“Mace is moving!” Carter exclaimed.
“All right, he’s been alive this long,” said Larson. “We gotta wait for the Apaches to come in again.”
While they waited, they discussed how their next move would work.
First, Carter would need to get to Mace and find out how badly he was hurt. Depending on how things looked, the best option might be for Carter to then drag Mace to a drainage gully that ran down from the mortar pit and tuck him under the concrete bridge that led across the river to the helicopter landing zone, where they would maybe have some cover.
When the Apaches returned and the enemy fire again subsided, Carter got out for a second time and sprinted over to the rock pile where Mace lay. Meanwhile, Larson exited on the driver’s side with his carbine. Because he was down to just fourteen rounds, he refrained from shooting and concentrated on scanning Urmul, the Switchbacks, and the Waterfall area through the scope of his M4, looking for anything that might pose a threat.
When Carter reached Mace, he found him lying facedown, with Gallegos’s dead body stretched out just a few feet away.
Mace was mumbling and in shock. He had also lost a great deal of blood. When Carter rolled him over, the front of his shredded uniform was crimson-colored from the wounds to his abdomen and legs. His intestines were partially exposed, his legs were covered with bullet holes and shrapnel, and one of his feet had almost been severed at the ankle. In addition, pieces of shrapnel had penetrated his hip, buttock, and flank on the right side of his body, as well as his back and his right arm.
Kneeling beside him, Carter got to work. Mace’s left leg had been shattered—he had a compound fracture of both the tibia and fibula—so the first order of business was to get a tourniquet around the leg. Then he used a pressure dressing to pack the wounds in Mace’s belly, and rolls of gauze and tape to plug up some of the larger holes in his legs. Finally, he snatched up a stick and used it to splint the damaged ankle.
When he was finished, Carter took a moment to look over the concrete bridge twenty yards to his south. Then he told Mace to hold tight and dashed back to the truck to confer with Larson.
The bridge was no good, Carter explained: too exposed, not enough cover. The only safe place for Mace was inside the gun truck.
“All right,” Larson agreed. “But we need to do one thing first.”
Grabbing his multitool, Larson prepped the truck using an old trick that he’d learned from me back in Iraq. The seat rest in a Humvee is supported by four bolts—two on each side. If you unscrew the top two bolts, the seat will go all the way down and you can turn it into a recliner, enabling a wounded man to lay almost flat. (We used to call it “riding gangster-style.”)
When the seat was ready, Larson again posted up with his M4 to provide cover, and Carter sprinted back to Mace.
Reaching Mace, Carter picked him up and carried him over to a nearby rock ledge. Setting Mace on top of the rocks, he climbed up the ledge and dragged him the rest of the way to the truck. Then he picked Mace up again and lifted him through the front passenger-side door.
When Mace was settled in the reclined seat, Carter scurried around the back of the truck and climbed into the seat behind Larson.
As he slammed the door shut, Mace turned his head and looked over at both of them.
“Say, do one of you guys have a cigarette?” he asked. “I could really use a smoke right now.”
• • •
IN ADDITION to his sense of humor, the thing that defined Mace was his tolerance for pain. Once, back in the eighth grade, he’d gotten tangled up in a scrum of kids during a football game and was tackled hard enough to break his femur. It was a bad fracture—the orthopedic surgeon would later say that it looked as if he’d been in a car accident going a hundred miles an hour—and to prevent the ends of the bone from severing his femoral artery, the paramedics were forced to set the bone right there on the field without any anesthetics. When Mace was delivered to the hospital, the staff in the emergency room couldn’t believe that a thirteen-year-old boy could handle such agony. But he had. Even his mother was astonished by what he’d been able to absorb.
Now that stoicism was about to be tested far beyond the limits of anything Mace had ever endured. He didn’t cry out or scream, but Larson could see the torment etched in his features. The skin on his face had taken on a bilious shade of green, and his eyes seemed to swim inside twin pools of pure, undiluted suffering. To Larson, it seemed like the worst pain one could ever imagine, multiplied by a factor of ten. And perhaps the most awful part of it was that neither he nor Carter could provide the one thing that might have given Mace a dollop of relief, the only thing he asked for—a cigarette.
