The Towers

by David Poyer

  Wenck came back, grumbling about DISNs and PIX Firewalls, port switches and STEP sites. “Major problem?” Dan asked, but all he got back was something about the “tropo scatter.”

  Wenck grumbled, “Everybody likes to buy all this off-the-shelf shit and they expect it to interface, but it never does and nobody ever asks why. They just throw more money at the contractors and wonder why it doesn’t work.”

  “I’ll tell you what I wonder,” Dan said.

  “What, sir?”

  “Why General Leache is in Florida and the land forces component commander and all his staff are in Kuwait. Why the forward ground commander, the Tenth Mountain Division commander, has his headquarters back at K2, and the spec ops CO’s here in Bagram.”

  “It ain’t like the Navy, sir.”

  “Better or worse?”

  “You need me, Commander? If you don’t, I’m gonna get some sleep.”

  As the tent walls breathed in and out with the wind, Dan contemplated the fact it worked at all. Both the comms and the command relationships were bewildering and time-wasting. Still, instant comms with home had its advantages. Since getting to Bagram, he’d done most of his work online, over a supersecure, dedicated digital system called Spartan Prime. Now he had a hard time believing he’d ever been able to accomplish anything with the Navy message system and secure STU-III calls. It all came in via super-high-frequency TACSAT, the military tactical satellites. Not only local intel, from the field and the JIF, but every day and nearly every hour he got synthesized information from analysts back at the Pentagon and CTC and even, occasionally, the FBI.

  They had data services, collaborative-planning and mission-analysis tools, and all kinds of digitized command and control. But there were only still twenty-four numbers on a military clock. Beyond a certain point it was like trying to drink, not out of a fire hose, but out of Niagara Falls.

  At 3:00 a.m. local he had his recommendations nailed down for the morning meeting, which he would present at, since both Provanzano and Belote were still out in the field. Sleep? He was dead on his feet, but the way his brain was buzzing, he’d just lie on his bunk and vibrate. He told Henrickson to hold the fort and went over to another tent to a guy who had a cell phone that would actually connect.

  Outside, he blinked in the darkness, astonished there was still a universe outside the SCIF. As his eyes adapted, enormous, cold stars appeared. The Milky Way glowed like spilled bleach if you looked away from the runway lights. Some of those stars moved, planets that gradually grew brighter: more transports, lining up for approach. A streak of soundless light scratched the black, revealing brilliance beneath. He tensed, ready to drop: incoming mortar, rocket? Then realized it was only a shooting star.

  “Halt. Halt!”

  A brilliant light dazzled him. He stopped dead, realizing he’d taken a wrong turn, was in a part of the compound he didn’t know. A huge oval the size of a kids’ wading pool loomed, mounted on some large vehicle. A trooper had an M4 trained on him. “Restricted area, sir,” he said.

  “Got it. Sorry.”

  * * *

  “HELLO?”

  “Hey, hon. It’s me. Finally got to a phone without a line in front of it.”

  “Dan? You okay? You sound hoarse again. Where are you?”

  “At the main base over here. I guess it’s the dry air, all this dust.… How you doing?”

  “They’re starting the physical therapy. The scar tissue … it really hurts.”

  Her voice dragged, a note he’d never before heard; resignation, weariness? It didn’t sound like her. He thought savagely, things will never be the same for a lot of people. Because of the religious idiots we’re here to kill. “Sure you’re okay, honey?”

  “Actually, I’m not. I saw it on the TV for the first time. Dad would turn it off. To not upset me. Or I would, because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to stand it. But this time I left it on. All those people. Waving their shirts in the air, for help. But nobody could help them.…”

  “It’s all right. It’s all—”

  “And then they just … stepped out. Or tried to climb down, as if it wasn’t a thousand feet. So they lost their grip. Then fell…”

  Her voice had gone ragged, edged with torn steel. He felt helpless, exiled to the edge of the world when he should have been there helping her heal.

  Her voice came stronger, infused with conscious will. “How about you? You’re the one out there.” She snorted. “I’m just sitting at home.”

