The Towers

by David Poyer

  Teddy looked, but didn’t see anyone though he could heard them yelling to each other in high-pitched yodels. No bone mikes on the other side. He glassed the rockfall. He’d fired two shots from the same position. A good spot, but he needed to move. Out of habit, he scouted for the empty brass, but it was gone down between the rocks. “Moving left,” he yelled, and low-crawled ten yards before edging around a boulder and glassing again. His mouth was terribly dry but his CamelBak was almost empty.

  The MX came alive. Verstegen was calling in air support to their right front. Pull back, he said. Teddy doubted this would do much good, but he and Swager took turns putting out bursts as the other scrambled to the rear, firing and falling back, until they were halfway to the village. At which point the lieutenant (jg) came back on and said, sorry, Air Force says no joy, get back on the line where you were.

  Choking back a wiseass reply, Teddy climbed again, but Verstegen halted them before they were all the way up and moved them even farther up the gradient. What was he doing? Deliberately keeping Teddy out here on the flank, so could make all the tactical decisions himself? So what. Make my day, punk.

  Teddy tilted his head neck-cricking back and looked up the mountain. It got real sheer up there, where all these rocks had let go. Almost a straight drop, but lots more mountain still above that.

  “Our guys down in the valley are pulling back,” someone said on the circuit.

  “What the fuck? They got ’em on the run.”

  “Way it is, webfoot. They’re taking a break. Having some of that nice hot goat stew.”

  Renewed firing, this time from the left flank. A probe? This might not be such a bad position. No one could get past above them, and the SBS was strung out down the slope below. Not the best use for either unit, but at least they could serve as a backstop while the Aghans did whatever Aghans did down below. Meanwhile, every few minutes another detonation went off in the valley as the air strikes continued. On the other hand, this’d make a great ambush site. The saddle, almost a ravine. The terrain would funnel anyone trying to retreat from the valley into it. Teddy glassed and caught movement again. Put his scope on it, but didn’t see it repeated. Maybe just a tuft of grass.

  Or Joe Talib in a sheepskin coat slow-snake-sliding between and under the rocks, taking his time. “I’m gonna snail-crawl a few yards upslope,” he told Swager. “Get right up against that bluff.”

  “Roger-dat, Chief.”

  Curled against the icy-cold living rock of the mountain, high as he could get without going sticky-footed up vertical stone like a gecko, he glassed again. Wondering why if they were trying to punch through here, they didn’t just attack, throw mortars or grenades and try to bust through. They’d take casualties, but thin on the ground as Echo was, they might get lucky. Once through they’d have an open field between them and the goal posts in Pakistan.

  But nothing happened for the next hour, except that the shadow of the mountains deepened the gloom. Maybe they were waiting for dark. The buzz ebbed. He ripped open plastic and filled the hollow feeling with Menu 15: meat enchiladas and a chocolate chip cookie made of Martex. Bombs lit the dusk, boiling the milky fog below. Something caught fire and exploded in fountaining pyrotechnics of white flame that arched like comets, trailing colored smoke. “Just like the Fourth in Seattle,” somebody said.

  “Looks like we’re gonna be here through the night,” Verstegen said over the channel. “But stay alert. They may try to infiltrate through us in the dark.”

  Maybe he wasn’t totally hopeless. “Pair up, if you’re not buddied up already,” Teddy added. “Share your water, but ration yourself. Work it out, who stays awake and who gets his head down. The one who’s sleeping, turn your MX off. Practice battery conservation.”

  “Chief, can you come in? I’m still up here at the peak. By the big rock.”

  Teddy said he could. He took his time, though, not wanting to slip and twist an ankle or hurt his shoulder any more than he had to. It had settled to a dull ache, but something was torn. Even eating Motrin didn’t help. It was an awkward time of day, too dark to see well, too light to use the NVGs yet. At last he found Verstegen and slumped beside him.

  “Water up, Chief.” A half case in bottles. Teddy grabbed two and made short work of one. Refilled his CamelBak and stuffed two in his cargo pockets for Knobby. Verstegen said, “They’re going to try to come through us tonight.”

  “I would if I were them.”

  “I was thinking. Ambush?”

