by Damien Lewis
They reached the last flight of stairs, hearts pounding, and prepared to break out on to the roof. With their weapons at the shoulder and on the aim, they crept up the last few steps. Each soldier stayed as light on his feet as possible. As their heads emerged from the stairwell, Tom and Sam were already searching for the enemy. Simultaneously, both men opened fire on the positions right in front of them. They took the three enemy soldiers by complete surprise and cut them down in a hail of bullets. For a split second the Dushka operator tried to spin his heavy machine gun around, but then he took a bullet in the head and slumped over on top of his weapon. His two fellow fighters were already lying dead or dying at the feet of the tripod that supported the giant gun.
Not a word had been spoken between Tom and Sam as they moved forward to secure the rest of the tower roof. They did a quick body-check. All the enemy fighters were dead. Tom reached down and picked up one of their AK47s, pulling several full magazines out of the dead man’s clothing. He knew that his Diemaco was down to the last few rounds. Slinging the AK47 over his shoulder he continued checking over the tower roof for any more of the enemy.
‘I’m movin’ forward, bro,’ Sam called over, softly, once they’d finished securing the position. Using hand signals again, he indicated to Tom that he was advancing along the parapet that ran along the outer wall towards the western tower. ‘I’m going to look for Mike. Cover me, bro.’
Giving the thumbs up, Tom heaved the corpse of the dead gunner off of the heavy machine gun, and gave it the once-over. It was undamaged, and would certainly give him a far greater firepower and range than the AK47 that he had slung over his shoulder. Lowering himself into the gunner’s ‘seat’, he spun the weapon around and pointed the barrel in the direction of the southern end of the fort. If the enemy were to counter-attack, it was from there that they’d be coming. Out of the corner of his eye Tom saw Sam set off at a crouching run along the parapet in the direction of the western tower. Soon, his lone figure was lost in the gathering darkness. Tom knew that the life of this brave and selfless American soldier now depended, in part, upon him.
As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, Tom tried to make out what movements, if any, the enemy were making up ahead of him. For a second, he caught what he thought were crouched figures running along the base of the fort’s dividing wall, some four hundred yards away from him, moving as if to cut off Sam’s advance. But then he wasn’t certain that he’d seen them at all. In the half-light of dusk, he was struggling to make things out clearly. And at this distance a film of evening mist seemed to have settled between himself and the distant walls of the fort, obscuring any detail.
‘Cover me,’ Sam had told him. Well, how the fuck could he cover him if he couldn’t see properly? Tom thought to himself, frustratedly.
But what the hell. If he opened fire in the general direction of those shadowy figures, it would at least create a diversion. And that might mean that Sam would get a clear run at things. By doing so, Tom reasoned, he’d be sure to draw down fire on to his position, so diverting any attention away from Sam. Sighting the heavy weapon on the base of the distant wall, Tom squeezed the trigger. Suddenly the Dushka roared into life, an ear-splitting percussion shattering the evening stillness. It was dark enough for Tom to follow the giant tracer rounds as they arced across the fort and hit the distant wall. Adjusting his fire, he dropped the target point six feet or so to the base of the wall, and began to fire for effect. If any of the enemy were trying to move across to intercept Sam, they’d now have to walk through a wall of fire to get to him.
Almost immediately, rounds started cracking back across the fort in Tom’s direction. The enemy had woken up to the fact that one of their ‘own’ guns was being turned on them. But at such range, most of the incoming fire was pretty inaccurate, and rounds were slamming into the tower well wide of their target. In any case, Tom had other things to worry about. As the Dushka kicked back with the powerful force of the rounds firing off, Tom felt his feet being forced off the floor. The weapon was obviously adjusted to suit a much taller operator than Tom, who was somewhat on the short side, and he was in danger of losing control of it. Calming his nerves, Tom leaned back, braced himself by getting his boots wedged up on to the weapon’s carriage, and settled into a position where he could continue operating the gun.
