by Damien Lewis
The soldiers spent the rest of the day at Boxer Base tending to their injuries and recovering. There were bruises, flesh wounds and sprained limbs to be dealt with. And even for those like Ruff who were impatient to get back and resume the fighting there was little chance that they might do so. Few of the SBS and 5th SOF soldiers had managed to recover their weapons from the rubble of the bombed-out tower. The plan for the remainder of the day was to recover their fighting fitness and get battle-ready. For now, there were more than enough Northern Alliance soldiers up at Qala-i-Janghi to keep the enemy bottled up in the fort.
That afternoon, the CIA officers at Boxer Base presented the SBS with a sizeable lump sum in cash: $40,000 as expenses to cover their trashed gear, and another $200,000 to pay for a new laser target designator. The LTD that the lads had been using was buried in the debris of the JDAM blast. The CIA officers had also entered into negotiations with the Northern Alliance commanders over how much compensation was to be paid to them, to make up for their deaths and the destruction to equipment (including the T-55 tank). One of the stumbling blocks to a deal being struck was that the CIA suspected the Afghan commanders of inflating the estimates of their dead, in order to extract a larger payment. Once a compensation deal was reached, the Afghan soldiers started returning the Diemacos and other missing bits of kit to the SBS at Boxer Base.
As the afternoon wore on there were sporadic bursts of gunfire up at the fort, and bitter exchanges of mortar fire. But there seemed little chance of dislodging the enemy any time soon. Their forces numbered in the hundreds still, and they were well entrenched in the southern end of the fort. They had ample supplies of water via the irrigation channels, and they had been eating the flesh of some of General Dostum’s horses that had been caught in the crossfire. Most importantly, they had an almost unlimited supply of weaponry, as the fort’s capacious arms stores had been stuffed to capacity. For now at least, the battle for Qala-i-Janghi seemed to have reached a stalemate.
But that night, a blow would be struck to break that impasse. At 2200 hours Major Martin, Jamie, Ruff and Mat headed up to the fort to oversee a night attack on the enemy. Around midnight there was the faint drone of an aircraft overhead, as a US AC-130 Spectre gunship began to circle lazily above the fort. As the watching special forces soldiers donned their NVGs, an extraordinary scene became visible to them. The Spectre gunship was using an infrared searchlight to comb the whole of the southern end of the fort for targets. The powerful ray of eerie green illumination that was beaming down from the night sky was only visible to those using NVGs, and it was an awesome sight to the watching British and American soldiers.
As it flew a series of search transects back and forth above the fort, the gunship was preparing to unleash its terrifying firepower, which would rip through the enemy positions. Coordinates were being fed into a state-of-the-art on-board computer system that pre-planned the strikes on the enemy targets. The AC-130 Spectre carried a powerful array of side-mounted, trainable weaponry, including two M61 20mm Vulcan cannons, one L60 40mm Bofors cannon and one M102 105mm howitzer. The $70 million aircraft also carried a crew of fourteen, including a low-light TV (LLTV) operator, an infrared detection set operator and five aerial gunners. As the Spectre flew over Qala-i-Janghi at an altitude of 10,000 feet, all of its human and technological know-how was focused on detecting and targeting enemy movement in the darkness below.
Mat, Jamie and Ruff waited with bated breath for the aircraft to open up on the enemy positions from the night-dark skies. As they did so, it occurred to Mat that the aircraft truly was living up to its name – the Spectre, a ghostly presence or apparition. The giant, four-engined aircraft was invisible in the darkness and all but inaudible to those on the ground. That morning’s surprise air strike had gone horribly wrong, the dawn wake-up call for the enemy turning into a nightmare for the allied forces. But now the Spectre was preparing to give the sleeping AQT fighters a midnight alarm call – after which many of them would never be waking again.