“Give me a cigarette, will ya?” he kept pleading, over and over.
It just killed Larson that he hadn’t brought any cigarettes or chew with him. But there was no way for him to get that across to Mace, who listened politely each time Larson told him that they were fresh out of tobacco, and then plaintively put forth the same request:
“Please, dude—just one cigarette.”
Eventually, Larson gave up trying to explain things and fell back on small phrases of encouragement—You’re tough . . . You’re good . . . We’ll getcha—while he and Carter tried to figure out their next move.
They continued to hear gunfire coming from the center of camp, but they still had no idea who was doing the shooting. It was quite possible, they reasoned, that some of us—HQ Platoon, plus maybe a few guys from Red and Blue—were still alive and making a final stand. But then again, maybe the Taliban had penetrated to the center of camp and were finishing off the last pockets of survivors. Or perhaps a group of our guys had fled beyond the wire into the hills, and the enemy was now inside the camp shooting out at them.
Isolated and cut off as they were, each of these scenarios seemed equally likely. And in light of those possibilities, it seemed that perhaps their only viable path of escape lay directly in front of them.
“Can you swim?” asked Carter, staring through the shot-up windshield out toward the river.
Larson was silent for a moment. The answer was an emphatic no: he couldn’t swim worth a lick, even when he wasn’t wounded in multiple places.
“Enough to survive,” he replied.
With that, they hatched a desperate plan in which they would wait until dark, crawl to the edge of the river while dragging Mace, then slip into the current and allow it to carry them more than a dozen miles downstream to Lowell, an American combat outpost carved into a rocky spur beside the river.
Needless to say, that plan had some serious drawbacks, starting with the fact that Mace was almost guaranteed to bleed to death within the first couple of minutes after entering the water. Soon thereafter, Larson would probably drown—a prospect that might sound slightly less unacceptable, he sardonically conceded to himself, if he could have one last dip of chewing tobacco.
Eventually, they agreed that making a Huck Finn–style bid to reach Lowell was an asinine scheme. But they also knew that Mace—who still hadn’t stopped campaigning for a cigarette—was suffering from massive internal bleeding and wouldn’t last much longer. And so it was around this point that Carter decided that he needed to try to find out what was happening toward the center of camp and determine, once and for all, whether anybody else at Keating was alive.
“I’m going out on a recon,” he announced. “If I’m not back in ten minutes, I either made it, or don’t worry about it.”
With that, he was out of the truck, over the terrace, and running for the rocks by the latrines where he had picked up Mace. He passed Gallegos’s body, then turned the corner of the latrines, paused, and scanned what lay before him. The first thing that caught his eye was Mace’s M4, which was on the ground next to the laundry connex.
He was about to make a dash for the connex when he glanced behind him and spotted somethin
g else.
It was an EFJohnson, lying in the dirt.
An EFJohnson radio is a two-way, handheld, open-channel walkie-talkie that is neither coded nor encrypted. As such, it’s not the sort of device you want to be using in combat, because the communications aren’t secure. But at Keating, the maintenance crew really liked the EFJohnsons because they offered a simple way of talking to one another.
Keating’s chief mechanic, Vernon Martin, had carried one of these radios. Apparently he’d dropped the thing when he, Mace, and Gallegos had tried to make their run for the Shura Building. Although it still wasn’t clear what had happened to Martin, Carter had just found that radio—and in so doing, he had stumbled on perhaps the only communications link that had not been affected by the net switch. The critical question was whether anybody was still alive in the center of camp—and if so, whether they were bothering to monitor Martin’s frequency on the EFJohnson that was kept inside the chargers on the eastern wall of the command post.
Carter snatched up the radio, keyed it, and heard nothing.
He turned it off, then on again, keyed it a second time, and heard it working.
“This is Blue Four Gulf,” he said, giving the call sign that identified him as a member of Blue Platoon. “Is anyone still alive?”
