Not a Good Day to Die (35 page)

The SEALs leveled their rifles and emptied their magazines into the tent, then pulled back. Goody decided to let the AC-130 take care of any enemies left alive. Andy, the combat controller, had already alerted Grim 31, the AC-130H Spectre orbiting overhead. The aircraft reported seeing two bodies just outside the tent and a third, wounded, enemy fighter trying to crawl to safety. Grim 31 also spotted the two remaining enemy fighters, who had apparently escaped the firefight outside the tent unharmed and were now trying to outflank the SEALs. From a range of 75 meters—almost point blank for a machine gun—one of the Al Qaida survivors fired a long burst of 7.62mm bullets from a PK machine gun at the SEALs, who hadn’t noticed their maneuver. The rounds missed. It was to be the last opportunity the two Islamist fighters would have to kill in the name of Allah. Grim 31 requested permission from the SEALs to engage the enemy fighters at “danger close” range, a step required of any aircraft crew about to attack a position in such close proximity to friendly forces that they might be hurt by the airstrike. The SEALs gave their okay. Within a couple of seconds the AC-130 poured 105mm rounds down upon the mountainside, killing both enemy fighters instantly. Then the Air Force gunners adjusted their fire and opened up on the tent and the wounded fighter outside. The explosions shredded the tent and sprayed its contents across the mountainside. When the echoes had faded away, five Al Qaida corpses were left cooling on the mountainside.

The sound of the AC-130 firing alerted every Al Qaida position around the valley. As they gazed upward, searching the night sky for the source of the attack, many fighters made a fatal error—they tilted their weapons skyward and fired blindly into the air, sending tracer rounds arcing into the darkness. Doing so revealed their positions to the three AFO teams, who quickly noted the location of each source of gunfire, to be passed to aircraft later that day as targets to be engaged.

The SEALs moved back to the Al Qaida observation post, which they intended to occupy themselves. What they found as they searched the debris confirmed how vital their mission had been. The DShK was in great condition, clean and well oiled with 2,000 rounds of ammunition arranged neatly within arm’s reach. The guerrillas had built a rough-and-ready traverse and elevation mechanism that, in the opinion of a special operations source, would have allowed the gunner to hit targets up to 3,000 meters away and to cover “easily” the routes to be taken by the helicopters that were shortly to enter the valley. It was fortunate that the SEALs had been able to take the guerrillas by surprise, because the Al Qaida fighters had been well armed. In addition to the DShK, the five tentmates were equipped with a Soviet-style SVD Dragunov sniper rifle, AK-series assault rifles, at least one RPG-7 launcher with several rounds, a PK machine gun, and several fragmentation grenades.

Scattered around were several handwritten documents. The fact that most were in Cyrillic script—suggesting at least one or more of the fighters were Uzbeks or Chechens—with a few in Arabic, when coupled with the different ethnicities of the five fighters who had been killed, was the first indication that enemy commanders had divided at least some of their force in the valley into cross-cultural teams. (Blaber speculated that the enemy did this to prevent one ethnic group—Arabs, Uighurs, Uzbeks, or Chechens—from leaving the others in the lurch.) The documents included what appeared to be a range card for an artillery system, as well as a notebook that included sketches and instructions on how to build homemade bombs and blow up bridges, buildings, buses, and cars. But as one special operations account of the notebook’s contents later put it, “The one chapter it didn’t have was how to defend against Americans who infil over 11,000-foot peaks.”

3.

RISING from their cots in the early hours of March 2, the dozen Apache pilots at Bagram were almost oblivious to the nerve-stretching tension felt by their infantry colleagues.

Despite Wiercinski’s melodramatic “give them everything you’ve got” comments of the previous evening, the pilots were anticipating “nothing out of the ordinary” from Anaconda. They had flown several missions since deploying to Afghanistan, all uneventful. Today, they expected, would be no different. “We were just there to make sure that Rak 6’s guys got on the ground,” Chief Warrant Officer 2 Stanley Pebsworth recalls thinking. “Zia’s forces were gonna come in. It was gonna be their show.” “For us,” said Chief Warrant Officer 4 Jim Hardy, “it was just another operation.”

