by Dalton Fury
“Sergeant Major?” Admiral Mason asked as he turned to the senior and most seasoned noncommissioned officer in the command.
“I recommend we go, sir,” Castor answered in his characteristic relaxed tone.
Kolt could barely hold back his delight. Smitty and Sergeant Major Castor were about to change the admiral’s mind. They were going to execute after all. He could feel the tide shifting.
Admiral Mason finally spoke. “Damn it, gentlemen!” he barked. “Ghafour better be in building five.”
Kolt pushed his luck a little. He rose up off his palms and instinctively reached down to his cargo pocket to pull out his chewing tobacco.
“We’ll get him, sir,” he said before turning to exit the admiral’s quarters. Over his shoulder, he added, “Smitty, we’ll be at the helos in five minutes, ready to load.” He moved quickly for the door, leaving the others to work the final details and to deal with an aggravated commanding general. He also wanted to get out of there before Mason changed his mind.
SEVEN
Goshai Valley, Western Pakistan
It was a few minutes after 0200 hours by the time the two black twin-rotor MH-47G Chinook helicopters reached the entrance to the high-walled Goshai Valley. Wicked and steady crosswinds forced the pilots to gorilla grip the joy sticks as the crew chiefs kept a keen eye out the open-door gunner hatches for rocky outcrops and thermal signatures of enemy fighters. Either one could bring down the vulnerable birds in a second.
Just like any valley in Afghanistan, the horizontal snow flurries played tricks on night-vision-laden pilots as they pierced the airspace at 130 knots just a few meters off the deck. Visibility was only a hundred, maybe two hundred, meters. Since it was also under twenty degrees out, the weather made it about the worst possible night for an air-assault raid.
Piloted by air operators from the black 2nd Battalion, 160th Special Ops Aviation Regiment, the two lumbering Chinooks, affectionately termed Dark Horses by those in the community, came in from the northwest low over the first set of outlying mud-walled buildings. Snow-covered ridgelines peaking at fourteen thousand feet boxed them in from the north and south. The sketches on their knee boards told them there was only one way in and the same way out. But seeing it firsthand, away from the comforts of the planning tents, had a way of ripping your gut out through your throat.
After making the final left-hand bank into the village, the pilots eased off the sticks to slow the aircrafts’ approach speed. Their motto, “On time, on target, plus or minus thirty seconds” was being put to the test once again. Smitty, running with call sign Ghost Two-One, now that the mission called for the larger, more powerful MH-47Gs instead of the smaller and sleeker MH-60M Black Hawks, strained under his night-vision aviator goggles to identify Shaft’s green infrared laser that was to mark the correct landing zone.
There was a problem.
“Negative signal from ground,” Smitty said over the radio.
Kolt looked back to the tinted minilaptop screen on the aircraft floor showing Shaft’s iPad 4 location still strong and steady between buildings 2 and 3 before replying. “Rog, that.”
Kolt checked his watch. The Night Stalkers were true to their motto once again, but their man Shaft was behind schedule.
Kolt tried to imagine Shaft’s situation. He had to know they’d be coming, regardless of the fact that the authorization hadn’t been given when they were on the phone. Maybe he decided to leave the iPad 4 behind for some reason and move to the landing zone without it? Shaft had to know Kolt wouldn’t leave him hanging … he hoped.
* * *
Shaft’s adrenaline button kicked in as he heard the telltale sound of helicopter blades powered by 4,868-shaft-horsepower Honeywell engines carrying on the cold night air. He smiled, but he wasn’t able to enjoy the sweet sound alone for long. His roommate, the twentysomething Paki man that had been assigned as his minder, startled awake and opened his eyes wide. He didn’t sit up; he just seemed to listen with one ear as the other rested on the dingy yellow covered pillow.
Shaft knew instantly what he needed to do. But he hesitated. The man was unarmed. He wasn’t displaying any hostile intent just yet. But Shaft knew that would change in a second as soon as the kid realized the noise of the helicopters weren’t just routine Pakistani resupply runs crisscrossing the mountain passes. Shaft stopped thinking and started to execute.
