Strike Force Delta

by Mack Maloney

  PART THREE

  One Bad Night over Khrash

  Chapter 18

  The first copter touched down on the eastern edge of Khrash just two minutes before midnight.

  The landing spot was close to the place where the city’s three main drainage culverts converged into one. On the team’s final option plan, this area was called Weak Point East.

  Ten heavily armed soldiers jumped off the helicopter, quickly taking up positions on one side of the cracked concrete culvert. These were all Delta guys; their squad had been designated 1st Delta for this operation. The squad god was one of the original Ghosts, Sergeant Dave Hunn. What they did in the next sixty minutes would determine whether this long-shot battle would be won or lost.

  The copter took off immediately after dropping Hunn and 1st Delta. It rose almost straight up into the sky, parking itself about one thousand-feet above the joining of culverts. Hunn did a head count; everyone had made it to the ground OK.

  He trained his night scope goggles in toward the city. They were about three-quarters of a mile from the center of Khrash, just a few hundred feet from the edge of a dead-end street. It was lined with clay and wooden houses for several blocks before the edge of the city proper began. This was the cluster of slum buildings where the city’s Taliban fighters had settled.

  Hunn could see lights in most of these hovels; he could also see armed men milling around outside some of them. The Superhawk copter that had dropped them here was nearly silent, but all it would take was for one sharp-eyed mook to look up into the sky and see the thing hovering up there and the game would be up.

  Hunn checked his watch. One minute to go. He scanned the Taliban neighborhood again; if anything, even more armed men seemed to be moving around inside the dilapidated buildings.

  Don’t these guys ever sleep? he thought to himself.

  The seconds passed like hours. If they were caught here, in the trench, and suddenly thrown on the defensive, it would get real nasty real quick.

  Thirty seconds . . .

  Hunn checked his weapon and attached his bayonet, the team’s trademark. He passed word on down the line that everyone else should do the same.

  Twenty seconds . . .

  He pinched the tiny gold cross he always wore around his neck—it had belonged to his kid sister, at 18 one of the youngest victims of 9/11. Just like every time before he went into battle, he now whispered five solemn words: “This one’s for you, Maggie.”

  Ten seconds . . .

  Another sweep of the slum neighborhood. Small armies of Taliban could be see on the buildings’ roofs now. They looked particularly dangerous in the green glow of the NV goggles.

  “Five seconds . . . four,” Hunn said aloud. “C’mon, guys, don’t let us down now . . . .”

  Three seconds . . .

  Two . . .

  One . . .

  Zero . . .

  Nothing.

  One of his men turned to Hunn and started to say: “Wouldn’t we hear them by now?”

  But suddenly he couldn’t be heard anymore. A tremendous noise had washed over them.

  The sound of many, many jet engines. The roar of jet fuel being burned and hundreds of tons of metal speeding through the cold air. Many of the Delta guys caught themselves looking up into the clear night sky, as if they would actually find contrails up there.

  Then came the sound of bombs. Bigger than the two they’d dropped on Sharif’s compound, these bombs made a whistling sound as they fell from a couple miles up. First dozens, then hundreds of them. The sirens in the city suddenly came alive. Antiaircraft fire began to paint the sky. The noise got even louder. By all indications, a B-52 strike was about to rain down on Khrash.

  Or at least, that’s what it sounded like.

  Now Hunn could see the mooks in his NV goggles start looking and pointing skyward, too. They’d heard it, too.

  The noise grew to monstrous proportions, earsplitting—but at the same time it was different. Sure, it was so loud. But the ground wasn’t moving beneath their feet.

  Finally one of the Delta guys cried out.

  “Here they come!”

  The whole squad looked behind them. But what they saw was not a fleet of B-52 heavy bombers approaching. It was the Psyclops plane, going right over their heads, broadcasting the sounds of a B-52 strike via their God’s Ear external speakers.

  On Hunn’s signal, every man in the squad applied a piece of cotton to his ears, this as the plane began dispensing incredibly bright flares above the slum. Between the noise and extreme light, it was like the most bombastic fireworks display they’d ever seen, times 10.