After a sustained burst Tom ceased firing and hunched over the Dushka, searching for any signs of enemy movement out there in the shadowy no man’s land of the fort. As he did so, sporadic bursts of enemy fire kept coming back at him. Then Tom heard the crack-crack-crack of several well-placed shots coming from the direction of the western tower. Fuck it, he cursed to himself, Sam must’ve run into trouble. Somehow, the enemy must have got through to him. Tom was expecting a fully-fledged firefight to break out on the western tower, and if it did then his only option would be to advance and try to go to his fellow soldier’s aid. But after those well-placed shots, all seemed to go quiet again.
As he sat there alone on the roof of the tower, Tom listened to the odd, sporadic burst of gunfire drifting across from the more distant sections of the fort complex. The newly arrived Northern Alliance forces would have a long night ahead of them keeping the enemy bottled up here, that much was for certain. A couple of minutes had passed since that isolated burst of shots, and Tom decided it was time to lay down some more suppressing fire. But he had to conserve the big gun’s ammunition. He allowed himself to squeeze off a few short bursts in the general direction of the enemy, and then ceased firing.
In the deafening silence that followed, Tom thought he caught the sound of a voice up ahead of him in the shadows. But then he thought he must have imagined it. Yet as he strained his ears in the echoing darkness he caught the voice again, calling to him out of the night.
‘Tom! Buddy! You hear me?’ came the voice. It was Sam, coming back along the parapet from the western tower. ‘What’s up, bro?’ he added, as soon as he caught sight of Tom. ‘What you got your legs up in the air for? You firin’ that gun or you ridin’ it?’
‘Fuck off, you lanky git,’ Tom replied. ‘Am I fuckin’ glad to see you, mate.’
As Sam appeared from the darkness, Tom was shocked by his appearance. He was ashen-faced, and looked completely drained and shaken.
‘You look like death, mate,’ Tom said, as he extricated himself from the machine gun. ‘What the fuck happened out there?’
‘I’m OK, bro,’ Sam sounded exhausted. ‘I just wanna get outta here. You know, it was pretty dark down there, but I saw this guy, lying there, face down, in jeans and a black shirt. I guess it had to be him … Hell, I don’t wanna talk about it – not now, anyways. Let’s just get the fuck outta here, bro.’
‘Fuckin’ fine by me, mate,’ Tom replied, trying to make light of things. ‘It was your fuckin’ crazy idea to come out here in the first place.’
As far as Tom was concerned Sam was right – it was high time they got the hell out of the fort. They began to retrace their steps. As they did so, Tom was busy trying to figure out what on earth had happened to Sam, out there alone on the western tower. He looked like he had gone through something that had shocked and sickened him – something that had affected him far more deeply than anything that had happened during the whole of that day’s bloody fighting, something that had forced him to face one of the worst decisions of his life. Or at least that was the only way that Tom could make any sense out of things now.
Twenty minutes later and all members of the rescue team had rendezvoused at the main entrance to the fort. Not surprisingly, Major Martin and CIA Steve had failed to find any signs of CIA Dave in the HQ building. The rescue party met up with Captain Lancer’s team and the rest of the 5th SOF boys, and everyone declared themselves more than ready to head back to Boxer Base.
As the SBS Land-Rovers pulled away from Qala-i-Janghi and hit the high road back to Mazar, every single man on those vehicles felt a massive adrenalin rush surging through his exhausted body, a burning sense of exh
ilaration. At some stage during the last six hours of combat operations, each and every one of them had faced the certainty that they were not going to live through that day. Yet somehow, they had cheated death and made it out alive from the Fort of War.
By the time they got back to Boxer Base it was dark. The first day of the battle for Qala-i-Janghi was over – and the SBS soldiers were wondering just how long the bitter siege would last. The first thing they did was a major ammo resupply. If anything major kicked off at the fort again that night, they’d be heading back up there to lend a hand, of that they were certain. So, before anyone could even think about a good feed and a kip, they had to get themselves battle-ready again.
‘The fookers,’ Mat remarked to no one in particular, as he slotted new rounds into his magazine. On the one hand he was feeling utterly exhausted, while on the other he was still on the adrenalin rush of combat. ‘“Prisoners” be fooked. They weren’t bloody prisoners and they never bloody well intended to be. They went to that fort to fight. They’d never stopped being bloody combatants.’
‘You can say that again, mate,’ said Jamie.
