Текст книги "Lone survivor"

Автор книги: Marcus Luttrell

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

Sometimes we’d run across a group of these guys sitting around a campfire, bearded, sullen, drinking coffee, their AK-47s at the ready. Our first task was to identify them. Were they Pashtuns? Peaceable shepherds, goatherds? Or armed warriors of the Taliban, the ferocious mountain men who’d slit your throat as soon as look at you? It took only a few days to work out that Taliban fighters were nothing like so rough and dirty as Afghan mountain peasants. Many of them had been educated in America, and here they were, carefully cleaning their AK-47s, getting ready to kill us.

And it did not take us much longer to realize how impressive they could be in action up here on their home ground. I always thought they would turn and run for it when we discovered them. But they did nothing of the kind. If they held or could reach the high ground, they would stand and fight. If we came down on them they’d usually either give up or head right back to the border and into Pakistan, where we could not follow them. But close up you could always see the defiance in their eyes, that hatred of America, the fire of the revolutionary that burned in their souls.

It was pretty damn creepy for us, because this was the heartland of terror, the place where the destruction of the World Trade Center was born and nourished, perfected by men such as these. I’ll be honest, it seemed kind of unreal, not possible. But we all knew that it had happened. Right here in this remote dust bowl was the root of it all, the homeland of bin Laden’s fighters, the place where they still plot and scheme to smash the United States. The place where the loathing of Uncle Sam is so ingrained, a brand of evil flourishes that is beyond the understanding of most Westerners. Mostly because it belongs to a different, more barbaric century.

And here stood Mikey, Shane, Axe, me, and the rest, ready for a face-off anytime against these silent, sure-footed warriors, masters of the mountains, deadly with rifle and tribal knife.

To meet these guys in these remote Pashtun villages only made the conundrum more difficult. Because right here we’re talking Primitive with a big P. Adobe huts made out of sun-dried clay bricks with dirt floors and an awful smell of urine and mule dung. Downstairs they have goats and chickens living in the house. And yet here, in these caveman conditions, they planned and then carried out the most shocking atrocity on a twenty-first-century city.

Sanitation in the villages is as rudimentary as it gets. They have a communal head, a kind of a pit, out on the edge of the houses. And we are all warned to watch out for them, particularly on night patrols. I misjudged it one night, slipped, and got my foot in there. That caused huge laughter up there in the dead of night, everyone trying not to explode. Wasn’t funny to me, however.

The next week it was much worse. We were all in the pitch dark, creeping through this very rough ground, trying to set up a surveillance point above a very small cluster of huts and goats. We could not see a thing without NVGs (night-vision goggles), and suddenly I slipped into a gaping hole.

I dared not yell. But I knew I was on my way down, and I shuddered to think where I was going to land. I just rammed my right arm rigid straight up, holding on tight to the rifle, and crashed straight into the village head. I went right under, vaguely hearing my teammates hiss, “Look out! Luttrell just found the shitter again!”

Never has there been that much suppressed laughter on an Afghan mission. But it was one of the worst experiences of my life. I could have given typhoid to the entire Bagram base. I was freezing cold but I cheerfully jumped into a river in full combat gear just to get washed off.

Sometimes there was real trouble on those border post checkpoints, and we occasionally had to load up the Humvees and transport about eighteen guys out there and then walk for miles. The problem was, the Pakistani government has obvious sympathy with the Taliban, and as a result leaves the border area in the northeast uncontrolled. Pakistan has decreed its authorities can operate on tarmac roads and then for twenty meters on either side of the road. Beyond that, anything goes, so the Taliban fighters simply swerve off the road and enter Afghanistan over the ancient pathways. They come and go as they please, the way they always have, unless we prevent them. Many of them only want to come in and rustle cattle, which we do not bother with. However, the Taliban know this, and they move around disguised as cattle farmers, and we most certainly do bother with that. And those little camel trains laden with high explosive, they really get our attention.

And every single time, we came under attack. The slightest noise, any betrayal of our position, someone would open fire on us, often from the Pakistan side of the border, where we could not go. So we moved stealthily, gathered our photographs, grabbed the ringleaders, stayed in touch with base, and whistled up reinforcements whenever we needed help.

