by Dalton Fury
Once on the ground the assaulters quickly oriented themselves and sprinted to their designated outbuildings, searching for targets and opening doors at their destinations. The men did not hesitate, they did not confer with one another, they did not stop to find cover.
They were assaulters — they attacked.
The first MH60 Black Hawk landed outside near the main gate. Monk led the way off this helo, his 416 on his shoulder, and he ran forward toward the entrance to the fortress. The second MH60 landed behind the Sandcastle. The third flew above in reserve in case Delta found al Qaeda or Taliban prisoners to evacuate. Both teams of assaulters on the ground offloaded and spread out to secure the areas and to prepare to reinforce the teams inside by blowing the locks off the gates and hitting the courtyard.
Benji led the first Little Bird assault team to hit the stockade. He and the seven men with him tossed flash-bang grenades through the windows and entered the ground floor through these windows.
After the explosions, Benji followed a mate inside. A Chechen in a Ranger uniform had been stunned by the banger — he leaned against the wall, his weapon low and weaving back and forth with his deep breaths.
Benji fired a burst into the man’s head, and then another burst into his body after he was down.
They cleared the room counterclockwise, using a technique called “Free Flow Close Quarters Battle on Unknown Floor Plans.” The men searched for friendlies, dropped enemies, and made sure every armed Chechen was dead before leaving him behind.
The main room now cleared, Benji’s team leapfrogged past him toward the stairwell. At the top of the stairs a Chechen ran away from the Americans. He was shot in the back with an HK416.
The stairwell was tight, so the assault team began heading down single file.
* * *
When the courtyard was clear of enemies Monk ordered a pair of assaulters to check each tower for survivors. He then checked on his wounded. He had three injured: two had been slightly hurt when a grenade exploded on the roof of the stockade, and another man had been shot through both legs breaching one of the mud-walled outbuildings. A team medic was already working on him over by the smoldering enemy helicopters.
A pair of young assaulters approached Monk from behind. He hadn’t been looking in their direction. “Hey, Monk, this asshole says he knows you.”
Monk turned around. He wore his typical game face, but still he cracked a half smile. “I’ll be damned. What the fuck you doing here, Racer?”
Kolt was all business. “T.J. is on the cell level with four friendlies. Tell the assaulters.”
Monk did not hesitate. He barked the warning into his radio, and Benji transmitted back that he understood.
Monk began heading up to check on the casualties. He said, “You look like shit, Kolt.”
Raynor had more intel he was desperate to convey. “Listen, I think you’re gonna get hit from the ground.”
Monk stopped in his tracks. “More crows coming?” he asked, using the Delta term “crows” to denote enemy forces.
“I … I don’t know for sure. I figured they’d be here by now. But the Pakistani Taliban were involved in the op, and they haven’t shown up yet. They just might be on the way.”
Monk looked up at the Black Hawks and the Little Birds circling above. He knew they’d already be monitoring the highway below. Fights like this often turned into “spectator sports,” with civilians grabbing guns and running to the battle. But nobody was looking for a planned attack on the Sandcastle. He’d rectify that immediately.
Monk reached for his radio and warned the men circling above. As soon as he ended the transmission another assaulter radioed to him from over by the burned Black Hawks. “Monk, don’t know if you want to see this.”
“What you got, Sheepdog?”
“I got a dead hajji in black pajamas holding a high-end video camera.”
“Is the camera intact?”
“The camera is, but the hajji isn’t. Looks like he lost a staring contest with a minigun.”
“Secure the camera and I’ll come take a look.”
Monk wondered if they’d managed to kill a journalist.
FORTY-SEVEN
Daoud al-Amriki had stripped down to his underwear, and now he pulled a pair of jeans and a Banana Republic T-shirt from his backpack. He had made his way through a window in the back of the stockade just as the choppers arrived overhead, and he’d entered the stairwell just as he heard Timble and the other prisoners come through the front door. Now he was in a small dark closet at the end of the hallway on the second level. Timble had passed by the hallway heading down toward the empty cells below, and now the Americans fired up at a group of five surviving Chechens who’d sought refuge on this level. More American soldiers were above on the stairs, firing down on the al Qaeda soldiers. The Chechens were caught in a crossfire, with only this small hallway for cover.
