhaust swirled through the cabin and swabbed the walls. He was already light-headed from the fumes.
The plane slowed and, like a boat, settled down into the air just off the helo’s nose. McGee was at the controls, still flying totally blacked out. Because of the optics of his night vision goggles, he had poor depth of field. The AC-130 looked like a silhouette of a plane pasted against the sky. McGee could look up and see his rotors chopping at the air close behind the plane. He looked down at his speed—he was traveling at 160 mph. One error and they’d crash. McGee was trailed by two Black Hawk helicopters, his security escorts, and he heard an increasing nervousness in the pilots’ voices. He had to get the refueling done before they ran into the sand-and snowstorm called the Black Stratus.
For reasons the weatherman at K2 still couldn’t explain, the Stratus had been loitering around the border, above the sandflats that ran from the Amu Darya River (which also marked the Afghan/Uzbekistan border) for thirty miles all the way to Mazar-i-Sharif. This was a bone-strewn no-man’s-land, sand and more sand. Through it traveled the occasional tribe of nomads marching in frayed capes and drawing with their passing a dogged calligraphy in the dust. Trailing them were legions of exhausted livestock, the wall-eyed goats, the ornery, terrified mules, the animals’ brass bells tolling a sullen note that turned the light of noon into ancient dusk. This was the ground they flew over, not through time, but backward in time. Essex looked down and saw the ground passing beneath him in blurred panes.
The smaller, faster Black Hawks following them did not have the sophisticated radar—the MMR—that the Chinook possessed. This meant that ever since leaving K2, the Black Hawks had been navigating through the mountains by following the glow of the Chinook’s engines ahead of them. The engines blew two rings of fire out of their exhausts, side by side—like two flaming wagon wheels—and wherever the rings went, up and down, left and right, the Black Hawks followed. It was boggling to Essex that this was how the pilots had to navigate.
Looking out the windscreen, he could see a long black hose coming out of the left wing of the tanker plane—seeming to grow, actually, like a black tendril. It stiffened out straight in the breeze. At its end was a gray, rubber blossom, about as big as a bicycle tire, called the drogue. It was meant to keep the hose from flapping up and down in the slipstream. It now hung open and empty, waiting for the hel
o’s metal fuel probe, which was about forty feet long and protruded from the front of the craft.
Essex felt the helo drift beneath him and lurch as McGee nudged the stick and the helo jumped and the probe and the orifice of the hose mated with a gentle sucking noise that was lost in the roar.
Fuel began pouring down the hose, through the probe, and into the helo’s tanks bolted on its sides. When the helo was full, McGee disengaged the probe and the drogue fell away and was reeled back to the plane. Now it was time to get the hell out of the sky—a fast-moving target flying close to the ground was harder to hit than one flying high. Al Mack pointed the helicopter at the desert floor in a dive.
They were nearly vertical as they plummeted. Nelson grabbed onto his seat with the increasing whine in the engines. They kept dropping. Nelson’s stomach jumped in his throat. He could smell the warmer air with its vaguely mineral scent and the ice on the guns started to melt and drip. The wind threw the puddles in silver skeins across the deck. Nelson looked down and they were 300 feet off the ground. It was like looking out a car window at the pavement while racing down the interstate. They were flying like this when they punched into the Black Stratus. It had unexpectedly moved to a new location, lower in altitude.
It swallowed the helo whole. “Can’t see, can’t see!” radioed the Black Hawk pilots behind them. “We may have to return to base, repeat, may RTB!”
McGee radioed back that they should remain with him if they could. “Can you see my cones?” he asked, meaning could they see the rings of exhaust atop the bird.
“Roger, but, repeat, it is getting very difficult.”
McGee switched over to a maneuver called “terrain following,” which meant that by using the cues on his screen he was flying close along the grain of the earth, rising and falling over dune, rockpile, and ridge. He looked out and saw the fuel probe starting to spark in the storm. There was so much grit in the air—so much particulate friction—that it began to glow. Soon the probe lit up like a rotisserie rod heated by a torch. McGee could see the tips of the rotors sparking too, making two dazzling gold halos atop the craft. The whole ship was literally glowing in the dark. The Black Hawk pilots radioed that now it was pretty goddamn hard to see and finally in exasperation they broke in: “Silver Team,” McGee’s call sign, “we are RTB,” and they peeled off and turned back through the Stratus and disappeared. McGee, Nelson, Essex, Spencer, Diller, and the rest of the men were alone.