He quickly grabbed his backpack with his left hand, reached into the top flap with his firing hand and found the familiar handle of his Glock 26. Without taking his hand out of the pack, he shoved it with both hands hard against his minder’s mouth. He tried to line up his aim, forced to guess the correct angle to the minder’s face. Rapidly, he broke the Glock Ghost 3.5-pound trigger twice.
Two Remington HTP 9mm lead bullets tore through everything in their way inside the pack before slamming into the Paki’s face. One entered just above the left eye orbit. The other one went through the right cheek. Both bullets pinballed around his skull but failed to exit out the rear. The man’s body went limp in a second. The backpack hadn’t muffled the gunshots as well as Shaft thought it would. He had never actually tried that before. But it did the job.
Shaft yanked the badly frayed wool blanket off the dead Paki, revealing his folded-stock AK-47 lying next to his torso. He grabbed it, placed the stock tight under his right arm, and dropped the banana magazine with his left hand. He press-checked the mag to see how many bullets he had, then rocked and locked the familiar metal magazine into the mag well and tugged firmly to ensure it was fully seated. Shaft tilted the weapon, took the safety off, and dropped his left hand underneath the receiver, finding the charging handle. He power-pushed the handle to the rear before releasing it, driving the top 7.62 × 39 full-metal-jacket round of the mag into the chamber. Better safe than sorry, he pulled the handle back just over an inch until he saw shiny brass, confirming the weapon was loaded, before releasing the handle.
Shaft patted the dead man’s pockets, looking for any identification that would show affiliation with the Pakistani Taliban, Haqqani network, or Hezb-i-Islami. He felt something small but hard in his front breast pocket and pushed two fingers in to secure it. He looked at the white plastic-covered thumb drive, debated whether or not to take it with him, then decided to keep it and slid it in his backpack along with the Glock 26. Shaft threw on his wool hat and reached deep into his pack, fishing for the buried PVS-14 night vision monocular and the IR laser pointer.
“Shit!”
Shaft felt small pieces of sharded glass inside his pack. He opened it wider and saw the damage. Before both 9mm rounds tore into the minder’s head, they had bored through the iPad 4.
Shaft closed the pack and pulled the drawstring tight. Holding both items in his left hand, he right-shouldered his pack and held the rifle in his right hand as he moved toward the doorway. He left the medical supplies he had brought all the way from J-bad sitting in the neat piles separated by type and size. He slung open the rusted door just in time to see the dark purple shapes of two low-flying helos against the snow-covered ridgeline overshoot the landing zones by two hundred meters or so.
“I’m late!” Shaft whispered.
Shaft watched as the helos started into a hard left-hand turn. Without an identifying laser marker and with the extra foot of fresh snow on the ground that hid dangerous landing obstacles, he knew the helo pilot had little choice. Shaft knew they were positioning to execute a go-around and make a second attempt to find his laser mark and the landing zones.
Shaft began slogging across the snow-covered ground like a man in molasses. He was surprised at how difficult it was to run in the freshly fallen snow. It had been snowing since they returned from the complicated birth hours earlier, and he thought about dumping the AK or the pack, or both, before quickly reconsidering. The fierce and raw high winds pushing against his chest only made it all the more difficult with each step forward.
He reached Ghafour’s mud-walled sleeping quarters and peered
around the corner. He fumbled to activate the laser marker as he eyeballed the exact spot he wanted to land the assault helos. There wasn’t any room for error. It was going to be a tight fit for both. But Shaft knew speed and location were essential. He wanted the assaulters to exit the back end of the helos right next to Ghafour’s house. The last thing he wanted was for Ghafour to squirt out the back door and hide out in another of the three dozen buildings in the area. If that happened, he knew they were in for a long night of methodical searching. And if it hadn’t been destroyed, he might as well throw his iPad 4 in the village well. Even if they got lucky and found Ghafour before he escaped, they faced even longer days and nights of walking back out of the valley with a noncompliant shackled man in tow.
