He put the plane in a gentle climb now. As we crossed twenty-thousand feet, I said a silent prayer, plugged into our O2, then dropped the ramp and popped the side hatch. I breathed—and the oxygen flowed. One more hurdle out of the way. I checked the Magellan. We were roughly seventy-five miles from the target and fifty-five miles from the drop now. The air coming into the fuselage was positively arctic. There was frost on my jump goggles. I could feel the cold through my gloves. This was going to be a bitch.
The plane banked right, then left, as we climbed through twenty-five thousand feet. Our insertion would be through the back door—flying from the north, parallel to (but southeast of) Afghanistan’s Kashmund range. That way, we wouldn’t have to retrace our steps on the exfil. It is bad juju to walk where you’ve been—especially if a mean bunch of motherfuckers are hot on your tail, which was a distinct possibility.
As visible as the ground was—the topography clearly delineated; the details absolutely visible—it amazed me to know that no one standing on the ground could see us. We were invisible to the naked eye. Only radar would find us up here. That gave us the advantage.
I stood in the door and watched the setting sun turn the mountain range to purple and gold. It was absolutely serene. The world below looked totally peaceful. It would be so easy to forget why we were here, so easy to sit back and enjoy the ride.
But there are things you do not do at times like this, and that was one of them. You cannot stop and smell the roses. You cannot think about the battles to come. You cannot think about the lethal, devastating effects your weapons will have on the enemy. You cannot ponder the philosophical/ moral/psychological consequences of your actions. Because if you do, you will lose your edge. That’s one of the things about war movies that has always disturbed me—and one of the reasons I stay away from them. All that endless talk about war that goes on—the pseudometaphysical psychobabble that filmmakers insert—is something I don’t allow in my units. I have never been reflective about making war, when I’m making war. The time for reflection is after you have achieved your mission; when the enemy is dead. Until then, you don’t suck your thumb or wring your hands or do anything else that will detract from the efficacy of your mission.
The plane banked again and the horizon shifted. I could see more than fifty miles out. Being able to see that much of the world gave us an edge. And believe me, we were going to need every particle of edge that could be found.
Rocky let me know that we were at twenty-seven thousand feet, and on our way to 29.5. I gave the proper hand signals. We stood in a line and checked each other out: helmets, goggles, gloves, rigs, harnesses, O2 bottles. We worked the straps of our rucksacks. No need to have all the ammo we were carrying pop out when we were jerked by the slipstream as we jumped, or the opening shock when we pulled the rip cord.
Less than two minutes to go. There was ice inside the plane now. I worked my way forward and stood behind Dick Campbell as he leveled off at our jump altitude. He turned and gave me a thumbs-up. I threw him the bird. I hoped he’d make it back to Peshawar—he was a good fucking egg, and he deserved to make it.
Forty-five seconds to exit point. I know, you’re asking how we knew it was the exit point, when we hadn’t thrown out any wind streamers to check the prevailing winds so we’d know how we’d parasail, or called down to the drop zone to pop a smoke in order to give us an idea what the surface winds were like to make our landing easier, or radioed the weather service for their computer readout for the region to see if there were any wind shears to pound us into the ground or thermals to carry us up and away to Tibet.
Well, when it comes to real-world HAHO parachute jumps, gentle reader, all that safety backup and assistance goes out the window. In the real world you fly by the seat of your pants. Your decisions are instinctive—based on audacity and experience, mixed (you hope) with a sprinkling of luck, and seasoned heavily with the kind of kick-ass determination that will let you grind it out and win even if everything turns into a clusterfuck.
I stood in the door, my heart pounding, probs and stats racing through my mind. I tapped the instrument package on my chest. Everything appeared functional. I’d taped the Magellan to my right arm. I could punch figures into it as we glided—an improvised homing device. If it worked, this would become the first SEAL instrument-guided insertion. If it didn’t, they’d find our desiccated, broken bones somewhere high in the Kashmund mountain range in a year or two. Maybe.
