Full Assault Mode (10 page)

“Speculation!” Mason blurted.

Kolt continued. “Sir, we have a responsibility here to execute this mission. If Haji Mohammed Ghafour was important enough to send Shaft on a singleton mission four days ago, then how can the target not be important now?” Kolt took inventory of his inflection. He took a deep breath and broke eye contact with the admiral. No need to push it.

You could have heard a pin drop. Kolt looked around the room and could see that his passionate comments startled the others. All of the other leaders in the room knew who Kolt was. And most actually liked his aggressiveness and thought he was in it for the right reasons. But this didn’t keep them from becoming shocked by Kolt’s tone with the admiral. Well, everyone except the guy in command of the assault helicopters. CW4 Bill Smith stepped up.

“Admiral Mason, sir,” Smitty said, his voice characteristically even-toned and without emotion, like all good pilots. “The aircraft are one-hundred-percent full-mission-profile ready. We are fully prepared and willing to execute this tonight.”

Admiral Mason stared at Smitty for an uncomfortable ten seconds or so. It was clear Mason was searching for the guts to launch the force. Or the balls to court-martial everyone in the damn room. He turned to the JSOC command sergeant major, Sergeant Major Castor. Castor had been typically back-row quiet up to this point. He knew when to interject and when to let a subordinate commander like Kolt speak for himself. Castor served with Kolt in the Unit years ago before making too much rank and moving up to JSOC, scratching and bitching the entire way.

“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.