It was the considered opinion of our commanders that the key to winning was intel, identifying the bombmakers, finding their supplies, and smashing the Taliban arsenal before they could use it. But it was never easy. Our enemy was brutal, implacable, with no discernible concern about time or life. As long as it takes, was their obvious belief. In the end they assume they will rid their holy Muslim soil of the infidel invaders. After all, they always have, right? Sorry, nyet?

Sometimes, while the head sheds (that’s SEAL vernacular for our senior commanders) were studying a specific target, we were kept on hold. I volunteered my spare time working in the Bagram hospital, mostly in the emergency room, helping with the wounded guys and trying to become a better medic for my team.

And that hospital was a real eye-opener, because we were happy to treat Afghans as well as our own military personnel. And they showed up at the emergency room with every kind of wound, mostly bullets, but occasionally stabbings. That’s one of the real problems in that country – everyone has a gun. There seems to be an AK-47 in every living room. And there were a lot of injuries. Afghan civilians would show up at the main gates so badly shot we had to send out Humvees to bring them into the ER. We treated anyone who came, at the American taxpayer’s expense, and we gave everyone as good care as we could.

Bagram was an excellent place for me to improve my skills, and I hoped I was doing some good at the same time. I was, of course, unpaid for this work. But medicine has always been a vocation for me, and those long hours in that hospital were priceless to the doctor I hoped one day to be.

And while I tended the sick and injured, the never-ending work of the commanders continued, filtering the intel reports, checking the CIA reports, trying to identify the Taliban leaders so we could cut the head off their operation.

There was always a very big list of potential targets, some more advanced than others. By that I mean certain communities where the really dangerous guys had been located, identified, and pinpointed by the satellites or by us. It was work that required immense perseverance and the ability to assess the likelihood of actually finding the guy who mattered.

The teams in Bagram were prepared to go out there and conduct this very dangerous work, but no one likes going on a series of wild-goose chases where the chances of finding a top Taliban terrorist are remote. And of course the intel guys have to be aware at all times that nothing is static up there in the mountains. Those Taliban guys are very mobile and very smart. They know a lot but not all there is to know about American capability. And they surely understand the merit of keeping it moving, from village to village, cave to cave, never remaining in one place long enough to get caught with their stockpiles of high explosive.

Our senior chief, Dan Healy, was outstanding at seeking out and finding the good jobs for us, ones where we had a better than average chance of finding our quarry. He spent hours poring over those lists, checking out a certain known terrorist, where he spent his time, where he was last seen.

Chief Healy would comb through the photographic evidence, checking maps, charts, working out the places we had a real chance of victory, of grabbing the main man without fighting an all-out street battle. He had a personal short list of the prime suspects and where to find them. And by June, he had a lot of records, the various methods used by these kingpin Taliban guys and their approximate access to TNT.

And one man’s name popped right out at him. For security reasons, I’m going to call him Ben Sharmak, and suffice to say he’s a leader of a serious Taliban force, a sinister mountain man known to make forays into the cities and known also to have been directly responsible for several lethal attacks on U.S. Marines, always with bombs. Sharmak was a shadowy figure of around forty. He commanded maybe 140 to 150 armed fighters, but he was an educated man, trained in military tactics and able to speak five languages. He was also known to be one of Osama bin Laden’s closest associates.

He kept his troops mobile, moving into or camping on the outskirts of friendly Pashtun villages, accepting hospitality and then traveling on to the next rendezvous, recruiting all the way. These mountain men were unbelievably difficult to trace, but even they need to rest, eat and drink, and perhaps even wash, and they need village communities to do all of that.

Almost every morning Chief Healy would run the main list of potential targets past Mikey, our team officer, and me. He usually gave us papers with a list of maybe twenty names and possible locations, and we made a short list of the guys we considered we should go after. We thus created a rogues’ gallery, and we made our mission choices depending on the amount of intel we had. The name Ben Sharmak kept on showing up, and the estimates of his force size kept going up just as often.