I peered at my men. Looking into the eyes of these six marvelous creatures, I saw they were prepared for anything. Their expressions were a combination of resolve and anticipation. Nasty saluted me with his middle finger. Wonder did the same. Tommy gave me a double. Howie and Duck Foot did, too. Despite their helmets, O2 masks, goggles, and the weight of their combat packs, they moved with incredible resilience toward the ramp. There was bounce in their step. The playfulness in their body language gave them an offbeat, zany appearance—something somewhere between a leprechaun and a Tasmanian devil.
It is at moments like this I know there is a God. I know there is, because He has put me on this earth so I can lead men like these into battle.
The Magellan GPS told me it was time to go. I checked the straps on my oxygen mask, gave everyone a thumbs-up (followed by the normal finger wave), then ran down the ramp and threw myself out the door.
Whaap! The ice-cold slipstream hit my body like a sucker punch and I twisted in the turbulence. I fought the current to roll faceup so I could see the C-123’s ramp as it slipped away in the darkening sky above me. That way I could count as my men jumped. Yeah—one-two-three-four-five-six bodies away.
I rolled again and threw a hump; the plane disappeared over my left shoulder. I pulled the rip cord. Opening shock—there are few things so appropriately named—caught me by surprise. The harness trapped my left nut dead center in my crotch and put such a squeeze on it I thought I was being fondled by a feminist blacksmith. Oh, but it was a good hurt. If you’re wondering how a hurt like that can be good, you have to look at things from my perspective: you see, if it hurt, my canopy must have opened.
Speaking of which, I looked up quickly to check my canopy. There were no cuts or tears—so much for worrywarting about seawater-rotted silk. That had been an unquestionable concern. See, if a shroud is improperly washed after a saltwater jump, residual salt crystals are left in the parachute silk. The problem: salt crystals are sharp enough to cut through parachute silk when the fabric is stressed to the max by opening shock. The result is that the chute develops hairline lacerations, which quickly develop into major fissures, which promptly turns into a major clusterfuck, because the chute disintegrates on you and you break into little pieces when you hit the ground.
But my chute was A-OK—she’d done her job. I double-checked my status—there’s no being too sure in situations like this. Two cells on the right-hand side were a little slow in filling, but the rest of them were taut as an eighteen-year-old’s nipple.
The huge dial of the altimeter on my left arm told me I was at 27,600 feet. That was close enough to where I wanted to be to make me relax for an instant or so. I took a quick look around me to count the other chutes. One-two-three-four-five canopies.
Shit.
I counted again and came up with the same number. Double shit.
I looked down. I could see a speck three or four thousand feet below me, trailing what looked like a long streamer. I cursed and screamed into my oxygen mask and told the stupid son of a bitch to cut away and pull his fucking reserve. Then I looked again and saw that he had cut away—and what was streaming behind him was his reserve. He was a goner.
One man down and we hadn’t even begun. This was not a good omen. But I had no time for grief—I had to go to work. I pulled to the right and started to circle, so that the rest of the troops could form up. I wanted to start things off in an orderly manner. After all, we had no lights and it would be almost dark by the time we hit the ground. On training flights, we’d worn
strobe lights on our helmets and harnesses so we’d be visible to each other. You can’t do that in combat because you’ll give your position away.
We formed up, I checked the compass, got a Magellan reading, and headed northwest. I could hear the throaty ruffling of canopies as I watched the men jockey into position. We were probably doing about eighty miles per hour. That may seem fast to you, but we were actually bucking headwinds. Once, in Arizona, when we were jumping out of Marana, the CIA’s clandestine airfield outside Tucson, twenty-four SEAL Team Six HAHO jumpers were picked up on Tucson airport’s radar as we glided in formation at twenty-six thousand feet. The air traffic controllers mistook us for a flight of A-10 Thunderbolts, the slow-flying Warthog tank killers of Gulf War fame. That—ha ha—should give you some idea of the speed you travel when you HAHO.
I turned into the wind and felt a bit of updraft. That was bad. One of the problems you face during a HAHO jump is weight distribution. We’d all jumped at the same time. But Tommy and Rodent weigh 75 pounds less than I do. My rate of fall, about seventeen feet per second, is more than theirs, about sixteen feet per second. The bottom line is that I have to fight for altitude, while they fight for descent.
