Victory Point (20 page)

Just over a mile away from their destination, the SEALs wasted no time putting the insert point well to their rear. The four moved quickly and with utmost stealth, despite portaging a full suite of gear: desertcamo “SOPMOD” M4 carbines each fitted with a flash/sound suppressor, an M203 40 mm grenade launcher, a visible wavelength laser pointer (producing a red dot on a target), an ACOG sight, and a PEQ-2A infrared floodlight/IR laser pointer (to be used with their night-vision goggles). Of course, they carried dozens of 5.56 mm thirty-round magazines and 40 mm high-explosive grenade rounds for their M4s and 203 launchers, as well as hand-lobbed fragmentation grenades should they make contact with Shah and his force. They also carried the MBITR, the Iridium satellite phone, infrared strobes to mark the insert point for the following night’s direct-action raid, red and white pen flares, a GPS unit, laser rangefinders, Steiner binoculars, a large Leupold long-range spotting scope, a tripod on which to mount the scope, a digital camera, and a Panasonic “Toughbook” laptop on which they could process digital images of possible target individuals then interface with the MBITR to pass the photographs to the COC for positive identification via secure satellite transmission. The team also carried a “Phraselator,” a wallet-size device loaded with prerecorded Pashto phrase files selectable in English on a menu screen, with the ability, through a speech recognition algorithm, to also translate phrases from English to Pashto by speaking into an attached microphone. As well, the team carried a 7.62 mm semiautomatic sniper rifle, similar to one Eggers had tested (designated an MK11 by the Marine Corps), to use for acquired targets of opportunity during phase two of the op. Should the unthinkable happen, and Shah’s force overrun the small team, they carried incendiary grenades, which would render their valuable and sensitive gear useless in a white-hot conflagration as they egressed from harm’s way.

The team maneuvered through the complex terrain of Sawtalo Sar’s upper ramparts through the dark night. With dense carpets of low-lying ferns, steep rock outcroppings, fields of dead upright and fallen trees, and large deodar cedars reaching into the thin air at over nine thousand feet, upper Sawtalo Sar presents confusingly treacherous navigational challenges during the height of midday, much less during the depths of a moonless night. Further complicating operational difficulties, this time of year sees the influx of moisture from the Indian monsoon, fueling volatile, unpredictable thunderheads that lash the slopes of the peak like angry clenched fists, leaving the mountain’s reddish-brown soil and sharp chunks of shale dangerously slick, even to daytime-traveling locals who know Sawtalo Sar and its trails, trees, outcrops, and villages like their own backyard. By midnight, however, with no sun to infuse convective energy for thunderheads to thrive, these storms typically disintegrate, revealing effervescent fields of stars, the brilliant view occasionally dashed by roving threads of dissipating clouds, the seasonal moisture then lying in wait for the pounding sun’s energy to once again engender the powerful, capricious, and operationally vexing storms. The recon team traversed some of the earth’s most unforgiving land that night, a forbidding yet uniquely beautiful labyrinth on which extremists could create a storm of fury for the Americans.

“They dropped the rope! I can’t believe it! They dropped the
fucking
fastrope!” Lieutenant Rob Long overheard one of the Navy SEAL operational liaison officers exclaim hours after the insert at his post at the Jalalabad Airfield Combat Operations Center. Long, who, like Wood, viewed the decision to helo-insert what he thought to be an insufficiently manned team for phase one with skepticism, felt his heart drop at the news—news immediately conveyed to the recon team once the MH-47s returned to base and Kristensen learned of the rope’s jettison.
This is their backyard,
Long thought, referencing the locals whom Shah was known through intel to pay to keep tabs on Sawtalo Sar’s many facets. Long knew that even tightly coiled, the fastrope would occupy a volume similar to that of a good-size moving box, something like three large suitcases stacked one atop another.
Where are they going to hide it?
Long wondered as he observed the commotion of the COC ramp into a near uproar. He imagined his own backyard, wondering how an outsider would conceal such a large package without him noticing.
They couldn’t. Period
. And villagers throughout the Kunar lived far more intimately with their mountainous environment than the lieutenant did with his backyard. But with all the gear the SEALs already had with them, they couldn’t pack that “anaconda” of a piece of gear as well.
Besides,
Long thought,
they must be far downrange of the fastrope. Would they break out of their concealed hide at OP-1 and risk being seen on their route to or from caching the rope?