Finally there was a tentative briefing about a possible Operation Redwing, which involved the capture or killing of this highly dangerous character. But he was always elusive. First he was here, then there, like the freakin’ Scarlet Pimpernel. And the photos available were just head and shoulders, not great quality and very grainy. Still, we knew approximately what the sonofabitch looked like, and on the face of it, this was stacking up to be like any other SR operation – get above the target, stalk him, photograph him, and, if at all possible, grab him.

We had very decent intel on him, which suggested the CIA and probably the FBI were also extremely interested in his capture or death. And as the various briefings went on, Ben Sharmak seemed to get progressively more important. There were now reports of an eighty-troop minimum and a two-hundred-troop maximum in his army, and this constituted a very big operation. And Chief Healy decreed that me and my three buddies in Alfa Platoon were the precise guys to carry it out.

We were not expected to take on this large bunch of wild-eyed killers. Indeed, we were expected to stay quieter than we had ever been in our lives. “Just find this bastard, nail him down, his location and troop strength, then radio in for a direct action force to come in by air and take him down.” Simple, right?

If we thought he might be preparing an immediate evacuation of the village in which he resided, then we would take him out forthwith. That would be me or Axe. The chances were I’d get only one shot at Sharmak, just one time when I could trap him in the crosshairs and squeeze that trigger, probably from hundreds of yards away. I knew only one thing: I better not miss, because the apparitions of Webb and Davis, not to mention every other serving SEAL, would surely rise up and tear my ass off. This was, after all, precisely what they had trained me for.

And in case anyone’s wondering, I had absolutely no qualms about putting a bullet straight through this bastard’s head. He was a fanatical sworn enemy of the United States of America who had already murdered many of my colleagues in the U.S. Marines. He was also the kind of terrorist who would like nothing better than to mastermind a new attack on the U.S. mainland. If I got a shot, he’d get no mercy from me. I knew what was expected of me. I knew the team boss wanted this character eliminated, and when I thought about it, I was damned proud they considered me and my buddies the men for the job. As ever, we would do everything possible not to let anyone down.

Every day we checked the intel office to see what further data there was on Sharmak. Chief Healy was right on the case, working with the ops officer and our skipper, Commander Pero. The problem was always the same: where was our target? He was worse than Saddam Hussein, disappearing, evading the prying eye of the satellites, keeping his identity and location secret even from the many CIA informers who were close to him.

There was of course no point in charging into the mountains armed to the teeth with weapons and cameras unless we were absolutely sure of his whereabouts. The Taliban were a serious threat to low-flying military aircraft, and the helo pilots knew they were in constant danger of being fired upon, even on night ops. These mountain men were as handy with missile launchers as they were with AK-47s.

There is a huge amount of backup required for any such operation: transportation, communications, available air support, not to mention ammunition, food, water, medical supplies, hand grenades, and weapons, all of which we would carry with us.

At one point, quite early on, we had a very definite “Redwing is a go.” And preparations were well under way when the entire thing was suddenly called off. “Turn one!” They’d lost him again. They had data, and they had reason to believe they knew where he was. But nothing hard. The guys in intel studied the maps and the terrain, ringed probability areas, made estimates and guesstimates. They thought they had him pinned down but not sufficiently narrowly to place him in an actual village or a camp, never mind with the accuracy required for a sniper to get off a shot.

Intel was just waiting for a break, and meanwhile, me and the guys were out on other SR missions, probably Operation Goat Rope or something. We’d just come back from one of these when we heard there’d been a break in the hunt for Ben Sharmak. It was very sudden, and we guessed one of our sources had come up with something. Chief Healy had maps and studies of the terrain under way, and it looked like we were going straight out again.

We were called into a briefing: Lieutenant Mike Murphy, Petty Officer Matthew Axelson, Petty Officer Shane Patton, and I. We listened to the data and the requirements and still regarded it as just another op. But at the last minute there was a big change. They decided that Shane should be replaced by Petty Officer Danny Dietz, a thirty-four-year-old I had known well for years.