The pilots pushed the green canvas flap of their tent aside and walked out into the night. Before them, infantry platoons were assembling in the cold darkness, nervous soldiers making last-minute adjustments to overstuffed rucks and awkward, bulky web gear. Sergeants with stress and determination etched on their faces shouted final roll calls before marching their troops to the airstrip. The contrast with the jovial atmosphere inside the pilots’ tent the previous evening could not have been sharper. “We were sitting around the potbellied stove, laughing, joking, making fun of each other,” Pebsworth said.

The Apaches were parked at the north end of the runway, almost one-and-a-half miles from tent city, and the pilots hitched Humvee and Gator rides down to the aircraft. Nary a butterfly stirred in their stomachs. The Apache drivers and their ground crews felt prepared for the mission. They had grounded the helicopters for the previous 48 hours in order to allow the crew chiefs to get them in perfect working order for D-Day, and TF Rakkasan had given them a detailed plan that seemed to leave little to chance.

That plan called for the six Apaches to fly from Bagram to the Shahikot in three flights—or “teams”—of two Apaches. The first flight consisted of Apache 203 (the helicopter’s serial number), flown by Chief Warrant Officer 3 Keith Hurley and Chief Warrant Officer 3 Stu Contant, and Apache 299, with Chief Warrant Officer 3 Rich Chenault as the pilot in command, and Captain Joe Herman—Ryan’s executive officer and 2
^nd
Platoon leader—as his copilot gunner. They were to take off ten minutes before the first Chinook serial and get to a spot about five kilometers southwest of Serkhankhel five minutes before Air Force jets bombed the preplanned targets around the valley. In the aviation phrase book, this spot is called the release point. It marked the place where the Apaches were released from the fixed route they must fly to the edge of the battlefield and could begin to move tactically into the engagement area. Once the bombs had gone in, the two Apaches were to swing into the valley and check each landing zone for crew-served weapons or enemy troops. They would then fly north into a position from which they could overwatch 2-187 Infantry’s landing zones at the foot of the eastern ridge. It would be Team 1’s responsibility to make the call as to whether the LZs were “hot” or “cold.” A “hot,” or “cherry,” LZ meant that the air assault probably would be met by enemy fire, a “cold,” or “ice,” LZ meant no enemy activity could be observed.

Team 2 was led by Captain Bill Ryan, the commander of 3-101’s A Company—” the Killer Spades”—and the senior officer on the Apache mission. His pilot was Chief Warrant Officer 3 Jody Kilburn. Ryan’s wingman was Chief Warrant Officer 4 Bob Carr, the most experienced Apache pilot in Bagram. Flying with Carr was Chief Warrant Officer 2 Emanuel “Manny” Pierre. Their orders were to take off immediately after the second serial of Chinooks, which would depart Bagram ten minutes after the first serial. The Apaches would follow the second serial—carrying the 10
^th
Mountain troops—into the southern end of the valley, covering them as they established their blocking positions.

Team 3 included the Apache flown by Hardy and Pebsworth, along with another flown by Chief Warrant Officer 2 John Hamilton and 1
^st
Lieutenant Gabriel Marriott, the 1
^st
Platoon leader. This team was Ryan’s reserve force. Their “on order” mission was to escort the reserve task force built around 1-187 Infantry if it had to be launched south. Otherwise they were to remain on standby at Bagram for any other missions that might arise. However, to give himself maximum flexibility in case he needed to change the plan at the last moment, Ryan had all six sets of pilots head to the tarmac together about an hour before takeoff, run through their preflight checklists and start their engines together.

The Apaches of Team 1 and Team 2 were to remain on station for two hours and thirty-five minutes, then make the thirty-minute flight back to the forward arming and refueling point (FARP), code-named Texaco, about eighty kilometers to the north, roughly halfway between Bagram and the Shahikot.

