Not a Good Day to Die (32 page)

After their brush with catastrophe, Juliet turned their attention back to the Whale. The weather abated long enough for them to spy four “possibly armed” individuals on the east side of the mountain. A few hours later they spotted three enemy positions on the Whale. One was an observation post occupied by a single guerrilla at the top of the ridgeline facing west. Two other fighters sheltered nearby in a rock shack with a cloth cover. Fifty meters below them were concealed fighting positions. Shortly thereafter Juliet identified another observation post and four fighters moving between a pair of bunkers on the eastern side of the Whale. Kris and his men were starting to realize the Whale was honeycombed with fighting positions. Looking south, they could see a portion of Marzak a little over five kilometers away and reckoned that at least five or six buildings in the town were active.

The weather worsened as the day wore on. The cloud ceiling descending to 7,000 feet and visibility was restricted to 400 meters. Speedy repositioned India a little lower down their hillside to get under the cloud cover. He and his men were momentarily alarmed to hear gunfire from the direction of Juliet, but quickly concluded it was the same sort of marksmanship training Mako 31 had reported earlier. The Gray Fox signals interceptors became the main effort. They reported every intercept they made quickly back to Gardez. From there the information was sent to Bagram, where Fred Egerer used it to task the NSA’s spy planes and satellites for further collection.

Later that afternoon Mako 31 also spotted enemy positions on the Whale. Once darkness fell, Goody and his troops struck out for their OP. A thick blanket of fog covered their movement, but the going was even tougher than the previous night’s efforts. With snow and sleet stinging their faces, the five men picked their way carefully along the steep, jagged ridgeline, only too aware that the slightest misplaced step could send them tumbling hundreds of feet into the dark crevasses below. It took them six hours to cover about 1,000 meters. They halted at about 2 a.m. on the morning of March 1 in a depression about 250 meters southwest of the Finger’s highest point. This would be their mission support site where they would stash their rucks and rest. The next morning they would push out and establish the observation post a little farther along and on the eastern side of the crest. That night the AFO operations center passed a message to the teams in the valley: H-Hour was set for 6:30 a.m. March 2, less than thirty-six hours away.

BY
the evening of February 28 word was seeping into the Mountain and Rakkasan final rehearsals that the enemy might not be concentrated on the valley floor after all. At 8.30 p.m. the senior officers and NCOs from Chip Preysler’s 2-187 Infantry gathered in a dark GP Medium tent where Captain Denis Holtery, the battalion’s intelligence officer, told them the focus was turning to the mountains that surrounded the valley. “The change is we’re not so much worried about taking rounds from the town,” Preysler then explained to his men. The threat to the platoons conducting the air assault was more likely to come from the mountains on the Shahikot’s eastern side. “We may have an uphill fight,” in which case the plan was to send the Apaches against the enemy positions in the mountains, he said. There was also new thinking on when the air assault’s second lift would be committed, Preysler told them. Originally scheduled to touch down in the valley at dusk on D-Day, the plan now was for the second lift of infantry to arrive within three hours of the first lift, he said. (The reason was that the planners now considered it impossible to seal all the blocking positions without those additional forces.) However, despite the reports reaching Bagram of an enemy presence in the ridgelines around the valley, no effort was made to change the plan to accommodate these new facts.

The focus for most Rakkasans that day had not been on new intelligence from the Shahikot, but on the flyaway rehearsal Wiercinski used to tailor his load plans for the aircraft. The extra forty-eight hours they had gained courtesy of Hagenbeck’s weather call also gave the battalion commanders and command sergeants major more time to focus their soldiers’ minds on the mission. Their messages reflected the curious dichotomy that existed at the higher levels of command. On one hand, the plan and the forces used to execute it were a function of the expectation that the enemy would not put up a big fight. Hence the focus at the small unit level on how to screen crowds of civilians for the presence of guerrillas trying to escape. On the other hand, in the world of the infantry officer or NCO, it was considered almost criminal to allow your soldiers to go into a “real-world” mission without mentally steeling them for combat. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the meeting Preysler held with his subordinates that evening. Mark Nielsen, Preysler’s wiry sergeant major who commanded enormous respect among the battalion’s enlisted men, personified this hardheaded, combat-oriented mentality. His eyes sweeping the tent, he told the company first sergeants to scrub their lists of soldiers heading into the Shahikot and leave behind those they thought couldn’t cut it physically or mentally. “I don’t want any pussies going on this mission,” Nielsen said, glowering like a bulldog in the weak electric light. “There’s no pop-up targets this time, boys; there’s fucking real flesh and blood out there. Let’s get ’em on the ground, meet the enemy, and destroy him.”