  “Sounds like a plan. Classic L-shaped ambush. How do you suck ’em in?”

  “Fire from the left flank, hold fire on the right. Swing the right flank back. Put the claymores out with trip wires and the Mark 46 behind them, in front of the village, and somebody sniper qual’d up by the bluff.”

  “Me?”

  “You and Swager?”

  “Okay.”

  They called O’Brien and Wasiakowski in and went over the drill if things went to shit, the fallback plan if they got overrun. Teddy asked if they had enough ammo and they said they did, hadn’t expended more than twenty rounds a man so far.

  Meanwhile it had gotten quite dark except for flames down in the valley and the stars and the planetlike lights that moved between them. When it was settled, Teddy and Vaseline went along the line making sure everybody had the word and was properly concealed and sighted. Teddy crossed the ravine, alert in case anybody was trying to infiltrate, and supervised setting the claymores. Had a couple of words with the gunner and moved him five meters to the left. Then climbed up to the bluff again, back to Swager. Put him in the picture too.

  When everything seemed to be ready, he told Knobby to flake out, get a few winks. And sat motionless, head turtled, as the dark got darker and the shooting below died. Even the air strikes tapered off, though now and then he still heard engines. He pulled his NVGs up out of his blouse, fitted them carefully, and clicked them on.

  At first he thought they were stars. Then realized they weren’t. Or not all of them. The ones above truly were. Shining unblinking, the way they never did back home. They were that high, the air was that thin.

  But the other lights lay below, and twinkled, wavering, tiny and far off but hundreds of them. He stared, only gradually realizing what they were.

  “Echo One, Echo Two. I’m seeing campfires in the IR spectrum. Lots of campfires.”

  “Copy. Got ’em here too.”

  “See them up above us, sir? They’re not all staying down in the valley. How about you let me do a little hunting?”

  “Negative. Appreciate your aggressiveness, but stay put. Let them come to us.”

  “‘Let them come to us,’” Teddy muttered through numb lips. “Fucking oblivious.” Despite the fleece he was beginning to shake. The middle of December. Colder every day. The Afghans kept advancing, then backing down. Now they were taking dinner breaks. Probably shouting back and forth to their buddies in the Taliban. Were they going to push this into deep winter? What the hell was the Team doing here, anyway? You didn’t need fucking Tier One operators for this. This was Tenth Mountain territory. Which, last he’d heard, were sitting on their cans in camp. While they were trying to corner O-sama with ragtag mountain men and a few specfor commandos.

  Beside him Swager stirred. Murmured, “Chief.”

  “What you need, Knobby?”

  “Just wondered. This’s my first time in combat.”

  “Well, no sweat, son, there’s a first rodeo for all of us. What’s on your mind?”

  “Well, I don’t know quite how to … like, when you shot those guys … what’d you feel?”

  “What’d I feel?” What kind of question was that? “I felt the fucking buttplate kicking my shoulder. That’s what I felt.” Swager didn’t respond and Teddy added, “That answer your fucking question?”

  “I guess so, Chief. I guess so.”

  “These are the enemy, Swager. Give ’em the chance, they’d butt-fuck you and then shoot you in the head. Hesitation, I
guarantee you, will kill you in combat. You want to play head games, you’ll have a fucking long time to do it. After you hang up your fins. Until then, you’re a killer. Just like the rest of us.”

  The kid fell silent. After a while he started snoring. Teddy settled, trying and failing to get comfortable on the hard rock, wrapping his arms around himself against the creeping cold.

  * * *

  THEY came around three in the morning. Teddy blinked awake the moment Swager patted his head. Curled around his weapon, poncho pulled close, shivering. Only the edge of sleep, anyway. The cold kept him shaking, and his shoulder wouldn’t let him stay in one position long before a thick needle started probing, right at the joint. His collarbone had started up again too.

  Meaning all in all he was almost awake anyway, so he just opened his eyes, quietly pushed the poncho off, and reached up to turn on the AN/PVS-9s. A faint whine, and the night dissolved into a boil of pea soup as they powered up.

  “There they are,” Swager muttered, taking hold of Teddy’s vision tube and turning it to point off to their left.