  “We’re making progress. The push is on. I’m hoping we’ll have some good news in a few days.”

  “About him? That’d be nice to hear.”

  “How’s Checkie? And Queekie?”

  “I wish they wouldn’t hover, but … I guess that’s what parents have to do.”

  “The hip? Is it healing? I hear bad things about broken hips.”

  “Well, it’s going to take time, Dan. And it does hurt. Sometimes a lot. But I can hobble around the house now. With a walker. I’m going in for some more work on my face next week.… You’re not going into combat? Are you?”

  “No, they’ve got the Eighty-second Airborne between me and whoever’s out there. And lots of concertina. Mainly I’m trying to set up to get food and water up to some of the villages. Humanitarian assistance. Just like in an office, only in a tent.”

  They caught up on acquaintances, then ran out of things to say. He wanted to ask what she was picking up from her circle of contacts, but long indoctrination about phone security kept him from asking. “Uh, what’s the Post saying? Are they following us out here?”

  “They say Kabul just fell. Sounds like it’s going faster than anyone expected. All the Taliban are surrendering.”

  “Kabul? We took Kabul last month. You mean Kandahar?”

  “I guess so. Aren’t a lot of them coming over to the ANA? Or are they just pretending to? Some of what I’m reading about this Karzai … he accepts a surrender, then the same guys who were fighting us turn around and suddenly they’re our friends. Exactly the same people.”

  Dan said, “Maybe we can do it the smart way this time. In quick, get bin Laden, set up a government, get out. Like we did in Haiti.”

  “The longer we stay, the harder it’s going to be to leave.”

  Dan said he’d gotten the same vibe from the local militia leaders. “But we have to have them on our side. These mountains … if ALQ digs in and fights up there, it’s going to cost. But this could be the end. The next couple of weeks. If we can pin him down and get a bomb on him or push a shooter in close enough. Maybe his own people will turn him in.”

  “It’d be better to have a body.”

  Objective as the old Blair. “Uh, right. They’ve already got a box of dry … never mind. You’re right, we need a body. So, got any plans?”

  “Just talking things over with Dad. We’ll discuss it when you get home.”

  A voice behind him. “Almost done, buddy? Other guys want to use that phone.”

  “Wrapping up,” Dan said to the trooper. To Blair; “Gotta go, gotta get back on the stick. Can you pass to Nan I’m okay? I’ll try to call her too, but connections are real limited.”

  They exchanged kissy noises, and that was his big call home.

  * * *

  THE morning brief. Mostly Army, majors and light colonels plus reps from the Special Forces, Marines, a civilian liaison to the humanitarian aid groups Dan was working with. The battle captain sat reticent, ready to yield to the ops cell commander. Salter sat flanked by his personal staff, listening as slide after slide flicked by. Dan attended with half an ear: friendly forces, enemy forces, current operations, tactical sustainablility. The Alliance continued to roll forward against a regime that, widely resented if not hated, had collapsed like a shack pushed over by an Abrams tank. Every major city had fallen. A quarter of the enemy’s leaders were in custody or confirmed dead. Thirty ALQ training camps and weapons-testing sites had been secured, with between five and ten thousand en
emy KIA and over five thousand POWs, and intel teams were vacuuming up documents, laptops, files, and weapons.

  Finally it was the Fusion Cell’s turn. Dan stood and triggered the first slide, conscious as he did so his news would not be as well received. “The Tora Bora valley. Based on the latest cross-pollination of all our sources, Template estimates a plus-ninety-percent probability OBL and his top associates, including Al-Zawahiri and possibly Omar as well, are headed there.”

  Salter turned his head. “J-2 agrees with that?”

  The intel officer nodded, without enthusiasm. “Yes, sir. All source reporting corroborates that destination. Course, that’s no guarantee—”

  “I understand that.”

  Dan cleared his throat, taking back the floor before the OIC and the J-2 started bickering. “Now, is everybody here clear what the Tora Bora valley is?”

