by Chris Ryan
The LTD continued to whirr.
Voodoo said later that we should have predicted what happened next. It was typical of him. Never satisfied. Always learning. I’d heard him say before that Tier 1 selection was an ongoing project. I guess that’s what he meant. And maybe he was right. Maybe we should have predicted that at some stage the sun would appear over the low peaks at the end of the valley.
A sudden, piercing shard of light lit up our position. We might have got away with it, had the sunlight not reflected off the lens of the LTD.
The enemy saw it immediately – a glint up on the side of the valley that gave away our position. One of Al-Zaranj’s men – the young guy who I’d seen unwrap the shamag from round his head – pointed directly at us, and suddenly there was the sound of shouting.
‘We’re spotted!’ I yelled. No need for secrecy now. ‘Fucking heads down!’
Half the enemy disappeared into the cave. The remainder started aiming their weapons in our direction. I quickly hurled myself behind the protection of the boulders as a round hit the stony ground just around us, causing a little explosion of dust and a ricochet of pebble fragments.
‘Rabbit, you good to go?’
‘Negative.’ He kept his eyes at the LTD, fully in the view of the enemy, but no less collected for that. ‘Hold ’em back,’ he instructed. ‘I need another thirty seconds.’
‘You got it, buddy,’ Voodoo replied. Another enemy round splintered into the front of the boulders, followed by a sudden burst from the valley floor. Voodoo swung round from the side of the boulder and aimed his rifle towards the valley floor. A quick burst of fire and he found cover again.
More shouting down below. Urgent. Confused. I put myself in the line of fire to send another burst of rounds down towards the enemy, and I saw one guy on the ground. The others ignored him. They were yelling at each other, running around chaotically. Someone ran out from inside the cave. He carried a rocket launcher on his shoulder, and even from this distance I could see he had one up the spout.
‘RPG!’ I shouted, and pulled back behind the boulder just as we heard the whooshing sound of the grenade speeding in our direction. All four of us hit the ground, including Rabbit, but the LTD stayed intact on its tripod, beaming its laser towards the target. I covered my head with my arms, just in time to hear the RPG starbursting a couple of metres short of our position. The shrapnel rained against the front of the boulders, falling harmlessly. But we knew that the next time they shot a grenade in our direction, we might not be so lucky.
‘Dusty!’ Voodoo shouted. ‘Get that fucker with the launcher!’
‘Let’s boogie,’ said Dusty.
Of all of us, he was the sharpest shooter. I’d heard that back home Dusty was a hunter and had been honing his skills since he was a kid. He pulled himself up and got down on one knee in the space between the two boulders that Rabbit had just vacated. Dusty didn’t need more than a second to take aim. Just a single shot. I heard a man scream down below.
‘Rabbit, did you get it?’ Voodoo yelled.
‘I got it.’
‘Zero, this is Voodoo. The target is marked. Repeat, the target is marked.’
‘RPG!’ It was Dusty who shouted it this time. Whether someone had reloaded the dead shooter’s launcher or emerged from the cave with a second one, I couldn’t tell. All I heard was the dread noise of the grenade fizzing towards us – over our heads this time – before it slammed into the hillside behind us. Another shower of shrapnel. Close this time. The enemy were getting their eye in.
I crawled back round the corner of the boulder and quickly took in what was happening. Two of the men were advancing towards us, about 100 metres away. The rest were retreating back into the cave. I couldn’t figure out what they were doing, but the advancing ones had to be stopped. I took out the guy on my side with a burst that ripped into the top of his chest. At the same time, Dusty got his mate with a headshot, and the two bodies tumbled a couple of metres down the hillside. By now, though, more guys were emerging from the cave, and they had something with them.
‘Dushka!’ Dusty screamed, and he was bang on. The Russian DShK machine-gun was already on its mount and being manhandled out of the cave by two men. Four others started raining covering fire on us, so Dusty and I were forced to take cover behind the boulders.
‘It’s gonna get noisy!’
It was Dusty again, but Voodoo barely acknowledged him. He glanced at his watch and then looked up to the sky. I followed his gaze.