“Holy shit!” Shaft intuitively hit the deck. His body practically flopped on the ground as if he were a kid again back home, turning somersaults in the snow. A rocket-propelled grenade had soared from a nearby rooftop, barely missing the tail rotor of the slow-moving lead helo by several meters. The warhead impacted harmlessly against the valley wall some fifty yards away. It was close. Too close. If Shaft had a radio link with the pilots, he would have aborted the infil immediately and been happy to walk home. Even Ghafour wasn’t worth losing a helo full of teammates. But he didn’t.
He watched as the lead helo flared then steadied over the small open area off the southern tip of Ghafour’s two-story house. He placed his green spotting laser off the starboard side, sparkling the center of the landing zone. The pilot was in the right place, but Shaft wanted to confirm their good judgment. He figured it might be smart to let them know he was in the area, too.
Shaft nervously watched the helo as it seemed frozen in the air. He knew the pilot was desperately trying to ease her down without striking the rotor blades on the uneven terrain and adjacent buildings. Shaft pulled his PVS-14 night vision to his left eye and aimed it at the back of the lead helo. He could make out one crew chief on a knee on the tail ramp looking out the back. He knew that guy was the pilot’s eyes in the rear.
Shaft also knew the operators were on their feet in the back of the helo up against the thin metal skin. As per standard operating procedure, they would be maintaining two lazy but separate lines facing the rear ramp, unable to do a damn thing from up there until they exited the aircraft.
* * *
Kolt could feel the erratic wobble in the rear of the helo, telling him Smitty was struggling with the controls, trying desperately to hold her steady in the middle of a man-made blizzard. The fresh snow was whipping up and turning on itself in a violent manner. The operators tried to look out the side bubble windows to orient themselves. The door gunners provided their only protection at the moment, but like Kolt and the other operators, they couldn’t see anything but a white wall of flurries.
Kolt knew all the rear crew chief needed was the call from the pilot to drop ropes. Once received, two Delta operators would step toward the edge of the tail ramp and reach up to release the cotter pin to free the two coiled green nylon fast ropes that hung lazily from an adjustable I beam. Both sixty-foot ropes would unsnake from their loose coil, and gravity would extend them all the way to the ground.
But after two minutes of hovering, the radio call hadn’t come yet.
Kolt watched some of the operators drop back to a knee as they held onto the side rails. Kolt joined them. They just felt safer than standing until the helo touched the ground. It was one of those lessons an operator just has to learn the hard way.
Kolt turned to look at the pilots. What is taking so damn long? They were a sitting duck for even a novice rocketeer.
On the other side of the helo, Kolt noticed the dark fuzzy outline of Admiral Mason. Un-fucking-believable! The admiral was still sitting on his rear end, still under the headset, ostensibly communicating with the pilots. His basic-issue tan-colored body armor and slick, freshly painted Kevlar helmet contrasted heavily with that of the operators on board, whose kit contained dozens of tools of the trade in various colors.
Kolt was beyond perturbed by the admiral’s last-minute demand to clear a spot on the manifest for him, but getting the execute order for the mission softened the pain a good deal. Kolt figured the admiral wanted to be able to report directly to the president that he was personally on the target and thus a very hands-on type of commander. After a couple of recent former JSOC commanders had done the same thing in Iraq years earlier, the pressure to equal their courage was significant. Kolt didn’t like it, but he got it. He shrugged the thought off. Besides, if the wide halls of the Pentagon and the plywood office space inside the circus tent were Admiral Mason’s domain, out here in the wild badlands it was Kolt’s. Kolt knew that as soon as he and his men could get off the damn helo things would happen so fast that there was nothing the admiral could do to stop them.
“What the fuck, Smitty?” he yelled, knowing he couldn’t be heard over the engine roar. “Is your crew chief gonna drop the ropes or…?”
Kolt couldn’t finish the sentence before he overheard Admiral Mason’s voice break into the radio net.
“Ghost Two-One actual, this is Capital Zero-Six. Heavy enemy resistance. Abort the infil. RTB immediately. Over.”
Kolt then noticed the helicopter crew chief giving the abort signal with his knifed hand, moving it quickly as if he was cutting his own throat. Kolt turned back quickly toward Admiral Mason. He was still under the radio headset but now making the same abort motion as the crew chief.
“Shit!”