  Some faces showed understanding, along with a reluctance to accept what he was saying. Others looked blank. “Tora Bora—literally, ‘black dust’—isn’t a single place. It’s a district or region in the White Mountains about thirty miles east of Jalalabad. A network of caves, interlocked defense points, and weapons and ammo stores the mujahideen developed during the Soviet War. Thirty-six square miles of canyonlike valleys, sharp ridgelines, and jagged peaks.”

  He gave them overhead imagery taken in clear weather. The tent was silent as they studied it. It was a cliché to say a place looked like the surface of the moon, but this looked worse. “How high are these peaks?” someone asked.

  “The area varies up and down two to three thousand feet, with an average of about fourteen thousand,” the J-2 said.

  “Thanks,” Dan told him. “Bin Laden goes back a long time in this part of Afghanistan. He built there in the eighties, when he was supplying the resistance. He graded out a rough road most of the way up from Jalalabad with construction equipment from his dad’s company. He used Saudi funding and ours to turn a natural fortress into a real stronghold. He extended the natural caves and dug new ones. Then dug connecting tunnels so fighters could move between positions without exposing themselves from the air. We really have no firm data on what we’re going to find under the ground. One source says it’s almost like the Maginot Line—a multistory bunker complex with its own ventilation system, armories, bakery, mosque, and hydroelectric power, and thousands of ALQ fighters who want nothing more than to go to Paradise fighting us.

  “Bottom line, if you had the world to pick from for a place to make a last stand, Tora Bora would probably be it.”

  “It’s also gonna be mined,” one of the Army officers put in. “Which means no ground vehicles, until they’re cleared. And we’re going to lose line-of-sight comms—any of those ridges will isolate a squad.”

  “But we know where he is,” the J-3 said, flushing. “So we could at least start bombing.”

  “Yes, sir,” Dan told him. “We could start that.”

  “We can definitely supply you with bombs,” an Air Force officer put in.

  The OIC weighed in on this, that the center of gravity of the bombing effort should be moved north. Dan had expected that. You could move a bomber’s target in hours. Getting any sort of infantry force up there would take considerably longer and entail a lot more risk.

  The real discussion opened when a colonel who identified himself as representing General Faulcon, the JSOC commander, said, “Let me make a point. The Soviets pushed a whole motorized battalion into this area. They got their heads handed to them. Bombing will only buy you so much, especially against a cave system—or this bunker, if it exists. Even when we put in teams with laser designators, laser beams travel in straight lines. Basically, we’d need to pour in hundreds if not thousands of tons of ordnance. From the air, since we can’t move heavy artillery in there, even if we had any in-country.”

  “We can do that,” the Air Force officer repeated.

  The J-3, who was Army, turned to face him. “We have to have boots on the ground. You can’t drop a bomb into a cave.”

  “You can take a lot of casualties, clearing caves,” someone else murmured.

  Salter put in, “Bill? You had a recommendation?”

  The SOF officer said the deciding factors were probably acclimatization and logistics. “Let’s face reality. I’ve watched our infantry. They jump out of the chopper and keel over from the altitude. We can only insert with Chinooks; every other helicopter we have is altitude-limited. We’re just not ready to fight at fourteen thousand feet in the winter.”

  Therefore, he went on, the Afghan allies should carry the brunt of the attack, supported by A-Teams and perhaps the Rangers. The Soviets had failed in a conventional assault, with forces far heavier than what the Coalition had in-country. He wound up, “We can kill people. That’s not at issue. But the Russians killed a million Afghans, and there were always more. Isn’t it smarter to get them to fight on our side?”

  “If they want to die, I can accommodate ’em,” a marine growled.

  The OIC gave him a gimlet eye and the shaven-headed SOF officer went on, “Bin Laden wants to suck us in and clobber us. Like Aidid did to Task Force Ranger. It would take us months to build up a conventional force that might have a chance. And the SecDef’s right about one thing. It would unite the Pashtuns against foreign invaders and make this a second jihad.

