Not a Good Day to Die (3 page)

At “Two minutes!” Koch barked a simple yet profound order: “Lock and load!” Simple, because it only required the troops to chamber a round in their M4 assault rifles, which they each did instantly with a series of metallic
kerr-chunks.
Profound, because the order is only given when combat may be imminent.

After careful analysis of maps and satellite photographs, the planners had given Blair an LZ next to a walled compound just north of a gully that ran west into the valley from the eastern ridgeline. But maps of the valley were notoriously unreliable, and satellite photos could be deceptive. A couple of days previously the CIA had flown a Russian-made Mi-17 helicopter over the area, filming the valley floor. Blair and the other pilots had watched the video, but it still hadn’t been clear enough to tell him whether or not the spot picked out for his LZ was really suitable. To minimize the chance of a helicopter being shot down, the Chinook pilots were told that under no conditions were they to double back and fly south—they were never to fly over the same piece of terrain twice. Therefore the pilots had agreed with the infantry officers that they would put the troops down at “the first sure thing” close to their assigned LZs.

As Blair approached the compound, he saw a perfect spot about 100 meters south of the gully in a tiny terraced field.

“Thirty seconds!” Wahl yelled to the soldier next to him. The Chinook slowed to a hover. Blair put the helicopter into what pilots call its “landing attitude,” with its nose pointing slightly upward to ensure the rear wheels touch down first. “Aircraft clear?” he asked over the intercom. It was the job of the three crewmen in the back to check for obstacles or hollows on the LZ that might disrupt the landing. “Clear to the left!” replied Moore. “Clear to the right!” yelled Wahl. “Clear to the rear!” shouted Cifers.

With the Chinook facing north toward the compound, Blair slowly lowered the big helicopter to the ground. In the cabin every infantryman was now wearing his “game face”—a look of focused determination—and had one arm through the harness of his rucksack, ready to move. As Cifers watched the dirt field rise up to meet him, he talked Blair through the last few seconds of the landing. “Aft wheels off ten feet!” he yelled over the intercom. “Five…four…three…two…one.”

The moment that the Chinook’s rear wheels hit the ground, the soldiers rose as one. Some wobbled under their huge packs before bracing themselves in an awkward runner’s stance. They were relieved to be on the ground, where they could regain some measure of control over their fates. In the air they were nothing but a big target. Blair brought the front wheels down gently. The helicopter bounced along the ground for a few feet, then stopped. The troops were instantly on their feet, shouldering their rucks. Cifers had raised the ramp a few degrees as the helicopter descended, so it would not bang off the ground. Now he depressed the short lever beside the ramp to lower it again. Nielsen bellowed blunt orders from the front of the helicopter: “Go! Go! Go! Move! Move! Move!” Other NCOs took up the shout.

Sergeant Scotty Mendenhall was closest to the ramp as it began to fall. His location there was no accident. The beefy six-footer carried one of the platoon’s two M240B machine guns—heavier, more lethal weapons than the SAWs. If the enemy was lying in wait for the Americans as they came off the helicopter, the firepower he laid down could provide the margin between life and death for him and his buddies. Impatient to get out, Mendenhall stepped onto the ramp while it was still descending. Holding the machine gun in one hand, he ran halfway down the ramp and jumped. It was just past 6:30 a.m. and the sun had not yet climbed over the mountains when his boots landed in the hard, gravelly dirt of the Shahikot Valley.

1.

IT was a raw, biting wind that swept down from the Hindu Kush in the first weeks of 2002, and the militiamen guarding the Ariana Hotel in downtown Kabul stamped their feet and blew on their hands to fight off the chill.

