Horse Soldiers

by Doug Stanton

  Well, I’ll be damned, he thought. That’s a first.

  The prisoners were still driving their own vehicles, headed to the fort. Sitting beside each of them, though, was a Northern Alliance soldier with a gun pointed at the prisoner’s head. It looked almost comical.

  Except why had they stopped outside the headquarters?

  Sonntag could see the prisoners staring at the schoolhouse as if they were casing it, as if they were trying to memorize a way inside.

  Upon hearing that the prisoners were heading to the fortress, Sonntag had not had a hard opinion one way or another, except that Major Mitchell had registered his displeasure about the plan. But both men knew that Dostum would be in charge of these enemy fighters, as they would be garrisoned in his quarters. Mitchell and Sonntag would stand by on an as-needed basis.

  But Sonntag hadn’t counted on them stopping outside his building. He realized that he didn’t know if the men with their AKs pointed at the drivers were really Northern Alliance soldiers. The whole thing could be a setup for an ambush.

  He called for Sergeant Betz, who flew into action. “Anybody who looks American, stay indoors,” he ordered. A handful of soldiers took positions around the cafeteria, their M-4 rifles pointed at the street.

  Mitchell came down from the second-floor office, worried. Why have these guys surrendered? You just don’t turn yourself in….

  There were prisoners hanging on the sides of some trucks; the truckbeds were piled high with men. Mitchell couldn’t believe these men were being brought straight through town. He realized they’d have to drive past the Blue Mosque and the market square, where they could bolt from the trucks.

  The convoy was led by two Northern Alliance vehicles, and two or three more were bringing up the rear, but to Mitchell’s way of thinking, this certainly wasn’t enough to contain an outbreak, should it happen.

  As the trucks sat idling, Mitchell watched as one of the prisoners was pulled from a truck by local men and disappeared behind it. There, on the ground, he was stomped to death by local citizens and Northern Alliance soldiers who’d come rushing to the scene.

  The trucks moved on. Mitchell and his men inside the Turkish Schoolhouse breathed their relief.

  Later that night, a civilian truck roared through a security roadblock on the street outside the schoolhouse, and the nervous Afghan soldiers guarding it opened fire. The truck sped away, unhit, as more gunfire broke out around the school. Mitchell’s men ran for cover. Some of the windows were shattered as machine-gun fire raked the building. No one could tell who the shooters were. The fire seemed to be coming from indeterminate directions, as if the attackers had been waiting to pounce. And then the shooting stopped.

  Mitchell learned that some of the fighting might have been between Atta’s and Dostum’s soldiers. He didn’t know why they were fighting each other. The situation worsened even more when Mitchell learned that one of Dostum’s lieutenants had been blown up in a suicide attack at the fortress. As the prisoners were unloaded from their trucks in the southern courtyard, a video-camera man, working under Dostum’s direction, was filming the event for posterity. The man was nervous to be surrounded by so many enemy fighters. These scowling, filthy men did not look like they wanted to surrender.

  “This is a very bad situation,” the man kept saying as he videotaped the scene. “A very bad situation.”

  One of the Taliban soldiers beckoned Dostum’s lieutenant over, and when he approached, the man pulled a grenade from his clothing and pulled the pin.

  The cameraman watched through his video camera as a small “pop” appeared in the background of his frame, followed by a puff of smoke. At least two men lay dead on the dirt.

  In retaliation, the guards quickly herded the prisoners into the basement of the Pink House. For good measure, they threw a grenade of their own down one of the square-shaped air vents in the brick foundation. The grenade came tumbling inside from overhead and exploded.

  When he heard this news, Mitchell feared that the city was spinning out of control.

  At the schoolhouse, Betz had already enacted the highest security alert, ThreatCon Delta, with soldiers posted on the roof and in the windows, guns poised.

  At one point, someone had pulled up to the schoolhouse in a van and then the driver had leaped out and run away, not to be found.

  Betz and Mitchell believed the vehicle was rigged with explosives, and so they called in a team to dispose of the bomb. But after cautious study, the team discovered that the van hadn’t been rigged with anything.

