Full Assault Mode (34 page)

Western Pakistan

Flying nap-of-the-earth, adjusting elevation according to the folds in the terrain below, the three black MH-47G twin-rotor-blade helicopters came in low over the rocky ridgeline. Almost entirely invisible to the naked eye, two of the large beasts banked south and entered into a short orbit to await call-in. The lead 47G descended the last hundred feet, lowered its six rubber balloon tires into the sandy soil, and dropped the tail ramp onto the black landing zone. Ten minutes earlier, Kolt had placed a black hood over his head. Kolt knew the drill. He knew it was coming.

The former Guantanamo inmates cross loaded on the other two helicopters had been hooded for the entire flight. Including Joma, who twenty minutes into the flight was administered .08 cc’s of zolpidem, a sleep medicine to treat severe insomnia, to put him completely out. They sat strapped to the cold metal floor along the outer skin of the aircraft. A Toyota pickup sat centered in each helicopter, tethered with heavy chains and j-hooked to the recessed metal O-rings in the floor.

Kolt certainly didn’t like it, though. After his temporary stay in Guantanamo, his fun meter was just about pegged. The terrorists about to be repatriated onto Muslim soil weren’t the only ones with their heads covered, though. The twenty or so uniformed guys making the trip with him wore tan face masks. The kind of tight Spiderman-like full head covering that offered small holes for the eyes and mouth.

Before being hooded ten minutes out, Kolt had sized them up during the hour-plus-long flight. Their MultiCam uniforms were sterile. None showed any identifying name tapes or patches. No rank insignia. No call-sign patches. No identifying marks on their helmets. All signs of a uniquely disciplined unit. Telltale signs of a
black
unit. All were heavily armed. An M240B general-purpose machine gun stood on its butt plate, held between the legs of one of the mystery soldiers. Another held a smaller 5.56mm light machine gun, muzzle up toward the roof of the helo, between his legs. The only thing that stood out as odd, even though Kolt understood the thought process, was the dingy, naturally aged, blue-dot special tennis shoes each of them wore and the half-dozen household brooms lying on the aircraft’s metal floor.

Carlos was right; the Mercs had skills, that much was obvious.

A heavy hand prompted Kolt to stand and nudged him to the edge of the rear ramp. A slight push, and Kolt skipped off the edge and dropped a foot or so to the sandy soil of Pakistan. The powerful rotor blades kicked the fine dust up into a massive sand plume. Without any goggles to protect his eyes from the blistering particles, maybe the bag on the head wasn’t that bad after all.

Kolt was led up a rocky ridgeline along a small animal path. Still hooded, his view was limited to the area around his feet, but with about ten-percent illumination he really couldn’t see much. His night vision had yet to adjust, tripping a few times along the way. He knew the landing zone was supposed to be in Pakistan, but the place smelled no different than Afghanistan. A light musky aroma hung in the air. It was the kind of raw, fresh air not infected by mass industry and man-made machinery.

The Mercs moved in a line, roughly arm’s length apart and spanning the highest point of the rocky hillock. They lay down on their bellies and settled in behind their weapons, the 240B on the east side, the LMG on the west end. The Mercs were all business. They wore the oddball-looking four-monocular night-vision goggles famously worn by SEAL Team Six when bin Laden was smoked in Abbottabad. White-light discipline was observed.

A few minutes after reaching higher ground, Kolt heard the approach of the two follow on helos from the direction of what he assumed was west, coming from Afghanistan. Kolt knew these helos would be carrying the terrorists. The same terrorists critical to Kolt’s success in the next few days. As the helos positioned to touch down, Kolt tilted his head back just enough to observe touchdown.

Kolt watched the terrorists file off the tail ramp single file. They were a strange mix of Guantanamo detainees collected over time during the war on terror. Kolt noticed all had both arms secured behind their lower backs, certain a set of black plastic flex ties secured their wrists. A long light-colored rope, tied around each terrorist’s waist, linked them like ducks in a row. Each wore a black hood similar to Kolt’s, and he knew, under the hood, they would also have a white rag tied around their eyes and one in their mouth to keep them quiet. It was impossible for them to make a break for it. No, for the time being, falsely assuming they had just exited the freedom bird, they would remain as compliant as lambs.

