The Lion of Sabray

by Patrick Robinson

  The policy was simple: blitz that mountain until it goes quiet. Real quiet.

  Mohammed Gulab, on the ground with Marcus, up against the wall, heard the American air attack coming in from miles away, right out of the west, above the cloud cover. They were about ten miles away when he first heard them. And, almost simultaneously, he again saw white lights moving on the mountain, a sure sign that Shah’s army was about to have one last crack at either killing him and Marcus or bringing down a US fighter aircraft with a missile.

  At this point, all options were narrowing. They all knew the rescue team was scheduled to make the pickup, and therefore the distant roar of those aircraft had to be associated with that operation. From where Gulab sat against the fieldstone wall with Marcus, a counterattack by the Taliban seemed imminent.

  He stood up and hissed to his American friend, “Marcus! Marcus! Lights. Taliban!” And he pointed over to the slopes on the opposite side of the village, where the activity was now more obvious.

  The American commanders moved very quickly, ordering everyone to his feet and over the wall. The other side had a bigger drop and would provide much more protection.

  Problem: Marcus could not make it by himself. So Gulab grabbed his rifle, heaved that over there, and then called in Norzamund and another friend to help with the wounded SEAL. They had to get him undercover without half killing him with the agony of that shattered left thigh, which was still bleeding intermittently.

  Slowly, they lowered him down from the top of the wall, but the American was so exhausted fighting the pain, trembling with the effort, that Gulab went for the only answer there was. He took the rifle, leaned it on top of the wall, a nice height, and aimed it straight up the mountain at the Taliban lights.

  By now, his warning had been heeded by everyone, and the “Green Berries” opened fire immediately. Marcus produced his telescopic glass and began “spotting”: guiding the fire and keeping Gulab’s aim steady, focused on the precise positions of the enemy.

  Gulab says he’d had other spotters in battle, but never one as good as Marcus. Despite the Texan’s pain, he never lost concentration and kept calling the shots, via hand signals, with the calm accuracy of a real professional. Gulab just kept firing, blowing out the distant lights whenever he could.

  It seemed like only seconds later when the American battle fleet came rumbling over the mountain, and it launched an air-to-ground attack the likes of which the tribesmen had never seen before.

  The US air fleet hit that mountain with everything it had. And it may have been just his imagination, but Gulab thought he saw great mountain oaks literally lifted out of their roots and flung skyward. The glare from the bomb blasts illuminated the land, and there were huge spouts of earth erupting into the air, along with bodies, weapons, and heaven knows what else.

  The Apache helicopters were circling around and around, strafing the ground with cannon fire and unleashing those ferocious Hellfire missiles, all of them leaving fiery trails before the blasts. Just above them were two fixed-wing fighter-bombers slamming rocket after rocket into the forest area, reducing Sabray’s prime forestry to splinters.

  Gulab watched all of this merciless destruction with a mixture of “Praise Allah for our deliverance” and the most profound sadness. He had seen pictures of the end of World War II, and shocking photographs of cities in Poland, of desolate streets turned to rubble, of shell-shocked people standing in front of their shattered homes. The tears, and the heartbreak, and the decimation of their dreams. Sad. Inconsolable. Ruined lives.

  Those were his feelings as he watched the greatest power on this earth smash its high explosives into his family’s lands. He was aware that the Americans meant only to help—to them, those steep mountain acres were of no consequence. They were just the tribal lands of a people that Washington, DC, scarcely knew existed.

  But to some, however, they were everything. It was upsetting to watch that earlier daytime bombing raid, which blew off a few roofs. But this was entirely different. This nighttime raid featured the most formidable air-to-ground weapons in the US arsenal. It would have leveled a medium-sized city.

  At the time, there was a stampede among the women and children back up the hill to their homes, to seek protection from the onslaught.

  Gulab had sheltered his wife at his father’s house because it was plain that she and the children could not go to their own home. With Marcus and Gulab gone, that would be the Taliban’s first stop, for some kind of mass slaughter of the innocents.

