by Damien Lewis
When Mat reached the little hollow in the hillside, the Diemaco was lying exactly where he’d remembered throwing it. But just as he stooped to retrieve his weapon, he froze: something had caught his attention. As he swivelled his head slowly to take a better look, Mat caught sight of an object faintly glowing on the ground, just a few yards ahead of him. It was too white and too regular to be any product of nature. Reaching down, Mat slipped his hands around the cold steel of the Diemaco, and flipped the safety to off. He was relieved to see that his weapon had suffered nothing more than a few small dents and scratches.
Crouching low and stepping as gently as he could on the rocky ground, Mat crept towards the mystery white object. As he got closer, another appeared out of the darkness, and then another and another, stretching away in line across the hillside. He was almost on top of them before he realised what they were: someone had placed a series of squarish boulders running across the hillside, and they were all painted a bright white. Out here on this darkened, deserted mountainside, they were about the last thing that Mat had expected to find.
From where he was now standing, one line of white boulders stretched away across the mountainside following the contours, and as he looked uphill Mat could see another running directly up the slope ahead of him. Someone had deliberately marked off a corner here – and Mat was standing at the apex of the right angle. But a corner of what? It could hardly be a field or a garden on this barren hillside, and the terrain was far too uneven for it to be a landing strip or a path. Mat was completely mystified. He made a mental note to consult the other lads when he rejoined them. Seven heads were better than one – maybe together they could figure it out. Whatever it was, it was man-made and had to have been put there by the local Afghans – which more than likely meant the enemy.
Mat turned and made his way back towards the waiting line of compasses, bobbing and faintly glowing in the darkness.
‘Sure did appreciate the firework display, buddy,’ Sam drawled as Mat hove into view. ‘Say, but next time can we have some rockets an’ maybe a couple of air bursts, too?’
‘Piss off, mate,’ Mat replied, as he dropped his bergen to the ground. ‘Take five, lads,’ he added, as he began rubbing the base of his neck, which was badly bruised from the fall. The rest of the team gathered around, dropping their packs on to the hard earth.
‘Ace quad-bike driver, me, mate,’ Mat remarked to no one in particular, making a reference to how stupid he felt for having taken a tumble down the mountainside.
‘Say, you sure you’re OK, buddy?’ CIA Bob asked. ‘You taken a bad knock on the head or somethin’? Cos you weren’t drivin’ no quad bike, buddy. ’Less I’m mistaken, you was walkin’.’
‘It’s just an expression, mate,’ Mat replied. ‘One of our blokes wrapped his quad bike around a rock on training back at Bagram. Now I can’t even manage to walk me way up a bloody mountain without taking a tumble. Bugger it, you Yanks wouldn’t understand anyways.’
‘Whatever,’ CIA Bob said. ‘Still, you know, by the looks of all them pyrotechnics down there, I guess you took a bad fall, huh?’
‘Yeah, could have done without it. Anyhow, listen up, lads. Way I see it is we’re in a honkin’ filthy place right now. What are we, two hours into the climb? And this is bad and only getting worse. Way we’re going, any AQT in the region will be able to hear us and see us coming bloody miles off. And we’ve taken two falls already. I had to drop me weapon, obviously, and I’m lucky it’s still OK. So, I know it goes against SOPs and all, but each of you’s got to feel free to do this climb as it’s easiest for you. So, if you want to sling your weapon, sling your weapon. You’ve all got some Paracord, right?’
‘Right,’ the rest of the guys confirmed.
‘OK, then use that to strap your weapon to your bergen, or, alternatively, sling it from your front,’ Mat continued. ‘Best way to protect your weapon is to strap it tight as buggery to your bergen. But if we’re compromised, you’ll have a bloody nightmare trying to get to your weapon. It’s your call. And we’ve got to try to avoid the worst of these rock slopes. Only way I can see us doing that is using NVGs. I know we decided against it back at base and for all the right reasons. But unless anyone’s got a couple of broomsticks and a pointy black hat so we can fly up there, it’s the best I can think of.’
‘Maybe we should’ve, you know, brought the quad bikes in with us, bro,’ Sam remarked. ‘Got the 10th Mountain boys to tow them in behind the Humvees. Might have been kinda neat for gettin’ in closer to the OP.’
