Operation Dark Heart (11 page)

As I was working one night, Kate Reese came by. It was on her computer that I’d seen a glimpse of a pair of those nice-looking legs during my first day in the SCIF. She’d gotten in the habit of stopping back into my section of the tent in the evenings to say hello. The 10th Mountain had nets of low-level sources that sometimes intersected with ours, who were after the bigger guys. Her job was to consolidate intel overnight for a report for General Vines’ briefing in the morning, look at the new info coming in, and put in the intelligence-collection requirements (what they needed to know and find) for the 10th Mountain intelligence-collection units in the field.

“I’m headed for the break tent for a cigar,” she said. “Want one?”

I did a double take. “A cigar?” It’s not often a woman asks you to share a cigar break with her. I was in the middle of an e-mail to Ray. “Let me finish this, and I’ll come on back in about five minutes.”

I had smoked cigars years ago, just after completing the Farm. I hadn’t had one in a while, but the thought of one sounded good.

Kate had brought an extra one for me. They were small Partagas that took about twenty minutes to smoke. The conversation between us was easy. First it was intel issues, then movies, and then family. She was twenty-four and came from a remote Alaskan town where everything was a plane ride away. Besides Natalie Portman, she also reminded me of Hilary Swank in the movie
Insomnia,
where Swank played a fresh-faced local detective investigating a bizarre murder in an Alaskan town. There was the same no-nonsense style, but also the same brown eyes, cheekbones, and smile. Kate had joined the army when she was twenty. Like me, but two decades later, she’d gone through intelligence training at Fort Huachuca, and we traded stories about frustrations and experiences there.

It was nice to have a pleasant conversation in the midst of this mayhem. Plus, there was definitely an attraction between us. That was OK—she was separated from her husband, who was the guy in the photo on her computer—and my relationship had ended as well. Still, I was careful.

We got in the habit of taking a cigar break together once a night about midnight. She dropped by after her initial surge of work was done and sat on the desk near me with her feet in a chair while I worked and then we headed for the break area. She had a cigar humidor, and I bought Cuban cigars at the Italian PX in Kabul when I commanded convoys into town, and I donated them to the humidor. Soon, she was riding shotgun for me about once a week on convoys.

Those times with her were a small, though welcome, distraction from the overall mission against the Taliban offense.

Just after the kickoff of combat operations for Mountain Viper, Ray called me late at night. His voice was urgent.

“Tony, I’ve got indications we’ve got a company-size Taliban near this village.” He named a grid coordinate—it was Deh Chopan, 100 miles northeast of Kandahar and one of the few villages in the rural Zabul province. One of his Afghan teams was in the area. It was in the heart of the Taliban activity. “We think they will overrun the place in the morning.”

“Ask your guys if there are any Paks in the area,” I told him. “I’ll go talk to Dave and see what he can get ** ********

I went over to Dave’s office. He was still working as well. “I just got this from Ray: a company-size Taliban element headed to Deh Chopan. What do you think?” I gave him the grid coordinates.

“Let me talk to Captain Knowles,” he said and turned to our foreign analyst. They worked with Dave in the SCIF, ******** **** **** *** ********** ** ***** *** ****** ****.

Capt. Mary Knowles looked up from her desk. “I’ve got indications of activity in the area.”

Dave and I headed outside the SCIF to the fires area in the Operations Center and grabbed Torres.

“We’ve got a company-size element. There is activity according to my folks and his guys have got eyes on target. They’re ready to take the village,” Dave told him.

“You sure?” snapped Torres.

“Indications are that the village elder has been resisting their advances. He told ’em to take a hike so they’re going to take it by force. Can we send anyone in to defend it?” asked Dave.

“Yeah, we got a company about 10 kilometers farther away in the mountains,” said Torres. He was thinking out loud. “We might be able to get airlift in to move them closer. I’ll have to check with aviation. Let’s get together at oh two hundred and decide what to do next.”