  Teddy clicked the MX-300 on and quietly passed the word on the intersquad. When everyone rogered, he slid the sling up on his left shoulder and cinched it tight above the biceps. Adjusted his bone phone, which was pressing painfully into his skull after lying so long against the rock.

  He was looking down. Had the high ground. Shapes oozed amid shadows. Each rock glowed a different intensity of green. But they were all dimmer than the outlines that wound slowly between them, in single file, climbing up out of the valley, each man with a hand on the shoulder of the one ahead.

  He picked out a space between darker shapes where the pale shapes would have to pass. Powered the reflex sight and pushed his goggles up. He reacquired, estimated range, and without looking dialed it in. “Two fifty,” he whispered to Swager.

  “Want me shooting too?”

  “No. Pull security for me. Keep a three-sixty, in case anybody back in that village decides to join the fun.”

  Swager clapped his shoulder and Teddy lined up on the column. Remembered voices whispered within his skull. He tracked the shapes. Could see vests swinging, the straight lines of slung weapons. One staggered under something heavy. Mortar baseplate? Gaps opened as the line straggled. His thumb caressed the safety. Left it on.

  Two hundred meters.

  The closer they got, the deeper they’d be in the kill zone.

  Verstegen knew that. Had to know. But sometimes it was hard to wait.

  After a while Teddy made out the rattle of stone against stone and metal against metal, then a little after that the harsh breathing of exhausted men. By then he’d made out the hotter shape of a small burro or donkey, heavily laden as well, sharp squares of ammo boxes perched high. He was dialed down to a hundred meters. The only other sounds were his own breathing and Swager’s behind him and the wind and the high buzz of a drone lost somewhere over the mountain. He kept looking for a silhouette taller than the rest, but the only possibility was halfway down the line, and would Osama bin Laden really be leading a donkey? He didn’t think so.

  Less than a hundred. How close was Vogey going to let them get? Teddy couldn’t see the end of the column. Then he could, far down the draw. The OIC was sucking them as deep into the zone as he could, get them all at once. Brass fucking balls.

  “Stand by” came over the net. Wasiakowski, not Verstegen. But that was all right. “Commence fire.”

  It was over in seconds. The gunflashes, the screaming, the hasty scattering as men dove for cover and tried to get weapons into action. But the firepower from above was too heavy to face. Teddy, from the opposite flank and above, had shot after clear shot as they tried to find shelter. He traversed from left to right, closest first because they were the biggest threat if they saw his muzzle flashes. He kept clicking his sights up until he got to the end, then worked his way back again. It wasn’t a fight, it was a massacre. Like a well-planned ambush ought to be. A few men at the head of the column tried to break out. They got a few dozen yards farther up the draw before the claymores went off and hundreds of steel balls clack-rippled away among the rocks. Then the 249 started up in bursts and the last men standing crumpled and fell. Somewhere in there someone shot the donkey. It was plunging and crying like a woman, and Teddy decided to put it out of its misery, but somebody else had the same idea before he got to it.

  The crack of 5.56s died down. The 249 gave one more burst and then fell mute too.

  “Cease fire,” Verstegen transmitted, when they’d all stopped anyway.

  They stayed in position for an hour. The excitement faded and he was shivering and freezing again. Teddy kept an eye downslope for a second wave. He kept looking behind and above him too. Then light started to filter down and Verstegen asked for reports along the line, anybody hurt, how many rounds expended and remaining. He ordered Obie to check out the kill zone on his side of the Clown Face Rock.

  Teddy told Swager to stay above and behind him and moseyed in, safety off, putting one boot carefully in front of the other, not taking his eyes off the crumpled bundles between the tumbled rocks as he neared them.

  Only a few of the infiltrators had made it up to where he and Swager had been posted. The MG and claymores had torn up those who had. He found one still alive, but the way his chest looked, it wasn’t worth wasting a pressure bandage. Teddy could see the man’s heart beating. He looked up without expression. Then the pulsing in the middle of the blood stopped and he closed his eyes. “Enjoy Hell, asshole,” Teddy told him. Swager managed a laugh. Maybe the kid would harden up, after all.

