by Damien Lewis
‘Well copied. Five-hundred-pounders only on target.’
‘OK, these are the first target coordinates: MGRS Foxtrot Echo 23849676. Repeat, coordinates are: 23849676.’
‘Foxtrot Echo 23849676. Got it.’
‘OK, I’m letting you see my laser,’ Mat continued, pointing his laser torch into the air and executing a figure of eight with it. He waited for a few seconds. The pilot would need time to pick it up with his on-board camera: it would appear as a small dot of intense white light. ‘You got it?’
‘Yeah, I got it.’
‘Right, I’m moving it down on to the mountain side.’
‘Yeah, I got it.’
‘OK, I’m moving it on to the target area now, the central wall of the fort.’
‘Yeah. I have the target visual now.’
‘OK, there’s an LTD aimed at the centre point of that wall, the gateway. You see the hot spot?’
‘I see it.’
‘OK, that’s where we want you to put the first five-hundred-pounder.’
‘I got it,’ the pilot responded. ‘What’s the friendly coordinates?’
‘OK, friendly coordinates are Foxtrot Echo 23849675,’ Mat replied. ‘Like I said, we’re danger-close.’
‘OK, coming in now, west of your location: three miles out, two miles out …’
Mat glanced up into the sky and spotted the US aircraft. ‘OK, Red Fox Four, I’ve got you visual now. If you look to your left front, you’ll pick up on the sparkler on my helmet.’ Mat was referring to the laser torch that he’d attached to his helmet, on pulse mode.
‘OK, I got your sparkler …’ the pilot began replying, but his words were lost in a confusion of yelling, as Jamie and Ruff spotted the enemy making another charge from the gateway.
‘THEY’RE BREAKIN’ OUT! THEY’RE BREAKIN’ OUT!’
A split second later there was the roar of a GPMG kicking into life. Glancing over the lip of the stairwell Mat could see that Ruff had dropped his LTD and was back at the battlements, pouring down fire on to the enemy.
Fuck, Mat thought to himself, which of them was lazing Target 1, Jamie or Ruff?
‘FUCKIN’ GET THE FAST AIR IN,’ Jamie screamed over, from where he was crouched behind his LTD. He had realised the source of Mat’s confusion. ‘I’m on Target 1. I’M ON TARGET 1. MALLET THE FUCKERS!’
‘RED FOX FOUR, RED FOX FOUR, YOU HEAR ME?’ Mat yelled into his radio.
‘Yeah, buddy, I hear ya and I can see ya now,’ came back the pilot’s reply. ‘There’s around a dozen of ya on the battlements there, an’ looks like you’re in some trouble.’
‘Yeah, that’s us. We need that air strike now.’
‘Right I’m starting my bombing run … I’m thirty secs to target … fifteen secs to target …’
Glancing up Mat was just in time to see a black, wheelie-bin-sized object streaking across the fort, homing in on the hot point of Jamie’s laser beam. As it plummeted towards the central gateway it made a fearsome noise, like an express train screeching to a halt. The SBS soldiers and their Afghan brothers in arms threw themselves flat on the deck as the missile struck. For a moment their lungs emptied and eardrums imploded as the shock wave of the explosion rolled over them, chunks of shrapnel flying past overhead. And then a huge plume of smoke and dust was thrown into the air high above the enemy positions. That first five-hundred-pound bomb had smashed into the building on the nearside of the gateway, punching a massive hole in its domed roof. The explosion would have incinerated anyone inside, while shrapnel would have shredded those in the near vicinity of the blast.
In the seconds immediately following the aftershock of the bomb strike the enemy guns at the gateway had fallen silent. And suddenly Jamie and Ruff were back at the battlements, laying down long bursts of fire with their GPMGs, cutting down the enemy figures still making a run for Dostum’s HQ building. The northern end of the fort was starting to look like a killing field now, with dozens of dead and injured AQT fighters littered across the sand. As the firing with the Gimpys ceased, an eerie quiet descended over the fort. Exhaustedly, the two men sank down behind the battlements, their backs to the wall and the smoking guns resting between their knees. But the respite was to be short-lived.
