The Towers (41 page)

They exchanged kissy noises, and that was his big call home.

*   *   *

THE
morning brief. Mostly Army, majors and light colonels plus reps from the Special Forces, Marines, a civilian liaison to the humanitarian aid groups Dan was working with. The battle captain sat reticent, ready to yield to the ops cell commander. Salter sat flanked by his personal staff, listening as slide after slide flicked by. Dan attended with half an ear: friendly forces, enemy forces, current operations, tactical sustainablility. The Alliance continued to roll forward against a regime that, widely resented if not hated, had collapsed like a shack pushed over by an Abrams tank. Every major city had fallen. A quarter of the enemy's leaders were in custody or confirmed dead. Thirty ALQ training camps and weapons-testing sites had been secured, with between five and ten thousand enemy KIA and over five thousand POWs, and intel teams were vacuuming up documents, laptops, files, and weapons.

Finally it was the Fusion Cell's turn. Dan stood and triggered the first slide, conscious as he did so his news would not be as well received. “The Tora Bora valley. Based on the latest cross-pollination of all our sources, Template estimates a plus-ninety-percent probability OBL and his top associates, including Al-Zawahiri and possibly Omar as well, are headed there.”

Salter turned his head. “J-2 agrees with that?”

The intel officer nodded, without enthusiasm. “Yes, sir. All source reporting corroborates that destination. Course, that's no guarantee—”

“I understand that.”

Dan cleared his throat, taking back the floor before the OIC and the J-2 started bickering. “Now, is everybody here clear what the Tora Bora valley is?”

Some faces showed understanding, along with a reluctance to accept what he was saying. Others looked blank. “Tora Bora—literally, ‘black dust'—isn't a single place. It's a district or region in the White Mountains about thirty miles east of Jalalabad. A network of caves, interlocked defense points, and weapons and ammo stores the mujahideen developed during the Soviet War. Thirty-six square miles of canyonlike valleys, sharp ridgelines, and jagged peaks.”

He gave them overhead imagery taken in clear weather. The tent was silent as they studied it. It was a cliché to say a place looked like the surface of the moon, but this looked worse. “How high are these peaks?” someone asked.

“The area varies up and down two to three thousand feet, with an average of about fourteen thousand,” the J-2 said.

“Thanks,” Dan told him. “Bin Laden goes back a long time in this part of Afghanistan. He built there in the eighties, when he was supplying the resistance. He graded out a rough road most of the way up from Jalalabad with construction equipment from his dad's company. He used Saudi funding and ours to turn a natural fortress into a real stronghold. He extended the natural caves and dug new ones. Then dug connecting tunnels so fighters could move between positions without exposing themselves from the air. We really have no firm data on what we're going to find under the ground. One source says it's almost like the Maginot Line—a multistory bunker complex with its own ventilation system, armories, bakery, mosque, and hydroelectric power, and thousands of ALQ fighters who want nothing more than to go to Paradise fighting us.

“Bottom line, if you had the world to pick from for a place to make a last stand, Tora Bora would probably be it.”

“It's also gonna be mined,” one of the Army officers put in. “Which means no ground vehicles, until they're cleared. And we're going to lose line-of-sight comms—any of those ridges will isolate a squad.”

“But we know where he is,” the J-3 said, flushing. “So we could at least start bombing.”

“Yes, sir,” Dan told him. “We could start that.”

“We can definitely supply you with bombs,” an Air Force officer put in.

The OIC weighed in on this, that the center of gravity of the bombing effort should be moved north. Dan had expected that. You could move a bomber's target in hours. Getting any sort of infantry force up there would take considerably longer and entail a lot more risk.

The real discussion opened when a colonel who identified himself as representing General Faulcon, the JSOC commander, said, “Let me make a point. The Soviets pushed a whole motorized battalion into this area. They got their heads handed to them. Bombing will only buy you so much, especially against a cave system—or this bunker, if it exists. Even when we put in teams with laser designators, laser beams travel in straight lines. Basically, we'd need to pour in hundreds if not thousands of tons of ordnance. From the air, since we can't move heavy artillery in there, even if we had any in-country.”

“We can do that,” the Air Force officer repeated.