  It felt like a warning: Next time.

  When Major Leahy crawled into bed that night, he thought of the last phone call he’d had with his wife back in the States, several days earlier.

  “Please be careful,” she had said.

  “I’m the support company commander,” Leahy had said. “What could possibly go wrong?”

  The following morning, the prisoners were led by twos up from the basement of the Pink House and set in the dirt courtyard on the west side of the building. Their hands were tied loosely behind their backs with their scarves.

  The Arabs came first, followed by the Pakistanis, and then the Uzbeks. Spann and Olson hoped to methodically debrief each of these men in hopes of mining a precious nugget about Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts, and Al Qaeda’s plan for future attacks, anywhere in the world.

  Before them were several hundred angry, filthy faces. As the CIA paramilitary officers marched up and down the ranks of seated prisoners, some of the men cursed the Americans: “We have come here to kill you.”

  Spann bent down and looked at one young man, whom he suspected could speak English. He was wearing a British-style commando sweater—there was something about the kid that piqued his curiosity and, finally, his ire.

  The kid wouldn’t speak.

  What Spann didn’t know was that the young man was afraid that if he did talk, this would mean he could be singled out as a defiant foreign terrorist.

  In the basement the night before, many of the prisoners had at first worried they would be killed in the morning by Dostum’s men. Even though one of his guards had thrown the grenade down into the basement, wounding several men, the prisoners had later received news that they would be able to continue their voyage to Herat, as had been agreed in the negotiations between General Dostum and Mullah Faisal.

  Still, the Uzbeks, in particular, were concerned. Because they shared Dostum’s ethnicity, they believed he would be especially harsh with them. He would torture them, and send them back to Uzbekistan, where the anti-Islamic government would execute them. As the Uzbeks saw it, they had nothing to lose. All of the prisoners also had shared the story of what they’d heard had happened to some Taliban prisoners when they found themselves trapped in a school in Mazar after Dostum captured the city. The place had been called Sultan Razia. The Taliban inside had been bombed and killed by U.S. warplanes.

  Many in the young man’s group believed that the basement was as far as they would travel in this life. They fingered the grenades and pistols they had secreted in their clothing. It might be possible to attack their guards in the morning. They would probably be killed, but they would also be martyrs.

  Sitting on a carpet in the dirt, the young man facing Mike Spann wanted no part of this plan. He wondered who the fair-haired, blue-eyed man was. The officer yelled at him to hold up his head so he could take his picture. He might be a Russian. He appeared to be working for General Dostum.

  Neither the blond-haired man nor his friend—a tall, broad-shouldered man in a dark shalwar kameez—had protested when Dostum’s guards kicked and punched at the prisoners. Any man who talked without permission had been beaten.

  No, he would keep his mouth shut, his head down, and pray that he would live.

  Spann bent close to the prisoner. He wondered if he was British because of his European-looking commando sweater.

  “What’s your name,” Spann snapped. “Who brought you here to Afghanistan?”<
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  The young man stared at the ground.

  Spann gazed at him, looking for an angle, some way to get the kid to talk.

  “Put your head up. Don’t make me have to get them to hold your head up. Push your hair back so I can see your face.”

  Spann raised a camera and took a picture.

  “You got to talk to me,” he said. “I know you speak English.”

  Nothing.

  Finally, Spann stood up. He would stop the questioning, for now.

  His partner Dave Olson approached with a handful of passports he’d confiscated from the prisoners. Olson wanted to know what Spann had learned, if anything.

  “I was explaining to the guy we just want to talk to him, find out what his story is,” said Spann.

  “Well, he’s a Muslim, you know,” said Olson. “The problem is, he’s got to decide if wants to live or die, and die here…. We’re just going to leave him and he’s going to fucking sit in prison the rest of his fucking short life…. We can only help the guys who want to talk to us.”

  Spann addressed the young man, “Do you know the people here you’re working with are terrorists, and killed other Muslims? There were several hundred Muslims killed in the bombing in New York City.

