The Only Thing Worth Dying For (34 page)

Brent dropped it next to the Afghans and did his best to explain to them what it was for, hoping they would leave it alone.

“Okay,” said Amerine. “Let’s keep moving.”

JD checked his watch. The split team had been gone almost fifteen minutes, and the gunfire to the west was getting louder. Then, down by the bridge, they heard the deep rumble of the DShK as it began to belt tracer rounds north and northeast into the desert. If these were local Taliban, JD realized, their families might still be in Shawali Kowt, which stood dangerously close to the Alamo. In that case, they would most likely attack with small arms and RPGs, not the DShK. On the other hand, they might move the heavy Soviet machine gun closer to the Americans.

Finally, Amerine’s voice crackled over the radio. “We’re on our way back. What’s the status of Spectre?”

“It will be on station in five minutes,” JD said.

The six men came into view, alone.

“Did you find any of our guys out there?” JD asked when they reached his position on the Alamo.

“Two groups on the berm,” said Amerine. “Wouldn’t budge, so we marked them with IR chemlites.”

“IR chem?” said Alex, putting down his microphone to listen.

“Yeah. Fifteen hundred meters out, the other about seven hundred,” said Amerine. “Okay, your turn, JD. Get out to the berm, spot for the enemy, and get your asses back directly if things get hot.”

Infrared lights blinking on their shoulders, JD, Ronnie, Victor, Dan, and Brent moved out.

“AC-130 is coming on station now,” said Alex.

The roar of the AC-130’s four turboprop engines, familiar to the men after years of airborne missions, filled the air as JD’s split team quickly covered the 150 yards to the berm and formed a line across the top.

“We are in position,” he radioed back.

“What do you see?” Amerine asked.

“The enemy is to the west of us and advancing west-northwest about a klick away. They are well north of the berm.”

Alex relayed the four friendly positions—the Alamo, JD’s men, and the two groups of guerrillas—to the gunship. Large groups of enemy dismounts beyond the berm were pushing north, he told the pilot, while their own guerrillas were in vehicles. There could be Taliban vehicles in the mix, however, since nobody could be sure that none had crossed the river.

“It’s a mess out there; the pilots aren’t sure who is who,” Alex said to Amerine. “JD spotted a group coming around over there. Watch this.”

An infrared spotlight—which the men could see through their NODs—poured down from the Spectre north of JD’s position.

JD came on the radio and said, “The enemy is east of that spot about five hundred meters.”

“Is Spectre cleared hot?” Alex asked Amerine.

“Yup. Put them to work.”

The gunship banked into an orbit over the target, and long streaks of flame, each composed of hundreds of bullets, began pounding a group of twenty to thirty Taliban who had been following a road that ran to Damana.

“They’re dead,” said Alex.

Behind them, Fox was on the radio finally talking to Casper. “Most of our guerrillas retreated back to you in Damana,” Fox said. “We need you to get them to come back down.”

And that’s why we needed you there, and not here,
thought Amerine.

“The enemy is so scattered I have no idea how we’re doing,” said Alex. “But this is definitely gonna scare the shit out of them.”

A moment later, the gunship took out another target farther north.

“Sucks to be the Taliban tonight,” said Mag.

About an hour and a half after the initial attack began, the Taliban stopped firing and vanished into the night.

“Gunship isn’t seeing anything between Damana and Shawali Kowt,” said Alex.

“Start working targets south of the river,” said Amerine. “Usual rules of engagement: Look for any convoys coming this way.”

It appeared that the AC-130 had forced the Taliban to retreat, but ODA 574 couldn’t chance it. They had to assume the enemy was still out there. For hours the men had missed a bunker they were standing on top of. What tunnel systems and camouflaged trenches did the surrounding desert, orchards, and structures conceal? Amerine decided that he’d better keep the team close in case there were any more surprises.

“Wes,” he said, “call JD and have him come back.”

While the gunship continued to orbit the immediate vicinity, the team stayed at 100 percent security, positioned close to one another along the Alamo’s upper slopes, with Bari Gul’s men covering the eastern end. IR chemlites scattered down the slopes marked their location for the AC-130.

Around midnight, Smith, who had reassembled his commo equipment near the Alamo’s highest point and had spent the last hour sending SITREPs to Task Force Dagger, realized that he’d missed the escape-and-recovery plan. If the Alamo were overrun, he had no idea what to do.