Behind them the hotel sat squat, yellow, and ugly. The Ariana was owned by the Afghan government, which in reality meant whichever guerrilla army happened to be in charge of Kabul at the time. It also meant the hotel had played several cameo roles in the decade of civil war that had wracked Afghanistan since the pro-Soviet government fell to the mujahideen in 1992. When the Taliban army of fundamentalist Muslim students routed the weak central government in 1996, their first order of business had been to drag Najibullah, the last pro-Soviet Afghan dictator, from the United Nations compound in which he and his brother had sheltered since their government fell in 1992. After torturing them, the Taliban death squad murdered the brothers and then hung their bodies from a makeshift scaffold in the traffic circle in front of the Ariana. Thereafter, the Taliban used the hotel as an R & R spot for troops rotating back from the front line in the war against the Northern Alliance forces of Ahmad Shah Massoud, and as a way station for Pakistani volunteers en route to the front. By way of payback, a Northern Alliance jet dropped a bomb on the hotel in 1997.

Now the tables had turned again. Al Qaida, the Islamist terrorist organization that had found a welcoming home in Afghanistan under the Taliban, had hijacked four planes in the United States and flown two of them into the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon, killing thousands and stirring the world’s only superpower to action. The Americans had come to Afghanistan, embraced the Northern Alliance, and driven the Taliban from power. And so it was that the guards lounging by the large concrete steps that led up to the Ariana’s main entrance were tough-looking Northern Alliance fighters, hard men down from the Panjshir Valley whose fingers never wandered far from the triggers of their Kalashnikov assault rifles. Some of these men had been fighting—against the Soviets, Najibullah’s regime, other mujahideen militias, and the Taliban—for more than twenty years, and it showed on their dark, worn faces and dirty, calloused hands.

But the balance of power had not shifted completely in the Northern Alliance’s favor. Not yet. The big dog on the block was the United States, and so while the Panjshiri guards shivered outside in their motley camouflage uniforms provided by the Central Intelligence Agency, inside the Ariana’s bullet-scarred walls the Americans held court. The CIA had rented the entire hotel, retained the staff, and set up its Kabul station there. It made sense for the spooks to use the Ariana. It was centrally located, just a couple of blocks from the Presidential Palace, and the safe house being used by the Special Forces, but it was protected from the busy street by a ten-foot wall. The only other defenses the Americans had added were a string of concertina wire atop the wall and a sandbagged guard post on the flat roof, manned twenty-four hours a day by a couple of Northern Alliance fighters.

Easy living it wasn’t. The plumbing was atrocious, even by Afghan standards, and the hotel was in a general state of disrepair. But it was warm, and the dining room still offered simple but delicious dishes of beans and rice and other staples of Afghan cuisine.

On this frigid mid-January afternoon a handful of men were gathered in one of the hotel’s upstairs rooms for a meeting. The CIA personnel conducted most of their meetings in this room during those first turbulent months after the fall of Kabul, but on this occasion only one agency officer was present—a thin, bearded man with long sandy hair called John, who was the deputy chief of station. The rest of the men were soldiers, special operators from the units that had been at the forefront of the war in Afghanistan. Like John, they were dressed in civilian clothes and wore their hair longer than most American soldiers are allowed. All sported the beards that were ubiquitous among American special operators and intelligence operatives in Afghanistan. Most were armed with M4 carbines or 9mm Beretta pistols.

It was a dark-walled room made even darker by the curtains drawn to prevent any snipers from drawing a bead on those inside. Dust motes swam in a single shaft of intense sunlight that exploited a small gap between the curtains. A lamp resting on an end table cast shadows on a floor covered by an Afghan rug, and the men sat on a tatty, overstuffed sofa and similarly worn but comfortable chairs.

As the Americans sipped green tea from a service that a member of the hotel staff had set on a glass-topped coffee table, the mood was businesslike. The Taliban had been defeated, the Northern Alliance had swept into Kabul, and the whole country was—in theory—under the control of the Americans and the Afghan warlords with whom they had allied themselves. But the men in the room were not celebrating. The Taliban were gone and Al Qaida’s guerrillas were on the run, but there was still much to do. Six weeks earlier the Americans thought they had Al Qaida’s leaders holed up at Tora Bora in the White Mountains that straddle the border with Pakistan. Reluctant to put too many American troops on the ground, U.S. commanders had relied on their Afghan allies backed up by Special Forces to snare Osama bin Laden and his henchmen. But this time the Americans’ faith in their militia allies was misplaced, and a failure to block escape routes into Pakistan from Tora Bora meant bin Laden and hundreds of Al Qaida’s most hardened fighters had slipped the net.