‘Yeah, well, we could’ve loaded the bloody bergens on them, that’s for sure,’ Mat replied. ‘I did think about it, back at the fort. And we might’ve done so had Gobbler not buggered up our little training session back at Bagram. Anyhow, the noise might’ve alerted the enemy, although the quads’re pretty bloody quiet. Well, bugger it, mate, the only way forward now’s on foot. Talking of which, did anyone else stumble across them painted white rocks? Long lines of ’em slung out across the hillside. Bollocksed if I can work out what they’re for, mind.’
‘Buddy, you sure you didn’t take a crack on the head when you took that fall?’ said CIA Bob, with a wicked gleam in his eye. ‘Cos if I didn’t know you better I’d say you been seeing things.’
‘Bob, are you taking the piss, mate?’ Mat was getting the measure of the little CIA spook by now, and had realised that he was a real joker. ‘Cos if you are all I can say is it’s very bloody un-American of you. As all us Brits know, you Yanks don’t do sarcasm, specially not Southern boys like you. Anyhow, you open your eyes a bit, mate, and you’ll see ’em soon enough. White rocks. Painted white rocks. Long lines of ’em. Off to the right of us. OK?’
‘Whatever you say, buddy,’ CIA Bob replied, shaking his head in mock amazement.
‘You know, whatever drugs he’s on, I wanna get me some,’ Sam added, nodding in Mat’s direction.
‘Like I said – ace quad-bike driver, me,’ Mat retorted, with a grin.
There were a few seconds’ silence finally broken by Sam. ‘Say, I dunno about the rest of you guys, but I’m kinda whacked. I guess, you know, you guys kinda do more of this sort of mule work than we do.’
‘You never yomped up a hill with a pack on your back before, mate?’ Mat asked.
‘Seriously, bro, it ain’t somethin’ we do much of in the SEALs,’ Sam replied. ‘Like, I ain’t never done nothin’ like it before. Reckon I don’t ever want to again, either.’
‘Nowt like learning on the job then, is there, mate?’ Mat said, unsympathetically. ‘Anyhow, thought you SEALs were tough. We’ll make a real man of you yet, mate, don’t you worry.’
‘You’ll make a goddam mule of me is about all, bro.’
‘All right then, lads, come on, let’s get going,’ Mat announced, grabbing his pack and lifting it on to his shoulders. ‘We got a lot of climbing to do before sun-up.’
As he got to his feet Mat flipped his NVGs down over his eyes. With the aid of their night vision, the patrol members soon spotted the lines of rocks that Mat had mentioned. And not just the white ones, either. Within the next half an hour or so, they’d passed long lines of blue and red ones too. But none of them were any the wiser as to what they might be for. And the NVGs proved to be only a marginal help in finding a better route. While the goggles were good at picking up movement or colour, static black rock was static black rock. The eerie green glow of the NVGs didn’t pick up a lot more detail than that. Within the next two hours fatigue really began to take a toll, and two more of the team took a fall down the mountainside. One of them had his NVGs ripped from his head as he went plunging down the slope. When he found them again they were completely ruined.
With all the falls they were taking Mat found himself wondering whether Commander Jim hadn’t been right after all. Maybe they were attempting the impossible.
It was five hours into the climb when they hit a particularly nasty section of slope. Suddenly, Mat heard Sam and CIA Bob cursing and yel
ling, and almost simultaneously they both took a fall. As CIA Bob went crashing past Mat – a flurry of rocks sparking down the hillside after him – Mat couldn’t help himself any longer and just cracked up laughing. Here they were, an elite special forces team supposedly on a covert night infil deep into enemy territory, and they couldn’t be making any more of a balls-up of it had they tried. You had to see the funny side of it. As the Team 6 lads gathered around to wait for CIA Bob and Sam, the merriment quickly spread. It was, after all, a ridiculous situation to find themselves in.
‘Tell you what,’ Mat said to the lads, ‘if them AQT wankers haven’t spotted us by now I reckon we’ve got nowt to worry about on this op. If they’re all they’re cracked up to be, we should’ve had Osama himself and all his merry men after us by now. Couldn’t have made more of a song and dance of it if we’d flown in here in a couple of Chinooks, all guns blazing.’
