The Lion of Sabray Page 17

  And right now, even as the Afghan sun burned through cool, clear skies, the ops room over at the Special Forces section was alive with information. The satellite maps were up on the big screen, there was now an open line to the Rangers, still hacking their way across the mountain to the west of Sabray.

  And still the pilots were calling in traces of that faint clicking being transmitted weakly by Marcus’s beacon—jammed in the window frame and still valiantly sending up its unanswered electronic plea for help.

  It was marvelous to have the photographs from space, illuminating at last the place where the lost SEAL was sheltering. But the images were not all encouraging. For a start, there was nowhere, anywhere, around the village, high or low, east or west, that any pilot, in his wildest dreams, could possibly land a helicopter without crashing and rolling down the mountain.

  There was hardly an inch of flat ground. The guys in the ops room were gazing at a rock and boulder–strewn moonscape with high trees and a cluster of maybe a hundred square, mud-brick houses, built tightly together around a narrow street not wide enough to park a couple of motor bikes, never mind a sixty-five-foot-long Pave Hawk helicopter with a fifty-four-foot rotor span.

  Computers were taking the images and making them three-dimensional, converting the helicopter into a line-drawn diagram, demonstrating the tight distances and dangers in this awful country. It was like an architect’s plan come to life—accurate, orange-lit, worked by military information-technology wizards, all trying to plot a way to fly the helicopter into the outer edges of the village.

  They tried every which way, all through the morning, and in the end arrived at precisely the same conclusion that Gulab had reached the previous day: it’s the opium field or nothing. And Spanky was gazing with a certain amount of horror at the map and the potential landing zone: not total horror, because nothing looks as bad from an ops office as it will from the cockpit of a piercingly loud helicopter, swerving in a mountain wind, in the pitch-dark, with a two-hundred-foot-high granite wall three feet to the left.

  Nonetheless, it was still horror. And it was tight—as tight a landing as either rescue pilot had ever seen, with a rock wall on one side, a two-thousand-foot sheer drop to the valley floor on the other, and a small grove of trees to the rear. The hazards to the left and right represented instant death. The trees? Don’t even think about what might happen if the slashing rotor blades hit one of those.

  In some ways, this was the mission these teams had been preparing for ever since they joined the Rescue Wing. But if it should go wrong, it would cast an everlasting shadow on their whole lives.

  Still, an everlasting shadow was a whole lot better than getting incinerated in a burning helo. Tumultuous thoughts clambered through all of their minds; some positive, some negative, all confused—the opportunity, the danger, the glory, and the terror of a screwup.

  This was the moment every combat rescue pilot dreams of and yet dreads. This is the day when each one of them puts years of training to the test.

  “In the end,” said Spanky, “none of it mattered. The objective remained pure and simple: to fly Marcus Luttrell out of there, hopefully alive. And every one of us knew that.

  “That day, we listened to a thousand assessments of the problems, and I paid deep attention to every one of them. But we were still going. I knew that, and so did everyone else. When night fell, we would lift off and head right back up to those mountains. If Marcus was alive, we were not coming back without him.”

  Focal point of their studies, all day long, was that landing zone in the opium field. And by midafternoon, another major breakthrough occurred when the Rangers made contact. They’d not only arrived on the hillside opposite the village but also had moved in and were sending in the GPS numbers. In their estimation, the landing was difficult but not impossible.

  Marcus was alive. He was badly hurt, but he wasn’t in danger of dying, and they had a top Green Beret corpsman tending his wounds. There were some good guys in Sabray, especially Marcus’s Afghani bodyguard, who had high authority among the villagers.

  The Rangers would have Marcus and his man down there at the LZ, or landing zone, by 2200. They wanted a barrage of high explosives blasted onto the western slope, where the heavy guns of the Taliban faced the opium field. And they wanted it a full half hour before the ETA (estimated time of arrival). They were concerned but not worried. Typical Green Berets.