The J-3, who was Army, turned to face him. “We have to have boots on the ground. You can't drop a bomb into a cave.”

“You can take a lot of casualties, clearing caves,” someone else murmured.

Salter put in, “Bill? You had a recommendation?”

The SOF officer said the deciding factors were probably acclimatization and logistics. “Let's face reality. I've watched our infantry. They jump out of the chopper and keel over from the altitude. We can only insert with Chinooks; every other helicopter we have is altitude-limited. We're just not ready to fight at fourteen thousand feet in the winter.”

Therefore, he went on, the Afghan allies should carry the brunt of the attack, supported by A-Teams and perhaps the Rangers. The Soviets had failed in a conventional assault, with forces far heavier than what the Coalition had in-country. He wound up, “We can kill people. That's not at issue. But the Russians killed a million Afghans, and there were always more. Isn't it smarter to get them to fight on our side?”

“If they want to die, I can accommodate 'em,” a marine growled.

The OIC gave him a gimlet eye and the shaven-headed SOF officer went on, “Bin Laden wants to suck us in and clobber us. Like Aidid did to Task Force Ranger. It would take us months to build up a conventional force that might have a chance. And the SecDef's right about one thing. It would unite the Pashtuns against foreign invaders and make this a second jihad.

“Let's not do what he wants. Extend the war into years, in an area where the US has no vital interest.”

Dan interpreted this as
no oil,
although he was sorry the moment after he thought it. He couldn't give way to cynicism.

General Salter said, “Okay, I'm hearing all this. Everybody's got great points. I'm leaning to the light footprint. Our Afghans, backed up by our Special Forces. And maybe the Rangers for stop groups, or on call for a QRF.

“But the final decision's going to come from the national level. My question, again: Can we trust the ANF? We didn't train these guys. We bought them off the shelf. We have no idea if—let's say they actually capture him. Will they turn him over? Or run him across the border themselves?”

“We have confidence in our allies,” the shaven-headed officer said. “And we'll be beside them. The Alliance has momentum. They've taken every city in the country, with minimal help from us. Jesus Christ, what more have they got to do?”

The general said deliberately, “That's true, Colonel, but this time we're asking them to actually incur major casualties. And on the other side of these mountains, we're expecting the Frontier Corps—the Pakistanis—to cut off his escape, if he tries to get out? It doesn't sound airtight. And if it works, how does it look? Like the US Army subcontracted its war. You're saying, this is the best we can do?”

The Green Beret said, “No, sir. I'm saying, it's the
only
thing we can do.”

Dan had again the familiar experience of standing at a screen with a pointer while the people who were supposed to be listening argued with one another. What was the right strategy? No one would know until the test of combat. Or maybe, with this terrain, this history, and this enemy, there
was
no right tactic. Short of feeding troops into a bleeding contest, and hoping you ran out of enemies before you ran out of friendlies.

In the breathing flutter of dust-filled air he sensed a disturbance in the Force, a shunting of destiny from one track to another. As one might have felt, on a pleasant day in September, watching the great silver airliners over Maryland and Pennsylvania and New York tilt their wings and slowly slide onto a new course.

He raised his voice. “Anyway, that's where he is. Template will continue to track and put out additional info on the command link. Any further questions?”

They didn't even look up, so he quietly resumed his seat.

 

20

Tora Bora

THEY
inserted from black MH-6 “Little Bird” helicopters on an uphill-slanted field swept with wind and dust and blowing thatch. All of Echo, plus a unit of British SBS and the Alliance interpreter, Aimal. Teddy unbuckled from the side of the bird and jumped down, staggering as he hit. Screaming through ravines at a hundred-plus knots, hanging off the bench seat looking down … almost
too much,
man. He wobbled a few yards and took a knee, staring up. Scraggly and bare as it was, the two-acre field was the only halfway flat terrain in sight. All around incredibly steep slopes angled upward, dotted with gray-green puffs of small evergreens. The incline they were on ended at an enormous … rockfall? Moraine? Above it the mountain just went up and up, vertical rock until the snow line. Fourteen thousand feet, the briefing'd said.