Major Rick Busko, Preysler’s operations officer, reminded the infantrymen that the eyes of President Bush and everyone else in their chain of command would be on them in the Shahikot. “At the National Command Authority-level…this is the only game in town,” he said, adding that company commanders and first sergeants needed to tell their soldiers “now is the time to perform.” The message was getting through to the soldiers. As he stood in line outside the chow tent waiting for dinner, Sergeant David Dedo of 2-187’s Charlie Company reflected on the mission to come. “Osama bin Laden made a comment that U.S. soldiers are ‘paper tigers,’” he said. “Well, now he’s got a chance to find out.” But, he added, displaying the hard-boiled realism of an infantry NCO, “I don’t think this is going to be the new-age Normandy the 101
^st
is looking for.”

The Rakkasans also used the extra time to give some last-minute instruction on how to fight and survive in the frozen conditions they expected to find in the Shahikot. Standing on the hood of a Humvee on the edge of tent city, Staff Sergeant John Hodges, a squad leader in 2-187 Infantry’s A Troop, gave a cold-weather operations class to a walk-up crowd. Hodges had been stationed in Alaska for three years and had gone through cold-weather training at the Army’s Northern Warfare Training Center at Camp Greely. He ran through the basics that might never have occurred to soldiers unused to operating in sub-freezing temperatures. “In the cold it’s going to take two to three times as long to do anything,” he said. A simple task like loading a magazine could take ten to fifteen minutes in extreme conditions. It was vital to keep eating and drinking water, particularly at high altitude, Hodges said. Then he explained the three types of cold weather injuries—chilblains, hypothermia, and frostbite—and how to avoid them. Finally Hodges gazed around the crowd and asked whether there was anyone who had never seen snow before. Two soldiers raised their hands. “If you’ve never seen snow, don’t worry about it,” Hodges told them. “Here’s your chance, and the Army’s picking up the tab.”

26.

SHORTLY after dawn on an overcast March 1, Goody sent two Mako 31 snipers up the Finger to scout the location the team had selected for their observation post. The two SEALs inched forward for 500 meters along the rocky ridgeline until they could put eyes on the exact spot Goody and Blaber had agreed on. As they poked their heads above the rocks to get a good look, they got the shock of their lives. Someone had beaten them to it. There, in the lee of a large, jagged outcrop, on the very patch of ground on which they intended to establish their observation post, sat a gray-green tent big enough to sleep several people. As the commandos digested this unexpected turn of events, their eyes fastened on an even more unsettling sight. About fifteen meters up the rock-strewn slope, they discerned the outline of a tripod-mounted DShK wrapped tightly in blue plastic. The discovery was momentous. The position dominated the southern end of the valley—that, after all, was why the AFO operators wanted to occupy it—and overlooked the 700-meter gap through which TF Rakkasan’s helicopters were to fly between the Finger and the eastern ridge. With an antiaircraft range of 1,000 meters, the DShK was ideally located to shoot down the infantry-packed Chinooks due to fly into the valley in less than twenty-four hours. It would be Frank Wiercinski’s worst nightmare come to horrifying life.

The loss of even one Chinook full of Rakkasans would be a disaster from which Operation Anaconda might not recover. Troops would have to be dispatched from their previously assigned missions to secure the downed helicopter, all while enemy fire poured down on them from the mountainsides. Any reserves flown in would have to brave the same gauntlet of fire that had precipitated their arrival in the first place. But the DShK was positioned to deal an even more devastating blow to the operation. Wiercinski planned to bring his forward command post, containing himself, Savusa, Marye, Corkran and Air Force Captain Paul “Dino” Murray, the Rakkasans’ air liaison officer, into the valley on two Black Hawks and land just a few hundred meters farther north along and a little farther down the Finger from the DShK. At such close range it would be hard for the Al Qaida gunner to miss. As he emptied his weapon into the two American helicopters, even he would not have dreamed that the Black Hawks cartwheeling to the ground were carrying to their deaths not only the commander of the entire air assault force but also the commanders of his aviation task force and his only reserve, as well as his senior NCO and the officer responsible for coordinating close air support for the troops who survived the initial air assault. In the opening minutes of Anaconda a single heavy machine gunner would have dealt the operation a shattering blow.