  “Is that what the Koran teaches?” Spann went on. “Are you going to talk to us?”

  “That’s all right, man,” said Olson. “Gotta give him a chance. He got his chance.”

  Spann decided that he was finished with the prisoner.

  A guard led the tall, frail-looking man back to the main group of prisoners, who were seated in orderly rows on the west side of the Pink House.

  The prisoner sat. He had made it. He hadn’t talked. And they hadn’t killed him, yet.

  Awhile later, an explosion suddenly rang out on the east side of the Pink House, filling the tall, bricked entrance that led into the basement with dust and smoke.

  An Uzbeki prisoner started up the stairs when he’d suddenly produced a grenade from his clothing and tried tossing it up the stairs at a guard.

  He missed and the live grenade rolled back toward him and blew up. He now lay in a heap, dead on the stairs.

  Out in the courtyard, hell had broken loose.

  Screaming Allah Akbar—God is great—some of the prisoners jumped up and swarmed over the guards, killing them instantly with grenades or weapons they pulled from their clothes.

  Mike Spann started running. He headed across the courtyard, east, as if trying to get inside the Pink House itself, where he might take cover and fire at the prisoners with his AK-47. He had one magazine of ammo and two pistols—one of the handguns secreted in his jeans waistband.

  The firefight probably wouldn’t last long, but he could take a lot of the prisoners with him. And maybe he could hold out long enough for fire support to arrive by air, or by ground, from the Special Forces soldiers back at the Turkish Schoolhouse. It had all gone so wrong so quickly.

  Three days before, he had called his wife in the States and told her he had new prisoners to process. He told her that he loved her. He missed their two daughters and their young son. He said he couldn’t wait to hold the little boy. Shannon rarely expected to hear from Mike, if at all, and she was delighted to hear his voice. But this phone conversation had somehow, almost mysteriously, it seemed, left her in tears. She had hung up feeling that something terrible was going to happen to Mike.

  Before falling asleep, she had prayed, “God protect Mike from having to see too much craziness today.”

  Now, as Mike ran, he felt arms tackle him from behind, and he fell in a storm of flesh. Fists and feet rained on him. He reached to one of his pistols and managed to shoot several of his attackers. But still they punched and kicked.

  One of the prisoners walked up and fired twice, point-blank, at Mike Spann.

  Mike Spann was dead.

  At the sound of the grenade exploding in the stairway, Dave Olson had turned to see what was the matter.

  After conferring with Mike about the prisoners, he had decided to return to Dostum’s headquarters in the north half of the courtyard, and he’d reached the middle wall when he saw Mike fall under a crush of bodies, all punching at him.

  He turned around. He was shocked to see that all of his guards were dead.

  Olson fired his pistol as some of the prisoners ran at him. Others were running across the courtyard and picking up weapons that had been dropped by the dead guards. They started firing at Olson.

  One man ran straight at him until Olson dropped him with his pistol. He tried firing again but he was out of bullets.

  So he ran.

  He sprinted across the courtyard, scanning left and right, seeing up on the fort walls that some of Dostum’s and Atta’s soldiers had scaled the heights at the first sound of gunfire. Now they were shooting down at the rioting prisoners. The volume of gunfire was deafening.

  Olson was joined by one of Dostum’s soldiers running alongside him, both of them pumping their knees high and straining for speed as bullets whizzed past their heads.

  Olson was worried they’d be shot by the men up on the walls if they mistook them for Taliban fighters. He relayed the fear to his new companion, saying they needed to get out of this courtyard, quickly.

  They headed for a wall, hoping it might screen them from the gunfire.

  “Allow me,” said the man, jumping over the barrier first and making sure that no enemy fighters were hiding behind it.

  “All clear!” he yelled back.

  Olson couldn’t believe the man’s daring. He shuffled over the chest-high wall and continued running.

  Reaching Dostum’s headquarters building, he bolted straight inside and up the stairs, where he ran smack into a short, wiry, blond-haired man who was standing on the stair landing.