Suddenly, there was what looked like a golden stream of fire arcing down from the night sky, and the Spectre began pounding the southern end of the fort with its weaponry. As thousands of large-calibre rounds slammed into the enemy positions, interspersed with the giant shells from the howitzer, a series of thunderous explosions rolled across the fort. Repeatedly, the Spectre gunship made silent passes over the fort, and on the fourth pass the infrared detection set operator spotted three enemy figures grouped around a mortar. Even as they had dropped a round down the mortar tube, the Spectre’s crew were feeding their target coordinates into the aircraft’s on-board computer system. Now, as the Spectre started spewing fire into the fort, the M61 operators opened up on the mortar crew, spraying a deadly barrage of 20mm rounds into their position.
As the gunship completed its attacking pass over the fort, a huge ball of flame lifted up from one of the buildings, followed by a series of enormous explosions. They in turn kicked off a dramatic firework display, as rounds, ammo belts, grenades and mortar shells went firing off into the air. As the night sky above the fort was lit up a burning white, Mat, Jamie, Ruff and the Major broke into a round of spontaneous applause. The Spectre had just hit the fort’s main arms dump, and much of the weaponry and ammo that the enemy had been relying on to sustain their uprising had just been blown sky-high. The AC-130 flew away from the scene and the pilot reported back on a job well done. As far as he was concerned, now that his AC-130 Spectre had been allowed to do its work the ground forces should expect little further trouble from the enemy.
‘Aaaahhhh!’ The unearthly screaming pierced the gloom of the underground basement, again and again and again. ‘Aaaaahhhhhh!’
‘By the grace of Allah, get us out of here!’ one of the brothers was crying. ‘Help us! We’re trapped! Allah have mercy.’
‘Has it gone? Can you still hear it?’ Ali asked fearfully, as he crouched in the darkness beneath the basement stairs, nursing a shrapnel wound to his right thigh.
‘It may have gone, brother,’ Ahmed answered wearily, from out of the darkness. ‘I can’t hear it any more. But that doesn’t mean a thing. I didn’t hear it the first time it hit us.’
‘The kafir strike the brothers silently, from the air, in the dark of the night, like the cowardly dogs that they are.’ Ali spat out the words, his voiced laced with fear and a wild, bitter fury. ‘May Allah punish them with all His wrath for what they have done this night. May they burn in eternal hell for what they have done to us, secretly, as we slept.’
‘It is not so bad, brother,’ Ahmed tried to reassure him, placing a giant hand on Ali’s arm. As he did so he winced with pain, the fresh wound to his shoulder pulsating with agony. ‘Most of the brothers were deep in the basement when the kafir gunship fired. Only those near the doorway were hit. Many have survived.’
‘It is not so bad, brother?’ Ali shook his head in despair. ‘We have no bandages, no dressings and no morphine and the brothers are bleeding to death and calling for their mothers in this stinking basement. We are using our turbans to patch up their wounds, brother. Our sacred turbans.’
For a second Ali and Ahmed squatted there in silence, listening to the cries of the wounded echoing around the dark walls.
‘Just look at what they did to you, brother,’ Ali continued, with vehemence. ‘Over these past two days none of the kafir soldiers could get your mortar team. By the grace of All Merciful Allah you were so quick, so deadly. So, what did they do, brother? They targeted you under the cloak of darkness, silently, without warning, from the air. And yet you say it is not so bad. Look at your wounds, brother. You didn’t even see the aircraft that did that to you. You didn’t even hear it. You didn’t even know it was there. How can we fight such things? How can we fight such things, brother? They are breaking us, Brother Ahmed. Slowly, bit by bit, hour by hour, they are tearing us apart and breaking us down with their cursed technology, their cowardly, secret weapons of war.’
‘But by the grace
of Allah, we are still alive,’ Ahmed replied, forcibly. ‘We knew it would not be easy. Yet we have endured, brother. And while we still have breath in our bodies we can fight.’
‘But for how much longer, brother?’ Ali asked, despairingly. ‘And to what purpose? Great and glorious it is to die in the jihad, brother, but not to suffer and bleed to death like pigs, like dogs in a pit, while the kafir pick us off at their will. How can we fight them, brother? How can we fight them? Maybe we should finish it here and now, brother – a quick, honourable death at our own hands? Is that not a better way to go to meet the Holy Prophet, peace and blessings be upon Him?’