But the dropped fastrope could very possibly reveal itself to be a complete nonissue, Long realized. Regardless of the number of decoy drops in days past, Shah certainly would push out patrols to see what a dark night’s clattering helicopters left in their wake each following day, as well as to get the word out to all the locals either paid by him or scared of him to look for signs of the presence of American forces.
Where are they and what are they looking for?
Long imagined Shah’s thoughts. With his rigorous training as both a ground intel officer and a sniper platoon commander, the lieutenant viewed the first two phases of
Red Wings
as “duct-taped together—
at best
” from a command and control perspective, and completely haphazard from an on-the-ground operational standpoint. Long kept wondering how the four would dispose of the dropped fastrope—go back and try to conceal it as a full team, just leave it and hope it wouldn’t be discovered, or have two SEALs remain at OP-1 while the other two dealt with the problem, breaking an already undersize team in half. Or call for an extract, which he thought to be the best option, based primarily on the loud helo insert, which he regarded as a huge neon sign proclaiming AMERICAN FORCES ARE HERE. But like Wood, Rob Scott, and even MacMannis, Long had no say. This phase of
Red Wings
was completely controlled by USSOCOM rules—and nobody in that chain of command, Long knew, would want any input from a young Marine Corps lieutenant.

Then, late in the morning of the twenty-eighth, the inevitable transmission Long had feared crackled over the radio in a barely audible voice: “We’ve been soft-compromised.” The exhausted Long’s ears pricked up; his heart pounding, he rose from his chair and lunged to the corner of the JAF COC occupied by the Navy SEAL
Red Wings
liaison officers. “Goat herder,” Long thought he heard at the tail end of the weak, thready transmission.
Herder or herders?
Didn’t matter.
Had they seen the fastrope, or found it buried—then searched for the team? Or just spotted the four by chance? Or were they Shah’s operatives, locals earning a little extra money as yet another set of the terrorist’s eyes?
Didn’t matter.
Mission’s blown. Get the FUCK outta there!
Long screamed in his head at the news of the “soft” compromise, a term referencing a unit’s discovery by
apparently
noncombatant locals. Had this been Team Ronin, Keith and his team would have photographed the locals, asked them a few questions, then sent them on their way—then called the COC to discuss options; but given the current circumstances now, there would have been only one choice: extract, extract immediately.
Call for extract,
he barked in his head at what he wanted done with the recon team.
Do it. Do it NOW!
Too many of the mission’s variables looked to be going south in too short a time. Long, Wood, and then Rob Scott and Pigeon—all out of the command and control loop at this stage—wished to just reach out to any air available and get them back to base. They immediately contacted Capuzzi, who stood ready with the quick reaction force at the Jalalabad Provincial Reconstruction Team base, and told the captain that the order to launch the QRF might likely be imminent.

“I don’t feel good about this, not at all,” Tom Wood uttered under his breath.

Then, after what seemed to Long like just a few minutes from the soft-compromise call, icy chills ran down his spine as the next of the recon team’s transmissions echoed through the room: “CONTACT! We’re
hard
-compromised!” No longer simply discovered by unarmed locals, machine-gun, RPG, AK-47, and possibly 82 mm mortar rounds tore downrange from members of Shah’s cell, who focused on killing all four of the SEALs, howling
“Alla-u Akhbar!
[God is the Greatest!]
Alla-u Akhbar! Alla-u-Akhbar!”
repeatedly between trigger pulls. A call from the team crackled through the COC again, but their PRC-148’s five watts just couldn’t kick a sufficient signal from Sawtalo Sar to Jalalabad to carry an audible voice. The transmission melted into splintered pops and squeals of static noise, indecipherable to Long and everybody else in the room.
Do a call for fire from Doghouse!
Long mentally screamed as every muscle in his body flexed.
Do it now! Get rounds impacting on the ACM!
Long practically shouted aloud as the liaison SEALs crowded around their comm gear. They shot message after message to the recon team. “Your transmission’s breaking up. It’s breaking up! Can’t READ YOU!” they yelled.

Then the Iridium rang. Long stepped closer to the SEAL liaison crew as the COC fell vacuously silent. “We’re in heavy contact, commencing our E-and-E [escape and evasion], going down the gulch below the OP.” The lieutenant heard the words as well as the chilling
crack! crack! crack!
of gunfire buzzing from the handset’s tinny receiver.
They’re in the gulch, no wonder their MBITR doesn’t work
, he thought. The SEAL liaison then asked for a ten-digit grid marking their position. “Do you hear us!” came the transmission from the recon team. “We’re in HEAVY CONTACT!”

“WHAT’S YOUR POS?!” the SEAL liaison roared.

“HELLO!”
Screamed the voice from the lonely mountain over a background of explosions and clatter of automatic weapons. Long instantly realized that the sat-phone had hit a partial blackout spot, allowing just one-way communication—the SEALs on Sawtalo Sar couldn’t hear a single word from the liaison officers at JAF. Like Kinser and the Blessing Marines had discovered in the area, the phone required perfect placement when operated in the steep mountains and deep valleys of that part of the Hindu Kush, something the recon team didn’t have the luxury of seeking at that desperate moment. Long, his eyes bugging out, stared in silent horror as the SEALs at JAF ended the call, then immediately called the four-man team back. The call went through, and
maybe
the recon team could hear them, but the liaison officers couldn’t hear the SEALS on the ground. They hung up; seconds later, the phone at the COC rang again, the SEAL liaisons answered, but heard just the booms of RPG impacts and the distant rattles of automatic weapons, then nothing but a terrible, bleak silence.
Those poor souls,
Long thought, cracking his knuckles.