Kolt knew the enemies’ green tracer fire seen out the side windows through the whiteout and off the back ramp made folks nervous. But after twelve years of war, the world-class crews and pilots from the 160th had learned to fly with ice in their veins
Kolt was only a few feet from the hinge side of the ramp. He thought about simply reaching up and out and pulling the damn cotter pin that kept the gathered fast rope connected to the helicopter. A quick yank, and gravity would do the rest. In a second, the end of the nylon rope would be lying in the snow-covered valley and ready for ropers.
No way he could pull that off, though. He knew that would be the craziest thing he’d ever done. If the admiral says abort, then that’s what they would do. And in a normal situation, if this could be called normal, the decision would stand. But what about Shaft?
Kolt hoped his mate had maintained his cover as the two Dark Horses made the hour-plus flight to the target area. He hoped he hadn’t done anything stupid. Nothing to be a hero. But there was no way to confirm his safety. Not from a hovering helo that was about to abort the mission and fly away. And not even over the cell phone. Shaft’s batteries were dead.
But if Shaft maintained his cover as a medicine man and went with the flow, Kolt figured he could safely work his way out of the situation. If the helos left the area, sure, things would be in full frenzy for a while with the locals on the ground, but Shaft was there to help them, not kill them.
Quickly, Kolt looked down at the Toughbook laptop screen. Seeing the liquid crystal display had gone into sleep mode, he reached down with his gloved firing hand to swipe the pressure pad to bring the screen back to life.
Where the hell is the blue icon?
Kolt slapped the Toughbook’s magnesium-alloy case slightly in the side, hoping it was a simple glitch and the blue icon would flash back on the screen in all its brilliance. Nothing. Kolt knew immediately that was too much of a coincidence to be, well, a simple coincidence. No. The blue icon had been strong and steady the entire time Shaft had been in Pakistan. Raptor X had been spot-on this entire rotation to the box. No. Something was definitely jacked up on the ground.
From underneath his headset, Kolt heard Smitty’s response to Mason’s order.
“Abort! Abort! Abort!” Smitty had made the net call, confirming to everyone listening in from Jalalabad to Tampa to Fort Bragg that the mission was aborted.
Kolt couldn’t blame Smitty. The order had been given. Maybe if Admiral Mason was hours away back at the JO
C watching things unfold on screen from a Predator B drone feed, Smitty could ignore the order. Maybe Kolt could maintain some control of the situation and keep Smitty focused. Enough focus, at least to get Kolt and his Delta operators on the ground.
But Mason wasn’t warm and safe in the circus tent listening to the radio traffic. He was front and center. And, as such, was in as much danger as anyone else in the back of the helicopters.
And then the black sky lit up like a rock concert stage. A massive fireball erupted only ninety feet to their four o’clock. Kolt instinctively turned away from the trail helo and lifted his arm to shield his face from any flying debris tearing through the sky at treacherous speeds.
Kolt’s helicopter shook violently for a second before it bounced back to level. Everyone standing had been thrown to the floor and toppled over those that had maintained a knee. Kolt turned back. He watched the flaming trail helo counter-rotate slowly, drop its tail uncharacteristically but then correct and level off as it struggled to move south down the valley on the front end of a massive smoke trail.
Kolt had no choice. The decision had been made. The mission to grab Ghafour had to go now. A downed helo full of operators? The blue icon of Shaft’s iPad 4 beacon gone? The admiral had pushed him at every turn.
If Kolt lived, what he was about to do would certainly get him booted out of the special-ops community for the second time in his life. Or, worse yet, it might come with a stay in Leavenworth federal penitentiary. Either would be worse than death to Kolt. But Shaft would never make it out alive now without help, and losing the lead on Zawahiri would push back years of effort.
“Fortune favors the bold,” whispered Kolt.
He dropped the radio headset, stepped over the legs of several kneeling teammates, and reached for the silver cotter pin. He yanked it out and watched the dark nylon rope fall freely toward the snow-covered ground. He didn’t bother to wait and ensure the infrared chemlite taped to the free-running end of the rope had stopped moving. The sign that the rope was actually on the ground. No, Kolt Raynor simply grabbed the rope with his two gloved hands and jumped out into the darkness before the ninety-foot fast rope had time to fully extend.