Always listen to experts. They’ll tell you what can’t be done and why. Then do it.
—Robert Heinlein
There is the mission, there is the plan—and then there’s what actually happens. Nothing ever goes according to plan, ever. It’s the first rule of combat. Which means simple reaction is rarely an effective tactic. The essence of effective Spec Ops is the ability to respond and adapt, to be instantly creative and inventive. In other words, to think and execute outside the box. By definition, as I said earlier, we exist to function off the reservation.
Alex Morrison, Rob Furlong, Jason Delgado, and Nick Irving were all about to go off the reservation.
* * *
Alex was mulling over thoughts about death and water as he felt their craft heave and plunge in the midnight African sea swell a few miles off the Somali coast.
He thought about the forces arrayed in a several-mile radius around him, picturing how it would all play out. The landing force consisted of about 1,800 U.S. Marines, an Italian marine battalion of 350, and a handful of “supporting forces.” Like Alex and the other SEALs packed into this tin can.
He looked around, craning his eyes in the dark. There were about forty of them, probably all going through the same thoughts he was. Running the mission, sifting through the variables, assessing the unexpected, and weighing the imponderables.
About half the landing party were heading up to Mogadishu’s harbor, New Port, a mile or two up the coast, in large landing crafts. Hundreds more were rolling in on the AAVs (amphibious assault vehicles) the marines had used to such stellar effect in Grenada and Desert Storm. Some personnel were flying in on transport choppers. Not Alex and his team. They were going in in true SEAL fashion: shuttling in on an amphibious hovercraft, known as an LCAC, for landing craft air cushion—essentially an oversize Zodiac raft outfitted with a bunch of monster window fans. You can’t ride on the deck of an LCAC; if you tried, you’d be blown off by the hovercraft propellers. Hence the MILVAN.
The plan was straightforward, if not exactly simple. Of a U.N. force of nearly thirty thousand less than a tenth remained, mostly Bangladeshi and Pakistani military plus assorted admin and HQ staff, all housed on and around the airport grounds or up at New Port. The landing force was to go ashore, set up a narrow secure perimeter running parallel to the shoreline, between the airport’s main runway and the ocean, from the airport clear up to the harbor. From there, they would oversee the withdrawal of the U.N. contingent of 2,500 to within the perimeter and then onto outgoing ships. Once the op was concluded, they would pull back to the beach, climb back on the amphibs, and head back out to sea.
From Alex’s vantage point, it was a classic SEAL operation: approach from the sea, support from the sea, withdraw to the sea.
In the rolling dark, Alex thought about the briefings they’d received—both what was said and what could be inferred from what was said.
They were evidently caught between two contradictory imperatives, reflecting two currents of paranoia at the highest command levels. On the one hand, people in Washington were terrified that the action might spark off another powder keg like the Battle of Mogadishu sixteen months earlier. Yes, the local warlord had promised a hands-off policy for the evacuation, but you couldn’t trust that bastard Aidid. If any violence should begin to erupt, it had to be contained at all costs.
On the other hand, command was also extremely skittish about the use of lethal force. The disaster of the Black Hawk Down episode had so spooked U.S. policymakers that the entire U.S. military had sat on its hands during the genocide in Rwanda the previous summer. During the briefings their current hyper-conservative rules of engagement had been drilled into them. “And if you screw up,” the briefers added, “they will prosecute you.” Oh boy.
Operation Hopeless had left our military planners gun-shy.
Gun-shy. Haha. That was the right term, all right. To bring the point home, some of the marines had been armed with various “nonlethal technologies”—pepper sprays, flashbangs, and guns that shot a sticky foam in place of actual bullets—“to fill the gap between verbal warnings and deadly force,” went the official reasoning.
The heave and roll slowed, then ceased, and Alex could feel their craft sliding over the shallows, then bump to a stop. They had arrived at Green Beach: Somali soil. He grabbed his big .50 cal—the Beast—and got to his feet.
If things got ugly, he sure as shit would not be shooting foam or pepper spray.
* * *
When morning broke on March 5 after their first night in the Shahikot Valley, Furlong and McMeekin had a problem to solve. Tenth Mountain Division troops were pinned down by machine gun and mortar fire and needed assistance. This was not how things were supposed to go; Coalition forces were supposed to be hemming in the enemy forces, not the other way around. But there it was.
This presented Rob and Tim with a clear agenda: shut these guys down. They needed to do what they could to take out the mortars and machine guns that had the American forces boxed in. But that presented a tactical problem: they were at a disadvantage. The day before, they’d managed to get partway up the ridge, but not that far. This close to the valley floor, they were somewhat boxed in themselves. They needed to secure one of the most basic and time-honored military advantages: high ground.
