by Scott McEwen
Naeem was belly-down in the dirt beneath the knee of a SEAL everyone called the Conman. Conman was the smallest guy on the team, not much over 5'6" at 145 pounds. He was a true gunfighter, a gambler with a killer’s disposition. He had the barrel of his MK 23 screwed tightly into Naeem’s ear, at the same time gripping his M4 in the opposite hand, ready to throw down again at any second. He gave Speed a shrug, as if to say, “Just another day at the office.”
Forogh got his bearings, pointing toward a hut with a rusted blue rain barrel in front. “There’s the rain barrel,” he said, remembering the guide’s directions. “When Doc’s finished, we need to move east through that hut over there.”
“Christ, no matter which way we go, it’s gonna be ambush fucking central.” Crosswhite looked on as the Latino corpsman treated the wounded Blane. He was bleeding profusely from the thigh, the femoral artery severed.
“How’s he doing, Doc?”
Doc shook his head, hurriedly ripping the plastic wrapper from a scalpel. “I gotta cut down to the artery and clamp it off before he bleeds out.” He ordered a SEAL named Jackson to sit on Blane’s chest. “This is gonna hurt like a motherfucker, Blane, but this ain’t fuckin’ Mogadishu—you ain’t fuckin’ dyin’ on me!”
As Doc began to cut down through Blane’s thigh muscle, more firing broke out from the huts across the clearing. The SEALs poured fire into the huts and the firing stopped.
Blane growled and gnashed his teeth like a rabid animal, squeezing Jackson’s hands in his own and biting down on the folded leather glove that Doc had jammed between his teeth. He bit down so hard that he thought his teeth were going to crack.
“Fuck!” Jackson said, feeling Blane’s grip beginning to overpower his own. “You gotta do that raw, Doc? Give this motherfucker some morphine.”
Doc desperately wiped the sweat from his eyes with the back of his sleeve. “How the fuck’s he gonna fight all doped up? Keep your leg still, Blane!”
More firing broke out from the far end of the alley to the west of where they were formed up. Crosswhite fired an HE round from his M203 and blew the hut apart. He ejected the spent casing and briefly met Trigg’s gaze.
Trigg was bleeding from a neck wound, but it wasn’t too serious. “We can’t absorb much more of this, Captain. You ready to call in Bank Heist Two?”
Crosswhite kept his eyes on the hut he had just blown to smithereens, shaking his head. “There’s nowhere for them to land in here. The helos would have to hover overhead and lower the lines. Any jackass with an RPG could blow them out of the sky, so we have to make it to the EZ—there’s no other choice.”
“Yes, there is. The helos could—”
“I’m not wiping out a village,” Crosswhite said. “If we’d found Sandra, that would be one thing, but we didn’t, so we have to tough this out.”
“Found it!” Doc exclaimed. “Fuckin’ A!” He took the artery clamp from his lapel and clamped off the artery deep in Blane’s thigh. Then he took a compress and pressed it down hard against the wound, wrapping it tightly around with green duct tape so that Blane would be able to walk, and hopefully fight, without shaking the clamp loose.
Jackson got off of Blane’s chest, and Blane sat up sweating, his face pale, eyes glassing over. Doc took a stainless steel flask from his medical bag and put it to Blane’s lips.
“Chug it down!” Doc said, tilting the flask up to pour it into the back of Blane’s throat. “We gotta stop the shock from setting in, or you’ll be too fucked to fight.”
Blane choked down the burning liquid and jerked his head away, coughing and shaking his head. “What the fuck is that—Tequila?”
“It slows down the shock,” Doc said, quickly jamming his gear back into the bag. “You stick close by me all the way out of here, vato. You’re in bad shape.” He looked at Crosswhite. “Ready to go when you are, Capt—” He noticed for the first time a SEAL named McAllister applying a bandage to the lower right of Speed’s back. “How bad are you?”
Speed shrugged. “Bad enough there ain’t shit you can do. If we don’t make the EZ pretty soon, I’m fucked.”
