The Alexandria Connection (14 page)

O
’Connor kept his head down as the Taliban peppered the old Korengal outpost with machine gun fire. Puffs of dirt and rock kicked up as the red tracer rounds ricocheted and arced gracefully into the night. Then came a heavier sound:
crump
 . . .
crump
 . . .
crump
. From an initial impact point further down the ridge, high explosive rounds were creeping toward the Americans’ position.

‘Mortars!’ O’Connor’s number two, the lanky chief petty officer Rudy Kennedy, engaged the Taliban with a burst of fire from his MK11 sniper rifle. ‘We better get those fucking base plates before they zero in on us!’ the CPO yelled to O’Connor.

‘I’m on it,’ O’Connor acknowledged, reaching for his radio handset. ‘Welcome to the Korengal Valley!’ he added. The pair grinned at each other as the bullets ricocheted around them. They’d been in tighter spots than this together.

‘Gangster One, this is Hopi One Four. We’re taking small arms fire from halfway up the ridge to the east of our position. Mortar fire from the same direction, over.’

Black shapes tumbled down the ropes suspended from the second Black Hawk, until the rest of the team had hit the ground. But as Alley Cat Four lifted off sharply, the starboard engine exploded.

‘This is Alley Cat Four, we’ve been hit!’ The pilot struggled to control the crippled machine, crash landing heavily on top of a pile of timber further up the mountain.

O’Connor reached for his handset again as he broke cover and sprinted toward the stricken chopper. ‘Black Hawk down!’

‘Alley Cat Seven, copied.’ The lead Black Hawk banked sharply and took up a position behind the ridgeline, ready for a hot extraction.

‘Gangster One, copied, out to you. Gangster Two, copy?’

‘Roger, infrared has located the mortar base plate, over.’

‘Roger, you take the base plate, we’ll deal with the small arms . . . I’m starting my run now.’ The pilot of the first Apache dived toward the machine gun flashes on the ridge. The gunner in the forward cockpit calmly tracked the Taliban with the night-vision system on his helmet, a forward-looking infrared system that was slaved to the sights on the aircraft’s chain gun. Wherever the gunner pointed the crosshairs, the chain gun automatically locked on to the target. The Apache shuddered slightly as the huge thirty-millimetre rounds ripped into the first of the Taliban machine-gun positions. The gunner tracked his sights on to the machine-gun flashes further up the ridge and blasted the Taliban insurgents with another burst. The Apache was barely 300 metres out when he silenced the third position.

‘Gangster Two, this is Gangster One, all yours, over,’ the pilot radioed, peeling away to give the second attack helicopter a clear run on the mortar base plate.

The gunner in the second Apache was already tracking the muzzle flashes from the Taliban’s 81-millimetre mortar tube, a single weapon being fired from a small clearing near some stone huts halfway up the ridge. Seconds later, the Hellfire missile found its mark. The mortar barrel and baseplate, along with the dismembered bodies of two insurgents, arced into the night. The ridge fell silent.

O’Connor and CPO Kennedy reached the burning Black Hawk in time to help the pilot extract the wounded co-pilot from his harness. ‘Alley Cat Seven, this is Hopi One Four,’ O’Connor radioed, ‘we’re going to blow this bird.’ This was no ordinary Black Hawk. It was one of two used in the raid on Osama bin Laden, and the gear on board was ‘above’ top secret.

‘Alley Cat Seven, roger, standing by for extraction.’

‘Hopi One Four . . . co-pilot has serious stomach wounds, out.’

As soon as the Black Hawk crew had cleared the crash site, carrying their wounded brother-in-arms, O’Connor and CPO Kennedy rigged the downed aircraft with explosives and O’Connor set the timer.

‘Timer on, let’s get out of here.’ The pair doubled down the ridge line, and thirty seconds later, Alley Cat Four exploded in a ball of fire. The aircraft burned fiercely and O’Connor gave Kennedy the thumbs up. The highly classified gear would soon be reduced to ash.

‘Hopi One Four, this is Gangster One,’ the lead Apache radioed. ‘We’re getting low on fuel. Will you be requiring any further assistance this evening, over?’

O’Connor grinned to himself. ‘This is Hopi One Four . . . not unless you can whistle up a regiment of tanks. Have a Budweiser when you get back.’

The three aircraft headed north back down the river, and an eerie silence settled over the valley.

Ten kilometres to the south, Tayeb Jamal and Omar Yousef were high in the mountains, and deep in conversation. Reports of the fiery clash had already reached their remote village.

‘We lost another ten men tonight, Tayeb. The Infidel is going to pay for that.’ The flickering light from the oil lamp caught the hatred on Yousef’s young face. Seated at the rough-hewn table where they had planned so many attacks on the Americans, Yousef turned and spat on the ground. ‘Do you think he’s back to stay?’

Jamal shook his head. ‘No. He’ll be trying to recover the bodies of those in the Chinook we shot down, although it’s a little odd that he’s back in this valley. I’ve had a report of more of them to the east, which is where the bodies are more likely to be.’

Yousef smiled, a slow, sinister smile. ‘
Alhamdulillah
, thanks be to Allah, the Infidel’s new missiles are being turned against him. When do we get more?’ he asked eagerly.