“The success or failure of your mission will predicate the success or failure of the entire operation,” Blaber had told Goody. The AFO commander learned how truthfully he had spoken at 10:02 a.m., when India Team relayed a message from Mako 31 to the safe house stating the bare facts of their discovery: an unmanned DShK and a tent sitting on the observation post. The news validated Blaber’s bold decision to risk an infiltration of the Shahikot before D-Day. Without the audacity displayed by the AFO commander and his three recce teams, the staffs at Bagram would have remained ignorant of the DShK’s existence until the moment Task Force Rakkasan flew into a buzz saw of high-caliber bullets. This was a lesson for anyone who thought the U.S. military’s billions of dollars’ worth of spy satellites and surveillance aircraft obviated the need for ground reconnaissance. Despite the boasts at Bagram that “every national asset” was being focused on the valley, none of the satellites or spy planes—not even the Mi-17 helicopter the CIA had flown over the Shahikot the previous day with an operative filming the valley floor—had revealed either the tent or the weapon that could have spelled defeat for the Americans in the battle’s opening moments. Lou Bello, the Mountain fires planner, compared searching for a single DShK on a mountainside from the air to “looking for a needle in a haystack.” In the giant haystack that was the Shahikot Valley, Mako 31 had found a needle and it was pointing straight at the heart of Operation Anaconda.

The SEAL snipers used a Nikon Coolpix digital camera equipped with an eight-power telephoto lens to snap a few photos of the DShK and the tent. They marked the position’s coordinates with a Global Positioning System receiver then slipped away as low clouds and a sudden snowstorm appeared to cover their withdrawal. Once the weather cleared, they returned for a second look and were rewarded with an extended sighting of two fighters manning the position. One was a short, dark-haired, and bearded man with Mongol features—possibly an Uighur Chinese. The other, clearly in charge of the DShK, was a tall, clean-shaven Caucasian with reddish-brown hair—most likely one of Yuldeshev’s Uzbeks. They were well equipped for the elements. A blue five-gallon gas can just outside and a pipe protruding from the roof indicated that their tent was heated. The shorter fighter wore a pale tunic, a sleeveless jacket, and what appeared to be a wool hat. The taller man wore a thick red Gore-Tex jacket, a Polartec fleece jacket tied around his waist, Russian-style camouflage pants, and Adidas sneakers. Each fighter appeared fit and healthy. The Uzbek-looking guerrilla would shadow-box in his spare time. Strolling between machine gun and tent with his hands in his pockets, he would not have looked out of place on any main street in Western Europe or North America.

The SEALs clicked off a few more photos and crept back to the mission support site, about 200 meters northwest of the DShK. From there, Goody sent several photos and a report back to Blaber using a Toshiba Libretto mini-laptop hooked via a USB port to the satellite radio. To emphasize the importance of the material, Goody labeled the photos and the report “eyes only,” his way of saying they were for Blaber only. The SEALs had alone seen two enemy fighters, but they reckoned as many as five might be occupying the position. Mako 31’s leader also had an urgent question for Blaber, prompted by the machine gunner’s European features: “Are there Brits up here?” He wanted to make sure he wasn’t about to get in a firefight with the SAS. “It was so fantastical seeing this guy with no beard and red hair and Gore-Tex [and] BDU pants, they had a hard time believing that’s what the enemy was,” recalled an operator. “And the guy did look like he could have been British. He could have been American, too. But they figured they knew where all the American special ops guys were.” Blaber assured Goody there were no Brits in the area, then he forwarded the photos to Jimmy in Bagram, who in turn sent them to Hagenbeck and to Masirah. Blaber followed up with a call to Hagenbeck. The AFO commander underlined his view that the fighters seen by Mako 31 and Juliet were proof the enemy was in the mountains. But despite the enemy presence, Blaber told the Mountain commander that with the three AFO teams occupying dominant terrain, “we are in a position to control the valley.” “Good job,” Hagenbeck replied.