Not a Good Day to Die (18 page)

To reduce the risk of friendly fire and to share situational awareness, Task Force Blue permitted a single liaison officer from Mountain to hang out in their TOC, located at the other end of the airfield from Hagenbeck’s headquarters. But there was only one other exception to TF 11’s “never the twain shall meet” policy regarding conventional forces: Pete Blaber’s AFO. In keeping with his belief in “the power of combinations,” Blaber had begun to work closely with the conventional troops soon after the basement meeting in Kabul. Although friction persisted between Blaber and some JSOC leaders, Blaber persuaded the TF 11 staff to support Anaconda and his participation in it. “Pete’s arguments, and why we ended up going into Shahikot, is if you go to the places they have fought before, where the caches were, where they had a historical pattern, that’s where the leaders will be, and that’s what some of the signals [intelligence] supported,” said a TF 11 staffer. “We were watching and supporting their operation because we believed that would flush the pheasants.”

(Despite the lack of hard evidence that any of the “big three” HVTs were in the Shahikot, the very presence of a large number of enemy fighters in one place, combined with a spike in Arabic cell phone traffic and a concentration of SUVs, suggested that one or more of them might be wintering there, protected by a large cadre of guards. This added to the widespread view among U.S. officers that Anaconda would prove to be the decisive operation in the Afghanistan. “It’s safe to say that the intel community thought that there were some significant leaders potentially in the Shahikot Valley,” Harrell said.)

Blaber installed Jimmy and his small command and control element in the Mountain TOC as soon as it was established in Bagram. The AFO officers decided there was no point in gaining knowledge only to keep it from the commanders whose troops would be at the tip of the spear, so Blaber fed Hagenbeck intel from Gardez and Jimmy ensured the AFO teams’ locations were marked on Mountain’s maps of the Shahikot and the surrounding area. Jimmy, who by now had about half a dozen operators working for him in Bagram, also attended every important rock drill and briefing that Mountain held. In the Mountain TOC Jimmy ran his operation from a table just five feet away from the table at which the three generals sat. Sitting on the AFO desk were enough radios, satellite phones, and secure laptops to keep a small electronics store in business. But the gadgetry and the proximity had a purpose. If Jimmy learned something important, he could immediately pass it on to the generals without even raising his voice.

THE
first Mountain staffers to arrive in Bagram—Bentley, Gray, Wille, Ziemba, and Captain Shawn Prickett, an air operations officer—threw themselves into their work. February 14, the day after their arrival, marked the start of a two-day planning conference held by Rosengard in Dagger’s AOB building. Mulholland and Rosengard gave the newcomers another detailed overview of the intelligence regarding the Shahikot, and how they proposed to attack the valley. The Mountain planners liked what they heard, and applied themselves to the painstaking staff work required to give such a complex military operation any chance of success. The work Wille and Ziemba had done sketching out a concept of operations for the Shahikot now paid dividends, drastically shortening the time the Mountain planners needed to get smart on the operation. By the time Hagenbeck arrived February 17, his advance party had a detailed concept of operation ready to brief to him. The nascent plan still clung to Rosengard’s vision of attacking the valley from the west with Zia’s troops and the two A-teams (a force now collectively known as Task Force Hammer) while air-assaulting TF Rakkasan—including LaCamera’s battalion—to occupy blocking positions astride the escape routes out of the valley. Many
i
’s remained to be dotted and
t
’s to be crossed, but the basic elements were there. With D-Day set for February 25, the planners needed the commanding generals at every level to sign off on the work that had been done so far. Those crucial briefings occurred February 17.

Hagenbeck was briefed first, by Gray and Smith, and gave his thumbs-up. Then Mikolashek flew in from Kuwait. His approval was vital for Anaconda to proceed, and represented the highest hurdle so far for the work into which Rosengard, Wille, and the other planners had been pouring themselves. All the assorted task force commanders—Hagenbeck, Harrell, Mulholland, Wiercinski, Harward, and even Trebon—gathered to hear Gray and Rosengard brief the CFLCC commander. Rich, the CIA chief of station, also came up to Bagram for the occasion. Gray outlined the conventional forces’ role in each phase of the plan to Mikolashek, Rosengard described what Dagger would contribute. Mikolashek raised two issues. He was concerned that the operation was scheduled to begin on the last day of Eid ul Adha, the three-day Feast of Sacrifice that commemorates Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Ishmael to Allah. During the holiday Moslems around the world sacrifice a lamb or other animal and distribute the meat to relatives or the needy. Mikolashek told Hagenbeck and the others that they should not ignore the holiday: Either they should take advantage of it and attack during the festivities to catch the enemy by surprise—he cited Washington’s Christmas 1776 crossing of the Delaware and attack on Trenton to illustrate what he meant—or they should delay the attack until the holiday had passed. Worried that some of their Afghan allies wouldn’t show up for the fight unless the date changed, the Americans decided there and then to move D-Day from February 25 to February 28.