Crosswhite made a quick assessment. Counting the bullet hole in his own leg, five of them were carrying wounds, two of them critical. Even Fischer had been hit again in the same damn shoulder, though he didn’t seem to be complaining.
Doc and Jackson helped Blane to his feet. Blane winced badly when he put weight on the leg, but he assured them all that he could continue the mission.
Alpha got back on point, and they made toward the hut with the blue rain barrel.
Once inside, Crosswhite took one of the claymore mines from Trigg’s pack. “Alpha, keep the column moving down through the village. I’ll catch up. Those cocksuckers at the top of the stairs are going to try and dog us all the way to the EZ.”
The rest of the team rousted the cowering Kalasha family from their hiding places and took them along out the back door, finding the narrow passage the tour guide had told Forogh about.
Crosswhite unfolded the scissor legs on the bottom of the claymore and stuck them into the dirt floor at the back of the hut, facing the door. Then he got up and fired a burst out the window at the small squad of Taliban fighters who were just emerging from cover at the top of the stone staircase. He didn’t hit anyone, but he managed to drive them briefly back under cover. As he returned to work setting the claymore, a hail of AK-47 fire rained through the hut, forcing him down onto his belly. He quickly ran the trigger wire from the mine to the door, securing it around a rusty nail protruding from the wood near the floor. A bullet struck his helmet a glancing blow and embedded itself in his back between his shoulder blades near his spine. Now more than ever he was regretting the decision to leave their body armor behind, but this was a moot point. Wearing armor, they would never have completed a forced march up the mountain.
As the Taliban gunners paused to reload, he leapt to his feet and dashed out the back door, running down the passageway to catch up with the team. A door opened and he plowed right into a pair of Taliban fighters in the midst of displacing to outflank the hut with the blue rain barrel.
All three men went sprawling, and a furious free-for-all ensued as they scrambled back to their feet. Crosswhite knew better than to try and recover the M4, or to even bother with the pistol. He simply drew his Ka-Bar and went to work, jamming it up under the rib cage of the much bigger Taliban fighter, pivoting to keep the dying man between himself and the other man in the narrow passage. The younger fighter who couldn’t directly engage just sort of stood there as his skewered compatriot screamed in agony, trying desperately to gouge out Crosswhite’s eyes.
Crosswhite gave the man a shove and jumped for space, leaving the knife embedded in his torso. He jerked out his pistol and shot both men down.
At this same moment, the Taliban squad from the staircase arrived outside the hut with the blue rain barrel. The leader jerked open the door and detonated the M18A1 claymore mine. Seven hundred 1/8-inch steel balls blasted outward in an arc of 60 degrees, at a velocity of 3,900 feet per second. The front of the hut disintegrated, and all nine Taliban fighters more or less disintegrated right along with it.
Crosswhite retrieved his weapons, pausing to make sure their pursuers were dead before dashing back down the passageway. He called out over the radio: “Alpha, the claymore did its job. I’m moving to catch up.”
“Roger that,” Alpha replied. “Take a left at the end of the passageway, then another right. We’re about fifty yards from your position, behind a stone wall. Be advised we are taking fire!”
Crosswhite could hear the rotors of the Black Hawk helicopters arriving high overhead now, well inside of the outer marker. He got them on the radio next.
“Bank Heist Two, be advised we’re in a running fight down here! There’s no way for you to extract us safely at this time. Pull back to the outer marker. Over!”
“Bank Heist One, be advised we are maintaining an altitude of thirty-five hundred feet. If
you will activate your infrared strobes, we’ll try and put a little bit of heat on those bad guys for you. Over.”
Crosswhite kept moving, realizing the helos were maintaining an altitude of 3,500 feet because an enemy RPG-7 self-detonated at a distance of roughly 3,000 feet. He doubted, however, that an RPG would fly that high if fired straight up into the air. “Negative, negative, Bank Heist! The bad guys are all mixed in with the civilians down here.”