Meanwhile, the four SEALs of the recon team lunged down the chutelike northeast gulch of Sawtalo Sar—leapfrogging with bursts of covering fire to protect one another during their egress—as RPGs exploded around them and interlocking PK machine-gun rounds cracked just inches overhead. Shah, loosing bursts of 7.62 × 54 mm rounds from his PK, directed his RPG gunner and two other AK-47-toting fighters at his side as well as controlling a small number of his other men at different positions through his ICOM. This was the real-life incarnation of the hypothetical ambush about which Justin Bradley had warned his Marines just a few days prior. Shah’s assault sent streams of coordinated deadly fire onto the retreating team, “funneling” the four down the steep gulch. The SEALs fired back, but four men, with no comms for indirect fire support, no mortars organic to them, who were unable to even see the muzzle flashes of the insurgents’ weapons through the steep ravine’s dense trees, couldn’t take down Shah’s team, roughly ten strong, who leveraged their advantage of superior ground, terrain familiarity, and use of RPGs and possibly 82 mm mortars to overwhelm the SEALs with downward ‘plunging’ fire, making their ambush seem as if perpetrated from a team of not ten, but fifty—or one hundred—
or more
. The number in Shah’s team didn’t matter; their superior, multiple positions geometrically amplified their numbers and weapons’ effects by many orders of magnitude—a basic, albeit relatively unknown, principle of mountain warfare. The four could only hope for a swift QRF as they struggled for survival.

“We need to launch the QRF right fucking now!” an exasperated Tom Wood barked to Rob Scott.

“We can’t. We don’t have the authority,” the executive officer answered what Wood already knew. “The react order is in the hands of SOF.” As the SEAL liaisons rushed to make a series of desperate calls to Bagram and continued attempts to raise the recon team by radio and Iridium, Capuzzi and his Marines of the QRF waited anxiously near a wooden guard shack at the east end of the PRT airstrip. Wood, Long, and Scott burned with frustration while the four men on the ground fought as desperately and valiantly as any U.S. military unit ever had in the history of American warfare. Outgunned, but far more important,
outpositioned
, the four continued to stave off the extremists and move farther down the northeast gulch into the Shuryek Valley, closing on the village of Salar Ban.

Forty-five minutes after the hard-compromise call, the Marines couldn’t believe that the order to extract the team hadn’t yet been issued. “By now, we could have birds in the air, eyes on the four SEALs, and grids of Shah and his men’s positions—and then have Apaches run close air support, and get the team the fuck outta there,” the OpsO raged. But the Marines could only stand by, hamstrung by the obscenely convoluted command structure. At a time when every second counted, the Marines in the COC felt helpless.
This can’t be happening. Who’s in control of this? What the fuck is going on?
Long felt almost dizzy; everything he’d been taught as a modern U.S. Marine seemed to swirl into dissolution around him: airpower was out of their control at that point, as was Doghouse (which couldn’t fire anyway because the gun team didn’t have grids on friendly positions since their comms were down); even the Marine portion of the QRF—composed of grunts from Golf Company—while theoretically under ⅔’s control, couldn’t launch unless the SOF lead element was under way. Scott and Wood, older and more attuned to the pitfalls of “joint discord,” themselves felt the black hole of emptiness in their guts; there were four Americans falling down some sinuous throat of death into the bowels of a monstrous hell. And nothing was being done to stop it. No actionable decisions were being made. Insanity in warfare was supposed to manifest itself as some out-of-control commander slaying innocent locals, incinerating schools, and decapitating children. But that was for the movies. This was real modern war insanity. It was like returning home to find one’s home engulfed in flames and firefighters obliviously playing a game of cards in the driveway. Each of the Marines stood shocked and blindsided by the command and control paralysis—the insanity of inaction at a moment requiring steadfast leadership and resolve. Out of the command and control loop, they could only observe the SEAL liaisons themselves observing the Bagram SEALs at their COC trying to get
their
higher command to authorize a QRF. Long imagined the scene on Sawtalo Sar that afternoon. Were the four even alive still? How could they survive more than a couple of minutes with rounds raining down on them from above? RPGs detonating with deafening, concussive blasts? PK and AK rounds pummeling the dirt, rocks, and trees of the ravine—and the SEALs, too? Then he imagined their families, so immensely proud of their decisions to join the fight against extremists; worried yet confident in their Afghan deployment—but now completely oblivious to their feverish fight for their lives. Thoughts of their friends and family made the lieutenant even more crazy with frustration that no authorization had come down the pike for a QRF launch for the eternity of hours.