Mikolashek was also concerned that too many conventional forces were being committed to the fight, according to officers who heard him speak. Larsen, the Rakkasan executive officer, who was present at the briefing, said Mikolashek reflected CENTCOM’s view that “the more targets we present to the enemy, the more he will kill.” This was a curious approach to take to an operation in which the objective was to trap and kill the enemy. Wiercinski countered that “he didn’t think we had enough force, because the enemy situation was too vague, and there were a lot of escape routes,” Larsen said. There was, of course, no chance of CENTCOM providing more forces for the operation. Just getting eight Apaches into the country had taken a momentous bureaucratic struggle. But Wiercinski’s argument at least persuaded Mikolashek not to tamper with the force already set aside for Anaconda. (Mikolashek took strong exception to this account. “I don’t remember saying anything about ‘too many conventional forces,’” he said.)

Finally, the leaders in Bagram held a video-teleconference with Franks and his principal staff in Tampa. The CENTCOM commander liked Rosengard’s concept of forcing the enemy in the valley to flee toward Pakistan, which the Dagger operations officer referred to as “convincing the enemy to do what he already wants to do.” Franks approved the concept of operations, but told Hagenbeck to give his task force a new name. “Don’t call yourself ‘Afghanistan,’” he said. “Call it anything else, but that has geopolitical implications.” With CENTCOM apparently still gripped by the fear of appearing like an army of occupation, Hagenbeck renamed his organization Coalition and Joint Task Force (CJTF) Mountain.

Having gotten a green light, the planners redoubled their efforts. What Mikolashek and Franks had approved was a concept of operations—the broad brush outline of who would do what in Anaconda. There was still much work to be done to determine the hows, wheres, and whens of the operation. As C-130s and C-17s landed night after night on the airstrip and scores of tents went up to shelter the army gathering at Bagram, Gray, Wille, Rosengard, and Larsen toiled long caffeine-and nicotine-fueled hours refining the plan. There were plenty of devils left in the details.

17.

PETE Blaber had a rapt audience.

It was February 14. The B Squadron recce guys had arrived earlier that day, only forty-eight hours after Blaber had requested them in the tense video-teleconference with Dailey. (They had actually been warned several days earlier by others in Delta that Blaber wanted them in Afghanistan, forcing them to cut short a training exercise in Europe to return to Bragg less than a week before their arrival in Gardez.)

Blaber gathered the new men—the operators he planned to send on the reconnaissance missions—and explained why they had been called forward. The meeting, held in the big work room, was also attended by the Special Forces and CIA folks. Their mission was to reconnoiter the approaches to and—eventually—the interior of the Shahikot Valley, Blaber said. He repeated his guiding principles for operating in the enemy’s backyard. First was the need to understand the enemy. Blaber told the new arrivals they should read everything about the Shahikot, talk to Zia’s troops about the enemy, and ask themselves, “If I were the enemy, how would I defend this area?” Locking eyes with each man in turn, he told them, not for the last time, that the key to success was to follow Patton’s three principles of war: “Audacity, audacity, and audacity.”

Blaber had handpicked these men because he knew they were some of the very few in the U.S. military—in anyone’s military—who could attempt the missions he had in mind with any hope of success.

The next day the reconnaissance effort began in earnest. The new guys got up to speed quickly, reading all the same books and intel papers the other guys had read, and familiarizing themselves with the surrounding area using maps and overhead photos. Helped by Glenn P., the AFO intel analyst, they looked for avenues of approach into and escape from the Shahikot, potential enemy lines of communication, evidence of enemy activity, and, crucially, places in and around the valley where they might be able to establish observation posts. It was busy, as they war-gamed numerous options for infiltrating teams into the valley.

The AFO operators were imbued with their commander’s audacious spirit, but neither they—nor he—were blind to the dangers of operating in that environment. They were particularly concerned about the threat of mines, which had been strewn about the Afghan countryside liberally over the previous twenty-five years. These haphazardly marked minefields had cost many civilians their legs or worse. The maps and other intelligence documents identifying the area’s minefields left a lot to be desired. The AFO troops turned for help to Hoskheyar’s fighters, who, as locals in the pay of the Americans, were the best sources of intel on the mine threat. Prompted by the AFO operators, the Dagger troops at the safe house asked their Afghan allies a series of seemingly innocuous questions designed to elicit information about minefield locations without letting on that a big operation in the Shahikot was in the offing. The militiamen knew there were Al Qaida troops in and around the Shahikot, and the Americans were clearly building up the force in the safe house and paying, training, and equipping the Afghans for something, so whether the local fighters failed to put two and two together is open to question. However, they did give the U.S. troops valuable information about “thousands” of mines that lay along routes the AFO patrols might otherwise have taken.