  “Anytime the boss wants us to knock the shit out of these Taliban jerks, just let us know. Meanwhile, keep ’em well occupied from the air while the rescue guys do their thing. Marcus says ‘Hi,’ and could someone reserve him a cheeseburger?”

  Long before they released details of the US air armada that would accompany the rescue helicopters, they established and confirmed that the mission would proceed under standard tactics. The two Pave Hawks would fly together, commanded by Colonel Macrander and Major Peterson.

  They would operate in close quarters, protecting and covering for each other, as they had practiced a thousand times in the Arizona desert. With a known enemy lying in wait, they would make the journey in the fastest possible time, at speeds reaching two hundred miles per hour.

  When they reached the zone, they would go in swiftly, with the lead helo making a fast pass over the LZ, trying to draw enemy fire, and then pulling out hard and high. This would hopefully leave the airspace clear for the second Pave Hawk to swoop in for the pickup.

  Major Spanky had heard all this so many times. That was the way the Rescue Wing operated. But he suspected that Skinny would elect to make the pickup himself. That, however, was not going to happen. Mindful of the difficult cloud cover and the lack of light up there when they were searching for the Chinook, the senior commander elected to go in first himself. Then he would hurl a glow stick right into the middle of the landing zone, to illuminate Spanky’s way.

  At that precise moment, the mild-natured, amiable major from Arizona understood for the first time that he, Spanky, had been selected to pilot the helicopter that would pick up Marcus Luttrell. He stared once more at the big screen and the virtual image of the Pave Hawk trying to make it down onto a “shelf” carved into the mountain.

  The shelf looked about as big as a chessboard. So far as the Rescue Wing commander could tell, this would have tested the edge of the envelope in the southwestern US desert in daylight. But in the Hindu Kush at night, with a bunch of wild men trying to get a missile shot into you, well . . .

  “That’s when my heart sank,” he said later. “That was when I shot right out of my comfort level. I was concentrating on that brief as if my life depended on it, and within a few seconds, I realized it might do just that. And I glared at that screen, studying everything I could commit to memory about that landing zone.

  “But, curiously, it was not the terrain on the mountain that jumped to the front of my mind. It was the angle of approach—the landing angle—where there is so much margin for even the slightest error . . .

  “The task of the first helo going in required pinpoint precision to drop that glow stick in exactly the right place at high speed. And Skinny was a master. The function of the second pilot, me, to land a ten-ton hunk of howling, vibrating machinery onto uneven ground as gently as a falling lotus blossom, that was altogether different. At least it was in my mind. As I mentioned before, right here my concentration was total.”

  Honored to have been chosen, utterly aware of the dangers, Major Peterson, like so many warriors before him, suddenly had thoughts of home, thoughts of Penny, his wife, and his four little boys. Not for the first time that day, he offered a prayer to anyone who might be paying attention: “Please don’t let me screw this up.”

  Meanwhile, the US Air Force was preparing once more for a huge combat rescue operation, which had inevitably shouldered its way to the forefront of everyone’s mind. It was hard for anyone to know the scariest part, but one thing was certain: if this rescue mission went down, there would not be a man in uniform in the entire USA
who would not know it had failed.

  The US military was taking no chances. And the big hitters of US fighter aviation were lined up en masse to accompany Skinny, Spanky, and the other guys, all the way to the Sabray field.

  As befits one of the most high-profile rescue operations of the Afghan War, there was an accompanying air-to-ground battle fleet riding shotgun for the Pave Hawks. It consisted of a formation of Boeing AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, with their 30-millimeter cannons and Hellfire missiles.

  By 2005, this fast, maneuverable, heavily armed gunship had become the scourge of a thousand Middle East terrorists. It was the most feared attack aircraft among insurgents everywhere. Its highly skilled two-man crew fires a laser-guided missile that essentially cannot miss.

  The crew rides in tandem with the pilot, behind and above the copilot-gunner. Both men can open fire independently. Their aircraft is powered by two General Electric T700 turbo-shaft engines with high-mounted exhaust.