Al-Amriki remained in the closet. He did not go out to fight and die with the doomed Chechens.
He finished changing, then smeared blood from his broken nose all over his face. He hid his rifle and his Ranger uniform under dry goods in the corner of the closet, and he waited for either the Chechens to come down the hall to his position, or the Americans to find him.
Looking across the small closet, he found a breaker for the lights to the building. He pulled it down, and the lights went out. He peeked out into the hallway and saw small emergency lights glow dimly in the stairwell.
* * *
As the lights went out Benji ordered two of his team to prepare to toss bangers into the hallway of the second floor. He’d just received word that Eagle 01 was two levels below his position, but between him and them were two levels of Chechens.
“Hit ’em!” Benji ordered, the pins were pulled on the flash-bangs, and the canisters bounced down the stairs. The six Delta men turned away from the blast and noise, actuated their rifles’ SureFire flashlights, and then descended hurriedly in a tactical train.
They made it to the first-level basement hallway, exchanging fire as they closed on a group of Chechens. The assaulter in front of Benji lurched back onto his heels and fell to the ground. Benji stepped in front of him and covered him while advancing into the hallway. He moved to the right to get more of his men in with him, and in seconds it was over.
Three Chechens in Ranger uniforms lay facedown in the dark hall. Benji and his men riddled them all with more gunfire, allowing no one to play possum. Some of the assaulters reloaded while others covered, and then the first group covered while the second got their guns reloaded and back in the fight.
There were two doors at the end of the hall, both closed.
Benji checked his men. Touchdown had been shot several times in his ballistic plate. He lay on his back and struggled to catch his breath, but a medic checking over him wasn’t finding any blood.
Benji moved forward through the darkness. “We’re going to bang those doors, roger?”
“Roger,” came the reply from the three men behind him.
They opened the first door, tossed in a flash-bang, and entered behind the noise and light. One man stayed in the hall to cover the other door.
The room was an empty communications center. Benji and his team exited and approached the other door.
“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” The voice on the other side of the door was clearly American.
“Come on out, hands high!” Benji shouted. The door opened slowly. A young, clean-shaven American in a T-shirt and jeans, his face streaked with a small amount of blood, stepped out into the dazzling beams of the weapon lights. His eyes blinked with fear.
“Joey Barnes. I’m with the CIA.”
Benji nodded to Tomahawk, who stepped forward and grabbed the man by the collar. It was odd that an Agency man would say “I’m with the CIA.” It sounded stilted and “Hollywood” to Benji. Normally CIA people would say “Agency” when in the field, if they said anything at all. But Benji had already turned with the rest of h
is men to head down and clear the next level. The young man behind him had sure as shit been through a lot in the last couple of hours, and he sure as shit would be motivated to get his point across that he wasn’t like all the Chechens that Delta were killing around here.
Benji didn’t think about it again as he reentered the stairwell with his men.
Tomahawk moved with the CIA operator toward the stairs.
“You hurt?”
“My face, man! It’s bad!” Even in the low light Tomahawk didn’t think it looked too bad. Maybe a busted nose, tops. Still, he patted the American on the back, then shouted up the stairwell. “Got a wounded friendly, coming up!”
“Roger!” came the reply from the ground-floor room.
Tomahawk pulled the injured American up the darkened stairs, held him by his arm, and led the way with the light on his rifle. At the top of the stairs he handed him off to another man. On the way out the front door of the stockade “Joey Barnes” grabbed a towel from the floor, shook out some bits of stone and broken glass, and then covered his face. He reentered the light of day with all but his eyes covered, and he was led over to a medic set up on the far side of the two burned-out Black Hawks.
