by Scott McEwen
“I’ll be right back! Just get us lined up!”
Brux found Master Chief Steelyard and Captain Daniel Crosswhite in the cargo hold, where they stood on the open ramp helping the load master ready the drop kit for the STAR system. The wind was howling, and he had to shout to be heard over the roar of the aircraft’s four T56 turboprop jet engines. “She’s been hit!”
“Sandra?” Steelyard shouted back. “How bad?”
“In the belly. Shannon’s pinned under the fucking horse. I think he plans on sending her up alone, but if Sandy’s bleeding—”
“If she’s bleeding, we can’t loiter up here long enough to cover Gil until the cavalry gets here!”
“That’s right!” Brux shouted. “CenCom’s sending everything they’ve got, but they’re twenty minutes out. Those Northern Alliance guys can’t see Gil from where they are, and all he’s got down there is a rifle!”
Steelyard turned to grab an emergency aircrew parachute from the bulkhead, throwing it at Crosswhite. “Put that on, asshole, we’re going in!”
Crosswhite grinned and began stepping into the harness. Steelyard grabbed a chute for himself.
“What the fuck do you mean, you’re going in?” Brux shouted in disbelief. “Jesus Christ, Chief! We’re dropping the kit from three hundred feet!”
“It’s a called an E-LALO!” Steelyard said with a laugh. “Extremely low!”
Brux adamantly shook his head. “You can’t do it! That’s just an old C-9! Those chutes aren’t made for LALO-ing. They take too long to open. You’ll hit too fucking hard!”
Crosswhite’s mind raced to form a solution to their dilemma. He considered briefly deploying the chutes inside the bay. This would allow the wind to drag them off the ramp behind the kit, but the idea was just too damn dangerous, and they might not land anywhere near the kit that way. “I got it!” He turned to the load master. “Get us some five-fifty cord—we’ll rig a pair of static lines!”
Steelyard took Brux by the arm, shouting into his ear. “Better get back up front, John. If Gil’s pinned under the horse, he won’t be able to set up the STAR system anyhow. We have to go in!”
By the time they were lined up for the drop, Crosswhite and Steelyard were armed and ready to jump with the kit. They had each attached a thirty-foot-long, double line of parachute cord to the chute carriers on their C-9 parachutes and secured the opposite ends of the lines to the deck of the ramp on either side. These static lines would rip the chute carries open the second they stepped off the end of the ramp and deploy each of their parachutes more or less instantly.
Crosswhite stood on the ramp beside Steelyard waiting for the load master’s signal to step forward. “You ever jump this low with one of these pieces of shit?”
Steelyard grinned at him. “What do you think? I used to be six feet tall!”
They broke up laughing, and the load master held up his thumb. “Thirty seconds to drop!”
They stepped off to either side of the kit, and Steelyard stuck an unlit cigar between his teeth. “I hope they got a couple a wheelchairs down there. ’Cause we’re gonna fuckin’ need ’em!”
58
AFGHANISTAN,
Panjshir Valley, Bazarak
Gil was having a hell of a time drawing a bead on his targets with one leg pinned beneath the horse. The only good thing about having the animal between him and the enemy was the fact that the incoming AK-47 and SKS rounds wouldn’t penetrate its body. With effort, he could raise up well enough to hit whatever target he needed to, but he couldn’t maintain a sight picture while working the bolt. After each shot, he had to fall onto his back again to eject the spent round and jack a new one into the battery before rising back up to shoot. It was costing him valuable time, allowing the enemy to encroach much closer on his position than they would have otherwise been able to. He was engaging targets at only a hundred yards now, and they should strictly not have been able to get that close.
“Goddamn you!” he swore at the man he caught belly crawling through the scrub at fifty yards, blowing the top of his head off. “Last time I saw that fucker he was clear over there!”
“Let me help you!” Sandra said for the third time, curled up in a ball beside him.
