The Last Rebel: Survivor (33 page)

Typically, too, Believer recon teams had learned that shaft entries were usually fifteen to twenty feet apart.

Now, simultaneously, the covering fire allowing it, Dawson, leading the assault on the mountain, as silently as possible approached the shaft entries, twenty-five in all, and first determined the depth of the shafts. This they did with mirrors, utilizing the sunlight to reflect light into the shaft so they could see what was there.

Then concussion grenades were dropped in to clear the area for the major explosive charges, which would follow. One after the other their muffled concussive blasts were followed by screaming, like people yelling underwater, and then the major charges, TCV-2.5 and TC-6.1 Italian antitank mines, were lowered to the bottom of the shaft. Then a second charge of high-explosive was lowered and the detonation cord linked to a standard hand-grenade fuse. The firing assembly would be locked in near the mouth of the shaft, a procedure that took only three minutes. When they were ready, the ring was pulled on the firing assembly, the troops first standing back seven or eight yards from the mouth of the shaft because when the charges went off, rocks and debris were blasted out of the hole at a velocity that could take your head off.

The effect was savage. Dawson, who was very knowledgeable about shafts and tunnels, knew that a double charge would work in concert like a left, right punch combination. The top charge went off a fraction of a second before the bottom charge. This resulted in the shaft being plugged with gases, and when the bottom charge went off the shock waves from them would push back down and against the sides of both shafts and tunnels, creating a deadly pressure between the two charges that Dawson knew was called the “stereophonic effect.”

In a few cases, he ratcheted up this effect into something known as the “quadraphonic effect” by setting up charges in adjoining shafts for simultaneous exploding. When this was done even more pressure was created.

The explosions were universally followed by sounds that were music to Dawson’s ears: screams of agony and faint, pitiful cries for help. But Dawson and his aides knew that anyone within reasonable proximity to the explosions was dead.

The next step was to enter the shafts, but before doing this a procedure was followed. First, the dust was allowed to settle so that they could see if it was safe for a team to enter. Any shaft could be rappelled down or entered by ladder depending on height. But first a nontoxic smoke pot was dropped into the shaft. If the smoke cleared, it meant that the ventilation system was working. Indeed, as the troops went down, Dawson received reports that the vent system was excellent, which meant that some tunnels were intact and that search teams could enter without masks. Dawson was also well aware that the methods he used would result in some people being buried alive. He didn’t give it a second thought. As long as they were dead was all that mattered to him.

Dawson dispatched three- or four-man search teams. They were lowered into the shafts, and two of the men would search one way; the other two would make sure they were not ambushed from behind.

The lead searcher had a line tied to his leg. If he found enemy material, he tied the line to it and the others could drag it out—and up, perhaps. Also, if the lead was shot, the other team members could use the line to drag him out without being in harm’s way themselves.

The searchers were equipped with entrenching tools, knives, grenades, pistols, and assault rifles—with flashlights taped to the fore stocks—the assault rifles were loaded with tracer ammunition.

As it happened, two of the searchers were shot, but neither fatally, and the Rejects who had shot them were shot back—fatally.

Dawson’s experience showed. From his days working in tunnels of Bosnia, he had also used a weapon that he adopted for this assault using what Russians used during their war in Afghanistan. These were SM signal mines. He used these in eighteen of the twenty tunnels he had discovered, and it was basically a psychological weapon that would stun the Rejects temporarily and made them easy targets. The SM was essentially a Roman candle that fired a series of green, white, and red signals from five to twenty yards. Originally it was a booby trap with a trip-wire release, which let loose a sirenlike sound at the same time. Dawson had armed his troops with three to six signal mines taped together. They could be held by hand, ignited, and tossed into the tunnel. The result was screams of sirens, a brilliant flash of light, and a starburst of signal stars. The tunnel was filled with this cacophony of sound and light for nine seconds, the stars bouncing off walls like tracer bullets. In every case, when the smoke cleared, Believer searches found the felled Rejects covering their eyes with their hands, which made them proverbial ducks in a shooting gallery.

