The Only Thing Worth Dying For (14 page)

“I think they might be friendlies,” Mike whispered.

“That’s what I’m thinking too,” said Mag.

“They’re going to find us here,” said Ronnie. “We should initiate, before they get here.”

“All right,” said Mag. “Mike, you know Farsi. You go forward a bit, away from this position. I’ll be right behind you. Everybody else, cover us. I’ve got the lead man. We’ll be back in a hurry if this goes bad.”

Mag and Mike double-checked the accessibility of their grenades—which they would use in the event of a rapid retreat—and with carbines aimed, crawled forward, carefully avoiding the shrubs that crackled when crushed. “I’ll be right with you,” Mag told Mike. “If my guy so much as raises that rifle, I’ll light him up.”

Thirty yards away from the Afghans, Mike yelled out in Farsi, “Are you a friend of Karzai?”

If the men were startled, they didn’t show it. Nobody raised a weapon. Someone answered in a dialect Mike couldn’t understand, though he thought he might have heard the word
Hamid
.

Two additional armed men appeared behind the others.

“Are you a friend of Hamid Karzai?” Mike shouted again in Farsi.

The response was jubilant. “Yes! Yes! We are friends of Hamid Karzai!”

“Where is Karzai?!”

“We can take you to him. It is not far!”

Mag and Mike had no way of knowing whether these strangers were telling the truth, but there was no better option than to follow them. They returned to Ronnie and Zepeda, went back to their gear cache, and strapped their go-to-hell packs on top of their rucksacks, except for Mike, whose pack held the bulk of the shared team equipment from the last-minute reorganization and was too heavy to carry. The four men concealed the pack, as well as the extra duffel bags containing equipment and medical supplies for the local population, and wrote down the GPS coordinates; the Afghans assured them that Karzai would send for the gear soon.

For an hour, they lugged their rucks over loose talus, powdery sand, uneven goat trails, and, at one point, a field of gopher tunnels where their legs punched through the surface every few steps. After a mile, Mag’s muscles were burning. He wondered if he could continue much farther carrying a 200-pound load, equal to his own body weight, and immediately chastised himself for the thought.

The only time Mag had quit anything was in the late 1980s, during the dreaded crossover exercise of the qualification for a Special Forces scuba team: Students, exhausted from a full day of physical training, separate into two groups at opposite sides of a pool, don their diving equipment—mask, fins, weight belt, air tank—and hold their breath while crossing back and forth underwater and trying to avoid running into each other. “Shark” instructors stand by, waiting to wrestle students to the bottom if they attempt to catch a breath or lose a piece of equipment. Pushed to the point of delirium, Mag, like many others, gave up when he felt he was just shy of drowning, and his sergeant kicked him off the team, saying, “I don’t have room for quitters.” Mag swore then that he would never quit anything again.

Two years later he was in Pakistan with ODA 573—a mountain team—learning high-altitude mountaineering at 21,000 feet when a teammate developed pulmonary edema. Another had cerebral edema, and both were medevaced out of the country. Suffering severe dysentery himself, Mag dropped from 200 pounds to 150 pounds in three weeks. Though sick, he crossed a glacier to aid a civilian mountaineer with pulmonary edema and fell into a crevasse on the way back. He was able to extricate himself but was hypothermic by the time he
staggered into base camp. Through it all, he refused to be medevaced. “I will not quit until we complete the exercise, sir,” Mag told his superior. “I’ll die before you get me off this mountain.”

Back in the mountains of Uruzgan, Ronnie grunted. “Fucking hell,” he said. “This is the last klick [kilometer] they’re getting out of Junior.”

“I hear that, brother,” Mag replied.

Ahead of them, Mike halted. “We’ve got some lights.”

Mag and Ronnie lowered themselves onto their knees to ease their loads and watched as dots of light from distant flashlights bobbed down the mountain, traversing the slope in their direction.

Their guides moved forward until they were thirty yards from the approaching group, while the Americans found cover behind a rock pile. They heard yelling, then one of the Afghans returned to Mike and said in Farsi, “We have found your friends. There”—he pointed—“is Hamid Karzai.”

Mike studied the other group of men, searching for weapons. A pair of white shoes glowed through his NODs, then he saw the two Western-dressed CIA spooks, Casper and Charlie, farther back.