Danny was a short (well, compared with me), very muscular guy from Colorado, but he lived with his spectacularly beautiful wife, Maria, known to all of us as Patsy, just outside the base in Virginia Beach. They had no children but two dogs, both of them damn near as tough as he was, an English bulldog and a bullmastiff.

Danny was with me at the SDV school in Panama City, Florida. We were both there on 9/11. He was heavily into yoga and martial arts and was a very close friend of Shane’s. Guess those beach gods and the mystic iron men have stuff in common. I was glad to have Danny on the team. He was a little reserved, but underneath he could be very funny and was a sweet-natured person. It was not a great plan to upset him, though. Danny Dietz was a caged tiger and a great Navy SEAL.

Now it seemed Redwing was again given the green light. The four-man team was nailed down. The two snipers would be Axe and me; the two spotters, Mikey and Danny. Command control, Mikey. Communications, Danny and me. The final shoot-on-target, me or Axe, either one of us spotting, whichever way it fell on the terrain.

The plan was to sit up there and hide above the place we believed Sharmak was resident, if necessary for four days, probably not able to move more than a foot, remaining deadly still in a deadly place – high in the hills.

At no time would we be anything but carefully concealed, watching these heavily armed mountain men, who were lifelong experts on the local terrain, awaiting our chance to gun down their leader. It doesn’t get a whole lot more dangerous than that.

We were actually in the helicopter, dressed and organized, ready to leave, “Redwing is a go,” when the mission was called off again. “Turn two!” It was not so much that we’d lost track of Sharmak as the fact that the slippery little son of a gun had turned up somewhere else.

We disembarked and wandered back to our quarters. We shed our heavy packs and weapons, changed out of our combat gear, cleaned the camouflage cream off our faces, and rejoined the human race. The break lasted for two weeks, during which time we did a couple of minor missions up in the passes and nearly got our heads blown off at least twice.

I surpassed myself once by nailing down one of the most dangerous terrorists in northeast Afghanistan. I had POSIDENT, and I actually saw him make a break for it on his own, riding a freakin’ bicycle along the track. I didn’t shoot him because I did not wish to betray our position by opening fire or even moving. We were expecting his complete camel train of high explosive to move along this route anytime, and we wanted both him and his munitions. At least I didn’t emulate the actions of a former colleague, who, according to SEAL folklore, fired up the direct link and advised a cruising U.S. fighter/bomber of the GPS position. Then he watched a five-hundred-pound bomb demolish the terrorist, his camel, and everything within fifty yards of him. On this mission, we halted the camel train and managed to capture the terrorist and unload the explosive without resorting to such wild-and-woolly action.

Sorry, lefties. But, like we say back home in Texas, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

And so the days passed by, until on Monday morning, June 27, 2005, they located Sharmak again. This time it looked really good. By noon the detailed maps and photos of the terrain were spread out before us. The intel was excellent, the maps weren’t bad, the photographs of the terrain passable. We still didn’t have a decent picture of Sharmak, just the same old head and shoulders, grainy, indistinct. But we’d located other killers up here with a lot less, and there was no doubt this time. “Redwing is a go!”

Right after the briefing, Chief Dan Healy said to me, quietly, “This is it, Marcus. We’re going. Go get the guys ready.”

I gave the crisp reply expected from a team leader to a SEAL CPO. “Okay, Chief. We’re outta here.”

And I walked out of the briefing room and headed back to our quarters with a lot on my mind. I can’t quite explain it, but I was assailed by doubts, and that feeling of disquiet never left me.

I’d seen the maps, and they were clear. What I couldn’t see was a place to hide. We did not have good intel on the vegetation. It was obviously bad and barren way up there in the Hindu Kush, around ten thousand feet. You don’t need to be a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Institute to know this is arid country above the tree line, not much growing. Great for climbers, a goddamned nightmare for us.

The village we were surveying had thirty-two houses. I counted them on the satellite picture. But we did not know which one Sharmak was in. Neither did we know if the houses were numbered in case we got better intel while we were up there.

We had some pictures of the layout but very little on the surrounding country. We had good GPS numbers, very accurate. And we had a short list of possible landing zones, unnecessary for the insert, because we’d fast-rope in, but critical for the extract.