  Their land, their trees, just being systematically smashed. It was bad. And Gulab was unsure whether he should recount his unhappiness to Allah. He was, after all, doing His bidding, and he’d tried to obey Him in every way. And the object of the holy instructions was still there, standing beside him, signaling the line of fire, as the tribesman blasted away with an American Special Forces rifle.

  Marcus himself, according to Gulab, had a slight smile on his face as the American fighter pilots finally pulverized the Taliban army. He seemed oblivious to the shattering noise and the thunder of the explosives. He just looked like a man who’d been waiting a long time for this moment, and, despite his pain, despite everything, he was gazing out over the opium field with some satisfaction.

  The terrorist troops taking the airborne shellacking were the exact same tribesmen who had tried over and over to blow him up and gun him down; the same men who had killed all three of his friends. That smile of his was very obviously grim in nature. But amidst all the chaos, it was still the smile of a real warrior.

  The two Pave Hawks continued their climb up toward the level of the landing zone, leaving the dark river valley far below. The scenario was unaltered, everyone demanding to know the status all across the airwaves, while the US fighters were still hurling everything they had against the Taliban.

  And then, quite suddenly, that all stopped, and the Taliban were temporarily silenced. But then the target changed. And as Skinny and Spanky straightened up for the homestretch, leveling out for their final approach, the US air attack switched from ground targets to unknown expanses of the mountain wall.

  The objective was now very different. It was simply to make as much noise as humanly possible, to drown out the noise of the helicopter rotors and, hopefully, to deceive the Taliban missile men as thoroughly as possible. Hellfire missiles slammed into the granite walls of the mountain from every angle.

  But the clouds were still completely uncooperative, cloaking the range in a fogbound mantle of thick, gray mist. Visibility: close to zero with the naked eye. And in the middle of all this came a curveball out of nowhere: from home base, a last-minute two-kilometer correction in the coordinates was coming in over the radio.

  This meant the pickup point was now a mile and a quarter different. Most of the aircrew thought this was a darned fine time to be telling them, with the two rescue aircraft hurtling in toward the landing zone, the final approach for Spanky. Worse yet, the navigators had only the numbers, with nothing to inform them whether they represented a sheer cliff face or the valley floor.

  Mass confusion from HQ, but no earthly point charging ahead to the wrong place, somewhere where Marcus wasn’t. Gonzo, Spanky’s copilot, was very shaken by this.

  “I just cannot tell the guys inside this aircraft to get that done fast enough!” he yelled.

  Skinny’s copilot, Major John Phalon, said later, “It was the time—there was almost none left—even with my helmet on, I was pulling out what little hair I still had!”

  But Colonel Skinny was certain. And he snapped out a command: “These new coordinates have to go in—let’s get it done right now.”

  And still there was no moon and nothing from the stars. It was getting darker, not lighter. And then—horrors—their NV goggles began to shut down. There was no light to magnify. Their only chance was the infrared camera, a small screen relaying the residual heat from the rocks below.

  The performance of the commander, Skinny Macrander, was sensati
onal. He was out in the lead, flying to the right, racing as close as possible to the mountain wall, on his side. You couldn’t pay guys to do that in the light, never mind the pitch-dark.

  He said later that he was just doing the best he could. But it was more than that. It was nothing short of brilliant, an exhibition of ice-cold military flying, which had a special private glory of its own.

  And right now they began to see the scale of the operation they were in. The valley floor around Sabray was electric with infrared marker strobes: sharp bright pulses visible only through night vision goggles. Every Ranger, every aircraft in the sky, was flashing an identifying warning in this way: Don’t shoot over here, for God’s sake, you’ll hit me!

  And at this point, Spanky elected to make some high-speed maneuvers designed to confuse the Taliban. He started banking and swerving at low level, and then he got another shock. It instantly became obvious that the air was much thinner up here, and the massive rotors were not getting as much lift.

  The Pave Hawk was too heavy, and the only way to lighten her was to dump fuel. The crew went right ahead and unloaded the weight, but instantly there was another nightmarish development: the infrared Nightsun system on board the Spectre gunship could not penetrate the dense cloud cover. The system shut down, and now the landing zone could not be illuminated.