They had been given a designated area within which they were supposed to operate, a set of coordinates that defined a “safety box.” They were not to go outside those coordinates. But if they stayed within them, they couldn’t do what they needed to do. They needed to get outside that box, to gain the high ground so they could lay down a serious leadstorm and dislodge the forces who had their boys pinned down. To do that, they had to go up higher.
The problem was, according to the air force, anything outside that box would be considered enemy. If they went up there, they would run the risk of being fired upon by their own guys. That risk was quite real. (In fact, although Rob and Tim didn’t know this at the time, Operation Anaconda had launched two days earlier with a devastating “blue-on-blue” incident, when an AC-130 had mistakenly fired upon a joint Afghan-American convoy of four vehicles, killing the convoy commander and wounding quite a few others. I was there when they brought those poor bastards in for emergency care.)
This was the dilemma: to do their job they needed some elevation, but if they moved up the mountain outside the parameters of that safety box they could become targets themselves.
Rob and Tim looked at each other and shrugged.
“We can die here, sitting at eight thousand feet,” said Tim, “or we can die up at ten thousand. Right?”
Rob flashed back on the feeling he’d had the day before, staring at that Taliban fighter wearing American BDUs, and realized he’d rather die up on the mountain being effective than sit on his hands back inside the safety box, watching their guys being pinned down and shot at. If they got killed, they got killed. At least they’d be making a difference.
“Let’s do this,” he replied.
They didn’t consult with anyone or phone it in, and they didn’t take anyone with them for security. They just moved out, the two of them, and started heading up the mountain.
As they pushed up toward higher ground, they passed an American team dug into the mountainside. “Hey, where are you guys going?” the Americans asked. “You guys know you’re about to move outside the box?”
“Yeah.” McMeekin nodded as they kept walking. “We know.”
“You guys are fucking crazy,” replied the Americans. “You go up there, you’re gonna get engaged.”
“Don’t worry, it’s okay,” said Rob. “We got this.”
Leaving the Americans behind, they kept walking.
It took them a while to get up into position. There was scattered snow the whole way up, but once they broke nine thousand feet the ground was covered with snow. Snow on the ground meant footprints, and sure enough, within minutes after pushing above the nine-thousand-foot mark, they found several sets of footprints. There were no other friendly forces up there at this altitude, not now. Nobody up here but the two of them, and the bad guys. And those footprints were fresh.
Rob felt his skin crawl. This was where they had spotted movement the day before, where he’d seen that Tali, wearing his purloined American BDU top. They were standing exactly where the enemy had stood.
Tim and Rob looked at each other without a word.
We’re sure as shit up in the hornet’s nest now, thought Rob.
* * *
About a week after Jason Delgado arrived in Husaybah, his team was given a mission to go observe an area they called the 440.
The 440 was Husaybah’s version of a high-end gated community: a large, squared-off cluster of houses set within a fenced perimeter, down on the southwest corner of the city, a stone’s throw from the Syrian border. The people who lived here were Saddam loyalists, Baath Party people who’d been rewarded for their fealty with a relatively cushy place to live. As far as command was concerned, Baath Party people were still considered the core of resistance, Saddam holdovers, and were the prime suspects for whatever level of instigation might be happening here in Husaybah. The snipers were directed to go observe this area to see if they could detect any suspicious activity.
Jason didn’t want any vehicle signature, so he decided to head down there on foot with his team, which included Mavica, DelFiorentino, and himself, plus the four snipers of the other team stationed there. Camp Husaybah had just one entry-and-exit point, facing the city, and Jason didn’t want to use that. He didn’t particularly want anyone in the city to know he and his men were out there. He got someone to open up a hatch for them in back of the complex, just enough for the seven men to squeeze out, and they left the FOB from the rear.
He didn’t trust Husaybah, not one thing about it. This was only his second or third mission there, and he and his team were just getting a feel for the place. So far, they didn’t much like what they felt.
Despite his bizarre first night in Husaybah with its police station shoot-out, Jason had at first been optimistic about what he and his team could accomplish there. The larger mission, according to policymakers at the top, was to help bring peace and stability to post-Saddam Iraq. They could call it that, if they wanted to; in Jason’s more pragmatic view, they were there to bring law and order. It hadn’t taken long to figure out what this place was. He’d understood where they were that first night as they rode in their Marine Recon convoy back to base after that crazy firefight.