‘Brother Ali, it is not yet over,’ Ahmed urged, taking his friend’s face between his giant hands and staring into his eyes. ‘Remember, brother, they still have to take this ground that we control, this fort. And we have shelter, brother: even their cursed gunship cannot hit us deep in the basement like this. We have water. We have weapons. If you give up, Brother Ali, truly all the brothers will lose heart. Imagine when the kafir are forced to come in here, brother, to fight their way into this fort, on foot, clearing it building by building. Then we shall be waiting for them, brother. We shall wait for them like death itself lurking in the basements, and we shall strike the kafir down.’
‘But do you really think they will come, Brother Ahmed?’
‘They will come. They have to,’ Ahmed answered, quietly, matter-of-factly. His years of experience in combat meant that he knew how this battle had to end. There was no way that he could see for the enemy to dislodge them from the fort, unless they came in on foot and cleared every room, every underground passageway. And that would mean hand-to-hand fighting – at which stage all the kafir’s technology and air power would be of little help to them. ‘Hold on, Brother Ali. Hold on. Be strong. By the grace of Allah, we shall have our day of glory. And then the kafir will know our anger as it rages like a storm upon them. We cannot do that, brother, if we take our own lives.’
16
FIRE AND WATER
ON THE MORNING of day three of the siege, the bandaged and aching SBS soldiers and their 5th SOF colleagues headed back to the fort. As they arrived at the scene of the previous day’s errant JDAM strike, they were shocked at the scale of the destruction that lay before them. As the 2,000-pound missile had struck, the T-55 tank had been blown into the air. It had come crashing down to earth in two pieces, with the body of the tank landing upside down and the turret next to it the right way up. Even now, there was still a severed human arm sticking out of the rubble next to the disembowelled machine. Parked up at the base of the tower there had been two Soviet-era armoured personnel carriers. As the JDAM’s blast wave had rolled over them it had torn them to pieces. It was like a giant tin-opener had ripped them apart.
Twenty-four hours earlier, the Northern Alliance soldiers and their British and American comrades had been pulling each other out of the smoke and the debris of the bomb strike. Now, they were hugging each other and embracing, as they discovered who exactly had made it out of there alive. As Mat, Jamie, Tom, Sam and Ruff stood around surveying the scene, the Afghans started handing around smokes and some local sweetmeats. There was a spirit of genuine camaraderie between the NA soldiers and their foreign friends now. Jamie felt himself being grabbed by one of the Afghans and smothered in a bear hug. It was the same Afghan soldier who had tried, and failed, to fire Jamie’s Diemaco on the first day of the siege. He seemed overjoyed that he’d found Jamie alive.
The soldier then proceeded to do a repeat performance of his charade from that first afternoon: helicopter rotor blades done with a twirling finger, the sound effects of the turbines to accompany it, and then a finger across the throat like a knife cut to signify death. And then the Afghan said simply: ‘Americans.’ Suddenly the SBS lads were cracking up laughing. The Afghan soldier was taking the piss out of the US warplanes having bombed their own forces. It was just the sort of grim humour that they appreciated. Once the merriment had died down a little, the grinning Afghan soldier asked for Jamie’s address back in the UK, so he could write to him.
Strangely enough, it was a great feeling to be back at the scene of the errant bomb strike and to have survived. The SBS soldiers had expected to get a hostile reception from the Afghans. But instead the reverse was turning out to be true. Somehow, it felt as if the British and American special forces and their fellow Afghan soldiers had been blooded together and were now true brothers in arms. Some of the American soldiers started handing out grenades to the Afghans – as if they would help make up for the errant air strike. Barely a minute later there were a series of loud explosions as the Afghans hurled the grenades over the wall in the general direction of the enemy, all for a bit of fun and games.
‘Will you tell your American buddies to stop handing out the grenades?’ Jamie remarked to one of the CIA officers. ‘They’re not sweets, mate.’
Jamie didn’t want to be a killjoy exactly. But sooner or later one of the Afghans was going to end up injuring himself, or someone else. And as far as Jamie was concerned there’d already been more than enough deaths from friendly fire at the fort.