“Let's do this, do this. Stop fucking around,” Moogie muttered as he trudged by, bent under ruck and gear and rifle wrapped with tape to break up the outline, goggles pulled down against the debris the choppers' blades were flinging as they pulled collective again, lurched, then plucked themselves up into the air. Dollhard trotted past, short legs flicking the ground like a goat's, with the radioman/grenadier, Ozzie Cannon, right behind him. To everyone's astonishment, Echo's tubby and truculent OIC had survived Kandahar. One of the rounds from the burning garage had struck his armor so hard in the solar plexus he'd been paralyzed. Even the corpsman had thought he was dead, though puzzled by finding an immense bruise rather than a wound. But Dollhard had rolled off the evac helo under his own power, refused further evacuation, and been back on duty within twenty-four hours.

Oberg stared up at boulders as far as the eye could see, from the size of refrigerators up to shipping containers, tumbled where they must have fallen off the mountain; yet each was rounded, worn as if it had spent time in a stream. They were gray-green, roan, purple, stained with lichen the color of dead cheeks. Here and there a stunted bush poked up, or less often, one of the pines or hemlocks.

“Could be a Q behind any one of those rocks,” Dollhard said. “So, it's daylight. Get used to it, operators. Chief, move 'em out.”

Teddy got Echo advancing by bounding overwatches up along what looked like goat trails. They ran on either side of an ice-bordered streamlet that splashed perfectly clear over a bed of rounded pebbles glowing ruby and garnet, opal and jade, as if a genie had paved it with jewels. Dry, dead-looking bushes overhung the stream here and there, but aside from that and the few low trees, there was little vegetation. Just bare, striated rocks. The goat-path petered out amid them. He scrambled from one boulder to the next like an ant climbing a pile of number two crush and run, sometimes in shadow, sometimes in sunlight. He wheezed the cold and exceedingly thin air in and out. A sudden bruising fall that knocked the wind out of him taught him the lichen patches were slippery. And, once again, that it was nearly impossible to break a fucking MX-300R.

From the far side of a low ridge between them and what seemed to be the main action came the thumps of bombs and the distant crackle of small arms. Teddy looked back. He couldn't see them all at once amid the rocks, but waited till he'd sighted each. Echo One to the left of the gully: the new OIC first, then Tatie Wasiakowski, Oz, Smeg, Bucky, Two Scoops, and Mud Cat. To the right, Echo Two: Teddy and Verstegen leading, then Vaseline, Harley, Moogie, Tore, Dipper—also called Doc, the corpsman—and Knobby Swager.

Dollhard's briefing had laid it out. The hard-core ALQ had taken refuge in a thirty-cave system called Tora Bora.” Sixty miles west of the Khyber Pass, it had been a redoubt all through the Soviet War. The Sovs had sent in armored columns, but bogged down and retreated. JSOC South—Cutlass's boss—had it that not only the core leadership but bin Laden himself was here. Not enough US forces in theater to attack, but someone had to. The weather would only get worse; both air support and aerial recon would degrade fast. The Alliance was pushing down from the north. Three separate militias, each led by a different warlord. Special Forces attachments were coordinating the air strikes that covered the advance. Meanwhile, on the far side, the Pakistani army was sealing the border. “It's not going to be easy, taking down these caves,” the OIC had warned. “But it's got to be done. Osama's in a shoebox; now we stomp on it.”

Teddy caught himself from falling between two rocks, scrambled across a slanting, slick boulder, and rested against a larger one. The valley was gradually being revealed as they climbed. Far down it rose an immense bare earthen hump; to the right climbed the sheer escarpment of the mountain; far above contrails carved the sky. Smoke plumed, and the air shook. He raised the rifle and through the scope made out tanks atop the bare hill. Small figures advanced like wary fleas, with many stops and side dashes. Too far to tell if they were uniformed, but he didn't get the impression of regular troops. The complex would be to his right, bored into the mountain. The shock waves of another stick rippled across the valley like a handful of pennies tossed into a pond of dust and smoke.

“We could get him, huh?” Knobby Swager said, pulling a sleeve across a bright red face. He was wearing loose Levi's with some kind of padding beneath, maybe long underwear, and a skateboard helmet spray-painted tan and black. “Think they'll give us the twenty-five mil, we bring his head back on a stick?”