I was certain we’d need to blow down a few trees on a lower level of the mountain in order to have cover when we left and to bring the helicopters in with the DA force if it was required. Barren, treeless mountainscapes are no place to conduct secretive landings and takeoffs, not with Taliban rocket men all around. Especially the highly trained group that surrounded Sharmak. He was goddamned lethal, and he’d proved it, more than once, blowing up the Marines.

The one aspect of the mission that dominated my thoughts as I walked back to meet the guys was that there was no place to hide, no place from which to watch. You simply cannot do effective reconnaissance if you can’t get into good position. And if those mountain cliffs that surrounded the village were as rough and stony as I suspected, we’d stick out on those heights like a diamond in a goat’s ass.

And there were likely to be between eighty and two hundred armed warriors keeping a very careful lookout on all the land around their boss. I was worried, not about the numbers of our enemy but about the problems of staying concealed in order to complete the mission. If there was a very limited selection of hiding places, we might have to compromise our angle on the village, not to mention our distance from it.

I met Mikey back at the bee hut. I told him we were going in, showed him the maps and what photographs we had, and I remember his reply. “Beautiful. Just another three days of fun and sun.” But I saw his expression change as he looked at the pictures, at the obviously very steep gradients, truly horrible terrain, a mountain we would have to clomp up and down in order to find cover.

By this time Axe and Danny had appeared. We briefed them and wandered, a bit apprehensively, over to the chow hall for lunch. I had a large bowl of spaghetti. Right afterward we went back to dress and get organized. I wore my desert bottoms and woodland top, mostly because intel had said the landing zone was fairly green and we would drop into an area of trees. I also had a sniper hood.

Mikey and Danny had their M4 rifles plus grenades; Axe had the Mark 12 .556-caliber rifle, and I had one as well. We all carried the SIG-Sauer 9mm pistol. We elected not to take a heavy weapon, the big twenty-one-pound machine gun M60, plus its ammunition. We were already loaded down with gear, and we thought it would be too heavy to haul up those cliffs.

I also took a couple of claymores, which are a kind of high-explosive device with a trip wire, to keep any intruder from walking up on us. I’d learned a hard lesson about that on my first day, when two Afghans got a lot closer than they should have and might easily have finished me.

We took a big roll of detonator cord to blow the trees for the incoming landing zone when the mission was complete or for the insert of a direct action force. At the last moment, still worried about this entire venture, I grabbed three extra magazines, which gave me a total of eleven, each holding thirty rounds. Eight was standard, but there was something about Operation Redwing. It turned out everyone felt the same. We all took three extra magazines.

I also carried an ISLiD (an acronym for image stabilization and light distribution unit) for guiding in an incoming helo, plus the spotting scope, and spare batteries for everything. Danny had the radio, and Mikey and Axe had the cameras and computers.

We took packed MREs – beef jerky, chicken noodles, power bars, water – plus peanuts and raisins. The whole lot weighed about forty-five pounds, which we considered traveling light. Shane was there to see us away: “ ’Bye, dudes, give ’em hell.”

All set, we were driven down to the special ops helicopter area, waiting to hear if there was a change. That would have been “Turn three!” The third time Redwing had been aborted. But this time there was only “Rolex, one hour,” which meant we were going as soon as it was dark.

We put down our loads and lay on the runway to wait. I remember it was very cold, with snowcaps on the not-too-distant mountains. Mikey assured me he had remembered to pack his lucky rock, a sharp-pointed bit of granite which had jabbed into his backside for three days on a previous mission when we were in a precarious hide and none of us could move even an inch. “Just in case you need to stick it up your ass,” he added. “Remind you of home.”

And so we waited, in company with a couple of other groups also going out that night. The quick reaction force (QRF) was going to Asadabad at the same time. We had just done a full photo recon of Asadabad, which they carried with them. The deserted Russian base was still there, and Asadabad, the capital city of Kunar Province, remained a known dangerous area. It was of course where the Afghan mujahideen had almost totally surrounded the base and then proceeded to slaughter all of the Russian enlisted men. It was the beginning of the end for the Soviets in 1989, only one range of mountains over from the spot we were going.