Barely thirty seconds after that first air strike had hit, the enemy guns opened up again. All of a sudden, wave upon wave of gunfire was coming up at the SBS soldiers hunkered down on the tower roof. The enemy must have reinforced their bombed-out positions at the gateway, and were hitting back against those who had called in the US air strikes. As they crouched down behind the battlements, Jamie and Ruff found themselves being targeted by massive amounts of incoming. At their backs the ramparts felt as if they were juddering with all the rounds ploughing into them, and dirt and chunks of masonry went falling down the necks of their combat jackets.
‘Fuck! How many more of the fuckers are there?’ Jamie yelled to Ruff.
‘Fucked if I know, mate,’ Ruff yelled back at him.
‘How long before the wall gives out?’ Jamie yelled again.
‘Fucked if I know,’ Ruff yelled back. ‘Fancy a fuckin’ smoke, mate?’
The previous summer, Ruff Pouncer had been in Sierra Leone, on Operation Barras, a do-or-die mission to rescue eleven British soldiers held hostage by murderous rebels in the jungle. The SAS had led the raid on the rebel base, but around a third of the force had been SBS. Then, as now, they had also been outnumbered five to one, and the men had nicknamed that mission ‘Operation Certain Death’. The airborne raid on the rebel base to rescue the hostages had been scheduled to take an hour. But it had ended up lasting four, and it had been an awesome operation. Ruff and the seventy other SBS/SAS soldiers had had a hundred men of the Parachute Regiment in support. But they’d been up against a thousand drugged-up rebels and child soldiers who seemed to know no fear. Hundreds of the rebels had been killed, but they had just kept coming back at the British forces for more.
Yet the intensity of that firefight just didn’t compare with what the SBS were facing now, here at Qala-i-Janghi, the Fort of War. While the rebels and child soldiers had been driven on by an evil cocktail of drugs, the enemy here were driven by a cold-hearted, diehard fanaticism. By a do-or-die need to kill British and American soldiers. If Ruff had to take his pick between fearless, drug-fuelled African rebels, or these crazy terrorists and religious fanatics, he knew who he would choose to fight. Repeatedly, the enemy here at Qala-i-Janghi were trying their suicidal charges. Sooner or later some of them were bound to succeed in breaking out. And in between those charges there was just a massive firestorm raging back and forth across the fort. No doubt about it, Sierra Leone had been a life-threatening mission; but here, several times already, Ruff had been convinced that he was about to die.
He and Jamie started chain-smoking to try to calm their nerves, sparking up one fag after another and passing it between them. As Jamie took the lighted cigarette from Ruff, he noticed that his own hands were shaking. For a second he felt a flush of embarrassment, in case Ruff had noticed. But as he passed the fag back again he saw that his mate’s hands were shaking too. Jamie knew this wasn’t from the fear: it was from the adrenalin rush of combat that was coursing through his veins. In fact, he felt oddly, weirdly calm. He was convinced that they were going to die. But he had reconciled himself to death during the first few minutes of the battle. If he caught a bullet he caught a bullet, and there was nothing he could do to prevent it. What he did fear was suffering the same fate as the two CIA agents – being captured alive. For if that happened Jamie had no illusions what would follow: the enemy would torture his very soul.
Jamie was torn away from his thoughts as a group of enemy fighters came bursting through the central gateway. Immediately, he and Ruff were up over the battlements with their Gimpys at the ready. They took it in turns to open up on the charging enemy fighters, each of them putting down sixty- to eighty-round bursts. They alternated their fire so that if either of them had a stoppage the othe
r could take over, and to ensure that they didn’t both run out of ammo at the same time. Giving the GPMGs a break also meant that the weapons had time to cool down a little – which would prevent rounds cooking off in the barrel. Even as they fought, Jamie and Ruff kept passing a lighted fag backwards and forwards between them, so that the guy not firing could take a few drags to calm his nerves. It would take just one fuck-up with one of the GPMGs, one stoppage, one fried gun barrel, and the enemy would be in among them.