  The Apache AH-64 cruises at 180 miles per hour and is designed to sustain hits from 23-millimeter rounds. The airframe includes 2,500 pounds of fuselage protection, and its fuel system is self-sealing to thwart ballistic missiles. In addition, it has a standard of crashworthiness unmatched by any combat helo—in particular, its landing gear and pilot seats, all designed to absorb the impact of a crash landing.

  Apache pilots usually fly into a frontline environment, with their M230 chain gun “slaved” to their helmets, forcing the gun to track head movements and aim precisely where the pilot looks.

  As for the air-to-surface Hellfire missile, a five-foot-long antitank killer armed with twenty pounds of high explosive, this precision rocket makes nearly a thousand miles per hour through the air.

  The legendary US four-star general Carl Stiner, former commanding general of the Eighty-Second Airborne, and C-in-C US Special Forces, was a Tennessee farmer by birth, and there was nothing he didn’t know about straight shooting. Said the general, “You could fire that Hellfire missile through a window, from four miles away, at night.”

  Also flying with them would be the A-10 Thunderbolt II, an unlovely but supremely effective single-seater fixed-wing, a specialist in close air support. This monster carries the heaviest automatic cannon ever mounted on a US fighter aircraft: the GAU-8 Gatling-type Avenger 30-millimeter rotary. It fires big shells, depleted uranium, armor-piercing, if required, at four thousand rounds per minute.

  It’s a bit slow to warm up. When the pilot hits the button, it unleashes “only” fifty rounds in the first second—and sixty-five to seventy thereafter—and is sufficiently accurate to put 80 percent of its shells inside a forty-foot circle from a distance of four thousand feet, in flight; slant range: four thousand feet in a 30-degree dive.

  When this tiger of a fighter plane comes lumbering over the horizon, best tighten your sandals and run for your life. The A-10 can also loiter in the sky for an extended time at altitudes lower than a thousand-foot ceiling, typically flying relatively slowly—at 350 miles per hour—in readiness for its ground-attack role. Fast fighter-bombers find it almost impossible to match the A-10’s ability to get a fix on slow-moving targets and then strike hard, with devastating accuracy.

  Additionally, it can get off the ground from short, rough landing strips, even under a heavy load. In a pinch, the old Thunderbolt can take off from a damaged air base runway or even down the middle of a highway. It’s a tough, sturdy, go-anywhere airborne warrior, and when the pilot opens up with that Gatling cannon, watch out.

  When racing in to support US ground troops, the A-10 Thunderbolt pilots have a telling motto: Go ugly early.

  A giant aerial refueling tanker accompanied the group, and flying way above the formation was a Lockheed AC-130 Spectre gunship, a heavily armed ground attack specialist. Its Vulcan and Bofors cannons are all ranged on the port side of the aircraft, which allows it to make a large circle around a target, and continue with sustained fire for longer than almost any other gunship.

  The AC-130 Spectres became Afghan specialists in very short order after they first arrived in 2001. With so many Taliban and Al Qaeda strongholds dug into the mountains, they were the natural US attack platform and saw service in all the major assaults in the early part of the war. These included missions in Kandahar, Tora Bora, and Operation Anaconda, which was fought in the Shahi-Kot Valley, due south of Kabul, in March 2002.

  The AC-130 requires a crew of thirteen, including five officers: pilot, copilot, navigator, and fire control and warfare officers. Among the eight enlisted men, there are a flight engineer, TV operator, infrared detection operator, loadmaster, and four aerial gunners.

  The aircraft is almost 100 feet long, with a 130-foot wingspan. Power plant: four turboprops, five-thousand-shaft horsepower each. Maximum takeoff weight: seventy tons. It’s feared by enemy militants as much as the Apache gunship, because once that Spectre gets its range, it’s basically time for prayers.

  The Lockheed gunship has one more priceless asset: its giant infrared spotlight, which is completely invisible to the naked eye but crystal clear to everyone wearing night goggles. At the precise moment of rescue, that spotlight will come lasering through the night air and illuminate the landing zone for Skinny to slam down the glow stick, hopefully straight over home plate.