‘General Khan is working on it,’ Jamal replied. ‘In the meantime, while the Infidel is in this valley, we need to make sure the ones we have are well hidden.’

‘I’ve sent messages to the villages. They are all hidden below ground.’

‘Good. We need to save them for the big targets, which brings us to tomorrow. Our sentries have the Infidel under observation. It looks as if there are eight of them, and they’re spending the night at their old observation post.’

‘Then why not attack them while they’re sleeping! We can annihilate them!’

‘Patience, Omar. The Infidel has a lot more firepower in the air than we do, and attacking that stronghold at night when each of them has night-vision goggles puts us at a disadvantage, and we can’t afford to get into a long firefight. We need to use the one thing we know better than he does . . . we know these mountains like the backs of our hands. The Infidel has to rely on his technology. So we’ll observe. He won’t move until morning, and we’ll be waiting for him.’

The dawn came quickly, far too quickly for O’Connor and his men. To the east, the mists enveloping the peaks of the mountains were tinged with pink. Breakfast was a sparse affair from the ‘first strike ration’ – a high-energy cereal bar and an instant coffee. For lunch, there was a choice of either a long-life barbecue beef or a bacon-cheddar sandwich, designed to deliver 2900 calories, witha pouch of tuna or chicken chunks for dinner, supplemented by beef jerky and peanut butter and crackers. From the reception the team had received on their arrival, and with secrecy and surprise now lost, O’Connor knew calories would likely be in deficit by the end of the day.

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘listen up. Our job’s just got that much harder. Latest intel?’ he asked, turning to the team’s intelligence operator, Alejandro ‘Chico’ Ramirez, an oval-faced twenty-six-year-old Latino from Arizona.

‘JSOC are reporting more movement to the south,’ Chico confirmed, his satellite laptop open on his knees. The Joint Special Operations Centre commanded some of the most sensitive US Special Forces operations. ‘They’re not sure how many are in the group. I’m trying to get some confirmation and I’ve asked for a drone to be assigned. The enemy seem to be concentrating near the village of Laniyal, a couple of clicks to the south of here.’

‘Should make life interesting,’ O’Connor observed dryly. ‘Air support?’ O’Connor had insisted on the inclusion of an air force combat air controller, and not just any combat controller. The lanky Hank Ventura was one of the best. He and his number two, twenty-two-year-old Milton Rayburn, a two-tour veteran from New Jersey, were equipped with satellite radios and a SOFLAM, a Special Operations Forces Laser Acquisition Marker. The classified kit looked like a very large pair of binoculars mounted on a tripod. In what was known as ‘painting the target’, the number two would fire a laser beam directly at the target. Once the target was located, Ventura would call in whatever air support was available, and with the help of a global positioning system, laser guided bombs would be linked to the SOFLAM from thousands of feet above. The Taliban would have no idea they were being ‘painted’.

‘Hens’ teeth and air support around here have got a lot in common,’ Hank replied, in his slow, southern drawl, ‘but we should be able to count on a couple of F-16 Vipers and the drone Chico’s asked for, and if we’re really in the clag, we may be able to prioritise a Ghostrider.’ The C-130 Hercules gunships – massive flying weapons-delivery platforms – were armed with the most fearsome array of cannons and missiles known to modern warfare. They had been in use in various forms since the Vietnam War, but the latest C-130H version was equipped with massive 30-millimetre cannons capable of firing at 200 rounds per minute; 140-millimetre rocket-powered Griffin missiles; Hellfire missiles; huge 250-pound GBU-39 bombs; and the smaller Viper laser-guided glide bombs.

‘We may need all of that and more. We’ll stick to the high ridgelines above the river until we get near Laniyal. Stay spread out, and cover your arcs of fire.’ O’Connor positioned himself just behind the lead scout and the patrol moved out, heading toward the next village, a group of stone huts perched halfway up the steep, rocky mountain slope.

High on the opposite mountainside, Jamal and Yousef watched through their binoculars.

‘The Infidel is moving out, my friend,’ Jamal observed. ‘We’ll need to get word to Laniyal.
Insha’Allah
, he will be drawn into the ambush.’

The commander of the 432nd Wing of the United States Air Force at Creech Air Force Base, Colonel Joe Stillwell, brought the briefing to a blunt conclusion. ‘Last night, their time, call sign Hopi One Four, the combined CIA-SEAL team in the Korengal Valley, came under intense mortar and machine-gun fire from the Taliban during their insertion into the old Korengal outpost, so it looks as if these bastards are back with a vengeance,’ Stillwell warned, turning toward Captain Rogers and his crew

‘Dawn is just breaking over there, and given their reception last night, it won’t be long before it’s on again. Any questions?’

‘Predator or Reaper?’ Rogers asked.

‘This mission’s about as tough as they come, so you’ve been assigned a Reaper . . . brand-new one, I’m told.’

Captain Rogers grinned. He would have given anything to be back in the cockpit of an F-16 Viper, but the Reaper was the next best thing. The latest drone had a speed of over 300 miles per hour, carried a staggering one and a half tonnes of armaments, and even with that load, it could stay up for fourteen hours.

‘Bagram are preparing it as we speak – armament configuration is four Hellfire missiles and two 500-pound GBU-38 bombs.’