Over in the tower stairwell, Mat glared at his watch. Why the fuck did that second hand move so slowly! He was waiting impatiently for the next warplane to be over target. It was 2.25 p.m., and they were barely an hour into the firefight. Yet it already felt like it had been a lifetime. Mat had few doubts about the seriousness of their situation. They were about to be overrun by hundreds of fanatical enemy fighters. If the fuckers came for them on the tower, Mat knew how he would react. He would stand shoulder to shoulder with his mates and fight to the last man. And if the bullets ran out, he would save the last round for himself. No way on earth was he letting himself get captured. Did he regret anything in his life? For a second Mat caught himself lamenting the fact that he’d had no kids with Suzie. And then he told himself to cut the crap. It was far better to be like this: his death would leave no young kid bereft of the father they needed.
Some three hundred yards to the north of Mat’s position, Major Martin’s rescue mission was starting to fight its way into the interior of the fort. The Major, CIA Steve, Sam and Tom had survived being caught by the RPG strikes as they climbed over the fort’s outer wall. But only just. As the air had cleared of smoke and debris it turned out that the massive, mud-brick wall had absorbed most of the impact of the explosions. But two of the Afghan soldiers had been right on top of the RPG detonations: they had been blown off the battlements by the blast and were badly injured.
As soon as the dust had cleared, Sam pointed out the buildings clustered around the central gateway from where the enemy fighters had launched the RPG attacks. In a second, Tom had his Diemaco up over the battlements and had started putting down short, sustained bursts of fire on to the enemy positions at the gateway. He’d got off a magazine and a half on to the target when he turned round to check on Sam, some six yards down the wall from him. He was pleased to see that his fellow SBS soldier was pouring rounds on to the same target. It felt great to be taking the fight to the enemy at last.
Glancing around at the Afghan soldiers that were with them, Tom realised that they had gone all goggle-eyed as they watched Sam and himself in action. Tom had noticed that when he and his fellow SBS soldiers had first rocked up at the fort in their jeans, T-shirts and shamags, the Afghan soldiers had looked at them askance. It was as if they had been thinking; ‘Who the fuck’re you guys?’ The Northern Alliance soldiers had a deep respect for uniforms, and it was clear that they hadn’t thought much of the SBS’s dress sense. In their minds, modern warriors wore smart military fatigues. Because the SBS soldiers were dressed in ragged, torn civvies, the Afghans had concluded that they couldn’t be real soldiers and wouldn’t know how to use a weapon.
But soldiers speak a universal language, and once the Afghans had seen Tom and Sam in action it had really broken the ice. Ultimately, if you were a warrior the Afghans would respect you, no matter how you might be dressed.
‘You know what?’ Sam shouted into Tom’s ear, as they crouched down on the small ledge on the outside of the battlements. ‘I’ve fucked my finger comin’ over the goddam wall.’
‘Which one, mate?’ Tom yelled back at him.
‘My trigger finger,’ Sam yelled back, his face splitting into a wide grin.
‘You fuckin’ what?’ Tom cracked up laughing. ‘We’re up here gettin’ shot to fuck and you’ve fucked your trigger finger?’
‘Yeah. Say, bro, you promise you won’t tell the others?’
‘Fat fuckin’ chance. That’s going’ up on the noticeboard back at Poole, mate.’
As Sam tried to massage his strained trigger finger back into life, the two SBS operators crouched behind the cover of the wall, pissing themselves laughing. The Afghan soldiers were staring at them now. They were clearly thinking that either these two foreign warriors were completely mad, or they were so at home in a firefight that they were quite happy to stop and have a laugh halfway through it all. Tom and Sam gave the Afghans a thumbs up, and got a grin and a thumbs up in return. But their merriment was, by necessity, short-lived. They knew that they had to get over the wall and push ahead pretty quickly now, if they were to have any chance of locating the two missing CIA officers.
Their destination, Dostum’s HQ building, lay on the inside of the fort some 150 yards or so to the west of them. Once they were down the far side of the wall they planned to make a mad dash for that building. But as they did so they’d be sitting ducks for the enemy forces bunched up at the central gateway. As they psyched themselves up for the next stage of the assault, Tom decided to check if there might be any help on hand from the US air power. They needed something to cover the next stage of their mission, and a nice big JDAM might just do the trick.
‘Romeo Zero Alpha, this is Delta Zero Alpha, you got any fast air on its way?’ Tom yelled into his radio.
‘Romeo Zero Alpha, fast air inbound,’ Mat responded, from his position on the entranceway tower. ‘Expect five, repeat five, minutes to target.’