A half minute later, the pair of two-door 1980s-era lemons appeared, un-assing the tail of the helos. A dark blue Toyota and a white one expertly maneuvered down the slightly angled tail ramp, gained the soil surface, and then drove across the sandy dirt to the main road. Choreographed perfectly, the three black MH-47Gs powered up, lifted off the sand, went nose down, and gained speed, heading west.

About twenty meters separated the white Toyota from the dark-blue one. Most of the terrorists were placed inside the trucks. A driver in both. A right-seater as well. Some in the bed of the trucks. A few were escorted by the arm and positioned in random areas around the vehicles, placed as if they had been thrown from a speeding train. Or maybe they had been able to get out once the shooting started? They might have been the brothers who tried to make a break for it. Allah would be proud.

Kolt noticed some of the Mercs scatter pocket litter on the ground in various spots before climbing the hill to link up with the others and lay down in position, where they could find a clear spot with good fields of fire down toward the Toyotas and bounded terrorists. He knew the litter would be doctored credentials, dated passports, worn pocket Korans, some black-and-white family photos, and documents confirming a recent stay at Hotel Gitmo. The drops would support the ruse, for sure. It was a mock-ambush scene that would have made a Hollywood stage manager pump his fist in triumph.

Obviously pleased with the setup, several of the stage hands carrying corn-bristle brooms moved to the helo touchdown points, careful to place the soles of their tennis shoes within the impressed sand lines that were left by the tires of the pickups. They delicately swept the helo tires’ impressions, leveling the sand to remove any evidence of its presence. Continuing backward, they were careful to remove the tire-tread imprints as well as their own tennis-shoe prints until they reached the hard dirt road again. Within fifteen minutes or so, the three Mercs had reached the hilltop and the ambush line.

The scene in the shallow valley floor roughly thirty-five meters to Kolt’s front and about fifteen meters below was incredible eerie. A dozen bound and hooded men, still in their prison whites, some likely relaxing, excited about the impending prisoner release, seeing their families again after years in captivity, hopeful of a productive future. Others, equally ecstatic about the surprise-release announcement by the president of the United States weeks earlier, maybe considering a little time off, just enough to catch up with family and friends, before rejoining the jihad and plotting to pay back the arrogant infidels as soon as possible.

Kolt overheard the Merc kneeling three meters to his front right and just behind the linear-arrayed, prone operators whisper into his helmeted mouthpiece.

“Blaster, check, check, check,” the obvious leader said.

Kolt tensed up, shaking his head quickly in an effort to lift the black hood a little higher on his forehead to improve his vision of the ambush area. He was fairly confident Joma couldn’t see him even if he was unhooded and awake inside the kill zone.

“Stand by, five, four, three, two, one, execute, execute, execute.”
Not much of a warning,
Kolt thought. But he knew the language. He figured he was the only one without ear protection and quickly raised his hands to cover his ears while holding the hood above his eyes. An operator squeezed the clacker three times, initiating the textbook ambush with the most casualty-producing weapon first—an M18 antipersonnel Claymore mine. Seven hundred steel balls traveling at just a hair under four thousand feet per second shredded the terrorists lying in the sand, peppered the thin skin doors and rear beds of the two Toyotas, and shattered the tempered-glass windows. The elevated ambush line of prone marksmen and machine gunners opened up simultaneously in classic high-noon ambush fashion. Thirty seconds of cyclic-rated machine guns, simultaneous with nearly two dozen personal M4 rifles, cut the convoy to pieces. Then, talking in sequence, first the heavier 7.62 mm M240B and then the lighter 5.56 mm LMG swapped back and forth, sending red tracers and ball ammo into the X with resulting ricochets careening into the distance until they reached tracer burnout. One operator popped up to a kneeling position, yanked both ends of a five-and-a-half-pound M72A3 antitank launcher to fully extend the weapon, and rotated it to his right shoulder. He steadied the rocket, aiming through the pop-up peep site, and slightly tilted his head to the left.

“Back-blast area clear!” he barked before pressing the
DETENT
button and sending the internal 66 mm warhead to the engine-block area of the dark-blue Toyota.

Except for the massive loss of life, it was really no different than training on a static ambush range back at Bragg, using wooden vehicle facsimiles and paper e-type silhouettes. In about sixty seconds, it was all over and Kolt removed his fingers from his ears.