“You keep watching our six. The plane’s gonna be overhead any minute now.” He took off his helmet and gave it to her. “Use the infrared scope to spot the strobe when they drop the kit. You’re gonna run out and drag it over here so I can help you assemble it.”
“Gil, I’m not sure I can even walk.”
“Yeah, well, you’re gonna run if it comes to that.” In his mind, he was wondering how in the bloody hell he was going to assemble the extraction kit and keep the enemy off their backs at the same time. He was hoping the Spectre would be able to beat the bastards back far enough one last time before breaking off to circle out again for the extraction run, but even sixty seconds was too far in the future for him to worry about. He rose up over the horse with the Remington and instantly spotted three desperados charging their position at a dead run.
“Fuck did they come from?” he swore, grabbing the saddle with his left hand to keep himself upright and taking the M4 away from Sandra. Keeping a grip on the saddle, he waited for the desperados to draw within fifty yards so he could see them well enough without the night-vision scope, using his left eye. He fired once, twice, three times, moving right to left across his field of vision, hitting each of them once in the belly . . . and every damn one of them kept right on coming.
“You motherfuckers!” he hissed, jerking the 1911 from his harness. “Come the fuck on then!” He gripped the pistol in both hands, using his already strained back muscles to keep himself upright.
Concentrating on the front sight, he squeezed off three more rounds . . . one . . . two . . . three. The last desperado toppled over less than twenty feet from their position, pitching a grenade at them on his way down. It hit the belly of the horse and bounced off.
“Grenade!” Gil shouted, pulling Sandra close to him.
The grenade exploded several feet away, disintegrating a large portion of the horse carcass and bathing them both in guts, blood, piss, and manure.
“You hit?” he asked, wiping the gore from her face.
“I don’t think so, no.”
He jerked his leg from beneath what was left of the horse and found that his ankle was either badly bruised or broken. “That’s about par for the fuckin’ course,” he said, casting a look around for his rifles. The M4 had disappeared, but he found the Remington ten feet away, the optics destroyed by the blast. He tore out the bolt and stuck it into his pocket with the pistol suppressor, then limped over to take the AK-47 from the desperado who had thrown the grenade. The fellow was still alive and moaning in agony.
“Life’s a cock in the mouth, ain’t it?” Gil stepped on his neck as he jerked the rifle from beneath him. He gathered the magazines from the other two and limped back to where Sandra was still hiding behind the horse carcass.
“I think I’m going to pass out,” she said. “Thanks for coming to get me.”
He took the helmet from her head and scanned the terrain through the infrared, seeing multiple targets moving their way.
“The only easy day was yesterday,” he muttered, reciting the SEAL motto for perhaps the five hundredth time in his career. He crouched down to touch Sandra’s gore-matted hair. “You ain’t got nothin’ to thank me for yet. You just sit tight. The plane’s comin’ in now.”
He took a knee and began firing on the enemy when they rose up from their positions to fire at the belly of the Spectre as it came roaring in over the valley floor, three hundred feet off the deck. Both the 25 mm Equalizer and 40 mm Bofors auto-cannon raked the enemy positions off the port side as it passed over the valley.
Gil fired into a group of men who were shooting at the Spectre’s defenseless starboard side. They couldn’t hear anything over the roar of the engines, and by the time they realized they were being fired upon, Gil had k
illed eleven of them at two hundred yards from the standing position over open sights.
The Spectre roared overhead, and three parachutes appeared in Gil’s night vision, all three of them twirling around as they descended quickly toward the earth. The aircraft was already climbing to circle back out and over the valley.
Gil fired the rest of the magazine at the enemy before turning to watch the kit come down, wondering why there were three parachutes instead of one. He got his answer when the kit hit the ground, followed by two parajumpers, both of them hitting the ground with bone-breaking force.
He ran forward, recognizing them immediately. “What the fuck are you assholes doin’ here?”
Steelyard sat up, shrugging the harness off his shoulders. “Saving your ass, Gilligan. Now help me the fuck up! I broke my fucking fibula.”
Gil gave him a hand up, glancing over to see Crosswhite limping toward them holding his hip. “How do know you it’s broken, Chief?”
