The Only Thing Worth Dying For (3 page)

The mission commander asked Amerine what he wanted to do.

“Press on,” replied Amerine. “Let’s give it another five minutes.”

After five minutes, there was still nothing. Amerine shook his head and was about to tell his pilot to turn back when the pilot from the surveillance plane came on the radio.

“We see four fires. Say again—we see four fires.”

The landing zone was in a small valley as long as a football field and slightly narrower—a cleft atop one of the taller broad-backed peaks in the region. As the helicopters swooped down into the rugged mountains, the fires marking the four corners of this smooth, barren patch of earth were extinguished so as not to blind the pilots through their NODs.

Less than two hundred feet above the ground, the five Black Hawks drifted gracefully into a straight line. Amerine’s helicopter descended first, with the others following close behind like boxcars tethered to a locomotive. As the helicopter dropped, its powerful rotors stirred up fine sand and dust that billowed into the air like a volcanic eruption, creating a brownout that shrouded the landing zone and threw the tightly synchronized formation into disarray. Amerine’s helicopter set down gently, its crew and passengers unaware that they were now invisible to the pilots above. Amerine, Alex, Ken, and a spook jumped out, dragging their rucksacks with them as the helicopter lifted off.

The second helicopter, descending quickly on top of Amerine’s group, nearly collided with the cleft’s rocky right wall. The men squinted up in disbelief as the mechanical monster seemed about to crush them—then it suddenly lurched to the left, regained stability, and landed gently as well.

The third helicopter dropped rapidly through the dust, its pilot determined to land despite zero visibility. The Black Hawk hit the ground hard. While Karzai, Casper, another spook named Charlie, and two of the Delta operators scrambled out, a gunner crawled underneath to inspect the landing gear. It was undamaged, and the helicopter lifted back into the air.

The fourth helicopter dipped into the enormous cloud. Inside, Mag, Mike, Ronnie, and a spook named Zepeda were choking on dust. The main rotor blades, throwing sparks from the static created by their proximity to the sides of the cleft, looked like giant sparklers to Mike, and he braced for a collision with the ground. Instead, he felt his stomach flip as the Black Hawk powered up and out of the brownout, banked away, and disappeared into the night.

Undeterred, the pilot of the fifth helicopter, carrying JD, Dan, and two spooks, set down without a problem.

Had the Black Hawk pilots been able to land in a row as planned instead of putting down wherever they could, the men would have dropped to the ground and remained in place, forming a single, cigar-shaped defensive perimeter about forty yards long.

Instead, they were scattered in small groups around the valley, each setting up its own defensive perimeter. And there was movement: a half-dozen armed Afghans milling next to a string of undersized donkeys a hundred yards away, near the eastern edge of the valley, and a solitary figure striding through the dust toward them.

Hamid Karzai, who was to make the initial linkup with the Pashtun tribesmen, had immediately sprung forward to meet them, the white leather tennis shoes he’d been given by the CIA in Pakistan practically glowing beneath his
shalwar kameez
and looking as if they
were walking themselves through the darkness. The Americans aimed their carbines at the tribesmen, the beams from their lasers invisible to the Afghans.

If there are spies or assassins within the ranks, this is when they’ll have his ass,
thought Wes as Karzai reached the reception party. To Wes, Karzai’s lengthy greeting of each man took an eternity. Finally, Karzai called out to the Americans: “Hello, hello! It’s okay. It’s fine. Come to me. Come to me.”

Standing up, Amerine ran to Karzai, leaving the rest of the men lying prone beside their rucksacks, weapons still trained on the Afghans. “Friends of yours?” he asked.

“Yes, yes,” said Karzai, “these are good men. We are safe.”

Amerine radioed JD: “Get the men moving. Have them bring their rucks to the pack animals.”

After the men from the ODA and CIA had dropped their rucks next to the donkeys, JD set them all in a tight perimeter, with every man lying prone and facing outward to form a circle half the size of a basketball court, with Amerine and Casper alongside Karzai at its center. Then he approached Amerine. “We’re missing four men: Mike, Mag, Ronnie, and one CIA. Their helicopter must have headed to an alternate landing zone.”

