by Mack Maloney
The Chief saw thirty, forty of his fighters cut down before his eyes. The brutality was incredible. Tank shells exploding and simply vaporizing five or six of his best men at a time. The others chopped in half by the huge .50-caliber rounds. It was unexpected and it was madness. The Americans knew the trick. They had beaten the Chief at his own game. He came very close to peeing his pants.
As this, he got up, turned on his heel, and started running as fast as he could in the opposite direction.
Behind him, all his bodyguards and most of his remaining fighters were doing the same thing.
* * *
Curry had watched all the action from afar. He was still carrying all his bombs; his cannon was still fully loaded. He was loitering over the western edge of Khrash, across the Farāh River, above the small slice of Afghanistan that quickly turned into Iran after one went over a steep two-lane mountain pass.
He was cruising at five thousand feet, barely making 150 mph, close to stall speed for an F-14 in flight. He was going in circles, trying to save fuel. When he put his NV goggles down he could clearly see what was happening over Khrash. Copters buzzing around, providing air support for the ground troops when needed, hitting targets of opportunity whenever possible. Above them, the Psyclops plane flying in even larger circles than he was, broadcasting both the sounds of a horrific land battle and noises mimicking a second B-52 raid.
And every once in a while he caught glimpses of Ryder doing his sonic-boom nosedives. Curry had wondered more than once whether Ryder was just brave or committed or, maybe, was a candidate for being committed. On the other hand, though he knew Ryder well, Curry had not walked a mile in his shoes. So it was not his place to judge. But the way the guy was flying and acting and bringing it to the mooks, scaring them to death as opposed to blowing them up, simply put, Curry had never seen anyone fly like that — even in the best of weather, during the daytime. Doing it at night, in very smoky skies, with antiaircraft fire all around him, the guy was flirting with disaster. But maybe that’s exactly what he wanted to do.
These thoughts were suddenly distracted by a glint of light below, picked up by Curry’s NV goggles. It turned out to be a single headlight, the only one working on a small red truck that had just pulled onto the Farāh River bridge from Highway 212 and was now making its way across.
It was exactly what Curry was looking for.
The red truck was actually the first of three. Curry sank a little lower, down to twenty-five hundred feet. Thanks to the NV goggles he could see each vehicle had at least six people jammed into it. Each vehicle also had bags or satchels tied to the roof or stuffed in the back.
Curry clenched his fist in triumph. This was the best thing he could have ever seen. It meant that their plan was probably working. Not only was it clear these people were making a hasty retreat out of Khrash and across to Iran, but he also could tell by the fact that they had motor vehicles that they were probably Al Qaeda types. And they weren’t staying to fight.
Because there were only a few dozen of them, the Ghosts’ bold idea was to create enough confusion and panic within Khrash that any Islamic fighters reluctant to meet Allah this particular day would naturally start moving west, get on the bridge, and get out of town. These three were trying it. And Curry knew there would probably be more to come.
Now flying too high to be heard over the commotion over the city, he waited for the three small trucks to get to the opposite end of the bridge. Then he swooped down and with very economical bursts from his nose cannon blew them off the road.
Then he went back up high again — into the smoke and darkness — and waited for his next victims to show up.
* * *
Nothing was routine in combat. But what Dave Hunn and the guys in 1st Delta squad had been doing for the past twenty minutes came very close.
They’d moved steadily out from their jump-off point, Weak Point East, and been methodically chasing the city’s religious police fighters and leftover Taliban out of their slummy buildings, pushing them west, toward the center of town and ultimately the Farāh River.
They had already cleared three blocks beyond the slum, this after being on the ground not even 30 minutes. What they were doing quickly fell into a pattern. They came to a building and more often than not, especially in the past 15 minutes, these buildings were either empty or holding a few die-hards or mooks wounded and left behind by their comrades. If that was the case, instead of wasting time and going inside, Delta would riddle the structure with their heavy weapons, hurl in a few hand grenades, or fire an enemy RPG they had captured during their miniblitzkrieg. There would be explosions, bright flashes of light, and a minor quaking of the earth; sometimes part of the building would come down. The Delta guys would spray the rubble with gunfire and pepper it with more grenades. No screams from those trapped under the tons of rock would confirm that the leftover bad guys had been killed. Delta would then mark the building by planting an American flag somewhere nearby and move on. If they thought there were still people alive and unbroken beneath the rubble, they would leave the house unmarked — as a signal, for those following in their path.
This was the second wave, coming in behind 1st Delta, made up entirely of the Zabul tribe foot soldiers, essentially mountain men with weapons. Their role was nasty but necessary. They would come to a house that wasn’t flying an American flag. They would first yell into the house, “Akbah! Salama-La-kin?” Roughly translated: “Brothers! How are you?”
If they received any reply, they would douse the rubble with something flammable and set it ablaze, finishing off those Muslim fighters still alive inside. Once the screams died down, then the Zabul would raise an American flag. And then they, too, would move on.