Torres gave an update to Ault and then to the aviation guys. Turns out a flight of Chinooks and Apaches was near one of the forward bases getting refueled. Torres gave him a verbal frago (fragmentary) order to change the existing order and then followed up a few minutes later with a written request.

About 0100, I got an e-mail from Ray. “Got a call from one of my guys. They’re about one klick (kilometer) away from the Taliban position. The Taliban are dispersing,” melting into the countryside to wait to launch an offensive soon on the village.

“Any indications of HVTs in the area?” I e-mailed back. HVTs are high-value targets like bin Laden, Hekmatyar, and Mullah Omar that the Leadership Targeting Cell was tasked to chase after.

“No.”

That was too bad for the LTC, but it meant we could go in guns blazing.

“Will advise you in an hour,” I typed back.

At 0200, we all gathered around the table in front of the big board in the SCIF.

“What do you got?” Torres asked.

“Indications are they’re dispersing for the moment.” The enemy knew the terrain. A lot of them were from the area, had been recruited, and had gone to Pakistan to train and had come back to try to retake these areas for the Taliban.

Torres nodded in satisfaction. “That’s good news. I’m going to move the 10th Mountain guys into the village while they’re still dispersed, and I’ll send a squad around back—to the east of the village—to cut them off.” We had to block off the road into Deh Chopan because we knew they were resupplying on motorcycles. We didn’t want them to be reinforced from Pakistan.

Torres went over to the map. “Can you tell me how they’re set up?”

I traced my hand along a ridgeline southeast of the village. “They’re along there. Indications are they’re lying low and will attempt a dawn attack.”

We disbanded, and I shot an e-mail back to Ray. “Make sure your guys know we have troops in the area.”

“What do you need now?” he e-mailed back.

“Keep one of your guys on the road to watch them. Advise when they try to move out.”

“Standing by,” he e-mailed back.

Dave and I were out back talking to each other, plotting things out on a map. Torres let us know that the 10th Mountain guys were expected to be set up before dawn. They were coming in from the northwest so they could move in quietly.

I got back on the phone with Ray. “My guys tell me the ACM are starting to advance toward the village. They’re coming from the east and the southeast.”

This is what we had been waiting for. The Taliban were on the attack.

7

FORCE ON FORCE

IN the past five days, the small force of two reinforced companies of 10th Mountain soldiers and a handful of Special Forces soldiers, along with Afghan National Army help, had been humping up and down the freakin’ mountains in continuous engagement with the ACM farther north of Deh Chopan. (ACMs were Anti-Coalition Militia … the Taliban to you or me.) This was officially a brigade combat team that, in reality, could not measure up to battalion strength. The fact that these kids could hang with this level of stress was a testament to their training and leadership.

At the SCIF, Torres had Colonel Ault issue the full range of orders to set into motion a movement of men, helicopters, and material to try to protect Deh Chopan. On Rob’s satellite images, I inspected the thick-walled mud huts in the small village. They reminded me of Bedrock, the cartoon town that the Flintstones lived in. For a moment, it was interesting to contemplate the Taliban as a bunch of Fred Flintstones. Nah. I couldn’t recall ever seeing a fat Taliban.

Dozens of DCU-clad officers sitting in the basketball court–sized operations tent, buffeted by periodic hurricanelike wind surges that rattled the tent down to the frame, began sending out information and orders to the commanders of the soldiers and aviators to choreograph the complex ballet of destruction.

With the detailed intelligence we had received from Ray’s assets, and continuous confirmation from JSTARS orbiting just over the Indian Ocean, a major engagement was about to occur. We believed we had the upper hand. Then again, this was Afghanistan. We were up against a hardened force of suicidal fighters who knew the terrain better than we did.