  This was a five-alarmer. And the comms chief in the Spectre screamed the warning: “ALOs! . . . Negative burn! . . . Negative burn!”

  The landing zone was now in total darkness. Spanky was desperate, still searching for the light that wasn’t there. He and Colonel Skinny were in close communication, but they couldn’t see a thing. In this, the most high-profile rescue mission the US Air Force had mounted for years, both lead pilots were flying blind, surrounded by mountains.

  And then this weeklong saga of divine interventions produced its next inexplicable miracle.

  The A-10s were just organizing one last concerted attack on the Taliban hillside, when the rear gunship quite suddenly spotted a gap in the cloud cover. He reacted with devastating speed, banked, and gunned the eleven-ton straight-wing aerial brawler straight at it, slamming on his targeting laser and lighting up the landing zone like a theater spotlight on a Bolshoi ballerina.

  Gonzo saw it and accepted that he was in the clear presence of a miracle.

  Spanky, too, was incredulous. “It was a sudden bright beam—seemed like from nowhere—and in all of these hundreds of miles, it was exactly where I wanted to land.”

  Said a wide-eyed Major Gonzo, “It was like the finger of God, out of the darkness, aimed straight at the landing zone.”

  The aircrew could now actually see where they were coming in. And a few of them nearly went into shock. This was no football field; no wide, flat pasture. This was a narrow shelf hacked into the side of the mountain below the village. It could not have been more than sixty feet wide, and from the open door of the Pave Hawk, it looked like about three feet.

  Sergeant Checky, who was sitting in the doorway, could not believe it. Later he said, “This was a landing zone I can state no pilot would even consider landing on in daylight. It was hard up against the mountain wall, and it was pitch-dark.”

  At the time he just gulped and muttered, “It’s pretty small.” And then, “You mean we’re gonna land there?!”

  Up front in the lead helo, Colonel Skinny rapidly lost height and set the helicopter to come in regardless of the flying bullets. It seemed that the surviving Taliban on the hillside had made their decision and were banging away at the opium field, determined to make life as difficult as possible for the Americans, trying to turn the LZ into a death trap that might drive away the rescue helicopters.

  Skinny kept coming, getting ready to drop that glow stick exactly in the middle of that flat ground. And down below, Marcus was calling the shots to Gulab and the Rangers gunners, staring through the glass, directing the fire, watching the remaining lights on the hillside. He was trained for this, and never had he been more determined to outwit an enemy.

  In came the lead Pave Hawk, engines howling, into the hail of Kalashnikov gunfire, bullets pinging off the fuselage. A grim-faced Colonel Skinny dropped that glow stick dead center in the LZ, and then ripped open the throttles and banked away steeply, climbing up the face of the mountain at a lunatic angle, trying to draw Taliban fire.

  This was mission critical, the tactic designed to offer irresistible bait to the Taliban, tempting them to aim at Skinny’s aircraft. He knew he might get hit again, and this time hit badly, but he never flinched. At least, not so that anyone noticed. And when he finally drove the lead Pave Hawk away over the valley, the air above the zone was clear and lit brightly by Skinny’s glow stick.

  Right then, Major Spanky Peterson turned toward the landing zone, hoping nothing more could go wrong, and steered the Pave Hawk toward Gulab’s mountain. He came in at an angle, intending to swing onto the flat ground with a slow descent and land on the flattest part he could see. It was, however, with mounting dread that he realized exactly how narrow it was.

  Straight ahead was the mountain wall. Directly below the helicopter was a drop of probably two thousand feet straight down. The margin for error was just about zero. It was, without a doubt, the most dangerous landing he had ever seen.

  One thought dominated his mind: If the rotors catch that mountain wall, even by a half inch, well, that’s all she wrote.

  There was, however, one other thought in his mind: failure unthinkable.

  Right next to him, Lieutenant Gonzo had his hands tight on the throttles, ready to go immediately to emergency lockout—a last resort if a sudden surge of power is required.