“Sir,” he asked Bolduc, “what’s the evac plan?”

“Nobody’s coming to get us,” Bolduc said. “We’re staying here.”

By four in the morning, the AC-130 had run out of targets after engaging two small convoys on the Kandahar Road, and JD downgraded security to 50 percent. Dan, who had joined Smith at his position, had taken second shift and was rolled up in a ball on the ground, shivering in his sleep. Pulling the poncho liner from his go-to-hell pack, Smith laid it over Dan, tucking the edges between his shoulders and the dirt.

Lying prone at the top of the Alamo, Smith fought to stay awake as he looked down the barrel of his rifle toward the river. Aside from his own chattering teeth, it was mostly quiet, and the monotonous
“mrrrr” of the big propeller plane circling overhead began to lull him to sleep. He bit his lip, which silenced his teeth but did little for his eyes, which struggled to stay open. Then the AC-130’s guns erupted again, firing at a target to the west and giving Smith one more surge of adrenaline to get him through the shift.

At dawn on December 4, the smoke from cooking fires in Shawali Kowt began to drift across the Alamo, where the sun warmed the men covered in the slime of day-old sweat and dirt. Bari Gul’s men were shuffling around the eastern end of the hill, some of them arranging prayer rugs, when Mag opened his eyes.

“Can’t believe it’s morning already,” he said.

“Are you kidding me?” Mike said. “That was one of the longest nights of my life.”

In the morning light, the ridgeline across the river was more jagged than Amerine remembered; the contrast between its rusty color and the clear blue sky sharpened its features.

“I see four dudes with RPGs,” said Mike, looking toward the bridge with binoculars.

“I’ve got air,” said Alex.

With his binoculars, Amerine saw the four Taliban walking west, toward the bridge, along the road on the other side of the river. There was no need to consult with Karzai; these were enemy combatants nowhere near civilian buildings. But looking over at Fox and Bolduc, Amerine wondered if they had any idea what Karzai was up to in Damana, and if they intended to join him.

“Let’s kill those guys,” said Amerine, his voice flat. “What do we have, Alex?”

“Clear line of sight. Let’s lase them.”

Mike was already on it, having set up the SOFLAM—which estimates the distance to a target and marks it for laser-guided munitions—on a tripod. All of the previous bombs had been guided by the aircrafts’ own laser marker targeting systems; this was the team’s first use of a SOFLAM on this mission.

Within three minutes, Alex had talked an F-18 pilot onto the target’s position, confirmed that it was cleared hot by the captain, and chosen a 500-pound laser-guided bomb from the jet’s weapons menu. Turning to Mike he said, “Laser on.”

“Lasing,” said Mike as he pointed the beam at the center of the four-man group.

Seconds later, black smoke and brown dust consumed the men, followed by a loud explosion.

“Damn!” somebody yelled, but otherwise the Alamo was quiet.

The cloud dissipated. Two of the Taliban, bloody and obviously injured, were dragging a body out of sight behind a rise. There was no sign of the fourth man.

Bolduc walked over to Mike to request a SOFLAM tutorial.

Hearing this, Mag muttered under his breath, “OJT” (on-the-job training). The presence of the brass continued to irritate him, and it only got worse a half hour later when JD informed ODA 574 that the rest of Fox’s staff would arrive that night.

Since their first day in Petawek, Fox had been coordinating to get his battalion staff in-country. They had solved the transportation problem by purchasing two new Toyota Tundra king cab trucks in Pakistan to be flown in with the men.

“How many more guys are coming?” Mag asked Amerine, taking advantage of a moment when Fox and Bolduc had moved out of earshot.

“Twelve. It’s not the entire battalion staff, just a command-and-control group.”

“Any ODAs coming with them?”

“Not that I’ve heard about,” Amerine said.

“Twelve battalion staff on this tiny hill is twelve too many,” said Mag. He suddenly realized that Smith was only two feet away, trying to ignore the conversation. “Shit,” said Mag. “No offense.”

Smith shrugged. “None taken,” he said.

Shortly before one o’clock that afternoon, the guerrillas who had fled to Damana returned to Shawali Kowt, honking their trucks’ horns
and holding their weapons overhead as though they had won the night’s battle. The men of ODA 574 watched in numb amusement, too tired to be angry at them for running away the night before. The fact that the guerrillas were able to return supported the evidence from aerial recon that their attackers had either been killed by the AC-130 in the desert between the two towns or escaped back to the southern side of the river.