At about 4:37 a.m. the pilots cranked their auxiliary power units (APUs). These are small fuel-saving engines that provide enough juice to run the Apache’s electronics systems without having to start the helicopter’s two large turbine engines. As each APU powered up, going from a whine to a roar in a matter of seconds, the pilots ran through their checklists. Ryan had just gotten into his aircraft when he spotted a couple of maintenance troops running over—never a good sign with a mission less than thirty minutes away. Sure enough, they were the bearers of bad news: Carr’s 30mm cannon had sprung a hydraulics leak. It could still fire, but it might get stuck as it slewed from side to side or up and down. It was a small glitch, not a serious break, but with take off only twenty-five minutes away, there was no time to fix it and stick to the schedule. Helicopters often launch on combat missions carrying minor technical ailments that would keep them grounded in peacetime. But there was no way Ryan was going to let one of his Apaches fly into a potential gunfight without its cannon working. Instead, the captain adapted his plan on the fly, switching from three teams of two aircraft to a first flight of two and a second flight of three by combining Team 3’s aircraft with Team 2’s remaining Apache. Team 1’s composition and mission would remain the same. Team 2’s three Apaches, under Ryan, would execute Team 2’s original mission of covering LaCamera’s troops as they set up their positions. Carr and Pierre would remain behind until the crew chiefs fixed the leak, then fly forward to join their comrades at Texaco. If Wiercinski had to launch the reserve force, Ryan figured he would have five Apaches either over the battlefield or at the FARP and he could detach a couple of helicopters to link up with the inbound Chinooks en route.

At 4:47 a.m., Hurley and Chenault turned the keys that enabled their turbine engines to crank up and flicked the switches to turn their number one engines on. They spooled up with a roar, the increasing turbine speed powering the transmissions, which in turn powered the rotor systems. The number two engines followed immediately. As the pilots turned off the no-longer-needed APUs, each helicopter’s four rotor blades slowly began to turn, scything faster and faster through the darkness until they became a blur. At 5:07 and fifteen seconds Contant’s voice came over the radio: “Lift off in ten,” and at 5:07 and twenty-five seconds, exactly on schedule, the two high-tech birds of prey lifted into the air, then banked and turned south, heading for their hunting ground in the Shahikot Valley.

AS
Wiercinski had made clear in his emotive comments the previous evening, the Apache drivers bore a heavy responsibility, however lightly it might have rested on their shoulders. They were the only source of heavy firepower that Wiercinski controlled, other than a couple of mortar tubes in the hands of the first wave of air-assault troops. Of course, in theory there would be “fastmovers”—Air Force and Navy bombers—available overhead to rain precision-guided munitions on the enemy, but ground commanders prefer to depend on firepower they control, rather than that which they must request from another service. For Wiercinski and the rest of Task Force Rakkasan, that meant relying on Bill Ryan and his six Apaches.

Designed to destroy Warsaw Pact tanks on Europe’s central plains, the Apache had been a controversial weapons system since it was fielded in 1985. At its best, it was a supremely capable killer of men and machines. Each of its stubby wings had two pylons, which could each carry a rack fitting up to four Hellfire antitank missiles or a pod containing nineteen 2.75-inch rockets. The Hellfire could destroy a tank or any other vehicle at a range of up to 8,000 meters. The rockets came in a dozen types. In addition, slung under the helicopter’s fuselage was a cannon that fired 30mm high-explosive rounds as big as a child’s forearm out to a range of 4,000 meters. Fired at targets in the open, the 30mm round would kill anyone and disable any vehicle within five meters of where it hit. Thus the cannon was an ideal weapon for engaging unprotected enemy troops and other “soft” targets like mortar and air defense weapons and crews, or the SUVs that formed the Al Qaida logistics fleet. Before a combat mission pilots had to preset their cannon to fire a certain number of rounds each time they pulled the trigger. This setting could not be changed from inside the cockpit. For Anaconda, the Killer Spades set their cannons to fire ten-round bursts.

Such a variety of killing mechanisms packed into a highly maneuverable helicopter made the Apache an extraordinarily complex machine to operate; so complex, in fact, that it required two pilots, sitting one behind the other. In the rear seat, the higher of the two, sat the pilot-in-command. Typically the more experienced pilot, his primary responsibility was flying the helicopter and making radio calls. In the front seat was the copilot gunner, whose primary jobs were to navigate and to identify and engage targets with the Apache’s suite of weapons. Each pilot, however, could perform the functions necessary to pilot the aircraft and fire most of the weapons systems. (An interesting quirk of Apache crews was that the pilot-in-command might be outranked by his copilot gunner. This is because an Apache unit’s most experienced pilots were its warrant officers, who had often spent their entire careers flying helicopters. The commissioned officers, who commanded platoons, companies, and battalions, on the other hand, had to spend much of their time in schools, or flying nothing more than a desk in a staff job. Therefore, although Ryan, as a captain and company commander, was the senior man on the mission whose job it was to give orders to the other pilots regarding their overall mission, he was not the pilot-in-command of his own helicopter.)