I knew what Dusty was looking for, but there was nothing. Just the clear blue of early morning. We could only hope that the LTD was transmitting its coordinates to the UAV that was supposed to be circling thousands of metres in the air.
Suddenly the air was filled with the sound of thunder as the enemy pumped the Russian equivalent of .50-cal rounds towards our position. At first the incoming fire flew over the boulders and slammed into the hillside, but as the gunner adjusted his aim, the rounds started slamming into the front of them.
‘Watch the LTD!’ Voodoo shouted. ‘That thing gets hit, we’re fucked…’
Just as he spoke, a burst of rounds flew through the triangular gap, inches above the laser target designator. The tripod wobbled slightly from the air displacement, but it then steadied itself. We were pinned down, unable to move as the brutal rounds from that machine-gun ripped through the air.
A sudden silence.
‘Go!’ Voodoo hissed.
All four of us moved quickly, putting ourselves out in the open and laying down rounds while the enemy changed the machine-gun link. None of us needed to tell the others to keep away from the LTD. We needed to draw their fire away from it, so we positioned ourselves on either side of the lying-up position.
Two more men went down, but we didn’t have more than ten seconds to fire before the DShK was up and running again and we had to press ourselves back behind the boulders. The air filled once more with the din of machine-gun rounds.
Rabbit’s face was dripping sweat. He moistened his lips with his tongue. ‘The more they fire,’ he shouted, ‘the less ammo they have. They can’t keep this up for ever. When the DShK’s out, they’re ours.’
Voodoo was on his knees looking up into the sky again, like a man praying. Not that any of us were the praying type. ‘Won’t be necessary!’ he shouted, and there was a ghost of a smile on his face as he pointed upwards.
They looked very tiny at first. Just two dots in the sky that could have been mistaken for anything – a couple of birds, maybe, or very distant aircraft. But they quickly grew bigger, zeroing in on our position with brutal, pinpoint accuracy.
‘Hit the ground!’ Voodoo shouted, but he needn’t have. We knew what those dots in the sky were, and what kind of effect they were going to have.
The Hellfires took another ten seconds to reach us. They weren’t noisy as they flew into the valley, but even if they had been – we wouldn’t have been able to hear them over the noise of the DShK that was still hurling rounds at our position.
We certainly heard the moment they hit, though. The sudden explosions were short – one after the other, with only a microsecond between them – but the booms echoed deafeningly off the valley walls as the heat from the blast scorched the air around us and the shockwaves knocked the LTD off its tripod. The moment the earth stopped shaking, I pulled myself out from the LUP, keeping low to the ground as we crawled round to view the damage. Huge clouds of smoke were billowing out from the cave, and I could hear the sound of ammo exploding inside. Above the cave mouth I could just make out hunks of rock tumbling to the ground. I kept my rifle at the ready, prepared to shoot anyone I saw escaping from the blast site.
But there was no one. A direct strike from two Hellfire missiles. Nobody was going to survive that.
From behind me, I heard Voodoo on the radio. ‘Zero, this is Voodoo. The enemy have gone to bed. Repeat, the enemy have gone to bed.’
I allowed myself a smile for the first time in twelve hour
s. ‘Understatement of the year,’ I muttered to myself. ‘Understatement of the fucking year.’
06.30 HRS.
It took several minutes for the smoke to clear. We didn’t let our concentration drop. Just because the guys inside Al-Zaranj’s cave were bargaining their way into paradise didn’t mean the Hellfire strike would not have been heard for miles around, and there was no guarantee we wouldn’t start drawing fire from other AQ targets that might be in the vicinity. So, while Voodoo called in a chopper to extract us, and Rabbit packed up the LTD, Dusty and I scoped the surrounding area, alert to movement or anything suspicious.