And coming right behind them was a third wave of invaders: hundreds of regular Zabul villagers who had created a small army of organized looters and were now spread over the liberated part of Khrash, robbing the bodies of the dead.
When Hunn and company did come upon a house that held a lot of living, breathing mooks, the ones that actually shot back at them, they would attack it full force. Heavy weapons, grenades, kick the door down, and go in blazing. They found bad guys everywhere in these buildings. They were in the closets, in the bedrooms, hiding in the ceiling. They were so crazy, so fanatical, or so doped up on qat, they would frequently reveal themselves too early by letting out a tongue-lapping scream and plunging at the invading Americans with their fists or knives, their heavier weapon unprepared. At such close-range fighting, the Delta guys used their bayonets more than their triggers. The larger, better-trained, stone-cold sober Americans won every battle, causing the wooden and clay floors to run thick with blood.
On the particularly hard-fought structures, the Delta guys would keep one mook alive, bring him to the roof, hang him over the side, and then raise the American flag themselves. Anytime the guys in 1st Delta looked behind them, all they saw was flames and smoke and dozens of American flags, whipping in the breeze.
Only when they got to a really hard target would they call in one of the choppers. Two flares would usually bring one calling; another flare shot at the target would bring the wrath of Hellfires or nose cannons. On those occasions, there was rarely anything to hang a flag on or a mook from, not after the copter was done with it.
* * *
By the 30-minute mark, 1st Delta had cleared eight blocks and sent dozens of Islamic fighters running. Just how far they would run before they realized this was really a grand hoax — or at least the B-52 strike was — no one knew. The hope was they’d keep running right into the river.
They left a large residential part of town and came to one that was more industrial. A bunch of repair shops, opium-processing plants, and gas stations. They took a few incoming rounds, but when the entire squad fired back en masse, on this strange night, that was usually enough to scatter whoever was shooting at them.
Hunn and his guys began the clearing process. No one was home in the repair shops or the
gas stations. Just before they busted their way into the opium factory, the Psyclops plane flew over again; it was now simulating the sounds of a great land battle, explosions, the noise of tanks moving, and lots of gunfire. Even the Delta guys found themselves ducking; that’s how real it sounded.
They cleared the opium business, set fire to the bins of poppies, and as a joke each trooper took a long, deep, noisy sniff of the resulting smoke.
Then Hunn and three other troopers went out the back door and it was here that they found the propane tank.
It was probably used in the poppy processing, Hunn theorized to his men. A lot of heat was needed to get the weeds to turn into the product from which they would eventually make heroin, slated for Europe’s streets. Propane burned high. The tank looked to hold several hundred gallons. But when Hunn knocked on the side of it, it seemed empty.
This was a slight problem. Hunn just couldn’t leave this thing sitting here, empty or not. Even if it contained just a few vapors, as he suspected, it was too much potential explosive material to leave in their wake — and God only knew what the follow-up Zabul troops would do with it.
So Hunn, never shy to make a little noise, took matters into his own hands.
He had his men step back about twenty feet. The tank was now about fifty feet away. Hunn raised his weapon, and before his men could say anything he fired a burst from his M16 directly into the tank.
That’s when he discovered that the tank, as it was under pressure, was not empty but actually full.
Hunn saw the bright white light first. He never heard the sound, never really saw the flames. It was just the bright white light and the sensation that he was floating through the air. His first thought was one of amazement: I must be dead….
Actually he was flying through the air — and three of his troops were up here with him. The force of the blast literally blew them right out of the alley and onto a major thoroughfare, nearly a half-block away.
One of his men crashed through the window of a scarf shop, landing out in the sidewalk. Two more came down on top of a kaffee cart. Hunn himself, all 250 pounds of him, just missed smashing into a wrecked and burning car and came down in a relatively soft mud hole instead.
He landed facedown, the bright white light replaced by the very dark brown mud. He sat up immediately. He couldn’t believe he was still alive. More incredibly, the other three troopers thrown by the explosion were alive and unhurt, too.
The rest of his men came barreling around the corner moments later. They helped Hunn back to his feet and checked the three others. Cuts and bruises were the worst of their injuries.
Meanwhile, the repair shop, the gas station, and the opium factory were all now reduced to flaming embers, this as the small mushroom cloud the propane explosion had created was still going straight up into the night sky. One of the copter pilots flew over, more curious than anything else. Its rotor blades neatly cut the mushroom in half. Every window within a quarter mile had burst in the explosion.
Except those in the storefront next to the mud puddle Hunn had found himself in. Once he cleared the crap from his eyes, he took a long look into this shop and realized that they had just hit pay dirt.
It was a store that sold cell phones.
Hunn immediately led four men into the store. The one thing the American strike team lacked was communications with one another. In that respect, they had hit a gold mine — or so they had thought.
They found the clerk cowering behind the counter of the very cluttered store. The Americans looked down at him. He was shaking all over.
“Where are all the fucking phones?” Hunn screamed at him in English.