Soon after, Karzai drove in with the CIA team, and Fox trotted down the hill to greet him.

“Looks like we won’t have to send Mag and Dan to Damana,” said JD to Amerine. “On the flip side, it sure isn’t a good idea for Hamid to be down here right now.”

“I know, but I would really rather keep him close to us after that mess last night,” said Amerine as he watched Karzai and his entourage take over a cinder-block building adjacent to the medical clinic.

When he walked down the hill, Amerine was greeted by the usual group of guerrillas guarding Karzai’s headquarters. Inside, Karzai was sitting with his circle of tribal leaders, Fox by his side.

“Hello, Jason,” Karzai said.

Amerine sat down. “I need your help, Hamid,” he said. “I have to organize a group to take control of the hill overlooking the bridge west of here. This will require a more elaborate explanation than Seylaab can manage, so could you translate? I’d like to get things moving right away.”

“Of course. Tell me what men you require.”

“I need Bashir. His men did very well yesterday. I will also take my friend Bari Gul.”

Seated across from Karzai, Bashir nodded when Karzai spoke to him.

“They will be ready in an hour,” Karzai said to Amerine.

Bashir, Bari Gul, and their men were assembled beside the Alamo, listening to Karzai translate the details of the plan.

JD’s split team and Bari Gul’s men would establish a “support by
fire” position on the berm a mile west of Shawali Kowt, overlooking ODA 574’s new objective—the hill with the ruins—six hundred yards to their south. Three PKM machine guns with a range of more than one thousand yards would provide support fire for an assault team led by Amerine. Once JD’s team was in place, Amerine’s team would drive to some compounds they had identified at the base of the hill. There they would lead Bashir’s men in a classic infantry assault to seize the ruins at its top.

“Four years at West Point and that’s all you come up with?” JD said to Amerine.

Admittedly, it wasn’t much; but the simpler the plan, the harder it would be for the guerrillas to mess up.

As the guerrillas dispersed after the briefing, Amerine took Bashir by the arm and led him over to Karzai.

“Can you ask Bashir if he’s clear on everything?” Amerine asked. Karzai uttered something in Pashto, and Bashir gave a nod. “He says his men are ready to take the hill.”

“See you on top,” JD said to Amerine just before he got in his truck shortly after 3
P.M.
to follow Bari Gul’s three vehicles to the western end of the berm.

Less than a mile down the road from Shawali Kowt, Bari Gul turned right, passed through a break in the berm, and headed into the desert. He made a U-turn and drove back to park on the north side of the berm, concealed from anyone who might have been watching from across the river. The hope was that their small convoy would appear as if it were heading back toward Damana.

JD parked alongside the others and hiked up the berm to recon the position before emplacing his men. He lay prone across the compacted ground at its top, the open desert behind him to the north. In front of him, to the south, the battlefield stretched across six hundred yards of farmland to the ruins of a fortress that looked like a sand castle eroding back into the hill it was built upon. Two hundred yards beyond that was the bridge across the Arghandab River.

When he sighted down his carbine barrel toward the ruins, JD saw an open, unplanted field, divided at the four-hundred-yard mark by an irrigation canal with a large compound on either side. The nearer one, on the north side of the canal, they’d named “compound one” and was to be the “objective rally point.” A wooden bridge barely large enough for a vehicle spanned the canal to “compound two.” Past the canal the terrain sloped gradually upward to the ruins, then downward to the orchards along the riverbank. The road that JD’s element had taken out of Shawali Kowt turned to the left where the fields ended, skirted the right (western) side of the hill, and continued on over the bridge and to Kandahar. On the west side of the road, about two hundred yards from the bridge, was another set of ruins dubbed “compound three,” atop a small rise that the men thought might conceal enemy movement to the west.

Amerine’s assault team would leave the road a quarter of a mile before it went left and drive across the field to compound one, then move on foot across the canal to the second compound, where they would stage their assault up the hill. The machine guns manned by JD’s team would engage any enemy positions on the hill or in the trenches that existed around it; they would also spot for Taliban hiding in the orchards on their side of the river. If needed, the machine guns could be super-elevated to reach the orchards and ridgeline on the other side of the Arghandab as well.