Once the party atmosphere had started to die down a little, Captain Lancer took his men up to their former positions on the devastated ramparts. Now they faced the grisly task of digging in the rubble for any remaining bits of kit, and for any Afghan bodies that had not yet been recovered. One of the SBS’s LTDs had been completely buried in the air strike. As it was such an expensive piece of kit, the lads were keen to recover it – despite the compensation money already paid by the CIA. But as they commenced digging in the shattered brickwork and bomb-blast debris, they started coming under sporadic fire from the enemy positions in the southern end of the fort.
‘Fuckin’ get behind the wall before we all get fuckin’ shot,’ Tom yelled out, as rounds cracked into the dirt right next to him. ‘It’s only a fuckin’ LTD and not worth getting slotted for.’
Mat, Sam, Jamie, Tom and Ruff got down behind some cover and started to do a bit of shooting in return. The Diemaco made for a good sniping weapon, being fitted with a x4 magnification sight with cross hairs and accurate up to four hundred metres. It was a damn sight more effective than the AK47s that the enemy were using, that much was for sure. But few of the enemy soldiers were making themselves easy targets. They were hunkered down in their subterranean stronghold, and only popping up occasionally to crack off a few rounds, before disappearing again. There was little chance of the SBS soldiers being able to get a clear shot at them and pick them off this way.
Whatever the Spectre gunship might have achieved in terms of destroying the ammo stores, it had not done nearly as much as had been expected in terms of taking out the enemy. The Northern Alliance commanders were trying to argue that there were less than a dozen enemy fighters left alive in the fort. But the SBS lads just knew that they had to be wrong. There were clearly more than enough enemy fighters with the energy and will to organise themselves properly and carry on fighting. While the NA forces did seem to be well in control of the situation from the outside of the fort, there was one big unanswered question that they would all have to face sooner or later. And that was how they were going to dislodge the enemy from the fort?
The previous night, General Dostum had left the siege at Kunduz and travelled back to Qala-i-Janghi. Upon arrival he had made it clear to his Afghan commanders that he was not a happy man. Apart from the devastation visited on the ancient fortress by the ‘prisoners’, he was painfully aware that he had personally negotiated the terms under which the six hundred fighters had supposedly surrendered. Sure, war was a nasty business and he didn’t exactly have a spotless reputation himself. But as far as the General was concerned, he had tried to hold out an olive branch to the prisoners and this is what they had done in return. Like most Afghans, the General viewed all soldiers as fighting men with a code of honour and conduct. Yet that code had been abrogated by the foreign fighters now occupying the fort, and he felt th
ey had betrayed him.
Even so, the General appeared to want to give the enemy one last chance to lay down their weapons. He had brought with him two captured Taliban commanders. These were the same two Taliban leaders with whom he had negotiated the terms of the original surrender deal. Those terms had enabled any Afghan Taliban to lay down their arms and get safe passage back home to their villages. But as for the foreign Taliban – the Pakistanis, Chechens, Saudis, Sudanese, Yemenis, Algerians, Egyptians and assorted Europeans and Americans who had answered the call to jihad – they were to be given over to General Dostum’s custody.
The two Taliban leaders had been brought to the fort to try to re-establish the currency of that original ceasefire deal, to use their good offices to convince those still holding out in the fort to surrender once and for all. But with the battle now locked into a bitter and bloody stalemate, with each side giving no quarter, there was no way in which the Taliban leaders could get to speak to the besieged fighters. And even if they had been able to do so, there was little guarantee that they would have received a sympathetic hearing.
In addition to the betrayal by the six hundred prisoners, General Dostum’s other main worry seemed to be his horses. The mounts that the General had kept stabled at the fort were his finest, the cream of the Northern Alliance’s cavalry. The fact that so many had been caught in the crossfire of the previous two days’ fighting – and that some had even been eaten by the prisoners – added insult to injury, as far as he was concerned. Whatever else happened over the next few days, the General had made it clear that no more of his horses were to be harmed. In particular, there were two of his favourite steeds still tethered next to the central wall of the fort. At the end of the fighting those two horses had to be brought out alive.