Nothing doing. The valley was as dead as Al-Zaranj himself and within ten minutes we heard the unmistakable sound of a chopper approaching. The MI-8 came over the brow of the valley, accompanied by its Hind chaperone, which now swooped in towards the ground and hovered just above the cave mouth, its nose gun moving left and right with the pilot’s head, ready to counter-attack any nasty surprises while the MI-8 came in to land. We scrambled down the stony hillside to where the chopper was setting down, bowing low on account of the downdraught. Twenty metres from the MI-8’s position, I passed the remnants of a severed limb, bloody and gore-spattered. It wouldn’t be there long – no doubt a wild animal would be glad of it before the following night was over.
The chopper rose up the moment we were all in. Within seconds we were above the ridgeline, the Hind offering us rear support, looking down on the scene of devastation below. And soon we were high enough to see the whole mountain range, purple and grey in the early morning sun, and the village of Pajay beyond. Beautiful place Afghanistan, looked at from up here. Shame it was such a shithole on the ground. And none of us was under any illusions that it was going to get better any time soon.
The FOB was just the same as it had been the previous morning. Busy. Hot. As we set down, left the aircraft and started trudging towards the tents, nobody came up to ask us what had been going down that night. Everyone else had their own jobs to think about and we weren’t about to go singing about our exploits. All in a night’s work. Eventful, certainly, but it wasn’t the first – and it sure as hell wouldn’t be the last. Especially not for Voodoo, Dusty and Rabbit. I might have an all-expenses-paid trip back to Hereford that day. For them, the battle was ongoing. It was no secret that the Americans had big plans for The Stan, and with operators like Dusty, Voodoo and Rabbit in country, the next few weeks and months would be a bad time to be in the Taliban.
Back in the tent, we got liquid inside us like it was going out of fashion. We didn’t discuss what had happened that night. What was there to discuss? Job done. Move on. Members from other teams who’d been out on the ground drifted in. I found myself in the company of my SAS mates; Voodoo and Rabbit were in another part of the tent talking to their Neptune colleagues; Dusty was surrounded by Wolfpack.
It was a couple of hours before I managed to get a bit of time to myself. I was sitting on my Bergen in the corner of the tent with a bottle of tepid water when Dusty approached me with something in his hands. He threw it in my direction and I caught it.
‘What’s this?’
‘American MRE, dude. Can’t bear to watch you eating any more of that British shit.’ He looked over his shoulder. ‘You chose the wrong time to be bugging out on us, my friend. Voodoo and Rabbit just got the word to move into Gardez. Some dude there called Tariq wants to tell us where the AQ forces are amassing.’
‘Hope he’s more reliable than Malouf.’
Dusty shrugged. ‘They’ll deal with it. Either way, things are about to get spicy.’
I looked across the tent. Voodoo and Rabbit were by the entrance. Voodoo nodded at me. It wasn’t much. No great show of emotion, but I got the gesture. We’d fought alongside each other. It made us brothers. We understood. Rabbit was flipping his lucky rabbit-foot talisman in his hand. He inclined his head in my direction. Both of them looked exhausted, but I knew that wasn’t going to stop them from doing what needed to be done. Guys like that, they thrive on the adrenaline. Guys like us. I realised with a pang that deep down I didn’t much want to be leaving theatre. Still, it wasn’t like it was forever.
‘I get the feeling I’ll be back in country pretty soon…’ I told Dusty.
He gave me a look as if to say, ‘Whatever’, then put his dark glasses back on and turned his back on me. ‘Enjoy your breakfast, my friend,’ he called as he walked away.
I looked at the foil package in my hands, then ripped open the top, suddenly realizing how damn hungry I was. I found a spoon from my pack and started shovelling the food into my mouth. It wasn’t so bad, but truth to tell, it wasn’t so much different to the British stuff. Same shit, I reckoned, different package.
A bit like the four of us who’d been on patrol that night, I thought to myself as I continued to eat. Different accents. Different training. But same attitude. Same single-minded determination. Same resolve to get the job done. In a world where reputation was everything, I reckoned ours were still intact.
Yeah. Same shit, different package. I continued to eat Dusty’s MRE, and waited for my transport home.
For a first glimpse of Osama, the latest book from Chris Ryan, published on 13/09/2012, turn the page and jump straight into the action.
ONE
The White House Situation Room, Washington DC, USA. 1 May 2011, 1430 hours EST.