Blaber envisioned an initial recon mission divided into two phases. The first would be a “vehicle recce,” driving along and off the roads southwest and southeast of Gardez in order to determine the feasibility of moving deeper into the mountains on foot. Providing such penetration seemed possible, the second phase would be the true environmental recon, with two teams approaching, but not entering, the Shahikot Valley—one from the north, one from the south—and establishing observation posts, before returning to Gardez to prepare for a mission into the valley just prior to D-Day.

The troops who would take the lead were the recce experts newly arrived from Bragg. The B Squadron operators were divided into two teams: India and Juliet. A Delta recce team usually consisted of four men, divided into two sniper-spotter duos, with the spotter being the senior man of each pair, but these teams had only five operators between them.

Juliet was the larger of the two. Its three men were led by Master Sergeant Kris K., a family man with golden blond hair and a boyish face from West Virginia. Kris was in his thirties and about five feet ten with a very athletic build. His work was characterized by precision and attention to detail. Second in command was Master Sergeant Bill R., an easygoing skydiver and technology wiz who could work miracles with computers. The team was rounded out by Sergeant First Class Dave H., the youngest of the five new arrivals who was also incredibly fit and another technology buff.

India had only two operators, less than the bare minimum for a mission with such a thin margin for error. But the two men could not have been better suited for the task at hand. The thirty-six-year-old team leader was Master Sergeant Kevin W. Short and tautly muscled, he grew up in the backwoods of western Kentucky, learning how to handle a hunting rifle by his eighth birthday. In addition to his hunting prowess, Kevin possessed a natural talent for running far and fast. He had been a competitive triathlete, and after he left his colleagues for dust in his first five-mile run during Delta’s operator training course, he was nicknamed “Speedy.” Every operator is assigned a nickname when he joins Delta. The names usually refer to a physical characteristic or personality trait, and are not always flattering or even completely accurate. But Speedy’s was entirely appropriate. Speedy did everything—eating, driving, running—as if his life depended on being the first one to finish. His penchant for speed had actually forced him into the Army. When he was seventeen, police arrived on the scene during an illegal motorcycle race between Speedy and a friend. His buddy was arrested on the spot, but Speedy outran the law on his bike, only for the police to show up at his home soon after. The judge strongly suggested Speedy join the Army, and dropped all charges when Speedy did so. That was nineteen years ago. Western Kentucky’s loss had been the Army’s gain. Speedy had gone straight from high school into Special Forces as an “SF baby.” He joined Delta in 1991. After doing his time in an assault troop, his hunting ability made him a natural for a spot in one of the reconnaissance and surveillance troops.

Speedy’s thirty-eight-year-old second in command was another master sergeant, Bob H., a stocky six-footer from Austin, Texas, who functioned as a “pack mule” on patrols, carrying other operators’ gear if they were having trouble keeping up. Bighearted and reliable, Bob’s reputation was of a guy who just wouldn’t quit. “If you’re in a bad situation, there’s nobody you’d rather have beside you,’ cause he’s gonna be there,” said another Delta NCO. Speedy and Bob were close friends and made a terrific recce team. Both were extraordinarily fit and avid outdoorsmen—expert trackers and game hunters. “If you needed two men to track a chipmunk in a 100,000-acre forest and kill it with one bullet, these are the two,” said Blaber later. “Although two operators was less than I would have said were needed for these missions, these two were living proof of why you never say ‘never’ with regards to rules or guiding principles governing tactics. Having Speedy and Bob on a team together was like having Daniel Boone and Simon Kenton together in the frontier days—as hunters and athletes, they had no peer, anywhere.”

Juliet had the northern reconnaissance. Their goal was reach a position from which the tri-cities area and the Ewadzkhal Valley, five kilometers to the Shahikot’s east and the site of reported enemy activity, could be observed. The concept they developed was to drive southeast down the road that ran in front of the safe house and penetrate the Sate Kandow pass that led through the mountains to Khowst. The Americans knew all about the Sate Kandow from their homework. Throughout the 1980s mujahideen forces under Jalalluddin Haqqani held the pass, effectively blocking the main road from Gardez to Khowst. The Soviets only broke through once, in 1987, behind an artillery and air bombardment so powerful that the chemical residue from the explosives poisoned the mountain streams. Twenty-five years later the pass retained its reputation as a forbidding, treacherous gateway to eastern Paktia and Khowst. No U.S. or other allied troops had yet broached the Sate Kandow. According to the Afghans at the safe house, hundreds of old antitank mines lined the pass, so once between its sheer cliffs, the operators would leave the road and drive south via a trail to find a suitable site to drop off the recce team. In phase two of the mission Juliet team would either walk or ride on all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) to positions several kilometers northeast of the Shahikot.