The problem’s compounded when you hit an updraft. When that happened, my weight would carry me through it, while Tommy and Rodent would get sucked upward. To compensate, they’d have to “dump” their canopies—a dangerous maneuver in which they’d pull down on their right-hand toggles, which would put them into a tight right turn. With a “flat” chute, all the air that’s trapped in the cells then goes out the back, the chute goes almost vertical, and you lose altitude fast. The problem is that if you lose too much air, the cells will rub together, you’ll develop a friction fissure, and it’s au revoir, sayonara, doom on you—then splaat.
These sorts of vagaries are why I always trained in saturation blocks of at least fifty parachute jumps per ten-day training cycle. These jump marathons served two purposes. First, the men flew together enough to build the kind of unit integrity that allowed them to know instinctively what each was doing and react to it. Second, the sheer number of jumps built confidence for those shooters—like Stevie Wonder and Howie Kaluha—who have always believed there is no good reason to throw themselves out of a perfectly good aircraft.
I eyeballed the altimeter. We were at sixteen thousand feet now—ten to eleven thousand feet above the Kashmund peaks below, and a little more above the valleys and high plateau. That gave me a glide time of ten to thirteen minutes if I could stretch things. I punched the Magellan’s computer. We were twenty-three kilometers from target—just over fourteen miles. From experience, I knew that unless I caught an updraft, we’d come down in nine or ten miles, which meant a long walk in the dark.
I hung in the harness, depressed, and thought of all the other things that could go wrong. The list was very, very long. Finally, after what seemed like a half an hour but was probably about four minutes, the flutter of the canopy went up an octave or so in tone. Simultaneously, the pressure on my sore left bail told me there was a little additional lift in my harness. I checked the altimeter, then started my stopwatch. I was actually climbing. Climbing ever so slowly, but climbing nonetheless.
Had the rest of my crew caught the change and compensated? I craned my neck to see. I glimpsed three other canopies keeping pace with me. Good. A quick peek at the digital stopwatch told me I’d climbed roughly one hundred feet in two minutes. That translated to fifty feet per minute, versus my previous seventeen-foot-per-second fall rate, an altogether fair exchange.
Under normal circumstances I would have sat back and enjoyed the ride. But here there was too much to think about—specifically, who had burned in. Was it Wonder? He hated jumping, but he was a careful jumper. Nasty had once taken a Humpty-Dumpty fall during a HAHO exercise. And it took all of the king’s horses and all of the king’s men (not to mention his best neurosurgeons) to put him together again. Tommy T was a great jumper—a natural who loved throwing himself out of planes. So was Duck Foot. Howie Kaluha had made more than one hundred jumps from 25K plus. And Rodent had been on the Navy’s parachute team. Of course, none of those quals meant shit during combat jumps. But it gave everybody an edge—or it should. Of course, there’s always Mr. Murphy around to play havoc with events. Not to mention the Eighth Commandment of SpecWar: Thou shalt never assume. Damn it.
My reverie was interrupted by the sound of my canopy, which ruffled, popped, and broke into a steady whistle. To anyone who’s spent any time jumping, those sounds translate as “the elevator’s going dowwwwn, Señor Marcinko.”
The altimeter had me at 9,800 feet. But we’d crested the mountain ridge, we were over rock-strewn foothills—and we were headed in the right direction. With a little more luck we’d wring three more miles out of this ride. I scanned the horizon and saw intermittent flickering out there. Were they villages or camps? Who knew. We’d find out soon enough.
Landing was as balls-to-the-wall as takeoff. I didn’t flare, went straight in, and was dragged face first across one hundred yards of Afghanistani desert. My altimeter was mangled, my nose scraped raw, and the AK I’d carefully slung across my chest butt-stroked me on the right knee—hard. Other than that, my landing was picture perfect. The way I look at it, any jump you walk away from is a good jump.
I watched as the others came down. Nasty flew in next—flaring nicely and touching down as evenly as if he’d been riding an elevator. Then Wonder landed, teeth clenched. He was sweating. Then Rodent. He dumped air at fifteen hundred feet, circled twice hard right, then flew straight, flared, pulled up, cut away at two feet, and let his chute land by itself. Fucking show-off. Two more to go. They landed a football field away. I went puffing to see who’d made it and found Tommy and Duck Foot balling their canopies.