  Verstegen, on the tac net again: “Any prisoners, wounded, up where you are, Chief?”

  “None here, sir.”

  “Got a hard count?”

  “Tough to say, they’re mixed all in among these rocks.”

  “Rough count.”

  “Thirteen, fourteen … fifteen. Might be crawlers, though.”

  Swager asked him, “What’s disposition on these dudes, Chief? You heard anything?”

  “The dog meat, you mean? Leave ’em for the villagers,” Teddy told him.

  He stood among the bodies as the gray light kept growing. More baggy shalwar kameez, shaggy, stinking sheepskin coats, flat wool caps, old Soviet gas-mask bags, worn-out AKs. They didn’t look as if they’d ever had much to eat, and even less in the recent past. They were all small and all had beards. Except the boys. One lay on his back, smooth-faced, arms flung wide, eyes and mouth open.

  But no tall, bearded, hound-dog-eyed Arab. None in black capes or black turbans either. These weren’t Al Qaeda. Not the fabled Fifty-Fifth Brigade, Bin Laden’s bodyguard, the shock troops of the jihad. Bad guys, but not the ones they wanted. He glanced back down at the valley, into the mist or smoke that hazed the ground down there. The boiling kettle the men they’d killed had been trying to escape. He took off his cap and scratched his head all over. Call in resupply … they’d gone in light … ammo, batteries, water, chow. Search the night’s crop for maps, documents, anything intel could use. But the valley kept drawing his eyes.

  Was he really down there? Bin Laden? Maybe he was. Maybe he wasn’t.

  But if the guy thought he was coming through here, he had another thing coming.

  21

  Joint Special Operations Center, Bagram

  THE moving party had arrived. Five men, all laconically silent as they helped Dan and Henrickson and Wenck pack up. Everything resided either in their notebooks, the main server, or back at TAG. CIRCE herself was at TAG; the combined outputs resided remotely, accessed only by those with clearances and need to know via the SIPRNET—the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network. So all they really had to move was their computers and any personal snivel gear—tissue boxes, M&M’s, and clean socks. No one told them why; it had just come down. Within two hours they were set up again and operating out of the JSOC. Still at Bagram, still in a tent, but in a smaller, even more elaborately fenced compound-within-a-
compound. “Should’ve had you plugged in here from the get-go,” Provanzano said, looking at their setup with fingers stuffed in the back pockets of his jeans. He kept sniffling, like a toddler with a cold.

  “Need to take it easy on that inhaler,” Dan said.

  “Only thing lets me get any sleep. Okay, you went to Gardez with Beanie. And you’re reading the command net. So you know what we’ve got written for bin Laden’s last act.”

  “I know we’re depending on the Afghan allies.”

  “Almost correct. Once one of the A-Teams can get us a GPS fix on that bunker, we blow it down on top of him. We’re not gonna tunnel-rat around. Just blow it and bury him. Which is why you’re officially with us now. Can you do that?”

  “I can’t give you an unqualified yes.”

  “Or a no? I see. Well, we fought off Big Army. With some help from upstairs. It’s up to us to deliver. Get in and get this mopped up before winter closes us down.” Provanzano peered at a map Wenck had taped to an equipment rack. “What else’ve they got you doing? I think we can throttle back on Template. Since we know where he is.”

  “We do?”

  “The intercepted call.”

  “They’re not sure that’s him.”

  “We played it to a guy who knows him.” The CIA man winked and started to leave, then turned back. “Tell me when you’re ready. Actually I don’t know if we’ll call on you, we have plenty of Air Force, but it’s better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it. Any questions, ask Commander Laughland.” Provanzano waved forward a compact guy who’d just come in. He wore the black SEAL insignia on his BDU.

  Dan mustered his strength, but Laughland’s grip wasn’t as daunting as it could have been. “Dan Lenson.”

  “Denny Laughland. Heard about you, sir. You’ve worked with us before.”

  “Yeah?” Dan was always astonished at how small a town the Navy was.

  “Obie Oberg told me about hijacking the Iranian sub. How you got them out of it when he figured you were toast. Good job.” This seemed to dispose of the courtesies, because Laughland went straight into asking what Dan could do for an assault in terms of missile support.