So this is what people look like, thinks Todd Greene, when they are about to witness a death.
The official photographer to the President of the United States takes his third picture in as many minutes. It is of a plain, narrow room with a long mahogany table, crammed full of laptops and polystyrene coffee cups. Thirteen men and two women are fixated by a screen on the wall at one end of the room. Some stand, their hands covering their worried mouths, their foreheads creased. Others sit: the President in the corner, his white shirt dotted with sweat stains, the Vice President to his right and his chief military adviser, General Herb Sagan, to his left. Unlike those of the President, the VP and most of the others in the room, Sagan’s clothes are immaculate. He wears a blue uniform, its lapel emblazoned with line upon line of medal flashes and decorations that Todd does not recognize. He thinks Sagan has the face of a man whose career will be defined by what happens in the next sixty minutes, 3000 miles away in a small town in Pakistan named Abbottabad.
The screen itself shows a dark image. It is the inside of a stealth-configured H-60 Black Hawk, specially designed to reduce radar splash, a dish-shaped cover over the rotors and with an infra-red suppression finish. This is top-secret stealth capability, Sagan has briefed everyone in the room. It will allow the aircraft to enter Pakistani airspace undetected. The juddering visual feed is from the helmet camera of a US Navy SEAL. For now, the sound is turned down low. There’s nothing to hear, other than the dull grind of the chopper circling in dark Afghan skies.
The VP speaks. ‘That guy on screen. What the hell does he have written on his armband?’
Sagan blinks at the politician he so clearly loathes. ‘His blood group, Mr Vice President, sir.’
The VP nods, embarrassed. ‘I see,’ he mutters.
Sagan interrupts. ‘Mr President, respectfully, DEVGRU are ready to enter Pakistani airspace. They need your authorization to continue …’
The President looks around the room. Nervous eyes look back at him.
His own eyes fall to documents on the table. Todd knows what they are: aerial maps of a compound in Abbottabad, taken from high altitude by a stealth drone. One of these grey, bat-winged spy planes is hovering over that faraway town right now, controlled from an operations base in the Nevada Desert. And next to the aerial maps is a photograph of a high-walled compound, taken three months ago by a plainclothes CIA operative. A hazy grey image of a man whose daily habit is to walk up and down outside the house within the compound walls. Despite everything – their surveillance from the air and from the ground, and their covert attempts to gather DNA samples from the occupants of the co
mpound – it has been impossible to make a positive identification of the man. The agents involved simply refer to him as ‘the Pacer’.
But the Pacer‘s strolling days are numbered.
‘You just need to give me the go order, sir …’ Sagan is polite, but tense. Perhaps even a little exasperated.
‘The back-up team?’ the President asks.
‘Three Chinooks,’ Sagan confirms. ‘Twenty-four men. They’re on-line by the Indus River, Mr President, ten minutes’ flight time from target Geronimo. That’s in addition to the attack team in the Black Hawks.’
‘We have surveillance on the compound? We’re sure of no unusual activity?’
‘Affirmative, Mr President.’
‘And our British cousins?’
‘Securing the Doctor and his family, Mr President. The Pakistanis won’t know what we’ve been doing in Abbottabad so long as we keep the Doctor out of the hands of the authorities. The British have instructions to maintain the cordon and stay out of the compound.’
He looks back up to the screen. Through the helmet-cam footage, Todd sees the face of one of the SEALs staring back, almost as though he is listening and waiting to hear the President speak. Half his face is in shadow. Moonlight, flooding in from one side of the Black Hawk, lights up the other half, revealing goggles propped up on the helmet and a boom mike beside his mouth.
The President gives a slow but distinct nod.
Sagan wastes no time. He lifts his lapel and addresses an unseen colleague via the microphone pinned to his uniform.
‘This is Sagan. I have a go order from the President. Start the clock on Operation Geronimo. Repeat, start the clock on Operation Geronimo. Confirmation code Charlie Alpha Niner.’
He turns back to his commander in chief.
‘We’ll know within the hour, Mr President,’ he says.