In response, he heard a voice. He couldn’t make out who it was or what was being said, but it was enough to send him racing back to the gun truck, where he handed the radio off to Larson.
“This is Red Dragon,” said Larson.
“Red Dragon, this is Black Knight Seven,” replied First Sergeant Burton. “What is your sitrep?”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Bone
INSIDE THE COMMAND POST, Burton handed the EFJohnson off to Bundermann so that Larson could provide a brief situation report that included only the most important details: that Gallegos was dead; that Hardt, Griffin, and Martin were missing; and that Mace was critically wounded and needed to be delivered to the aid station as fast as possible if they were to have any chance of saving his life.
“If I lay down a fuck-ton of fire,” asked Bundermann, “can you and Carter get him back here on your own?”
“Hell yeah,” replied Larson. “We’ve got a litter right here. But we need a two-minute window to do it.”
“All right, get him on the litter,” said Bundermann. “As soon as you hear a boom, start moving.”
Picking up an ICOM radio, Bundermann then called Jordan Bellamy up at Fritsche. The mortar crew there was still trying to calibrate their guns so that they could hang rounds accurately, but Bundermann didn’t care about that right now.
“I need you to prepare to hit Urmul,” he said.
“Which part?” asked Bellamy.
“All of it,” said Bundermann, giving him the eight-digit grid for the center of the village and specifying he use incendiary white phosphorus shells, which would cause whatever they hit to burn. “Give me fifteen rounds from the 120 and fifteen from the 60.”
“Roger,” said Bellamy.
Bundermann’s next call was to me at the Shura Building.
“They’re gonna try to get Mace outta there,” he told me after passing along the astonishing news that Larson was alive—news that lifted my spirits and boosted my confidence in a way that nothing else could.
If Larson is still in this fight, I thought to myself, we’re solid.
“Can you provide covering fire?” asked Bundermann.
“Yep,” I confirmed. “We can set up in the front and the rear of the Shura Building.”
“Okay, so what’s gonna happen is you’re gonna hear a boom and then we’re gonna fire the 120s,” he said. “That’s when I want you and your guys to push out and set your support by fire. Anything your team can shoot at the Putting Green, Urmul, or the North Face, do it. Larson and Carter are gonna grab Mace and run.”
“Roger that,” I said.
Then Bundermann summoned Hill, who was just outside the command center, and gave him the same orders, but with instructions for Hill’s men to direct their fire at the Diving Board and the Switchbacks.
Finally, Bundermann put out a call to anyone listening on the combat net. “If you have any sort of weapons system, it needs to go on target,” he declared. “I don’t care what it is—I want everything we have ready to fire in one minute.”
It was a bold gamble. Every weapon inside Keating would open up at the same time in the hope that a massive barrage of outgoing fire would provide just enough cover for Larson and Carter to pick up Mace and complete an extended sprint over uneven terrain, weaving their way through ammo cans, rocks, and assorted pieces of wreckage, across an unthinkably long distance—almost two hundred yards—from the far end of camp to the aid station, without being picked off.
All of us assumed that the trigger for this move—the “boom” that Bundermann had referred to—would be the 120-mm mortar rounds from Fritsche.
In fact, he had something quite a bit bigger than that in mind.
• • •
ROUGHLY FIVE HOURS prior to the start of the attack on Keating, a captain named Justin Kulish pushed his throttles and started hurtling down a runway at Al Udeid, an air base in Qatar more than thirteen hundred miles southwest of Nuristan, at the controls of a B-1 Lancer.
The Lancer is a supersonic intercontinental bomber whose size and power are enough to boggle the mind. On the ground, the aircraft sits higher than a three-story office building. Its wingspan is almost half the length of a football field. When fully loaded it weighs nearly half a million pounds, and when it gets into the air, the thing can fly more than nine hundred miles an hour. Pilots like Kulish who fly this plane don’t call it a Lancer, however. Instead, using a riff that derives from “B-1,” they simply refer to it as “the Bone.”