  The US High Command was taking no chances on this one, top secret as it was, with half the military world waiting to hear that Marcus was safe, and that the bodies of his close buddies Danny, Axe, and Mikey had been located and gathered up. No level of US heroism in this entire conflict had ever been edged more cruelly with such a deep and abiding sadness.

  The air armada that would accompany the two Pave Hawks thundered off the runway with as little fuss as possible shortly after 2100. It regrouped high over the foothills east of the base and then flew in the agreed-upon formation straight up to the Hindu Kush. Its mission: to soften up (read: frighten the living daylights out of) the Taliban on the mountain.

  “I was well aware of the route we were taking,” Chris Piercecchi said later. “We were headed into the exact same valley as before—the one where they fired and missed once, and then smashed a missile into the Chinook. It might not yet have been real for everyone, but it was sure as hell real for me, right from the start.”

  Checky, of course, would be the first man out of the aircraft, if necessary, down a rope in the night to grab Marcus. He would also be the first man to come under fire if the big boys hadn’t yet wrapped up the Taliban.

  At 2200, the final signal came into both cockpits. The rescue mission was a go. Engines running, rotors flashing in wide circles, doors slammed. Outside, an unusual number of the guys stood alongside the runway to watch the takeoff. It was as if everyone was involved in this rescue, if not physically, then with their fighting hearts and steel-rimmed willpower. There was not a man among them who would not have grabbed a rifle and gone with them if such a call had come.

  Skinny led the way, climbing into the night sky, tracked by the second Pave Hawk. Below them, a thousand eyes watched the helos clattering higher and higher, up toward the black canyon where death lurked on every escarpment.

  Alongside the runway, men who had faced fire and fury in battle together just offered those tight little nods, one to the other. Everyone understood the stakes. And no one spoke, except for one Navy SEAL chaplain, standing alone. He just muttered, “God go with you.”

  The rescue helicopters kept going, following behind the support fleet of Apache gunships, the A-10 Thunderbolts, and the Spectre, which was flying far higher than the rest. But once more the cloud cover was heavy, and the pilots did not even get much help from the mountain peaks below, which, on this ride, usually got whiter and whiter the farther north they traveled.

  Tonight there was little in the way of guidance from the outside. Everything was concentrated on the instrument panels in the cockpits—altitude, speed, direction, GPS numbers, all communications—while the pilots peered through their NVGs at a green world that wa
s growing dimmer by the mile, the moon and the stars obliterated by the dense cloud.

  After a half hour, the Pave Hawks were in contact with the main fleet. They could see the lights when they ventured above the clouds, but that was not a good plan. They needed to stay low, reducing the enemy’s ability to see them, creeping along the valley floors, staying close to the mountain wall. Because there, Taliban radar, if any, would find it impossible to pick them up. There’s nothing like a zillion tons of solid granite stretching to the sky to confuse even the most sophisticated radar beams.

  Skinny and Spanky sped on along the main river valley, preparing for the final approach, as close to the mountain wall as it was possible to fly. High above them the clouds were shrouding the mountains and blocking out all light from the stars.

  The trouble was that the LZ was much higher than the route they were now following, and they needed to ascend very soon. Meanwhile, with so many people shouting, communications were becoming slightly chaotic.

  Everyone wanted to know the same thing: “What’s the status? Over.” “What’s the status?” “What’s the status?” Since no one could see a damned thing beyond the cockpit glass, it was a hard one to answer.

  Both rescue pilots began to climb swiftly, like two dragonflies, against the massive cliff face. And right there, they could see a new sight: green flashes through their goggles, like the center of a major thunderstorm. But this was not one of nature’s spectacular sights—this was heavy-duty American firepower slamming into that mountain, making doubly sure that no member of the Taliban army got even a half shot at a US plane. And certainly no heavy machine gun fire aimed at Marcus Luttrell, wherever he might be.