Finally, the rotor blades began to howl on the helos. Apparently the many moving parts of Operation Redwing, so susceptible to change, were still in place. The call came through, “Redwing is a go!,” and we hoisted up our gear and clambered on board the Chinook 47 for the insert, forty-five minutes away to the northeast. “Guess this fucker Ben Sharmak is still where we think he is,” said Mikey.

We were joined by five other guys going in to Asadabad, and the other helo took off first. Then we lifted off the runway, following them out over the base and banking around to our correct course. It was dark now, and I spent the time looking at the floor rather than out of the window. Every one of the four of us, Mikey, Axe, Danny, and me, made it clear, each in his own way, that we did not have a good feeling about this. And I cannot describe how unusual that was. We go into ops areas full of gung ho bravado, the way we’re trained – Bring ’em on, we’re ready!

No SEAL would ever admit to being scared of anything. Even if we were, we would never say it. We open the door and go outside to face the enemy, whoever the hell he might be. Whatever we all felt that night, it was not fear of the enemy, although I recognize it might have been fear of the unknown, because we really were unsure about what we would encounter in the way of terrain.

When we reached the ops area, the helicopter made three false inserts, several miles apart, coming in very low and hovering over places we had no intention of going anywhere near. If the Afghans were watching, they must have been very confused – even we were confused! Going in, pulling out, going back in again, hovering, leaving. I’m damn sure, if Sharmak’s guys were out there, they could not have had the slightest clue where we were, if we were, or how to locate us.

Finally, we were on the way into our real landing zone. The final call came – “Redwing is a go!” The landing controller was calling the shots: “Ten minutes out...Three minutes out...One minute...Thirty seconds!...Let’s go!”

The ramp was down, we were open at the rear, the gunner was ready with the M60 machine gun in case of ambush. It was pitch black outside, no moon, and the rotor blades were making that familiar bom-bom-bom-bom on the wind. So far no one had fired anything at us.

The rope snaked from the rear of the aircraft to the ground, positioned expertly so our guns could not get caught as we left. Right now no one spoke. Loaded with our weapons and gear, we lined up. Danny went first, out into the dark, I followed him, then Mikey, then Axe. Each one of us grabbed the rope and slid down fast, wearing gloves to avoid the burn. It was a drop of about twenty feet, and there was a stiff, biting wind.

We hit the deck and spread, moving twenty yards away from one another. It was really cold up there, and the downward gale from the rotors, beating on us, whisking up the dust, made it much worse. We did not know if we were being watched by unseen tribesmen, but it was plainly a possibility, out here in this lawless rebel-held territory. We heard the howl of the helicopter’s engines increase as it lifted off. And then it clattered away into the darkness, gaining speed and height rapidly as it left this godforsaken escarpment.

We froze into the landscape for fifteen minutes of total silence. There was not a movement, not a single communication among us. And there was not a sound on the mountain. This was beyond silence, a stillness beyond the concept of silence, like being in outer space. Way down below us we could see two fires, or perhaps lanterns, burning, probably about a mile away, goatherds, I hoped.

The fifteen minutes passed. To my left was the mountain, a great looming mass sweeping skyward. To my right was a group of huge, thick trees. All around us were low tree stumps and thick foliage.

We were way below the place where we would ultimately operate, and it was very unnerving, because right here anyone could hide out. We couldn’t see a damn thing and had no idea if there was anyone around. Sixteen years ago, not too far away from here, I guess those Russian conscripts sensed something very similar before someone slashed their throats.

Finally, we climbed to our feet. I walked over to Danny and told him to get the comms up and let the controllers know we were down. Then I walked up the hill to where Mikey and Axe had the big rope which had, absurdly, been cut down and dropped from the helicopter.

This was definitely a mistake. That helo crew was supposed to have taken the rope away with them. God knows what they thought we were going to do with it, and I was just glad Mikey found it. If he hadn’t and we’d left it lying on the ground, it might easily have been found by a wandering tribesman or farmer, especially if they had heard the helicopter come in. That rope might have rung our death knell, signifying, as it surely must, that the American eagle had landed.