He could hear small arms chattering elsewhere in the village now and realized the helos had already begun taking fire. He switched on the infrared strobe attached to his combat harness and ordered the rest of the team to do the same so the helo gunners could tell friend from foe. He heard a loud explosion high over the village and realized that some wing nut had just tried to shoot down one of the helos with an RPG.
“Bank Heist Two, did you take any damage from that RPG? Over.”
“Negative, Bank Heist.” The pilot’s voice sounded almost bored. “Listen, we’ve got a pretty good visual on both you and the enemy now. They seem to have anticipated your march route out. They’re assembled and waiting for you in the rocks just below the village. Why don’t you clear us to fire and let us expedite your exfiltration? Over.”
Crosswhite realized that by now either the NSA or the CIA—or both—would be intercepting all of this excessive radio traffic and that pretty soon their unauthorized mission would be hitting prime time. “Bank Heist, you advise they’re clear of the village? Over.”
“Roger that, Bank Heist. But we’d better fire soon, because they’re moving back toward the village now. Over.”
“Take ’em, Bank Heist.”
“Roger that. Get your heads down, gentlemen.”
Crosswhite managed to reestablish contact with the rest of the team just as the Night Stalker gunners began to engage the Taliban fighters outside the village with a pair of M134, 20 mm Gatling guns that fired up to 6,000 rounds per minute. From their position behind the stone wall, they watched as the Taliban broke from the cover of the rocks, running for their lives in every direction. The hot 20 mm tracers sought them out like red laser beams, exploding their bodies with hundred-round bursts of fire, raking the mountainside with great, sweeping arcs of fire. Within a few seconds, twenty-five Taliban fighters were obliterated.
Crosswhite ordered the team out from behind the wall. They made their way five hundred yards down the mountain to a relatively flat piece of real estate they had preselected as their extraction zone and waited for the first Black Hawk to set down. The second helo remained on station high overhead, providing top-cover.
The crew chief jumped out and saluted Crosswhite. “The word’s out, Captain. We’ve just received orders to return to base immediately. We haven’t acknowledged the transmission, but they know we’re listening. We should have F-15s buzzing the area any time now.”
Crosswhite signaled for Naeem to be brought front and center. “Sergeant Major . . . this is Romeo.”
The crew chief raised the visor on his flight helmet and grinned in the Taliban leader’s face. “Congratulations, Mr. Taliban. At this particular moment in time, you have the distinction of being the unluckiest man on the entire planet.”
32
LANGLEY
Robert Pope stood in a dark room before a bank of high-resolution video monitors used for viewing the live feed from a CIA spy satellite locked in a geosynchronous orbit some two hundred miles above the earth’s surface. He allowed his mind to drift as he watched the Black Hawk helicopter lift into the air. The battle of Waigal Village was apparently over, but it did not appear that the rescue team had located Sandra Brux, and the identity of their male prisoner remained to be seen. The call sign Romeo meant nothing to him. He patted a lone pair of technicians on their shoulders and turned for the door.
“Nice work, ladies. Make sure that video card disappears into the proper black hole, will you, please?”
“Yes, sir.”
He gave them a wink and slipped into the hallway. Pope wasn’t remotely worried that anyone would ever find out he had watched the unauthorized mission—from start to finish—without reporting it to the director of the CIA. He was at the very tip-top of the intelligence food chain. No one knew more about the systems than he did, and no one oversaw his work. The buck stopped with him in his private little corner of the world. Many of the computer programs he used these days were programs that he had custom written for his own personal use, secret programs running parallel to the authorized programs he was supposed to be using for the intelligence-gathering tasks he was charged with carrying out on behalf of the United States Government. As a result, if anyone ever did attempt to backtrack his activities, they would find nothing more than series after series of very boring, very legitimate, and routinely mundane intelligence exercises . . . all of them accurately dated, reviewed, and evaluated.
Pope’s philosophy was very simple: Why stop at having one brilliant, exceedingly loyal young woman for a protégée when you could have two? This not only doubled the amount of work they could get done on his behalf; it doubled the amount time he could spend ignoring what he was supposed to be doing while researching the things that truly interested him. For instance, what was the Russian navy up to in the Sea of Okhotsk—and why had he been ordered to ignore it? Why were American oil prospectors poking around in regions of the African continent where there wasn’t supposed to be any oil? And why was the Israeli Mossad suddenly so interested in spying on the Mexican government?