The assaulter accompanying him said, “Take a knee here and the medic will check you out. We’ll have you over to Bagram in no time, buddy.” Then the young Delta man turned away and returned to his mates in the stockade.
Daoud al-Amriki stood there, covering his face with the towel in case any of the CIA men who had seen him before the soldiers appeared were still alive. A few feet in front of him a medic had just finished pushing an IV into the arm of another injured man. Al-Amriki heard the medic talk on his radio, ordering a medevac to land.
“Let me help this helo land, and then I’ll take a look, sir,” the medic said to al-Amriki.
While the soldier’s back was turned, the al Qaeda operator knelt over to the unconscious patient with the IV in his arm, pulled the long combat knife and the tan-colored.40 caliber Glock from his chest rig.
The small helicopter came in for a landing not fifteen yards from the medic in the center of the compound. In the sky above other choppers circled.
The medic turned back around. Said, “Okay. Let me take a look at — ”
Daoud al-Amriki rammed the knife into the medic’s stomach, just below his body armor.
The man staggered backward, fell back over the other wounded assaulter on the ground.
The Little Bird was, at that moment, landing with its side toward the injured man on the ground. Consequently, neither the pilot nor the copilot witnessed the commotion behind them and to their right. Instead, the copilot jumped out of the left seat and began running around front to help load the casualty. Al-Amriki came around the back of the Little Bird, avoiding the copilot, and climbed into the man’s vacated seat.
The pilot saw the stranger climbing in next to him. Over the spinning propeller he shouted, “What the hell do you think — ”
Al-Amriki pointed the Glock between his eyes. “Fly! Now!”
The copilot arrived at the two wounded men on the ground. He wondered where in the hell the medic had gone. Looking down at one of the injured, he recognized a soldier named Dice, knew he was the medic who had called for the casualty evacuation not sixty seconds earlier. Dice lifted a hand covered in a bloody latex glove and weakly pointed to the copilot’s Little Bird.
The copilot turned around in time to see his small black helicopter rise straight up into the sky.
It took thirty seconds for the other choppers to notice the Little Bird streaking off to the east instead of the west. A radio call from a Delta assaulter on the ground came just after. The other helicopters began broadcasting to one another about the hijacked chopper, and a few seconds after that, both of the circling gunships began giving chase.
* * *
Three levels belowground, Benji had made it to T.J. and his men.
“Good to see you, Colonel,” Benji said. But T.J. cut him off.
“Did you get the American?”
“What American?”
“Shit! There is an American AQ guy! Dressed as a Ranger. He’s the one running this op.”
Benji waved away the worry. “All the Rangers are dead. Let’s get you up and you can tell Monk what you know.”
Hammond was unconscious now, so he had to be carried by a pair of assaulters. Other men began coming down the stairs, causing a logjam.
Finally, as they started up the stairs, Benji’s radio came alive with the transmissions about the American CIA man who had stabbed Dice and hijacked a chopper.
T.J. shoved past Delta men trying to help him as he rushed to the surface.
* * *
The hijacked Little Bird landed in an intersection in western Peshawar. A gunshot rang out and a man climbed out and ran for his life.
Forty seconds later an identical Little Bird touched down in the intersection just long enough for two Delta assaulters to leap to the ground. The chopper shot back into the air, flew low and fast in a tight circle as the Delta pair moved toward the chopper with their rifles high. They found the aircraft empty save for the body of the dead pilot. After a brief radio exchange between the men on the ground, the helicopter circling above them, and personnel in a Black Hawk back over the Sandcastle, another Little Bird landed in the street, this time disgorging the copilot. He ran to the copilot’s seat of the other Little Bird, and one Delta man boarded each helicopter.
Seconds later both of the helos were back in the air, retreating to the west.
Daoud al-Amriki disappeared into the markets of Peshawar, searching frantically for a telephone.