What made it even funnier as far as Mat was concerned was that CIA Bob had finally taken a tumble. Mat was rapidly warming to the funny little American spook and his evil sense of humour, and now it was his chance to give CIA Bob some grief in return.
‘Take a couple of Yanks on the mission and it all goes to rat shit,’ Mat called out, in the general direction of Sam and CIA Bob. ‘You guys still alive down there?’
‘Ace quad-bike drivers, us!’ a voice floated up from down below them.
‘Reckon bloody Spooky there’s two sandwiches short of a picnic,’ Mat remarked to the others, as they waited for the two Americans to rejoin them. ‘Seen the size of that pack he’s carrying? More like a girly handbag than a rucksack. You blokes took a bit of a tumble, did you?’ he said, as he spotted Sam and CIA Bob emerging from the darkness.
‘Well, you know, we were feelin’ kinda all left out,’ Sam retorted.
‘Don’t want you Brits havin’ all the goddam fun, do we?’ CIA Bob added.
Once the two Americans had checked themselves over, Mat was keen to press ahead. But as he got to his feet and reached for his pack Sam drew him to one side to have a quiet word.
‘Listen, bro, I’m real whacked,’ Sam said.
‘Yeah, well, we’re all bloody hooped, mate, what of it?’ Mat replied.
‘No, really, I mean it, bro, I’m kinda finished. I mean, with all that goddam weight I’m carryin’, I ain’t sure how much longer I can do this for.’
‘You serious, mate?’ Mat asked, finally realising that Sam was in trouble. He knew this tough American soldier well enough to know that he never normally complained.
‘Yeah, I’m real serious, bro. My shoulders are ripped to shreds from that goddam pack. My back’s on fire. And my legs feel like Jell-O. I wouldn’t be sayin’ nothin’ unless it was bad.’
‘All right, well, this is what we’ll do, mate. First off, lose that pack,’ said Mat. For some reason Sam had chosen to carry a standard-issue British Army bergen, not a civilian pack. And Mat rated the British Army backpacks about as highly as he rated the boots. ‘Try my bergen. It’s a civvy version. If it suits, we’ll swap and I’ll also take some of your extra weight. And then we’ll just have to crack on.’
‘Shit, buddy, I feel goddam awful about this.’
‘No problem, mate. Just don’t forget to buy me a couple of pints when we’re back in Poole. And take your grab bag, mate. Fat lot of good that’ll be if it all goes noisy and we’ve got the wrong bags to hand.’
Back at the fort Sam had volunteered to carry the team radio, a big, chunky piece of kit. Mat wondered if maybe that was part of his problem. After they had redistributed some of the weight, Mat and Sam and the rest of the patrol recommenced the exhausting climb. By now, they had been on the move for six hours, and the first glimmer of dawn was just starting to lighten the mountain peaks to the east. As the soldiers trudged upwards, they broke out from a wooded area on to a barren hillside. By the light of the coming sunrise they could see that the top of the ridge they were climbing now lay some five hundred yards directly ahead of them. And between them and the ridgeline lay a snowfield, glowing a fantastic fiery orange in the rarefied dawn light.
The men stopped for a second to catch their breath. Beyond the ridge, towering above and behind it, lay the peak for which they were heading – the snowfields on the near side of the mountain picking up the dawn light and throwing it back at Mat and his team in a thousand different shades of red. Despite where they were and the nature of the mission, it was an uplifting, awe-inspiring sight. At last they could finally see their destination. Mat felt the tension and exhaustion of the climb dropping away from his shoulders. He consulted his Trek GPS, which showed that they were at 9,000 feet now. The summit lay 3,000 feet above them. Which meant it was three hours’ walk away, but well within their reach.