‘Tell you another thing, mate, they’re fuckin’ evil, even by our standards,’ Tom observed, as he cleaned his weapon. ‘I’d say they’re the most hard core of the lot of ’em. You know, the fuckin’ “Arab Afghans”. Bunch of foreigners – Saudis, Chechens, whatever. You saw the way they fought? They’d break cover, take a couple of well-aimed shots – then dive back into cover again before you could even get a fuckin’ bead on ’em. Not bad for a bunch of ragheads.’
‘They were good all right,’ said Jamie. ‘I reckon we’re lucky we made it out of there without taking casualties.’
‘In a way you got to fuckin’ admire them, mate – a grim admiration,’ said Tom. ‘Fighting to the death they were, and fearless –’
‘I don’t bloody admire them,’ Mat interrupted. ‘And I wouldn’t bloody say they were fearless, either. Driven insane for a cause, I’ll grant you. But I can’t see that they was brave. They was bloody fanatical, and I don’t admire them nowt for seeking death. Even the local Afghans, the local Muslims, even they don’t understand it. I mean, those bloody suicide charges. How can you blow yourself up for a senseless cause? It’s crazy, downright mad.’
‘Yeah, all right, mate,’ said Tom. ‘But this fort housed all the foreign fighters. These people come from all over the fuckin’ world to fight, to seek death in this cause. So, call it whatever you fuckin’ want to, mate – bravery, an attitude, madness, suicide, whatever – it ain’t like nothin’ else you’ve ever seen before. And the question is, how do you fight against fuckers like that?’
‘Fuckin’ simple, mate,’ Ruff interjected. ‘You just fuckin’ get your Gimpy and fuckin’ mallet the fuckers.’
‘It ain’t no different from what we trained for back at home,’ Mat added. ‘How long we been training for it – counter-terrorism, close-quarter battle, room-to-room combat – call it what you bloody well like? Years mate, that’s what. And it don’t matter where you are – in Bosnia, Sierra Leone, East Timor or bloody Afghanistan, this is what we trained for. And it don’t matter who the enemy is, we’re still doing what we bloody trained for. Killing the fookers. Every time you train, you do it like it’s for real, and every time it’s for real you’re relying on your bloody training.’
There were a few seconds where no one spoke, as they were all contemplating what Mat had just been saying. The sound of metal scraping on metal, of rounds being slotted into magazines, filled the room.
‘So, it’s just a fuckin’ test for all the trainin’, is that it?’ Tom countered, finally. ‘Is that what you’re sayin’? Is that all it is? Don’t get me wrong, mate. I still think we should put a bullet in every last one of the fuckers. I’m just trying to work out how best we do that, that’s all.’
‘You know why we’re operating so bloody well in there, mate, despite all the madness?’ Mat answered. ‘Cos that’s what we trained for back at home – for it all going to rat shit, for it all going totally bloody pear-shaped. That fort is a fuck-up but not of our making, and it’s one we’ve been sent in to sort out.’
‘Fair enough, mate,’ Tom conceded, after a slight pause. ‘But I’ll tell you another fuckin’ thing – I reckon there’s a good number of ’em will get away tonight, under cover of darkness.’
‘How d’you figure that?’ asked Jamie.
‘Tom’s got a point there, mate,’ Mat cut in. ‘Stands to reason. There’s no way the Afghans will be able to keep all those fookers in there – in that fort – overnight. It’s dark. You seen the bloody size of the place. Like three bloody great big football pitches laid side to side. There’s hundreds of them left in there, got to be. Stands to bloody reason some of them are going to get away, don’t it?’
‘Yeah, and what with the way the fuckin’ Afghans police the place and all,’ Tom added, shaking his head, ‘it’ll be a quick leg-up over the wall and they’ll scarper. What is it, a few guys wandering about on the outside of the fuckin’ fort and the rest of ’em crouchin’ around their fires to keep warm. I mean, there’s no formal sentry system or nothing, is there? Yeah, a good number of the fuckers’ll sneak away tonight.’
‘But we aren’t exactly expecting them to come back for any more, are we?’ said Jamie. ‘There’s a lot of people have died in there today. And they must know that a fuck sight more of ’em are going to get malleted, before this thing is over.’