  “OK, that’s our cue!” Hunn screamed. “Let’s go!”

  The 10 soldiers jumped out of the culvert and began rushing right into the heart of the enemy encampment, weapons blazing.

  The Battle of Khrash had begun.

  The next two minutes unfolded like a dream for Hunn. It was always like that for him in combat. But this—this was particularly surreal.

  They hit the edge of the slum just 10 seconds out of the trench. They were all firing their weapons, from the hip, as they were running, adding even more to the substantial confusion. Because Hunn kept his NV goggles down, to him, it looked like they were running into a green hell.

  The Blackhawk helicopter that had dropped them off now reappeared and laid a barrage of .50-caliber machine-gun fire into the first house in a row of buildings. Despite the racket being made by the now-circling Psyclops plane, and his blocked ears, Hunn could hear people screaming inside.

  He and his men reached the first apartment building a few seconds later. There were many Taliban inside who were trying to jump out of the windows after dodging the copter’s bullets and still thinking that B-52 bombs were about to pulverize them. Hunn’s guys opened up on them; at least 12 mooks died in this initial fusillade.

  Hunn hit the house’s front door running. It exploded in a storm of wooden splinters. Two Taliban fighters were in the hallway, bent over, hands covering their ears, trying to block out the horrendous sounds coming from above. Hunn shot both of them in the head.

  His men poured into the building after him. They began a split-second clearing operation. The place was full of Taliban, but like the first two, most were in shock or were jumping out the windows. Those who remained were shot, stabbed, and kicked to death. The first and second floors were cleared inside a minute. Somehow a fire had started in the kitchen.

  Hunn and his guys headed for the roof. Up here they found another knot of Taliban who, incredibly, were in the process of pouring a barrel of rainwater through a hole in the roof onto the kitchen fire below. Seemingly unaware of what was happening, five of these six men died in a hail of bullets. One was spared intentionally.

  The Psyclops plane went overhead again, the roar from its loudspeakers now mimicking strings of bombs hitting the ground. The plane was also shooting out an incredible number of flares now. It was as bright as day in the slum. Even through their blocked ears the men of 1st Delta could hear the commotion; without any protection, it was deafening.

  Still, Hunn was able to yell down through the hole in the ceiling, telling his men below to verbalize the securing of the building. Five shouts back confirmed the building was clear and under their control. Their Blackhawk helicopter went over again, firing at mooks in the next apartment building over. Suddenly half that structure was on fire. Hunn turned to his guys up on the roof and said: “Get the rope.”

  They took the surviving Taliban fighter, so frightened he had soiled himself, and pulled a noose over his head. Then they dropped him over the side of the building. His scream pierced the chaos of the night—caught short only by his windpipe collapsing, his neck breaking. He was dead in a second. Then the Delta soldiers unfurled one of the dozens of American flags they’d carried into Khrash and draped it over the still-twitching body.

  Then they ran out of the house and back onto the street, this as the Blackhawk resumed firing into the n
ext apartment house they intended to seize.

  Hunn stopped for a moment and looked up at the first smoking building, the dead body, and the flag waving above it all.

  “That’s one . . . ,” he said.

  No sooner had Rich Kennedy’s feet hit the ground when the great blast of light arrived, knocking him on his ass. Two bombs went over his head. One hit the side of the tin and plywood wall approximately fifty feet away from Kennedy’s current location, obliterating a fifty-foot section of it. The second bomb landed somewhere on the other side.

  It began raining dirt and pebbles and flaming debris. Huddled beneath this cloud of sparks, Kennedy, another original member of the team, and nine other Delta operators kept their noses in the ground. For the night, they were 2nd Delta. They’d just been dropped off by one of the team’s other Blackhawks; the aircraft was climbing above them somewhere, vanishing into the dark.

  Ryder’s F-14 streaked overhead a moment later. It had dropped the pair of five-hundred-pound bombs, one on a section of Khrash’s wall identified in the plan as Weak Point North, the other into a neighborhood a few feet beyond. His F-14 was so low, Kennedy and his men could actually feel the heat of its exhaust as it passed over them. At the moment, it was the best feeling in the world.