The Bone also happens to carry the largest payload of any guided or unguided weapon in the entire air force inventory, which means that it offers an unrivaled bouquet of options for an on-the-ground commander who is calling in an air strike. Air force crews sometimes say that the Bone functions as a kind of airborne Dunkin’ Donuts showcase of death where the guys on the ground can browse through a menu of offerings and order up whatever they want. Regardless of whether you need a five-hundred-pound GPS-guided bomb to demolish a building, a wind-corrected cluster bomb to rip the guts out of an armored column, or a standoff missile to take out a surface-to-air missile site from fifty miles away, a pilot like Kulish and his three-man crew (copilot plus two wizzos) have got you covered.
Kulish’s bomber, whose call sign was “Bone 21,” was conducting a routine patrol and had already been in the air for almost eight hours when the call came through that Keating was in danger of being overrun and needed help. As Kulish swung in the direction of Nuristan, the air force controllers at Bostick asked him how long it would take him to get there.
Thirty minutes, radioed Kulish, if he flew at maximum speed without his afterburners—but far less if he went supersonic. The catch: the Bone would inhale five times as much fuel once it broke the sound barrier, and he would need to refuel pretty much the moment he showed up.
Do it, replied the controllers.
Kicking in his afterburners, Kulish pushed his bomber to 1.2 Mach. Meanwhile, Michal Polidor and Aaron Dove started rearranging the stack to make room for his arrival.
Shortly after ten thirty a.m. as Kulish drew near the target zone, he and his crew started catching the radio traffic, and were a bit stunned to discover how many aircraft were in the area. The airspace above Keating seemed to be packed with jets, so they knew that whatever was taking place on the ground was no ordinary engagement.
When they finally got directly overhead and were able to pick up details of what was unfolding, they had the same reaction as every other pilot who arrived on scene that day. What struck Kulish most forcefully was how much of Keating was on fire. From the air, i
t looked as if the entire outpost was burning.
The other thing they noted was that the weather was starting to change.
At 10:39 a.m., the controllers at Bostick requested a weather check from any Predator surveillance aircraft orbiting inside the stack. One minute later, a drone with the call sign “Sijan,” which was working the airspace five nautical miles southeast of Keating, started receiving icing warnings on its sensors. At the same time, Lemay—the call sign for another drone in the area—recorded that heavy cumulous clouds were gathering everywhere.
An early-winter storm was starting to roll in from the east, pushing a wall of clouds laced with thunderstorms from two hundred feet off the ground all the way up to thirty thousand feet. When the storm kicked in fully, the ground would no longer be visible and any aircraft inside the stack would be able to drop only GPS-guided smart bombs whose sensors were locked on to coordinates provided by forward observers on the ground. As an added difficulty, the storm would force the Stratotankers to move off about a hundred miles away, which would force the smaller jets inside the stack to fly farther in order to refuel.
Fortunately, in addition to all of its other munitions, the Bone was equipped with twenty precision-guided bombs known as JDAMs. Twelve of those smart bombs tipped the scales at five hundred pounds apiece. The other eight were monsters that weighed two thousand pounds each and were as long as a pickup truck. Jammed with high explosives and encased in a metal housing that was designed to fragment into hot shrapnel, those bombs were collectively capable of blowing a sizable hole into the middle of the Taliban’s assault—although there was a hitch that needed to be taken into account.
When word reached Keating’s command post that a B-1 was on its way, Bundermann told Shrode to break out the Field Artillery manual and pull up the specs on just how close they could drop those bombs without obliterating everybody inside the wire.
The JDAMs on board the Bone were equipped with GPS receivers in their tails, along with small steering mechanisms called “servo motors” that could redirect their flight path. Thanks to that guidance package, the bombs were supposed to be accurate to within fifteen yards. This was an important consideration, because the normal rule of thumb during training is that you want to have a yard of standoff—the distance between the point of detonation and the nearest personnel—for every pound of explosives, because no one who is inside that radius and not under some sort of cover is likely to survive the shock wave and the shrapnel.
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