  “Let’s not do what he wants. Extend the war into years, in an area where the US has no vital interest.”

  Dan interpreted this as no oil, although he was sorry the moment after he thought it. He couldn’t give way to cynicism.

  General Salter said, “Okay, I’m hearing all this. Everybody’s got great points. I’m leaning to the light footprint. Our Afghans, backed up by our Special Forces. And maybe the Rangers for stop groups, or on call for a QRF.

  “But the final decision’s going to come from the national level. My question, again: Can we trust the ANF? We didn’t train these guys. We bought them off the shelf. We have no idea if—let’s say they actually capture him. Will they turn him over? Or run him across the border themselves?”

  “We have confidence in our allies,” the shaven-headed officer said. “And we’ll be beside them. The Alliance has momentum. They’ve taken every city in the country, with minimal help from us. Jesus Christ, what more have they got to do?”

  The general said deliberately, “That’s true, Colonel, but this time we’re asking them to actually incur major casualties. And on the other side of these mountains, we’re expecting the Frontier Corps—the Pakistanis—to cut off his escape, if he tries to get out? It doesn’t sound airtight. And if it works, how does it look? Like the US Army subcontracted its war. You’re saying, this is the best we can do?”

  The Green Beret said, “No, sir. I’m saying, it’s the only thing we can do.”

  Dan had again the familiar experience of standing at a screen with a pointer while the people who were supposed to be listening argued with one another. What was the right strategy? No one would know until the test of combat. Or maybe, with this terrain, this history, and this enemy, there was no right tactic. Short of feeding troops into a bleeding contest, and hoping you ran out of enemies before you ran out of friendlies.

  In the breathing flutter of dust-filled air he sensed a disturbance in the Force, a shunting of destiny from one track to another. As one might have felt, on a pleasant day in September, watching the great silver airliners over Maryland and Pennsylvania and New York tilt their wings and slowly slide onto a new course.

  He raised his voice. “Anyway, that’s where he is. Template will continue to track and put out additional info on the command link. Any further questions?”

  They didn’t even look up, so he quietly resumed his seat.

  20

  Tora Bora

  THEY inserted from black MH-6 “Little Bird” helicopters on an uphill-slanted field swept with wind and dust and blowing thatch. All of Echo, plus a unit of British SBS and the Alliance interpreter, Aimal. Teddy unbuckled from the side
of the bird and jumped down, staggering as he hit. Screaming through ravines at a hundred-plus knots, hanging off the bench seat looking down … almost too much, man. He wobbled a few yards and took a knee, staring up. Scraggly and bare as it was, the two-acre field was the only halfway flat terrain in sight. All around incredibly steep slopes angled upward, dotted with gray-green puffs of small evergreens. The incline they were on ended at an enormous … rockfall? Moraine? Above it the mountain just went up and up, vertical rock until the snow line. Fourteen thousand feet, the briefing’d said.

  “Let’s do this, do this. Stop fucking around,” Moogie muttered as he trudged by, bent under ruck and gear and rifle wrapped with tape to break up the outline, goggles pulled down against the debris the choppers’ blades were flinging as they pulled collective again, lurched, then plucked themselves up into the air. Dollhard trotted past, short legs flicking the ground like a goat’s, with the radioman/grenadier, Ozzie Cannon, right behind him. To everyone’s astonishment, Echo’s tubby and truculent OIC had survived Kandahar. One of the rounds from the burning garage had struck his armor so hard in the solar plexus he’d been paralyzed. Even the corpsman had thought he was dead, though puzzled by finding an immense bruise rather than a wound. But Dollhard had rolled off the evac helo under his own power, refused further evacuation, and been back on duty within twenty-four hours.

  Oberg stared up at boulders as far as the eye could see, from the size of refrigerators up to shipping containers, tumbled where they must have fallen off the mountain; yet each was rounded, worn as if it had spent time in a stream. They were gray-green, roan, purple, stained with lichen the color of dead cheeks. Here and there a stunted bush poked up, or less often, one of the pines or hemlocks.