  Ryder’s Bombcat went right through the fireball it had created, adding a burst of nose cannon shells to the fiery chaos. Then it stood on its tail, went completely over, and disappeared to the west. All this happened in about five seconds.

  Through the newly created hole in the wall Kennedy saw streets of whitewashed buildings with neatly packed dirt sidewalks, and even a few trees lining the roadway.

  This was Khrash’s Old Quarter, the ancient part of town. Because of Ryder’s dead-on one-two punch, though, the wall had been breached and the first block of buildings had been leveled. This is what usually happened to something on the wrong end of a five-hundred-pound bomb.

  While this was going on, the noise being generated by the Psyclops plane was also washing over them. The bizarre-looking plane was now circling directly above. They were well hidden in a berm not a stone’s throw away from the blasted-out wall. Still they were finding it just about impossible not to keep their heads in the ground when their ears were telling them that tons of explosives were dropping all around them. It sounded that real.

  Still, Kennedy managed to get all of their attention.

  “Bayonets, on?” he yelled to his men.

  They replied, as one, with a massive grunt.

  “Cotton, in?”

  Each man put the cotton pieces in his ears. Now raising their hands meant they were ready.

  “OK!” Kennedy screamed, trying to yell loud enough for them to hear him. “Let’s rock and roll!”

  A second later they began pouring through the hole in the wall.

  At the same moment, their guardian angel Blackhawk went into action. Moving incredibly fast, it threw a few missiles into the buildings just ahead of 2nd Delta, then peeled off and opened up with its nose-mounted cannons on other buildings farther up the street.

  While the copter was here to cover Kennedy’s attack team, its primary job was to clear the nearby rooftops of the city religious police. Many of them were stationed up here by way of their chief’s defense plan. But they’d been expecting to shoot their RPGs at American helicopters that were either moving slow or even stopped in a hover. They weren’t prepared to shoot at helicopters going very fast, with missiles firing and soldiers stuffed into the open cargo bay shooting back at them.

  Kennedy’s men could almost feel the panic in the air as the Islamic fighters realized that with the sounds of huge B-52 bombs falling all around them, the blinding flash of the flares, real bombs hitting buildings around them, and streets that suddenly seemed to be filled with hundreds of Americans—well, a rooftop was just not the place to be.

  But whenever the fighters would flee a building, inevitably the Blackhawk would be waiting for them, shooting them down as they came out. Inside a minute, the streets in this part of the Old Quarter began filling up with bodies.

  Kennedy’s men pressed on. In the air were even more sounds now. Explosions, people shouting. People killing. People getting killed. The real sound track of war.

  They went house to house, arriving just moments after the speeding copter had strafed it. They found religious policemen trying to jump out windows or cowering in closets or corners. All of them met the bullets of Kennedy’s guys coming in. Loki Soto had been perfect training for this. Fighting in confined spaces was now another specialty of the Ghosts’ Delta members. In less than five minutes they’d cleared five buildings and claimed them by displaying their American flags and hanging a mook or two.

  There were no heroes among the religious police who managed to escape all this.

  They began fleeing for their lives.

  Finally 2nd Delta reached the area where the three-hundred-year old Eastern Moon Mosque had once stood. They couldn’t believe what they saw. Even in the midst of the chaos and confusion, with the Psyclops plane roaring overhead and the Blackhawk helicopter flitting back and forth and the sound of the two F-14s up there somewhere as well, Kennedy’s men found themselves stopped in their tracks, awestruck by the destruction caused by the bombing of the Muslim temple.

  It was utter devastation for six blocks. Many buildings flattened. A few still on fire. A huge smoking hole in the ground where the former holy place had been. It really did look like a small atom bomb had hit it. No wonder resistance in the Old Quarter was scattered at best.

  Kennedy got his men moving again; he had to. This operation wasn’t so much about seizing and holding territory as it was about scaring the hell out of the mooks and getting them to retreat in disarray toward the western part of the city.