‘Reckon you can hit those fuckers at the gateway?’ Tom radioed back at him. ‘Cos they’ve got us nailed somethin’ chronic here, mate.’
‘Give us five minutes and we’ll mallet the fookers,’ Mat replied. ‘Wait out.’
Tom and Sam signalled to Major Martin, CIA Steve and the Afghan fighters to hold their position on the wall until the air strike went in. As soon as that US aircraft had hit the enemy at the gateway, they would be down the other side of the wall and heading for Dostum’s HQ building as fast as they could. As they waited out the minutes, Tom and Sam took it in turns to lay down fire on to the enemy, taking a lot of incoming fire in return. The air was thick with the acrid stench of gunfire and burning, and the noise of the battle was building to a deafening crescendo. Finally, above the deafening battle roar there was the ear-splitting shriek of the missile going in over their heads. Tom and Sam gripped the battlements as the five-hundred-pound bomb smashed into the enemy positions, the blast wave rolling over the rescue team on the wall and all but bursting their eardrums.
‘GO! GO! GO!’ Tom yelled a split second after the missile had struck. Suddenly, he, Sam, CIA Steve, Major Martin and the Afghan fighters were piling over the wall and skidding down the rampart on the far side.
They hit the ground running and were immediately powering across the fort towards Dostum’s HQ building. For the first few moments following the air strike a deathly quiet enveloped the battleground. But as the smoke and dust cleared from around the gateway, the guns that had fallen silent opened up with a vengeance, as the surviving enemy fighters spotted the rescue party sprinting across the inner grounds of the fort. Suddenly, there was a withering barrage of machine-gun fire cutting across the space in between. Tom, Sam, CIA Steve and the Major were caught in the open. Bullets started kicking up the dust and the dirt around their feet as they ran, the very ground dancing with the impact of the incoming rounds.
Sam and Tom hit the deck and started returning fire, ‘pepper-potting’ from one fire point to another – laying down short, three-second bursts and moving on before they could be targeted. It was only this movement that was keeping them alive. But around them the Afghan soldiers had taken up static fire points in the open ground, and were returning fire at the enemy with long bursts from their AK47s. Caught out in the open like this, the Afghan fighters were sitting ducks. Within seconds, one, then two, had fallen, as they were picked off by the enemy. They were all fighting for their very lives now. They knew that to continue on across the open ground in the face of this wall of fire would be pure suicide.
�
��MOVE!’ Tom shouted at the Afghan fighters, as he dived on to his front and started belly-crawling forward. ‘MOVE IT! ON ME!’
He had spotted the only piece of vaguely decent cover around, a crumbling mud-brick wall some dozen yards in front of them, and he started inching his way across the open ground towards it. As he pressed his body into the sandy earth, he heard rounds whirring past him barely inches from his flattened torso. More bullets kicked into the earth just ahead of him, throwing sand and dirt into his face and eyes. As soon as he reached the cover of the wall, Tom flipped over on to his back and checked behind him. With a surge of relief he found that the Afghan soldiers had followed his lead: they were down on their fronts and crawling as fast as they could towards cover. Sam was already beside him at the wall, and Major Martin and CIA Steve were just a couple of yards behind.
As far as the British and US soldiers were concerned, without more air strikes to take out the enemy guns, they were finished. The special forces soldiers and their Afghan fellow fighters put down short bursts of fire over the wall, but at the same time they could feel the enemy rounds tearing into the brickwork on the far side. If they were pinned down here much longer, the crumbling masonry would be shot to pieces and then they would be dead. Caught out in the midst of the open fort with next to no cover, their rescue mission was fast becoming a death trip. And while death trips appeared to be something that their fanatical enemy relished, the concept didn’t fill Tom and Sam with any joyful anticipation. Paradise could wait, as far as they were concerned.
Tom rolled on to his side, ducked his head down and began yelling into his PRM radio. ‘Romeo Zero Alpha, this is Delta Zero Alpha, where’s the fuckin’ fast air?’
‘Romeo Zero Alpha, fast air inbound six, repeat six, minutes,’ Mat responded, in a voice that he hoped sounded calm and reassuring.
‘Mallet the fuckers at the fucking gateway!’ Tom cried. ‘We’re fuckin’ pinned down here and takin’ fuckin’ casualties.’