‘Did someone say it was called the Fort of War?’ said Mat. ‘More like the Fort of bloody Death, I reckon.’
‘Reckon I must’ve malleted dozens of the fuckers while I was on the Gimpy,’ Jamie remarked. ‘Just mowing ’em down I was. So was Ruff there. It was like they were all just looking to die, like they wanted nothing more than to get it over with, to get slotted. Fucking weird it was. Young kiddies a lot of them, too.’
‘Fuckin’ Gimpy’s too fuckin’ good for the fuckers,’ Ruff growled.
There was an interruption as one of the 5th SOF soldiers put his head around the door. ‘Heads up on the top floor, guys,’ he announced. ‘Say, you know, that Tom guy of yours – he’s got balls made of brass from what I been hearin’.’
‘Yeah, well, you had to be there, mate,’ Mat replied, with a forced grin.
‘Well, all right, I’ll see you up on the top floor, buddy,’ the US soldier added.
‘Balls of brass?’ said Mat, once the US soldier had gone. ‘Reckon your missus will be shocked when she hears that, mate.’
‘Fuck off, mate,’ Tom retorted, with a grin. ‘She fuckin’ knows already, don’t she.’
Once the SBS soldiers had finished rearming themselves, they headed up to the top floor of the building. After fixing a brew, they settled down for the debrief and to plan the next day’s operations. First off, CIA Dave stood up to give an account of what had happened in the fort from his side of things. He covered the period from the start of the uprising and seeing Mike Spann go down under a pile of enemy prisoners, to the moment of his final escape from the fort. CIA Dave had eventually taken the same route out to safety as the ICRC workers had done before him. He’d climbed out a window at the rear of the HQ building, scaled the outer parapet of the fort and run down the sloping buttress on the far side. Once there, he’d jumped in a local taxi that had just ferried a news crew to the battle scene, and headed back to Boxer Base.
CIA Dave said that he’d only decided to abandon the fort at the last possible moment, when darkness was coming down and he was convinced that there was no rescuing Mike Spann. The general consensus in the room seemed to be that Mike was unlikely to have survived the initial attack on him by the prisoners. And it was clear that he was even less likely to survive a night alone in the fort. This being the case then, the following day’s battle plan could be very different. If there were no allied personnel left alive in the fort, they could go in hard and just obliterate the enemy positions from the air. The gloves would be off. A plan for the f
ollowing morning was drawn up which involved the same SBS/5th SOF teams going into action. But now the teams would be tasked almost exclusively with calling in air strikes.
‘All around the walls of that place there’s rooms stuffed full of ammo and weapons,’ Tom remarked. ‘OK, a lot of it might be World War II vintage, but it still goes bang if you point it in the right fuckin’ direction. It’s a fuckin’ stupid place to put your prisoners –’
‘Yeah, an’ they got kinda irrigation channels running beneath the walls,’ one of the 5th SOF soldiers interjected, ‘which, you know, bring in the water.’
‘So, they’ve got weapons and they got water,’ Tom continued. ‘The point being they could hold out in there for fuckin’ weeks, if they wanted to. But I reckon their real aim is to break out and cause as much havoc and mayhem as possible.’
‘No two ways about it, we gotta break that siege,’ said Major Martin. In spite of the earlier friction between the 5th SOF commanding officer and one or two of the SBS soldiers, the US Major was more than rising to the challenge of the fort uprising. ‘An’ the only way I can see to do that is with the air power. That’s unless, you know, anyone else can think of a better way.’
‘Well, consider the options,’ said Tom. ‘We can’t fuckin’ storm the place, that’s for sure. We’re outnumbered and the enemy are well armed and well dug in. We can’t just wait it out as a siege tactic, cos there’s still enough of ’em in there to try and break out. There’s only one option that makes any sense: we got to locate their strongholds and fuckin’ mallet ’em from the air.’
‘We got fast air on standby all day tomorrow,’ Major Martin enthused. ‘Way I see it, they ain’t never gonna give it up unless we break their hold on the place, that’s for sure.’
‘Tell you one thing, mate,’ Jamie remarked. ‘Without them air strikes today we’d have been in real trouble. We had some real angels on our shoulders.’