Dawson had not used flamethrowers that much and he thought them ideally suited for clearing tunnels without collapsing them as explosives would, but he found this, at first, a hazardous tactic.

They used a soviet-made RPO. A flamethrower, which had a maximum effective range of six hundred meters, a minimum of twenty.

At first, the flame was fired into the mouth of a shaft to clear anyone around it, but when the first Believer trooper stuck his head over the open shaft he was greeted by someone shooting an AK-47 wherein the bullet went through his forehead and exited at the rear, taking a half-dollar-size circle of brain and bone matter with it, splattering his fellow troopers.

To counter this, grenades were thrown down the shaft, clearing it, and then an aide to Dawson came up with a quick, clever way to use the flamethrower.

First, the RPO-A flamethrower was locked and loaded with a thermo-baric round, then two lines were tied to it and it was lowered into the shaft until it reached the tunnel, with another line tied to the trigger mechanism. When the Believers were sure the flamethrower was pointing toward the tunnel, the trigger was pulled. This was done in four tunnels and in each the correct direction was indicated by the screams of agony that ensued.

Dawson calculated that the chaos created in the tunnels would make some of the Rejects go deeper into the tunnels—some went on for miles—but most would make a mass and quick exodus out the main entrance of the tunnel. And, he told his troops, they would be waiting, but they were not to fire until the commanding officer gave them the signal, this because they wanted to make sure that the maximum number was exposed to fire before they fired.

Almost all the Rebel troops as well as a mass of Believers waited by the entrance—and Dawson was right. Over six hundred Reject troops poured out of the mouth of the cave and when it looked like the maximum had emerged the signal was given and they were cut down in a withering cross fire of assault rifle fire, grenades, and RPGs.

Some Rejects returned fire but it was ineffectual. Within minutes, the gray-uniformed six hundred, their uniforms bathed in blood, were lying dead or dying, and then a Believer death squad roamed among them, using .45s to shoot in the head any of the soldiers who showed any signs of life. Said one of the Believer troopers: “I was too young to be at Little Big Horn. But I know how Custer must have felt.”

The aboveground assault, Operation Over, was led by Raymond Dawson’s twin, Brian. Like his brother, Brian was a small, wiry man with intense blue eyes and as hard as nails (Someone once said of him he was small like a finishing nail but as hard as a railroad spike). With his brother, he had devised plans for making the aboveground assault, and it was decided, after extensive recon, that the key to the operation was snipers. As recon revealed, many of the Rejects were dug in on the mountainside and manned both mortars and machine guns. Also, anyone trying to get through the valley to their base camp, which was usually in it, would have great difficulty, because not only did they have mortar and machine-gun emplacements but their troops were free-ranging, with access to the natural cover of the mountains. Any troops trying to overrun them would be reduced, in short order, to hamburger meat.

Brian Dawson knew that his specific background was going to serve him very well. Two years earlier, he had started to select from the ranks sharpshooters, people who could qualify as snipers, individuals with eyes likes hawks and capable of great concentration.

He was certainly qualified as a teacher. In Iraq, at the turn of the century, he had made an unconfirmed kill, a chest shot, of the driver of an enemy re-supply truck. If it had been confirmed, which it had not though it had occurred, it would be a new record for the longest shot made by a military sniper in combat, which was 2,500 yards or about 2,250 meters, held by Sergeant Carlos Hathcock, a marine, a feared sniper in Vietnam near Duck Pho, South Vietnam, in January 1967, with a Browning .50 HMG mounting an eight-power telescopic sight. Dawson’s shot had been made with a Canadian-made McMillan .50 sniper rifle with a twenty-power compact spotting scope.