“Because it’s sticking out of my fucking calf, Chief!” Steelyard looked at Crosswhite. “How about you, you Delta pussy? Break anything?”
Crosswhite nodded. “My ass, I think. You two faggots set up the kit. I got some goddamn killing to do.” He trotted crookedly over to where Sandra was still hiding behind the horse. He knelt to squeeze her arm for moment and then began taking shots at the enemy.
Gil and Steelyard broke open the aluminum trunk containing the ground elements of the Fulton Skyhook Surface-to-Air Recovery system. Inside were a harness, a steel cylinder full of helium, a camouflaged, deflated barrage-type balloon, and 500 feet of high-strength, braided nylon cord. Gil screwed the coupling onto the balloon valve, and Steelyard cranked open the tank. The balloon began to inflate instantly. There were a pair of infrared strobes attached to it to make it visible to the pilots without drawing too much attention from the enemy.
Crosswhite fired on full auto to drive back a group of ten, spotting them encroaching through the rocks to the east. He dropped the magazine and quickly switched it out. “They’re loading into trucks over by the village,” he said to Sandra. “Find out if Big Ten has an angle on those pricks to the east, honey.”
“Big Ten,” Sandra called over the radio, struggling against unconsciousness. “Can you see the trucks to the east? Over?”
“Roger, Track Star. We don’t have the angle. We’re lining up for the final run. Sit tight.”
As the balloon raced toward the sky, Gil gimped over to pick Sandra up. She passed out in his arms, and the PRC-112 fell to the ground. “You got the radio, Dan. We gotta hook her up.”
“Roger that.” Crosswhite continued to fire on the enemy. “Here come those fucking trucks, Gil!”
Gil glanced over his shoulder through the monocular to see three pickups full of men rolling out of the village 1,500 meters to the south. He set Sandra down, and with Steelyard’s help they got her quickly buckled into the harness.
“Thank Christ there’s no wind,” Steelyard said, looking up at the balloon now swaying gently at the end of its tether five hundred feet off the deck. “Brux has to get this on the first run, or she’s had it.”
“Sit with her, Chief.” Gil grabbed up the AK-47. “I’m going to help Dan.”
“Be right behind you the second she’s off the ground, Gilligan.”
Gil could see the Spectre dropping to the deck on the far side of the valley, racing toward the village. He nearly swallowed his tongue when he saw a pair of RPGs go streaking up into the sky. One of the rockets struck the outboard starboard engine. It started to burn immediately.
The AC-130J slewed off course to the right and began to lose altitude.
“Holy Jesus,” Crosswhite said. “We’re fucked.”
59
AC-130J SPECTRE GUNSHIP,
in the sky over the Panjshir Valley
Brux and the copilot hauled back on the yoke with all their strength to level the aircraft at two hundred feet. Brux cut the fuel to the outboard engine and feathered the prop, hitting the fire suppression system.
“We gotta go around again!” the copilot said, fighting the yoke to help bring the plane back on course.
“No!” Brux said. “We can’t risk that!”
“We don’t have enough altitude, John! We came in too low!”
“Just get us back on fucking course! There’s still time to bank into the fucking line!”
“Christ!” Dave shouted, seeing the balloon looming above them as they raced toward the line. “There won’t be enough line below us. She’s gonna smack into the bottom of the fucking plane, John!”
Brux chopped the throttles, and together they hauled back on the yoke to gain another fifty feet of altitude.
“We’re gonna miss it!” Dave shouted.
“No, we’re not!” Brux kicked the rudder to swing the tail of the aircraft around just enough so that the far left edge of the V-shaped pickup yoke, extending from the front of the Spectre, caught the line less than a foot inside of the left turnbuckle. The line rode the yoke down into the eye and locked into the Skyhook at the bottom of the V, snapping against the windscreen and slapping back over the top of the fuselage, tearing away from the balloon as it was designed to do.