  The tension in the Pave Hawk was atomic, every noise and almost every thought drowned out by the roaring, shuddering beat of the big main rotor—that familiar Bom! Bom! Bom!—as the crew strained to see through the weird glow from Skinny’s firework illuminating the ground. This was high alert gone mad.

  They were ten feet from touchdown, and Spanky was hovering and losing height in slow motion. The navigator was counting, the aircraft lurching in sudden gusts of mountain wind.

  “Seven . . . six . . . five . . . four . . .” And then it happened: someone had miscalculated the depth of the loose earth and sand on the opium field, and those fifty-four-foot-wide rotor blades suddenly scooped up the dusty ground into a seething, blinding vortex—a sandstorm that enveloped the aircraft and rose thirty feet into the air. It billowed over the entire area. No one could see a thing.

  “Brownout!” shouted the navigator.

  With the rotors screaming, Spanky held tight over the narrow land, neither rising nor falling. But the situation was worse than dangerous. This was dire. There was no landmark, nothing to take a fix, impossible to see the drift, if any, and beyond the cockpit glass swirled an unimaginable dust storm.

  The downwash of the rotors was whipping it higher. They were enveloped in a churning, choking cloud of brown dust. A landing was not just impossible, it could prove lethal, and the commander immediately understood he was in the helicopter pilot’s worst nightmare: flying in the mountains, confined space, pitch-dark, no visual reference point. Even the lights on the LZ had died in the dust.

  The pilot does, of course, have instruments to show the drift of the aircraft. But this felt like flying with your eyes closed. The enormous danger was stark in Spanky’s mind:

  If we drift and then touch down on an uneven surface, we will most likely roll over, because the first wheel becomes a tipping point. That’s disaster. And in a brownout, it’s impossible to see whether we’re drifting left or right. You basically need to know just one truth: if the blades touch the ground, she breaks up.

  No one in the Pave Hawk’s crew had ever experienced anything this dangerous before. Spanky held the bird, and his nerve, with iron control, and everyone braced for a blind touchdown. Maximum alert.

  Lieutenant Gonzo suddenly got a sight of the rock face, and he called it: “Mountain wall fifteen feet from
rotors!” To himself, he muttered, “Holy crap! If we bump that way, we’re gonna hit it!”

  Next to him, Spanky suddenly saw through the dust cloud the two-thousand-foot drop, gulped, and told himself, If we drift on touchdown, we will crash.

  Lieutenant Gonzo said firmly, “If you guys believe in prayer, you might want to pray right now.”

  Sergeant Checky recalled, “I knew the only thing that might save you in a helicopter crash was to get down flat on the floor. I figured at that point we’re gonna hit—we’re gonna crash.” And the big staff sergeant hit the deck:

  “Stop left! . . . Stop right! . . . Stop left!”

  The pilot was completely dependent on directions from his crew and could do nothing but hover, blind in the dust. And then finally there was a call from the rear gunner: “We’re two and a half feet from a couple of trees! Stern rotor!”

  Spanky knew which way was front and which way was back, and he edged forward, still hovering in the dust cloud.

  “If you’ve a nice calm person in the back,” says Checky, “someone just calling ‘Come a little left,’ that’s one thing, and you make the correction. But when everyone’s yelling ‘Stop right!’ ‘Stop left!’ then that’s different, and I guess you react best you can.”

  Spanky lifted slightly and edged right, to avoid the looming terror of the mountain wall.

  Gonzo dived for the duel controls to stop the pilot from overcorrecting. It was a possible overcorrection that worried the lieutenant, and he held on, talking to Spanky calmly, ensuring that there were no drastic, heavy moves.

  But Spanky was too experienced for that, and he was just looking for anything on the ground that wasn’t going to blow away. But he couldn’t see anything. Only the brownout cloud, which was still swirling, still blocking out all forms of light.

  And right here the major understood he might be facing the end. A couple of feet one side or the other could sound the death knell for everyone aboard.