  Arnim Stauth, a German television reporter, looked up in surprise. He had taken cover on the landing when he heard the gunfire erupt several hundred yards away, in the southern courtyard. He had no idea what was happening in the fort. He had driven to Qala-i-Janghi early in the morning from Mazar to film some International Red Cross workers as they monitored the well-being of the newly arrived prisoners.

  He looked at the tall, dark-bearded man now standing before him. He appeared out of breath, confused, dazed even. The man had been holding his pistol by the barrel, instead of the grip, as if he’d forgotten how to carry it, and he kept trying to put it back in its holster and missing.

  Stauth asked him what had happened.

  Olson answered in a dry, shaky voice. It was probably now that it occurred to him that his covert status as a CIA paramilitary officer had been suddenly, and permanently, blown.

  He explained to Stauth that the prisoners had rioted in the southern courtyard, and he thought one American was dead. He wasn’t sure. They moved to another room in the headquarters, deeper inside, where Olson surprised Stauth by asking if he could borrow a phone.

  Stauth guessed, because the man was wearing a nonstandard “uniform”—a long shalwar kameez—that he was a CIA officer, and he found it hard to believe that he wasn’t carrying some means of communication. He offered Olson his satellite handset.

  Olson now had another problem. He didn’t have a number to call at the Turkish Schoolhouse.

  So he dialed the U.S. Embassy in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, which patched him through to U.S. Army Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, which then routed Olson to the Turkish Schoolhouse. The urgent call had traveled some 20,000 miles before it arrived on the fifth floor of the CIA’s makeshift headquarters in Mazar-i-Sharif.

  There, a gruff, bushy-bearded fellow officer named Garth Rogers received the news. The seemingly bulletproof shield that the CIA had been traveling under during the entire mission had been pierced. It was almost inconceivable that this could be true.

  Rogers hung up, shocked.

  Back at the schoolhouse, Mark Mitchell had been receiving reports throughout the late morning about steady but unexplained gunfire occurr
ing somewhere in the city. Did he know anything about this? No, Mitchell said. All was shipshape, so far as he knew.

  Earlier that morning, Admiral Bert Calland, along with U.S. Army medical surgeon Craig (“Doc”) McFarland, had been touring area hospitals and surveying their suitability. McFarland had been appalled by the conditions. The outdated X-ray machines were barely powerful enough for the simplest tests, and the anesthesia equipment looked to be 1950s vintage. Almost none of the officers had antibiotics or bandages. McFarland saw he would have his work cut out for him as the chief medical officer in Mazar.

  As they returned to the Turkish Schoolhouse, McFarland thought he heard heavy gunfire coming from the vicinity of Qala-i-Janghi. He found this strange. He knew Mike Spann and Dave Olson had gone over there to question prisoners.

  As soon as he got to Mitchell’s office, he asked about the gunfire. He told Mitchell that it had sounded like a real battle was going on at the fort.

  Kurt Sonntag was getting the same kind of queries by radio from Special Forces soldiers traveling in the city. “Hey, there’s gunfire out to the west. What’s going on?”

  “Does it sound like anything?”

  “No, just a lot of intermittent fire.”

  Finally, Sonntag got a call from an officer at K2, in Uzbekistan. “We’ve got a report that there’s, you know, two Americans dead in Mazar.”

  Sonntag said he hadn’t heard anything about this. He thought it must be some mistake.

  Just then, Mitchell got a message that he had an urgent visitor wanting to see him. Into the office burst one of Dostum’s friends, a civilian named Alam Razam, dressed in an ill-fitting suit coat and tie. Razam was in a panic.

  “There’s been a terrible incident,” he said. “You must come. I think there are dead Americans. The prisoners have seized control of the fortress. You’ve got to come right now!”

  Kurt Sonntag had entered the office with Razam, and Sonntag and Mitchell looked at each other, disbelieving.

  Mitchell and Sonntag struggled to maintain their composure. Mitchell had lived in the fort longer than any of the new arrivals to Mazar, and knew most of the maze of rooms and passageways.