The unconscious Sandra was snatched up into the sky with little more force than that of an opening parachute and disappeared into the night. As the AC-130J leveled off, the line extending from her harness ascended to a parallel position with the bottom of the aircraft. She trailed seventy-five feet behind the plane, twisting slowly in the wind as the load master reached down from the end of the ramp with a retrieving hook attached to a long pole to grab the line. After the line was hooked, he and one of the gunners ran the line through a pulley anchored over the ramp and fed it back into a winch that reeled Sandra up into the plane.
Within three minutes of being snatched from the ground, she was lying on the deck with an Air Force medic starting an IV of O-negative blood.
John Brux appeared a minute later and knelt beside her to take her hand, both seeing and smelling that his wife was covered in filth. When he looked into her face, he thought she was dead. “Is she going to make it?” he asked, shattered by what he saw.
The medic nodded. “Her vitals are weak, but not that weak. She should make it if we haul ass for home. No way can we afford to stick around and help.”
Brux nodded, shaken to his core by the feel of Sandra’s missing ring finger. “Roger. I gotta get back up front.” He felt Sandra’s grip tighten and looked down to see her looking up at him in the red glow of the cargo hold.
“Baby, I’m so sorry for everything!”
His face contorted, and he leaned down to kiss her filth-covered face, fighting the deluge of emotions threatening to break him down. “I love you! I gotta go fly the plane now.”
“Okay,” she said. “Love you.”
He went forward and strapped himself back into his seat, taking the yoke and wiping his eyes on his upper arms.
“She okay?” Dave asked.
“For now,” Brux choked, checking the starboard outboard engine to make sure the fire was still out. “Jesus Christ, Dave, she’s a goddamn mess. I don’t even fucking recognize her.”
Dave reached across and grabbed his shoulder. “Hey, you did it, man. You got her the fuck out of there. Everything else from here on is fucking gravy.”
“Yeah?” Brux said. “What about them back there?” He thumbed over his shoulder. “We have to leave them, and help is still ten minutes out.”
Dave shook his head. “We can’t worry about them. They volunteered for this same as you and me . . . same as everybody on this plane. They’re down there for Sandra. Now get on the fucking radio.”
Brux keyed the radio. “Big Ten to Typhoon. Big Ten to Typhoon. Do you copy? Over.”
“Roger, Big Ten. Is she up there with you now? Over.”
“Roger that, Typhoon. Be advised . . . be advised we have to bug out on you. She’s lost too much blood. Over.”
“Roger t
hat, Big Ten. We knew that already. Godspeed!”
Brux choked up and Dave took over the radio.
“Typhoon, be advised that Big Ten is very grateful for all your help. Over.”
“We’re grateful for yours, Big Ten! Gotta get back to the fight now. Typhoon out.”
60
AFGHANISTAN,
Kabul, Central Command
By now, Couture and the others in Central Command were watching the battle via satellite in addition to the UAV feed, providing them a more expansive view of the valley. People came and went from the room like bees working a hive, delivering communiqués from DC, Langley, and various other locations from inside the ATO.
Couture stared at the screen where Gil and his compatriots were taking cover behind a pickup truck that Crosswhite had disabled with a grenade. It was easy to see from the way all three men moved about that they were carrying wounds, slowly being picked apart. Their situation was perilous, to say the least, and degrading rapidly. A large HIK force numbering close to eighty had gathered west of their position on the far side of the river, and it was readily apparent that Gil and the others had no idea they were about to be caught in a lethal crossfire. They were too heavily engaged by the hundred or so men fanned out ninety yards in front of them to the southeast. What kept the enemy from overrunning their position from both directions was anyone’s guess at this point, but Couture assumed it must have something to do with their not having any idea how large a force they were up against.
“It’s a damn good thing these people have no command structure to speak of,” he said to no one in particular. “How long before those B-52s are over the target, Major?”
“Five minutes out, General.”
An RPG struck the pickup truck, and the entire screen was temporarily whited out.
Couture glanced at the UAV screen for a better picture, but it was obscured as well.