The answers to these sorts of questions might all end up being very benign by the time he puzzled them out, but Pope found the questions themselves much too intriguing to ignore. Similarly, once he had realized that elements of the American Special Forces community were preparing to go off the reservation in an attempt to rescue Sandra Brux—rather than sit idly by while Washington considered the political angles—he had been far too fascinated by their audacity even to think about blowing the whistle. Still, he had warned the director of the possibility, even if only subtly.
He sat down at his desk and passed the time musing as he awaited the inevitable text message from the DDO. The NSA had certainly intercepted the clandestine mission’s radio traffic, and by now an emergency action message would have been sent directly to the CIA station chief in Kabul, who would have then gotten into immediate contact with the chief of the Middle East bureau, who would have in turn made a direct call to the deputy director of Operations for the CIA—Cletus Webb.
Almost to the exact minute of Pope’s estimated time, the iPhone resting on his desk began to buzz with the anticipated text message: CONTACT ME AT HOME IMMEDIATELY!
He picked up the landline and pressed the auto dial for Webb’s house. He was often in his office until the wee hours of the morning, so there was no reason to worry about this raising any real suspicion. And he was well aware that most everyone regarded him as something of an eccentric anyhow—a perception he never hesitated to take advantage of.
Webb answered on the first ring. “Bob?”
“Yeah. What is it, Cletus? Is something wrong?”
“I was hoping you could tell me,” Webb said. “You haven’t heard any chatter coming out of Afghanistan tonight?”
“I haven’t been listening for any,” Pope said, yawning audibly. “Electronic eavesdropping isn’t exactly in my job description.”
“Well, that’s never stopped you before,” Webb muttered. “Listen, Bob, it sounds like elements of both DEVGRU and SOAR may have just carried out some kind of a joint rescue mission in the Waigal Valley. I’m calling to find out what you might know before I call Shroyer at home. I’ll need to brief him so he can call the president before the president hears about it from someone else.”
“Someone else, as in the NSA?”
“As in anybody, Bob. What can you tell me?”
“Well, Waigal is in the Nuristan Province,” Pope said. “North of Jalalabad. The people there tend to speak mostly Kalasha. I also seem to remember that�
��”
“Bob, are you telling me you know nothing about this operation—that your people are capable of pulling off an unauthorized rescue mission without anyone knowing anything about it until it’s over?”
In that moment, Pope noticed that he’d forgotten to tear the page from his desk blotter after the change of the month. He began to clear the desk so he could tear the page away without knocking anything over.
“Bob!”
“Yes? Oh—well, sure, it’s possible, Cletus. These people are in operation thousands of miles away. We can’t monitor every single move they make. They are highly trained adults, after all. At some point, we have to trust them to look after themselves . . . and I did warn you about the Uncertainty Principle. Who contacted you, by the way, the Mideast section chief?”
“No, Bob, it was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” Webb said. “General Couture called him directly from the ATO.” General Couture was the Supreme Commander of all US forces in Afghanistan. “He was apparently in the middle of his breakfast when he was informed that a clandestine operation had taken place within his theater of operations during the night and without anyone having had the common decency to mention it to him. He’s hopping mad.”
Pope chuckled. “Well, knowing Couture, I can imagine. I’ll look into this, Cletus, and get back to you. How’s that?”
Webb let out a dissatisfied sigh. “That’ll be fine, Bob. Call me the minute you have something you’re willing to share with the rest of us.”
“You bet.” Pope hung up the phone.
Having forgotten about the desk blotter, he stretched and yawned and rocked back in the leather chair, remembering himself as a young man, as a very green operative skylarking with Air America, a covert airlift operation run by SAD for the CIA from 1950 to 1976. It was during the final days of the Vietnam War that Pope had stumbled across his first big chip in the poker game of American intelligence gathering.