“That’s him,” said Mike. “That’s Hamid.”

Karzai came toward them. “Hello, hello!” he said. “Welcome to Uruzgan.”

When Mag asked about the equipment they’d left behind, Karzai spoke a few words to the Afghans, then said in English, “They are from the same village where we are going; they know where it is and will bring it to you.”

“They can be trusted?” asked Mike.

“They can be trusted,” replied Karzai.

“You know,” Mike said with a lowered voice, “we thought these guys were Taliban.”

“Hmmm,” said Karzai. “They might be.”

A few minutes after meeting up with Karzai, Mag heard Dan’s voice through the static on his radio.

“Texas One Two,” Mag radioed back, “your lost sheep are coming in. Don’t open up on us.”

Nearly three long, tense hours had passed since the infiltration, and now, with the missing Americans on their way, everybody became restless, uneasy about lingering so close to the landing zone.

“It will be good to get the hell out of here,” said Dan a moment after sending Task Force Dagger a SITREP.

“The funny thing is that this is pretty much how bad it goes in training,” Amerine said.

“Yup,” said JD. “They say to train as you fight. I think we got it backwards.”

Forty-five minutes later, the glow of flashlights announced the arrival of the men.

“Stay close to Hamid,” JD said to Amerine. “And don’t let those knuckleheads pull that shit again,” he added, referring to the CIA spooks running off on their own.

“Roger that,” said Amerine. He eyed Casper as he rejoined his men, but this wasn’t the time for a confrontation. They needed to get moving.

No more than two minutes after the arrival of Mag, Mike, and Ronnie, who received some pats on the back, ODA 574 and the spooks moved out as a group, following Karzai and his Pashtun tribesmen—the first of his supposed three hundred guerrillas—down off the ridge toward the southern end of the narrowing valley. There, the gently sloping trail plunged into a steeper ravine, a drainage of loose rocks and boulders that elicited grunts and growls from the Americans trying to keep pace with the nimble guerrillas, whose flashlights flickered like fireflies as they glided across the rough terrain. For the team, the lights acted as a point of reference from which to read the terrain and anticipate an ambush, which would likely come uphill from the Afghans.

After a knee-jarring two-hour descent in a southwestern direction, the lights ahead paused in a group. Carefully walking forward to join the guerrillas, Amerine saw that they were at the end of the trail, or so it seemed. He peered over the edge of a cliff, seeing nothing but a black void that appeared impassable without ropes and climbing gear.

The guerrillas, having stopped just long enough for the Americans to catch up, continued on, squeezing through a small cleft marked with miniature rock cairns. Amerine could hear the men shuffling downward.

“We have to keep moving,” said JD. He edged himself past Amerine farther over the rim of the cliff, then came back. “I can make out some vehicles below.”

“How far below?” asked Dan, third in line.

“Pretty damn far.”

“I’m going to be really pissed if I fall off this fucking cliff,” said Dan as the men began to move down a two-foot-wide trail chiseled into the rock. It was dusted with patches of gritty sand that slid like ball bearings under their boots, throwing off their top-heavy balance. At one point someone shouted “Rock!” and a loose stone fell down the face above them, bounced once on the narrow ledge, and after seconds of silence clattered onto the ground below. Even though JD remained up top, using the Americans at the end of the line to maintain security, they were horribly exposed.

It took nearly forty-five minutes for the entire team to reach the bottom, where the Afghans waved for them to get into the two waiting vehicles—a truck and a minivan.

“We can’t fit seventeen of us in there,” said Ronnie.

Amerine looked at his map and GPS. They were about three miles north of War Jan and needed to get farther away from the landing zone as fast as possible.

“What are we doing?” JD asked Amerine.

“No choice,” he said, glancing at his men, then at the truck and the minivan. “Get them inside, however you can fit them.”

“We’re screwed if we’re attacked,” said Mike.

“I know. But we’re just as screwed if we stay here,” said Amerine.

All seventeen Americans crammed into the vehicles, with Dan slithering into the minivan last atop shoulders and gear, his body tight against the roof. Amerine sat next to the Afghan driving the minivan and wondered if he was making the worst tactical decision of his career. Their fate was completely in the hands of these guerrillas, whom they knew only through Karzai. If they hit a checkpoint, ODA 574
would be executing every battle drill in the book—assuming they could get out of the vehicles in the first place.