So long as those guerrillas remained at large, the Americans knew they could not rest. And so as usual in these brainstorming sessions, which John convened daily in his excuse for a sitting room, the talk this afternoon was where to focus next.

As the meeting was breaking up, John looked across the table and spoke directly to one of the special operators—an Army officer dressed in a thick, long-sleeved shirt with an Afghan scarf around his neck. Clipped into the waistband of his cargo pants was a black leather holster in which nestled a semiautomatic Glock pistol with a twenty-round extended clip. Over six feet tall with dark hair and a goatee that framed an open and honest face, the officer was forty years old, yet still had the lean, hard physique of the track and field champion he had been in his youth. He exuded the self-confident air of a man used to not just living but succeeding on his wits. His name was Pete Blaber and he was a lieutenant colonel in 1
^st
Special Forces Operational Detachment—Delta, better known to the public as “Delta Force.”

The agency was getting a lot of reports that Al Qaida forces were regrouping in a mountainous region south of Gardez in eastern Afghanistan’s rugged Paktia province, John said. “What’s it called?” Blaber asked. The CIA officer told him. Blaber, who had been in Afghanistan for a month and thought he knew the lay of the land, had never heard of the place. “How do you spell it?” he said, eyes narrowing with curiosity as he grabbed a mechanical pencil to jot the name down in his day planner.

As Blaber scribbled, the CIA officer spoke each letter in turn: “S-H-A-H-IK-H-O-T.”

2.

THE spooks and operators at the Ariana weren’t the only Americans in central Asia to have taken a sudden interest in the Shahikot Valley. Two weeks earlier, and 350 miles (about 563 kilometers) to the northwest, at a remote air base in Uzbekistan, two Army officers had been poring over maps of eastern Afghanistan. Major Paul Wille and Captain Francesca Ziemba were on the staff of the 10
^th
Mountain Division, and they were working on an urgent tasking from the division commander, Major General Franklin “Buster” Hagenbeck.

A native Floridian and West Point graduate, Hagenbeck had taken command of the division in August, having previously seen combat in Grenada with the 82
^nd
Airborne Division in 1983.

By late December 2001, Hagenbeck was a frustrated man. He’d left 10
^th
Mountain’s home post of Fort Drum in upstate New York a month earlier in the expectation that he would soon be commanding troops in combat in Afghanistan. Although it had been America’s commandos who had carried the fight to the enemy so far, Hagenbeck was sure the conventional Army’s battalions, brigades, and divisions would be essential in defeating the Taliban. He was by no means alone in believing that victory in Afghanistan would likely require conventional forces sooner rather than later. When the first CIA operatives and Special Forces soldiers had flown into Afghanistan in September to link up with the Northern Alliance, U.S. commanders were not planning for victory by Christmas. Their ambitions were far more modest: to use the Northern Alliance, emboldened by the precise lethality of America’s air power and the tactical savvy of her special operators, to carve out a foothold in northern Afghanistan before the onset of the dreaded Afghan winter. The aim was to seize at least one airfield in the north into which conventional troops could be flown, if necessary, in time to launch a spring offensive.

When, against all expectations, one province after another fell quickly to the Northern Alliance, the Americans instead began planning to introduce conventional forces in a battle for Kabul, in case the Alliance’s attack stalled at the gates of the Afghan capital. The plan was to airdrop a brigade of the 82
^nd
Airborne Division to seize Kabul’s airport, through which would flow the conventional units charged with taking control of the city. But the Taliban’s hasty retreat from the capital on November 13 obviated the need for such an assault. (This was fortunate. With no permission to stage the airborne assault from bases in neighboring countries, it would have taken every tanker aircraft in the Air Force’s fleet to refuel the C-17 and C-141 transports flying the paratroopers from Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina, to the dark skies over Kabul. This would have left no tankers for the bombers that would be expected to conduct preassault strikes on Kabul’s defenses.) Similar plans for a conventional assault on the southern city of Kandahar, the Taliban’s spiritual home, also went by the wayside when the regime failed to make the last ditch defense of the city expected by U.S. commanders.