The man looked up at him in terror. “No more! No more!” he screamed.
And it seemed true. The shelves were empty, at least of cell phones.
Then, still terrified, the clerk added: “I don’t have any videotapes, either… ”
* * *
Lieutenant Ozzi’s attack squad had also made good time.
After leaving the utilities circle, they’d continued on to clear two more blocks of houses, both sides of the street, in just twenty minutes. As before, the opposition had been stiff at first. But whenever Ozzi and his Zabul friends returned fire in volume, those terrorist fighters they didn’t kill quickly ran away.
Again, it was hard to believe that just a year before the diminutive Ozzi was riding a desk in the basement of the Pentagon. He’d never received any combat training beyond what was needed to qualify for his commission at Annapolis. But being a part of the Ghost Team was training enough. It was like going through Parris Island, Airborne training, and survival school all at once. He had such faith in Murphy, this didn’t seem so strange for him to be doing. And luckily, the Afghani fighters he was leading were brave and hard fighters. At least, they weren’t running in the other direction any time an explosion went off.
Ozzi and his team continued moving, way beyond what the plan called for. They eventually reached a large deserted intersection, a broad meeting of roadways. On one corner sat a good-sized building that had once been a hotel. There was an enemy machine-gun position sticking out of a building on the opposite corner. The gunners were inexperienced, sending off a few bursts as soon as Ozzi’s team came around the corner.
This was probably the worst thing to do. Ozzi’s guys took cover, and Ozzi fired the flare gun in the general direction of the gun position. The green phosphorescent light was like a siren. Suddenly one of the F-14s swooped down from nowhere and laid a five-hundred-pound bomb right on top of the machine-gun nest and then streaked away. The bomb blew not just the gun but the entire building sky-high, setting off a number of secondary explosions farther down the block.
Ozzi’s guys immediately ran across the street and into the entrance of the hotel. The rush of the battle was flowing through them like hard liquor now. It was chaos, but it was also combat and, as always, everything, though happening fast, was actually unfolding in slow motion for them. The adrenaline rush, plus the complete lack of casualties among Ozzi’s team, had him feeling higher than a kite.
That’s when he stepped in the front door and found the bodies, and he felt everything drain out of him.
There were eight of them. Women and children, they’d all had their hands bound and their throats slit. They must have been stopped trying to escape in the opening minutes of the attack and executed by the city’s religious police. Whatever happened, their deaths served no military value. It was just murder, plain and simple.
Ozzi was furious — and his Zabul allies stunned. No sooner had they tripped over the corpses when they started taking fire from the second floor of the hotel lobby. A spiral staircase led to this second level. There were about a half-dozen terrorist fighters up there, firing down on them.
Even though the bullets were splattering all around them, Ozzi let out a scream, something in the approximation of, “Let’s go!” to his Zabul squad and up the stairs he went, firing his M16 wildly in front of him.
He took the steps two at a time, dodging bullets, screaming to his men behind him, suddenly reenergized with adrenaline and rage. The mooks were shooting down at him, even throwing Molotov cocktail — type bombs at him. But this did not slow Ozzi’s ascent. He was firing nonstop and screaming at the top of his lungs. He was acting so crazy, the mooks began pulling back, running away from this madman.
Up to the second floor he went. He sprayed the stairs up to the third level with gunfire and continued climbing, still screaming nonsense and in Arabic urging his Zabul fighters onward. A burning bottle of gasoline came down on him, thrown by one of the retreating mooks. It hit Ozzi on the shoulder. He picked it up and threw it back at them, while never losing a step. It exploded above him, nailing two of the fighters. They both went over the railing in flames, screaming all the way down.
Still Ozzi charged on. He shot three more of the retreating mooks in the back. His M16 ran out of ammunition, but this was no problem. He simply shouldered his weapon
, picked up an AK-47 dropped by one of the fleeing mooks, and kept on firing, hardly losing a second in the transition. All the while he was shouting at his men to be careful on the stairs, to zigzag, to move around, to not give the enemy a good target.
He reached the third level. Now all that was left was a ladder that led up to the roof. He shot the last mook going up this ladder in the rear end and flanks; he fell backward with a crash, mortally wounded.
Ozzi reached the bottom of the ladder, still yelling at his men. He looked up the hole in the roof and incomprehensibly saw a gas stove coming down at him. He dodged it at the last possible moment, yelling for his men to “watch out!” while he fired his gun over his head, in hopes of hitting the people who’d hurled this thing down at him.
Finally he reached the top of the ladder to find the two remaining mooks standing on the edge of the building, holding empty weapons, staring back at him. He didn’t hesitate a moment. They didn’t need prisoners; plus he was sure these were the people who’d killed the innocents they’d found below.
He put a half-dozen bullets in each of them. Both men pitched off the roof to the street below.
Only then did Ozzi stop to catch his breath and stop his heart from beating out of his chest. Then he turned around to address his men, to give them congratulations for clearing the building… and for the first time realized that he was alone.