It had been Howie Kaluha who’d burned in. The big Hawaiian had now been added to the list of SEALs standing their eternal watch in heaven, waiting for the recall to muster for the ultimate war.
We buried out chutes expeditiously—enough to hide them but not as deep or completely as we might have. My feeling was that even if they were discovered, we’d be long gone. No one knew what had happened to Howie. It could have been the chute—sea-rotted silk—or tangled risers. It could have been a fissure. It could have been contaminated oxygen in his O2 bottle. Fuck—it could have been anything. There was no time to dwell on it—we had to push on. We took inventory. We were missing Howie’s load: half a pound of plastic, three grenades, ten AK magazines, two detonators, and a pair of Dick Campbell’s gold coins. We’d have to live without them—and Howie, too.
We sorted our clothes and changed into lighter gear. It was cold in these foothills—high thirties from the feel of it—but we’d be moving and sweating under the weight of our combat packs, so we unlayered ourselves. We were each carrying close to one hundred pounds. AK ammo is almost twice as heavy as M16 ammo—but we each humped ten of the forty-round magazines. Then there were our sixteen-round Glocks—plus three extra mags apiece. We also carried three canteens of water each. You can go almost a week without food, but not more than a day without water, especially when you’re sweating. I knew we’d find water in the tango camp, but I wasn’t about to take any chances. I also had a pair of pocket waterproof binoculars, as well as extra batteries for the Magellan and the burst transmitters—there were no drugstores out here.
We carried no rations. I learned in Vietnam it’s easier to live off the land, and we’d do so here, too. But we had our grenades, plastic explosives, and other lethal goodies. Each man had somehow managed to bring a piece or two of his own personal kit as well. Nasty and Duck Foot had their Field Fighter knives—fifteen inches of deadly steel designed by master knife fighter and survivalist expert Bob Spear of Leavenworth, Kansas. Wonder carried his keep-it-simple-stupid Ka-Bar. Rodent had his lucky U.S. Divers knife. Tommy carried a leather-covered sap in his sock, and a Mad Dog SWAT knife in his boot. And me? I was happy my Emerson CQC6 folder hadn’t gotten
lost yet.
The Magellan had also survived my sloppy landing, and I squinted to read the screen. The little green numbers told me we were just over five klicks southeast of our target. The good news was that the march would be to the west—downhill. The bad news was that once we staged our hit, we’d be climbing back up the fucking mountain range to scramble eastward, ho, across the border back into the relative safety—and let me stress the word relative—of Pakistan.
I jotted down the compass headings, then put Nasty and Wonder on point. Nasty was the pathfinder; Wonder held the thermal-imaging range finder Mick Owen had given me. Just behind him, Tommy carried the Magellan—he’d keep Nasty and Wonder pointed in the right direction. Duck Foot was rear security. Rodent and I took port and starboard watch. Weapons locked and loaded, we moved out.
We walked silently, each man intent on carrying out his assignment. Howie Kaluha was not part of the equation anymore. That may sound callous to you. It’s not meant to be. He would have understood—in fact, he would have performed in the same way, if it had been one of us who’d taken the twenty-nine-thousand-foot plunge. It’s not that we didn’t care about Howie. We did. But when you’re in combat, you can’t brood about what’s happened. You must remain sharp, focused, obsessive about your mission, otherwise you will fail. I knew that Howie’s death would always stay with me. Later, there would be time to mourn him. Now, the best way to avenge his death was to succeed in taking down Lord B and his tangos.
It was past twenty hundred now, and dark. I made my way forward past Wonder and asked Nasty if he wanted to be relieved.
His eyes never stopped examining the ground ahead. “Nope.”
“Just let me know.”
“Roger that, Skipper.”
I knew he’d never willingly be relieved. Nasty’s the kind of shooter who gets bored if he’s not being challenged. Put him in the back of the pack and he stumbles over his size 13s. Set him on point, and he’s a walking bundle of nerve endings. Nothing gets past him.
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