So instead of pitting their wits against the Taliban and Al Qaida, the end of 2001 found Hagenbeck and his staff sitting on the sidelines, itching to get into the action. Hagenbeck’s mission was to be the forward headquarters in the Afghanistan theater for Lieutenant General Paul Mikolashek, who commanded all of America’s conventional ground forces in a swathe of the globe that encompassed twenty-five countries stretching from Sudan to Kazakhstan. That was the territory for which U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM)—one of the Pentagon’s five regional commands—was responsible, and Mikolashek’s boss was CENTCOM commander General Tommy Franks. In peacetime Mikolashek’s command was known as the Army component of Central Command, or ARCENT. But during the war in Afghanistan, as other ground forces—U.S. Marines, as well as U.S. and allied special ops units—were placed under Mikolashek, Franks gave it the tongue-twisting title of Coalition Forces Land Component Command, or CFLCC (pronounced “sea-flick”).

ARCENT’s headquarters at Fort McPherson in Atlanta, Georgia, was too far away from Afghanistan for Mikolashek’s taste, so he moved it to the high-tech facilities at Camp Doha in Kuwait. But he wanted a headquarters element even closer, so the Army gave him the 10
^th
Mountain division HQ, which is how Hagenbeck found himself at the windblown base at Kharsi-Khanabad, Uzbekistan. He and his headquarters arrived at K2, as it quickly became known, on December 1.

By the time Hagenbeck’s troops had pitched their tents in K2, the Taliban had abandoned Kabul and retreated to their power base in the southern city of Kandahar, where their resistance evaporated by December 9. Meanwhile, bin Laden and hundreds of his fighters had fled to their Tora Bora stronghold. When Franks declined to commit conventional troops to stop those fighters from escaping into Pakistan, another opportunity to get into the fight seemed to have slipped through Hagenbeck’s fingers. But he wasn’t about to give up. Although an even-tempered officer of patrician countenance, the division commander was, by his own admission, “chomping at the bit to do something.” He knew there were still enemy forces in Afghanistan. That much was clear from the daily video-teleconferences (VTCs) through which CENTCOM ran the war from its headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. These video-teleconferences, in which the senior figures from each headquarters sat in front of a TV camera–monitor combination that automatically broadcast the picture of whoever was talking to the other headquarters watching, were a feature of daily life for the colonels and generals planning and fighting the war. In these discussions CENTCOM officials referred to remaining concentrations of Al Qaida fighters in Afghanistan as “puddles of resistance.”

Hagenbeck gathered his staff in late December and told them to collect all the intelligence they could about the situation in Afghanistan and to draw up rough plans—concepts of operations, in Army lingo—for missions in which the Mountain headquarters could be used to command and control conventional and special operations forces. Hagenbeck’s aim was to demonstrate his headquarters’ value to Mikolashek, in the hope of persuading the three-star general to give Mountain a combat operation to head up.

Wille and Ziemba got to work. A brawny, likable and plainspoken man, Wille was the division’s chief of plans. His job was to coordinate the efforts of all the other planners in the division staff and subordinate units. Ziemba, a slender brunette who as a West Point cadet had somehow acquired the incongruous nickname “Ox,” was the plans officer in the division’s intelligence section. “Okay, where’s some enemy activity?” Wille asked the intel officer. “Right here,” she said, indicating a digital map display on her laptop, her finger pointing right at the Shahikot. “There’s some enemy activity in this valley.” The Shahikot area had been a mujahideen stronghold during the Soviet-Afghan war, she added. To Wille that seemed as good a place as any for which to plan an operation. He and Ziemba applied themselves to the task assiduously. Their “office” was the plans tent, the only unheated tent in the entire command post. In the chill of the Uzbek winter, they often typed with their gloves on. Operating on two hours of sleep a night, supplemented by copious amounts of coffee, the two officers scrutinized maps, analyzed intelligence reports, and put together a rough plan.