“What does that mean?” asked Karzai.

“Means we have men lost in the mountains,” Amerine said.

“I’m going to need to get to higher ground to reach them,” said Dan, holding up his radio’s hand mic. “I’m not getting anything here.”

Any Taliban patrols in the area would have heard the helicopters and would already be en route to the landing zone. They had to get moving.

“We need to find our guys,” Casper said to Amerine, who then told Karzai, “We need to leave this valley and get to higher ground so we can reach our lost men.”

Karzai rattled off something in Pashto to the tribesmen. They switched on flashlights, alarming the soldiers, who felt safer under the cover of darkness, and led their animals away. The men followed fifty yards behind the glow of the flashlights south for a quarter mile, then Amerine and Karzai guided the column of Americans a few hundred
vertical feet up a steep slope and onto a ridgeline that rimmed the western side of the valley. On a small hillock that offered little cover but was the highest ground in the area, JD formed another security perimeter around Dan, who sat down on the hard dirt, assembled the sections of an antenna, and screwed it into his radio. The Afghans remained in the valley at the bottom of the ridge with the pack animals.

“They would like to keep the donkeys moving,” Karzai said to Amerine.

Amerine looked at JD, who shrugged and said, “I wouldn’t want to get in a fight in the middle of that pack.”

Nodding, Amerine told Karzai, “Let them go. We’ll meet up with them at the village.”

Karzai called out in Pashto, and the tribesmen continued on into the night while Dan attempted to reach his missing teammates using ODA 574’s call sign: “Any Texas element, this is Texas One Two, over…”

From a rucksack between Dan’s legs an obscenely long antenna stuck up into the starlit sky. His bearded face was almost hidden beneath a black beanie pulled low to battle the cold wind that chilled his hands as they worked the radio’s knobs. “I can hear them now—they’re trying to reach us, but they can’t hear me at all,” he growled. “They need to get to higher ground.”

“Keep trying,” said Amerine.

The absence of gunfire was encouraging, but three of Amerine’s nine men and a CIA spook were lost in the night, and until they too got to higher ground, there was little Amerine could do to find them. Then JD’s rapid footsteps announced the arrival of more ominous news.

“Casper and Charlie sneaked off to try to find the missing men,” he told Amerine angrily.

“If
we
don’t have commo with our guys,
they
sure as hell don’t,” Amerine said. “Did they tell anyone their plan?”

“They left their commo guy behind and took only handheld radios, so they aren’t going to be able to talk to anybody,” said JD, looking out into the night. Distinguishing between friend and foe is often difficult during the daytime; at night it’s nearly impossible, even
with clear communications and a well-devised set of signals. The two spooks had neither.

“C-I-A, Children In Action,” Dan said.

“Oh, it gets worse,” JD said. “They took Karzai with them.”

There was a pause as the men realized they had lost their guide, their only translator, and the one man whom Amerine trusted to muster the local Pashtun fighting force and, in doing so, possibly avert a civil war.

“We are so fucked,” said Dan.

The fourth Black Hawk had drifted more than two miles west from the landing zone as its pilot searched for a suitable place to set down. In desperation, he briefly flicked on his spotlights, flooding the valley below in white light and prompting a resounding “What the fuck!” from the back of the helicopter.

“We better not fucking land right there!” yelled Mike.

As the Black Hawk crisscrossed the terrain for what seemed like forever, Mag, the highest-ranking sergeant present, went from being nervous about announcing their arrival with spotlights to being nervous that they weren’t going to land at all. Finally the pilot said, “I’m putting it down right here.”

He dropped the helicopter like a rock, determined to land before the dust storm could swallow the Black Hawk. They bounced hard, then settled on a massive shelf with mountains rising to the east. To the west, the flat terrain rolled off into either a sloping hillside or a cliff—it was impossible to tell which. Before Mag jumped from the helicopter, he told the pilot, “Radio my team with these coordinates so we can link up.” The crew chief practically shoved Mag out as the pilot nodded mechanically and lifted off.