This is the fucking Wild West, he thought. And we’re the new sheriff in town.
“Listen, guys,” he’d told his snipers the next day. “This is going to slow up once we start locking down the place. Let’s just get out into the city and show ’em there are marines here. Once we flex our muscles a few times, let them know we’re not playing around, these guys will stand down.”
That’s what he thought. Or at least, that was what he was telling himself. But the reality on the street seemed to be telling another story. His gut said there was more going on here than anyone was seeing or talking about.
After sneaking out the rear of the camp, he and his sniper team started walking, moving southwest, away from the FOB and toward the back side of the 440, the Syrian border side. It was close to a mile’s hike in nothing but open desert, but they were used to walking in the desert.
As they got closer to the 440 area, they passed a deep quarry where people were mining quartz or something. It was nearly dusk by this time and nobody was working; machines sat still and deserted. The seven men stopped for a moment to admire the scene; it was huge, like something from a megalithic era.
Suddenly they heard the clatter of gunfire. The sound was coming from farther down the border, away from the city. They sprang into go mode and started running southwest toward the commotion. They ran well over a mile, Jason estimates about four klicks, until they could just see something happening in the distance.
They got down and got on glass.
Jason saw an Iraqi border shanty, a little cement thing, no bigger than a portable toilet.
There was just one official border crossing in the area, up behind Camp Husaybah. But the border itself was nothing but a berm and open desert; no barbed wire, no fence, no anything, really. Even the precise delineation of the exact borderline itself was a matter of debate. For security, a series of little shacks were strung out along the border, essentially no more than observation posts. Anyone could sneak through, pretty much anywhere.
This poor guy sat there on one side of his little observation shack, facing northeast toward Jason and his group, sitting on his ass with an AK-47 propped on the ground between his legs with his head down against it, rocking back and forth like he couldn’t believe what was happening to him. His little shed was being shot up—chips of concrete blowing off and dust flying everywhere. The damn thing was being chipped away to nothing by machine gun fire.
The snipers scanned farther off in the direction of the gunfire to try to locate where it was coming from. And there, a ways past the border guard, was a five-man team, the one in the middle hunched over on an RPK, just laying into this poor Iraqi border guard like they were using him for target practice.
Jason called in to the watch commander at the TOC. “This is Sierra 3, we’ve got a group of five men dressed in black on an RPK, looks like a machine gun team, and they’re tormenting the shit out of an Iraqi border agent.”
Snipers typically have different rules of engagement from the line company, because they can see what’s going on with their own eyes. Normally, they’re allowed to make the call themselves, and take the shot. At this point, though, they were not in combat mode. This was, after all, the occupation phase, or peacekeeping phase, or whatever the correct term du jour was. They were supposed to call these shots in before they took them.
The officer on the other end said, “They’re shooting at an Iraqi, and he’s a border officer?”
“Yes, sir,” said Jason. They didn’t know exactly where they were; there were no landmarks, nothing around them but open desert and that little cement shed. But he gave the officer their GPS coordinates, then asked for permission to reduce the target.
“That’s what we’re here for,” the officer replied. “Help the poor fucker out.”
“Roger that!” said Jason. That was all he needed to hear.
Brandon DelFiorentino was on as Jason’s spotter, and he called out distance: 1,015 yards.
One thousand fifteen yards. Almost a full klick, well over half a mile. Jason had his M40A3 sniper rifle with him, but this was outside the maximum effective range even for the M40A3. To make things worse, it’s tough to call wind in the open desert where you have no visual cues to gauge by. No fluttering leaves or blowing grasses, let alone the hanging laundry and window curtains that had helped him gauge wind when shooting off a rooftop in the middle of Baghdad.
He sighted in on the RPK shooter, maxed out his elevation turret, said a little sniper’s prayer, and took a shot.
Nothing happened. No hit, no dust, no splash. Nothing.
He racked the bolt again, took a second shot.
Nothing.
“You guys see anything?” he asked. Nobody had.
He had six guys lying down on scopes, some on his right, some on his left, as if they were all lined up at a county fair shooting gallery. (Or working the range at sniper school.) All six of these guys were highly trained, and all six were trying to solve this problem. Where the hell were Delgado’s rounds going? And no one could see anything.
After the third round Jason said, “All right, stop. This isn’t working.” He thought for a second, then said, “Find me something to zero on.”
The other guys started scanning all around the horizon with their scopes, until someone said, “I’ve got a berm!”
They looked over where he was pointing. There it was. Barely visible, since it blended in perfectly with the rest of the sand, but there it was.