Within minutes, electronic messages were sent to the aviation units from the desk officers in the Operations Center directing a flight of three CH-47s and two AH-64 Apaches to be prepared to securely pick up the two reinforced companies of infantry that would, hopefully, move approximately 60 miles in less than eight hours to catch the Taliban by surprise before they could infect another village. They would be picked up close to dawn, in rugged mountain terrain. The CH-47 pilots had learned, adapted, and become skilled at swinging the massive twin-rotor medium-lift helicopters around in that environment. In many ways, the CH-47 was proving to be a better combat helicopter in the mountains than the single-rotor UH-60 Black Hawk because of the inherently superior lift of two rotors.

At midnight, the company commanders and platoon leaders of the 10th Mountain Strike Brigade would be huddling in the frigid mountain air, receiving and discussing their new instructions. In small, temporary command posts, they would sit under a bluff, or in a small mud hut that they had found and occupied, using red lights and detailed maps to conduct hasty planning, and assessing the best approaches into Deh Chopan. The weather, the known and expected Taliban strength, the timeline, the number of MREs each man had to sustain himself during the assault, and, most important, which squads would conduct the assault/occupation and which would be designated to perform the “shaping attack” to cut off and block the Taliban from retreating back to Pakistan—all these were factors. They had to prevent reinforcement or resupply by the hundreds of motorcycle couriers that the Taliban were now employing to support their invasion.

The young GIs must have thought Afghanistan would be a cakewalk, if they had believed the propaganda. The war here was over, right? It had been in all the newspapers. Rumsfeld had declared it. Taliban vanquished and al Qaeda but a whisper in the dark recesses of lost mountain villages.

Right.

Now, based on someone’s idea of intelligence, these GIs were on the move. I sat at my desk and stared at my computer screen that night and thought about what was to come. These kids, no more than twenty years old for the most part, were taking it on faith that someone out there (myself and the rest of the CJTF 180 intelligence team) knew what the hell we were doing.

At times, it was difficult for me to consider that my job—to task, collect, recover, and distribute intelligence, then recommend action—would mean life or death for these brave young men. It was tough to see the results of violence that I’d wrought in the form of a bombed-out ridge—or maybe even a body that was one of our own.

I had recently attended an Honor Review for a Navy SEAL. Everyone—and I mean everyone—in Bagram came to Disney Boulevard (the paved road that ran through Bagram paralleling the air strip) and rendered honors as he passed. It was near sunset, and the road was lined with people standing shoulder to shoulder. There was an eerie calm, for Bagram, as the SEALs walked in formation behind him. In their civilian clothes and beards, the rugged operatives looked like a ragtag group of renegades, but they walked in formation with crispness and certainty in their steps. You just knew these guys were true warriors—true patriots—and that this death had affected them deeply.

In the SCIF that night, I contemplated my “weapons”—a computer, a phone, and my decades of experience in intelligence. My mission was to do the best damned job I could to help keep these GIs effective, deadly, and always in the right place at the right time.

I’d never felt my responsibility as heavily as I did that night.

The connection between action and reaction, decision and execution; intake and execution of concepts; this was the use of intelligence information in its purest form to affect the real battle.

This 10th Mountain band of brothers had been baptized in the ways of modern warfare by retaking the vital Moray mountain pass just days earlier, but there would be no time to celebrate or note the event by much more than a few scrawls in personal journals.

With orders issued by CJTF 180 that directed the soldiers to rally at the assembly area for pickup, the CH-47s were refueled and flying, and crews—ever watchful for the telltale glow of an SA-7 or Stinger missile rocketing up from the mountainside in the partial darkness of a half-moon night—choppered over the silent mountains en route to collecting the two companies of a very tired infantry.

On the leeward side of a plateau at just over 5,000 feet, a small landing zone was set up using chem lights that burned in the infrared spectrum so that anyone without night-vision goggles (NVGs) would not be able to see them, but they showed up clear and crisp to the aviators as they made their approach to the LZ. Two squads had been set up on and around the key compass points of the ridge to provide security and, if necessary, suppressive fire, should the Taliban attack during the consolidation of troops and load-up onto the choppers.