Squatting with his gear, Mag gripped his rifle as the engine noise from the departing Black Hawk faded away. He reviewed the situation: nighttime, foreign land, behind enemy lines, separated from the main group, no cover except low brush.
Oh God
, he thought. Then he flipped on his NODs, bathing the high desert terrain in familiar green hues.

The four lost men—Mike, Mag, Ronnie, and the spook Zepeda—had just set up in a 360-degree security formation when a light appeared in the distance. They hadn’t been on the ground for more than two minutes.

“We’ve got movement,” said Ronnie.

Unfuckingbelievable
, thought Mag.

A couple hundred yards northwest, someone was sweeping a flashlight beam back and forth across the ground, slowly and steadily, as if searching for something. Leaving Ronnie and Mike with instructions to head for the mountains to their east if they weren’t back in fifteen minutes, Mag took Zepeda and crept east in a straight line, searching for better cover. About eighty yards out, they practically fell into what would suffice as a fighting position: a depression at the base of a slight embankment. They hurried back to get the others, and the men concealed their gear as best they could in the bushes, then relocated to the depression with their go-to-hell packs.

Although the flashlight continued to flicker in the distance, here they felt sheltered enough to try to orient themselves. Unfolding the map produced a crackle that was, in this silence, almost as disconcerting as gunfire.
Jesus
, Mag thought,
might as well make some popcorn while we’re at it
. But the flashlight didn’t waver.

Using their GPS, they figured out that their position was below the valley where the main group had landed. The Helmand River and its Taliban-patrolled villages were more than two miles to the west, at the base of the mountains. Only one and a half miles lay between them and the rest of the team to the east, but on terrain like this it might as well have been fifty. Their best course of action was to stay put, avoid detection, and pray that they could make radio contact by morning.

As Mike continued trying to radio the rest of the team, one thing was certain: Pashtun tribesmen didn’t normally travel around the mountains at night. Whoever was out there with that flashlight was not a goatherd looking for a lost kid.

CHAPTER TWO

The Quiet Professionals

It makes no difference what men think of war…. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him.

The ultimate trade awaiting the ultimate practitioner.

—Cormac McCarthy,
Blood Meridian

Two months earlier, on September 14, Captain Jason Amerine had been sitting in a hotel room in Almaty, Kazakhstan, writing in his journal, when his burly senior communications sergeant, Dan Petithory, knocked on the door. Dan was dressed casually in jeans, a T-shirt, and a Boston Red Sox baseball cap, but his normally jovial eyes were narrowed in an intense glare.

Amerine was immediately concerned—the last news Dan had delivered was that of the terrorist attacks on the United States three days before.

“Kazakhstan,” said Dan, entering the room. “Shit. We’re still only in Kazakhstan. I’m here a week now…waiting for a mission, getting softer.” He began to pace. “Every minute I stay in this room I get weaker, and every minute Osama squats in a cave, he gets stronger. Each time I look around, the walls move in a little tighter.” Dan threw a mock punch at a mirror.

Amerine laughed. He’d always admired the sergeant’s ability to ease a tense situation by quoting the perfect movie line. Dan’s spot-on impersonation of Martin Sheen’s opening monologue as Captain
Willard in
Apocalypse Now
made light of the reality: The men of ODA 574 were restless, sequestered in this hotel killing time when all they really wanted to do was kill the terrorists responsible for the attacks on their homeland.

Picking up where Dan left off, Amerine said, “Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service. It was a real choice mission, and when it was over I’d never want another.”

“Not bad, sir,” Dan said with a chuckle. “You’ve got a Captain Willard thing going on without even trying. Anyway, your mission tonight is to get drunk with Colonel Asimov.”

For the previous year, ODA 574 had been teaching counterinsurgency tactics to Colonel Asimov’s airborne battalion, but during his five deployments to Kazakhstan during this time, Amerine had barely interacted with the high-ranking Kazakh army officer.

“No shit?” said Amerine.

“No shit, sir,” said Dan. “Meet in the lobby at eight
P.M
. He’s sending taxis for the whole team. Private dinner at some old KGB hangout…and sir? Don’t forget your liver.”