“Cease fire, cease fire!” the leader yelled.

The operators stood very professionally, dropping their spent mags and inserting fresh ones. They began moving back down the goat path the same way they came. They deliberately left the spent brass and metal machine-gun links where they landed on the hilltop. It was just another piece of the intricate puzzle set up to alleviate any doubt in the Taliban’s eyes.

Once at the bottom of the hill, the still-hooded Kolt was moved into the kill zone and placed near the back of the white Toyota. He watched the ambush force systematically remove the flex ties and hoods from the dead former Gitmo detainees. They moved deliberately, half starting from the right, the other half from behind Kolt and to the left. They met in the center and then continued on through the other team’s sector to ensure they didn’t miss anything that would compromise the insertion.

The blue truck’s back leather seats were engulfed in flames. A thick black smog snaked out of the shattered windows and high into the air. The engine hood, thrown from the vehicle when the warhead impacted, lay mangled and pockmarked roughly forty feet off the road. The smell of leaking gasoline and engine oil hung in the air.

The mystery operators moved around the kill zone with a sense of urgency. Some opened large black trash bags as others removed the hoods from the dead and cut the plastic flex ties from their wrists. Within a couple of minutes, the kill zone was sterile.

A few seconds later, three helmeted and masked commandos approached Kolt. Two were carrying a hooded man, who Kolt figured was Joma. They set him down on the desert floor next to the lead shot-up and burning vehicle. Two operators flex-tied Joma’s ankles together and wrists behind his back before rolling him on his side. One of the operators pulled out a Glock 19 9mm while the other two positioned his leg away from his body. He aimed it at Joma’s outer leg, depressed the trigger safety, and broke the four-pound trigger. A single shot at close range gave Joma a clean, flesh wound on his thigh and a mean powder burn. It looked worse than it really was, and Joma didn’t feel a thing.

“What the fuck are you guys doing?” Kolt growled as several of the Mercs suddenly corralled him to the ground. They didn’t answer him. Instead, they flexed Kolt just as they did with Joma, wrapped a rope around his mouth to keep him quiet, and laid him on his back. They then dragged him away from Joma, back around the rear shot-up pickup truck, and placed him on the other side, opposite Joma. Kolt struggled only slightly, worried that if Joma was watching all this somehow through his black hood, then the mission was compromised already and he wouldn’t see the sun come up.

With the two guys still holding him on the ground, the gunman holstered his pistol and unsheathed his fixed blade knife. With a quick swipe, he delivered an unexpected quarter-inch gash on the back of Kolt’s head, cutting a three-inch hole in the black hood.

“Motherfuckers!” Kolt screamed as much for the pain as for the surprise. Instinctively, he turned around and lunged for the knife man, grabbing his assault vest and finding his M4 hung in front of his chest. Blind to his surroundings, Kolt maintained his grip on the operator’s vest, just below the armpit, and delivered a palm strike to the chin, but he couldn’t shake the right hand grip on his own collar.

In an instant, Kolt grabbed a handful of his opponent’s right sleeve to control his elbow while punching in a high grip with his right hand to control the left shoulder. Using both tight grips, Kolt pulled himself up and into his opponent as he planted his left foot on the operator’s right hip. Kolt launched into the air, thinking standard arm lock by simply falling backward to the ground while controlling an arm. Kolt sensed the operator was skilled in jiujitsu, feeling him crouch to counter the attack. This keyed Kolt to remain high, rotate his body counterclockwise around the man’s head, and push hard off the man’s right hip. Now practically sitting on top of the man’s shoulders, from behind Kolt leaned forward and locked in a triangle with his legs around the man’s upper body. Kolt and his opponent were locked now together, where Kolt goes, so goes his adversary.

Kolt let his body weight carry him forward, dropping his head between his opponent’s legs. With Kolt now upside down but facing his opponent, he executed a forward roll while reaching back to grab the man’s right ankle. Kolt now could control the roll as they both tumbled, executing a complete forward roll locked in unison. The flying reverse triangle is a risky move, particularly when you are hooded and in the dark. Kolt was about to stick it, but, to lock in the submission, he tightened the crook of his right leg over his left foot, pulled the operator’s leg into his body, and arched his hips forward.