Once they got off the ridgeline – where they could easily have been spotted, silhouetted against the sunrise – Mat called a short break. It was light now, and no amount of hurrying was going to change that. The team slumped to the ground, broke out some chocolate bars and began munching quietly, psyching themselves up for the final ascent. As they did so, Mat was running a new scenario through his mind. They had barely passed any river or stream or other source of water in the six hours that they’d been climbing. But now they had reached the snowline, and Mat was wondering if they could melt the snow and use it to replenish their water supplies. Trouble was they were on hard routine, and using a fire or a stove to melt the snow could betray their position to the enemy. It was a risk Mat wasn’t willing to take, not at this stage of the mission, anyway.
They recommenced the climb with Mat taking point and Sam bringing up the rear, sticking to just below the ridgeline. When they reached the point where the ridge met the base of the mountain, Mat noticed a little dampness in the earth at his feet. Stooping down, he realised that there was a tiny spring just at the base of the mountain wall. It was emitting a feeble flow, barely enough to wet his boots. But it was more than enough to work the Katadyn intake pipe into so they could filter the water. Pulling his GPS unit out of his smock pocket, Mat waymarked the coordinates of the stream. This could be their lifesaver: the nearest water source to their mountaintop OP. It certainly meant they had other options than to risk melting the snow.
Mat led his team on the summit climb and, at that altitude and with all the weight they were carrying, they quickly found themselves all but crawling up the barren, shattered scree of the mountainside. Progress was painfully slow, and they were all gasping for breath in the thin air. Each man had to force himself to place one foot in front of the other and keep moving forwards. They reached the summit just before lunchtime and collapsed, gasping for breath, into the weird, cactus-like undergrowth that was all that seemed to cling to the peak. Before them stretched an undulating vista of ridges and plunging valleys. But a harsh, midday sun beat down from the sky now, painting everything – rocks, snowfields, vegetation – an unrelenting drab grey brown. The Naka Valley was an inhospitable, unforgiving landscape if ever there was one.
By the time his patrol had reached the mountain summit, Mat knew that they were all suffering from the onset of acute mountain sickness (AMS), a life-threatening condition of high altitude. At 12,000 feet the oxygen present in the atmosphere is only half that found at sea level. Which meant that every time the lads breathed in, they were taking in half as much oxygen as normal. Oxygen is vital to physical well-being and survival. The early symptoms of AMS are like a bad hangover: a thumping headache, nausea and a general feeling of lousiness. An AMS headache is generally believed to be the worst a man can get: a blinding, pounding pain that thuds like a jackhammer inside the skull.
As AMS worsens, the nausea turns to vomiting, the headache becomes even more unbearable and the sufferer finds himself gasping for breath. Then balance and coordination begin to fail, a symptom known as ataxia. Mental confusion, slurred speech and drowsiness follows. The sufferer may have a horrible gurgling in the lungs, and be coughing up bloody phlegm. At this point death is just hours away, and th
e only cure is to rapidly descend the mountain and use oxygen. The one way to avoid getting AMS is to climb slowly. SBS SOPs for high-altitude missions suggest making no more than three to five hundred yards of ascent for each day’s climb. Yet Mat’s team had just made a 12,000-foot climb in less than twelve hours.
It was no wonder that they were feeling so awful, Mat reflected, as he staggered off into the bush to vomit. He had a splitting headache, a churning stomach and was struggling to drag enough air into his aching lungs. He had vomited three times on the last stage of the climb, and the rest of the lads were suffering just as badly. Mat knew the symptoms of AMS well, having carried out several Alpine and Arctic training missions. He also knew that they would just have to grit their teeth and bear it, as descent was not an option. Over the next forty-eight hours either the AMS would become life threatening, or they would acclimatise. The men were parched from the climb, and drinking plenty of water is one of the main ways to avoid AMS. Mat knew that his men should be drinking five litres of water per day, but they could only allow themselves less than a third of that on this mission.
It was crucial that Mat got his men into the cover and shade of a secure observation position as quickly as possible. Scanning the ridgeline ahead of him with his binoculars, Mat spotted a giant heap of boulders about a mile ahead. It should provide some protection, and offer a clear view down into the Naka Valley to the north. After a short break Mat urged his men on with the promise of a proper feed and a rest. Some twenty minutes later they arrived at the mound of boulders, and it did indeed appear to be a classic site for an OP. It provided good cover, great arcs of fire across the surrounding terrain, several escape routes and views both to the north and south of the ridgeline.