FORTY-EIGHT
Inside the ground-floor room of the stockade, Monk placed the Turk’s camera on a wooden table. He and T.J. looked at it. Timble had explained to the master sergeant the significance of the camera in front of him and the problems it could cause.
Monk’s prescription for the problem was succinct. “Thermite?”
“That’ll do it,” T.J. said.
Monk pulled a thermite grenade and laid the camera and the grenade in an empty metal ammo can. “Fire in the hole!” he shouted as he pulled the pin on the thermite. The men backed out of the room, and a searing heat followed them through the doorway. Sputtering flame shot out of the canister burning everything it touched.
* * *
Pam Archer’s UAV banked over the eastern outskirts of Landi Kotal, began flying back to the Sandcastle. She’d been heading toward Peshawar to look for the missing Little Bird, but a pair of CIA Reaper drones had moved into the sector, so she was called back to base by Grauer. On her way back to Jalalabad, she decided to make one final pass over the Delta hit.
All the action was over, as far as she knew. Several men had been injured, but she hadn’t heard of any KIAs from Grauer other than the Little Bird pilot. The assault seemed to have had its snags, but, she admitted, it had gone better than she’d expected.
And Racer was still alive.
She eyed the traffic on the N25 highway. It had picked up with the morning — even the huge battle a few hundred meters from the road hadn’t halted the flow of trucks heading from Pakistan toward the Afghanistan border. It was amazing how accustomed people around here had become to violence.
Ten thousand feet below Baby Girl she saw the three big Black Hawks descending as they prepared to land to exfiltrate the Delta team. She decided to turn back around, to make one more circuit of the area of operation to keep an eye out while the boys loaded up.
A flash of light in the mountains to the east of the Sandcastle caught her eye. She looked at the area it had come from, but then her eyes changed their focus to the far side of her monitor.
One of the Black Hawks emitted billowing black smoke and began slowly rotating, losing control of its XY axis.
“Holy shit!” she shouted into her mike.
“What the hell was that?” came Grauer’s voice in her headset. He had seen it too.
�
�That sure looked like a SAM!” As Pam said it she was certain it had, in fact, been a surface-to-air missile. She panned closer to the portion of the hill where she’d seen the flash. There, secreted down in a tiny crevasse that ran parallel to the wall of the Sandcastle, a two-man team hefted a long green tube. She enlarged the image.
One of Grauer’s analysts spoke in the OC, and Pam could pick up her voice in the headset. “That’s an Anza. Probably a Mark 3. They are Pakistani-made, knockoffs of a Chinese design. Damned effective against choppers out to five kilometers. The Pakistani army has them.”
“Guess the Taliban has them too,” Grauer said.
On a hunch Pam decreased the magnification on her camera and began scanning the rocky hills around the Sandcastle.
Two more flashes in the mountains to the east now. A pair of missiles shot into the sky from points a quarter mile apart. Above the brown earth a circling Little Bird dove and banked hard to the right, desperate to avoid them.
* * *
Kolt Raynor stood with T.J. and the other ex-prisoners, watching in horror as the big Black Hawk above them spun on its center axis and its nose dipped. In seconds it made a hard, spinning crash landing near the western wall.
Raynor began running toward the wreckage when he heard another explosion, to his right. A Little Bird helo, just back from Peshawar, had taken a direct hit from a missile and exploded in midair. Burning debris fell five hundred feet and landed in the hills to the north of the Sandcastle.
Behind him Kolt heard Monk shouting, “From the east! SAMs from the east!”
The second and third Black Hawks landed without incident, and men began helping the Eagle 01 survivors aboard.
Raynor saw others ahead of him rushing to look for survivors of the downed Black Hawk, so he turned and ran the other way, toward the eastern wall of the Sandcastle. He knew the attackers would be Pakistani Taliban, but he had not expected them to come from that direction. The terrain on both sides of the Khyber Pass was brutal, but this force of men had managed to make it overland, not via the convenient highway that had been cut right through the mountains.