But, he discovered, it was not that easy to assemble a team. It was one thing to kill someone in the course of combat. It was quite another to lie six hundred yards away but bring a man’s head so close by adjusting the scope that you could see the hair in his ears, and then squeeze off a shot and watch the head explode in a welter of bright red.

Four of the candidates for sniper quit before they got deeply into it after hearing Dawson describe what it was like.

“You may be far away from your target,” he said, “but the scope brings you up close.”

Some of the people disliked the idea of going up a mountain on foot after the enemy, while others felt heroic, being a doer, not a watcher. And by the time you graduated from Dawson’s sniper school you could, as he said, “hole a target at seven hundred meters.”

Dawson told them worrying about targets was a “terminal disease” for a sniper. “In one day,” he said, “in Iraq Two, I killed seven of Hussein’s private guards and also turned my scope on a lovely young woman—who was holding an AK-47. I watched her face go away in the scope.

“On the other hand, here is a chance to make a visible difference in the war between the Rejects and Believers. Every time you kill a Reject you know that that’s one Reject who won’t be able to end the life of a Believer.

“You can’t care,” he said. “Caring is for your brother.”

In the two years he had been doing it he’d trained over a hundred snipers and organized them into a deadly fighting machine. Now they were ready.

The fight on the ground was much fiercer than the fight in the tunnels, but eventually they were neutralized, all killed, mostly because of the work of the snipers, who neutralized all Reject mortar and machine-gun emplacements.

Some of the Rejects gave up, exiting their foxholes and bunkers with hands raised. Snipers cut them down as they did. The order of the day was no survivors, and they followed it.

Some Rejects deserted, and they were not pursued.

Finally, just one hour after the battle started, the Dawson brothers looked out on a landscape filled with bodies, puffs of smoke drifting across the beautiful wilderness.

They had won. Dawson contacted the other attack forces, listened intently, and then announced to the troops who were standing around, “Here is a message from Father McAulliffe. Victory is ours. This day Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior has seen fit to give us a victory. All the Rejects are being driven from the land.”

The Believers cheered and shouted hysterically, pumping their weapons toward the sky.

Many of the Rebels were happy too, but some were not, because they knew why they were here. To try to save the life of a brother’s wife.

Kindhand, who was standing around among a group of Rebels, asked: “Where’s Jim?”

No one seemed to know.

Then a familiar voice came from the back of the group and Morty Rosen pushed his way through.

“I saw him,” he said. “All through this he looked like he wanted to get into the compound. But I just saw him again. He was alone. He was heading into the mouth of the tunnel.”

He paused, puzzled, then asked, “Did they nail Szabo?”

“I don’t know,” Kindhand said. “There’s a lot of dead in the tunnels.”

Then Kindhand left the group, and a couple of the Rebels went with him. He headed for the cave. There were few times in his life that he wanted something as badly as this, and that was that Bev LaDoux would be still alive.

THIRTY-EIGHT

Jim entered the Reject compound. He was armed with his SEAL knife and a Glock, fully loaded, and he was carrying it but he was beyond caring for this own personal safety. At some point in his life, he had come to realize that there were some things worth dying for, and once you accepted that, then, though you might be afraid to die, you were not so crippled with fear that you couldn’t proceed.

He did not really expect to encounter anyone. They were likely long gone through the tunnels. And Szabo. Where could he be? He could be dead, but every instinct in Jim said that he wouldn’t be. People like Szabo live. Other people die.

Jim really only cared about one thing. Finding Bev. He did not want to face it, but he knew he had to: it was highly likely she was dead. Szabo had killed her friend Ida. Why not her?

But if there was a chance that she was alive, even half alive, he did not want to let that go.

He thought about Bev. Oh, she was beautiful all right, and she had a figure like a movie star, but how beautiful was she inside? Exquisite. Like her father, who had died, she had put aside her fears and tried to be a missionary in this land that had become so unholy. No, Jim had never been religious, but he recognized how beautiful spirituality could be.