The southern recce was India Team’s responsibility. The first phase would be to drive to Zermat, which appeared to be a logistics hub for the enemy in the Shahikot. No Americans had driven down the Zermat road since January 20, after the CIA and Dagger higher headquarters had told their men in Gardez to limit operations in that area. Reopening the road would open the back door to the Shahikot, Blaber told his men. The second phase would involve a second vehicle recce, dropping India Team off at a point from which they could continue toward their observation posts on foot. An alternate plan involved a helicopter insertion south of Pecawul Ghar, Celam Kac and Jakangir Kot, the site of a suspected Al Qaida exfiltration network and headquarters. Intel analysts assessed this area as the main avenue of escape from the valley. From their LZ, the team would then hike to their observation posts. (Blaber did not want either of his teams to actually enter the Shahikot. That would have carried too high a risk of compromise, not only for the teams, but for the entire operation.)

The first phase of the northern recce was ready to go within a couple of days, but there were problems with the southern approach. The CIA was running local agents into Zermat and didn’t want Americans driving in that direction and arousing local suspicions. Bad weather south of the Shahikot also argued for a delay. So while India Team refined their plan, the rest of the AFO contingent focused their energies on Juliet’s mission. Glenn P., AFO’s intel wizard, gave Juliet a briefing paper on the situation in the area they were about to enter. Their route was controlled by militiamen loyal to local warlord Pacha Khan Zadran. Although loosely allied with him the Americans had identified Pacha Khan as a troublemaker and begun to marginalize him. Pacha Khan’s men had a checkpoint and billets along the Gardez-Khowst highway before it reached the Sate Kandow, and an observation post in the hills overlooking the road. There had been no report of enemy movement around the Sate Kandow since the end of December, when about 500 Al Qaida troops were supposedly in the area, as well as Taliban forces. The only reported enemy activity in the area was west and south of where Juliet hoped to emplace their observation posts. Those reports—of up to 100 Al Qaida fighters and sixteen tanks in the town of Menjawar to the west, and of “many Al Qaida” to the south in the Shahikot—were, of course, why the mission was being undertaken in the first place. The briefing included another unsettling detail: “According to mine maps, the infiltration road area is cleared of mines, meaning the area was mined in the past. Accuracy of the clearing is not known.”

The reconnaissance mission began at 11 a.m. February 17. A Predator unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) appeared in the cloudy skies above the safe house and began following the route toward the Sate Kandow. The Predator beamed back live television pictures to Bagram where Jimmy watched closely, relaying what he saw to the operations center in the safe house. (There were two types of Predator flying over Afghanistan: an unarmed version controlled by the Air Force and a CIA-controlled version armed with a Hellfire missile.) AFO had arranged for the Predator to fly the entire route before the patrol left Gardez, so the team would be forewarned of any obstacles or potential threats. The Predator returned within an hour, having spotted nothing untoward. It took up position overhead as Juliet’s two Toyota Tacoma crew-cab trucks pulled out of the compound onto the main road, hung a right, and headed for the mountains.

The Toyotas trundled through Pacha Khan’s checkpoints without incident. The tiny convoy drove into the small town of Dara and turned south along a dirt trail that led into the heart of the dark mountains. The operators kept their eyes peeled for danger, bouncing in their seats as the bone-jarring ride took them past the snowline at 8,000 feet, higher and higher into the mountains. But there was no sign of Al Qaida, or any other human activity. The trail became a creek bed covered with deep snow. The truck engines labored as the drivers negotiated the increasingly rough and rocky terrain. The operators wanted to get far enough south to identify spots for future observation posts, but the route became impassable before that was possible. Juliet turned around and retraced their route back to Gardez. The Predator, which observed nothing alarming, monitored their progress until they reached the safe house.

That first recce taught Juliet several lessons. Most important, the rough terrain meant the northern routes toward the Shahikot were not viable avenues of approach or escape. The AFO troops found it harder than expected to negotiate the rocky mountain trails. In addition, communication and coordination with the numerous intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance aircraft that supported the mission needed more planning. On the plus side, the team’s satellite radios with batwing antennae that could be attached to the roof or the bed of the truck worked well. For the first time the troops could talk securely over satellite from inside a moving vehicle. Overall, the operators were more than satisfied with the mission’s planning and execution.

The next day the Americans got a big break when one of the CIA’s sources gave up fresh information on Al Qaida positions in the Shahikot area. Once again the way Spider and his men treated the information validated the pilot team concept. Instead of the usual CIA practice—even in war zones where U.S. troops were fighting—of sending a report up the Agency’s chain for editing and dissemination, which would have forced the AFO and Dagger troops working just yards away from their Agency colleagues to wait days before receiving the benefits of their wisdom, the CIA operatives gave the soldiers the raw report of their interview with the source immediately. As a result, the AFO men were able to order overhead imagery to confirm or deny the source’s report, and share the pictures with Spider’s men.