They drove west down the rutted mountain track a short distance, then turned north on a better-maintained road that paralleled the Helmand River. The GPS in Amerine’s hand indicated that they were moving away from War Jan, their intended destination. Karzai, the only translator, was in the other vehicle.
Another mistake,
thought Amerine.
I should have stayed with him
. He glanced to his left. In the light from the dashboard, he could see that the driver was smiling as he hunched over the steering wheel, peering through a windshield fogged up from body heat. After two miles, Amerine saw the dull glow of lights ahead. His M9 was holstered; he preferred his carbine, which was resting on the floorboard, barrel pointing downward, sending vibrations from the road into his arm.

Amerine had never felt so inept or so vulnerable.

The vehicles stopped in front of a mud wall, their headlights illuminating a doorway that was opening before the engines shut down. A man wearing an Afghan turban, known as a
lungee
, and holding a long-barreled rifle in one hand leaned out and smiled.

Stove fires and kerosene lanterns behind the wall painted the enclosed adobe-like buildings in soft light. The Taliban barricade Amerine had imagined was just a mountain hamlet, its main street lined with traditional Afghan homes such as this one—compounds composed of a central courtyard and one to several buildings surrounded by an exterior wall.

Mag crawled out of the dank interior of the minivan into the cold air, recognizing what he called “yeti,” the odor that made him nostalgic for past 5th Group assignments: a hint of city dump, a pinch of campfire, and a dash of sewage. He inhaled deeply and thought,
Smells like a mission
.

The rest of ODA 574 followed suit, surveying their surroundings as they lugged gear into the compound. They’d all “flown” the streets of War Jan on Big Mama and studied the maps meticulously
while formulating their plan. They’d plotted out locations for airdrops, designated rally points, and strategized avenues for retreat,
all pretty fucking major things
, thought Mike as it dawned on him:
This is not War Jan.

Mike walked over to Amerine and said, “Sir, this isn’t—”

“Yeah, I got that,” Amerine cut him off. “I’m going to go see what’s going on.”

Tired but on edge, the Green Berets went about their individual tasks. JD immediately assigned Mike, Mag, and Ronnie to security, and Mike and Mag headed straight to the compound’s far wall, both of them checking for the same thing—a back door. There wasn’t one.
Okay,
Mike thought,
if these fuckers turn on us, how are we going to defend ourselves?
He stood on a crate and peered into an adjacent compound.
I’ll toss a grenade over this wall; if they come in the front, there will be somebody covering the back.

Setting up satellite antennas, Dan, Alex, and Wes linked into the U.S. military’s secure communications network and sent an encrypted SITREP to Task Force Dagger. Ken watched over ODA 574’s gear while Ronnie kept an eye on the half-dozen armed Afghans mingling near the entrance to the narrow courtyard, and Mag walked around shaking hands with every Afghan with a gun, sharing cigarettes and seeing if his “street sense” picked up any bad vibes. Unarmed men began to enter the courtyard, seating themselves around its walls.

Inside a twelve-foot-square room with an open stove exposing hot coals in the corner, Amerine, Casper, and Karzai sat on brightly colored hand-woven carpets with a group of tribal elders. A young man offered tea and something that looked like bread pudding from a clay pot; Amerine followed Karzai’s lead in accepting both. The smell of what Amerine would come to call Afghan shepherd’s pie—flat bread soaked in broth and layered with a stew of meat, lentils, and raisins—was tantalizing, and he ate it heartily, much to the pleasure of the man seated closest to Karzai, whom he introduced as Haji Badhur.

“This is Haji Badhur’s village,” Karzai said. “He has agreed to let us stay here; this will be our base.”

“So we aren’t going to operate from War Jan?” asked Amerine.

“No,” said Karzai. “This is near the outskirts of War Jan. Haji Badhur thought this was a better location for us.”

With Casper’s earlier misgivings about War Jan, Amerine wondered if the spook had somehow orchestrated this change in plans. Not wanting to seem ungrateful for the hospitality, however, he asked no more questions. Instead, he smiled and thanked Haji Badhur. “I look forward to seeing your village after the sun rises,” he said, speaking directly to the man, who he sensed would appreciate a BFK as a gift.