  Delta took over another series of buildings on the other side of the blast zone, all of them abandoned by fleeing mooks. Kennedy was able to look back and see more than a dozen American flags fluttering in the breeze now. What’s more, about a quarter-mile away to the east he could see more buildings with more flags flying above them. This was Hunn and 1st Delta doing their work in the Taliban slum.

  So far, so good, Kennedy thought.

  Then he and his men turned the next corner and found themselves at the first intersection they’d come to. That’s when a rain of shells and bullets came down on them from every direction.

  In seconds they were pinned down.

  Kennedy kept his cool. This wasn’t totally unexpected. He made sure his men were under good cover; then he took out his flare gun and fired two large green flares into the air.

  That was the signal.

  They needed a tank up here.

  The DSA officer named Ozzi was leading the third attack squad.

  Unlike the first two, which were made up of Delta operators, Ozzi’s team, designated 3rd IF, for Irregular Forces, was comprised entirely of Zabul tribesmen. They’d been dropped about a quarter-mile south of Hunn’s position, more than 20 Zabul, plus Ozzi, crammed inside the third Blackhawk helicopter.

  Their objective was to clear a four-block area known as Kuhada Circle. It was a lightly populated area of Khrash, but there were several utilities’ centers here, including the city’s electrical power plant, its waterworks, and the telephone exchange. Destroying them would mean lights-out for the city, with no water to fight fire and no phones to call for help, demoralizing aspects for the people living here. It was the art of psychological warfare again. No matter what was happening in combat, it always seemed twice as bad if it was happening in the dark. The confusion the Americans were sowing now, in the opening minutes of the attack, would only be compounded when the lights went out. And the whole idea was to keep that confusion up for as long as possible.

  But Ozzi’s squad also had a secondary mission down here. Utilities used underground tunnels, and tunnels offered perfect hiding places to set up ambushes. Gunmen could pop up through a manhole, fire away, and then disappear again. Many of the city�
��s utility tunnels began and ended here at Kuhada Circle. If the mooks were going to use them for dirty work, they’d probably try to either enter the tunnels here or use them as their means of escape.

  Taking out the utility buildings could have been done by an air strike. But because the manhole covers were scattered all over the circle, it would have been almost impossible for aerial bombs to get them all. That’s why Ozzi’s 1st IF was sent in.

  Ozzi was armed with his short-stock M16; his Afghani allies were carrying AK-47s. The Zabul elders, the cousin of Tarik Aboo had assured them, were the tribe’s equivalent of Special Forces; that’s why Ozzi would be the only Ghost Team member accompanying them. It seemed like a good match. He could speak a little Arabic—not a year ago he was a systems analyst sitting in the smallest office in the Pentagon—and a couple of the Zabul fighters could speak English. Before jumping off, they’d also agreed on hand signals to be used in combat.

  They blew up a half-dozen manholes in the first two minutes. It didn’t have to be pretty: Two hand grenades down the spout usually did it, as the tunnels were old and for the most part were made of dirt. A few times his fighters wanted to go down into the tunnels and look for the defenders of Khrash, but each time Ozzi managed to diplomatically talk them out of it. There really was no need to be tunnel rats here, like in ’Nam. All they had to do was seal the tunnels from this end. That might be enough to trap a whole lot of mooks inside.

  Another ten manholes were taken out before they reached Kuhada Circle itself. The first building they faced was the waterworks. It was a two-story squarish structure; built of typical red bricks, it looked like something built in the nineteenth century. It was unoccupied. There was a massive pipe and a huge control wheel running right next to the building. It seemed as simple an act as turning this wheel would shut off all water in the city. Ozzi instructed his Zabul friends to prepare four explosive charges. Two would go on the pipe; two would go beside the building itself.

  It took five minutes of skulking around, wrapping sticks of dynamite and laying fuse wire, but the building and the water pipe went up in a grand explosion. The Psyclops plane flew overhead just as the four blasts were going off and had to bank violently to the right to avoid getting caught in the fireball. Ozzi watched the plane go over, nearly lose its flight envelope, and then recover again, only to fly away. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Through the whole thing, the plane had continued broadcasting the earsplitting mimicry of a huge B-52 raid.