“All right,” said Jason, “I’ve got the berm. Walk me out to something.”
“Okay,” said DelFiorentino, “about four fingers to the left of the slope of the berm, you see where it raises up? Three fingers past that, there’s a boulder. You see the boulder?”
Jason saw it. “Yeah, Roger that. I see the boulder.”
“Take a shot,” said DelFiorentino.
Boom … splashhhhh. He could see a big splatter of dust kick up, way beyond and to the right of where he’d shot. Perfect. Now he had a reference point in his scope’s reticle. He wasted no time.
He swung back over toward the group of five guys, racked another round, and, using that exact same reference point in his scope—what Nick Irving calls the “cut and paste method”—he took a shot. He didn’t aim specifically at the guy in the middle. The distance was so insanely far, he just did his best to aim into the middle of the group, center mass, figuring his chance of hitting one of them was high.
The M40A3 has a muzzle velocity of 2,550 fps, or 850 yards per second. Shooting out to 1,015 yards, the round would be airborne for a little over one full second.
Boom! The round burst out of the barrel and took off toward the group—one thousand, two th—and the guy on the machine gun flipped over backward.
Jason stared through his scope, hardly believing what he saw. He had scored a direct hit on the dude on the machine gun.
The other four guys scattered—ran and hid under a little concrete A-frame structure nearby. Jason and his guys hopped up and down, pumping their fists in the air. The sniper’s touchdown dance. Then they began collecting their stuff to leave the area. These other four attackers were hidden, and there was nothing else they could do here. They figured they’d call it in and then go on their way, back to the 440 to carry out their mission for the day.
And then one of the four decided to sneak out from under the little A-frame and go back to where his dead buddy lay. He crept over there to the inert machine gunner and leaned over the machine gun.
“Mother fuck,” whispered Jason. “This guy is stupid.”
Jason wasn’t sure whether the guy was going to lay hold of his dead friend’s body to drag him away, or to pull him out of the way so he could grab the RPK himself and start shooting again. All he knew was, this guy was now on the machine gun, and he had to go. They’d seen these five jokers tormenting this poor border guard. They weren’t about to let them continue.
Because the guy was now leaning directly into the space where his friend had been stationed, Jason didn’t have to make any kind of new adjustment. He already had his gun set up perfectly. He had the guy perfectly in his scope, knew exactly where his reference spot was on his reticle.
He took another shot.
Guy #2 dropped and hit the ground.
The snipers all started our victory dance again.
One of Jason’s snipers now got behind the gun and took a look, wanting to see if a third brave soul would give it a try—but at that point they got a radio call to come back to the camp. Like, right away.
Lieutenant Colonel Lopez, the commander of the entire battalion, was there, and wanted to talk to him.
Delgado was in trouble.
* * *
As with Jason Delgado, his final deployment would be Nick Irving’s first time in a leadership position. As a newly minted E5 (sergeant) and sniper team leader, he would have rank and responsibility for planning some missions. And he wanted to use the latitude that gave him to fulfill his concept of what it meant to be a sniper—even if it meant bending (or breaking) the rules a little. There was still a nine-year-old kid inside Nick wearing that ghillie suit made out of his mom’s yarn and shooting his .22. He wanted the chance to color outside the lines, get out there outside the wire, build a hide sight, and stalk his prey like Carlos Hathcock.
He wanted to go outside the box.
“Hey man,” he told Pemberton when they first arrived in Afghanistan, “this is my last deployment. I want us to do some cool stuff, kind of do our own thing, and if we get in trouble, I’ll take the heat for it.”
It was July 2, after a good three months of the insane pace of action in Helmand Province, when the chance to do exactly that finally came. That was the day the U.S. commenced Operation Khanjar, the Summer of Decision offensive that dropped thousands of marines into the middle of Helmand Province in an effort to root out Taliban forces there. None of which had any immediate impact on the rangers of Charlie Company. But that was also the day Nick was approached by a scrungy-looking character with a mountain-man beard and serious need of a bath.
If this had been back home, Nick would probably have taken the guy for a homeless dude bent on panhandling. But this was no derelict, this was a member of a four-man team from the rangers’ regimental reconnaissance division, a special unit of recce operators.
These guys were legendary. They operated on their own, often deep behind enemy lines for extended periods of time doing their own who-knew-what ops. They were as Spec Ops as Spec Ops gets.
And they were looking for a good sniper.
They were hunting a particular HVT, a leader quite high up on the terrorist food chain. They had surveilled him for a while, spotted him a few times, at one point gotten close enough to see him getting into a car—but they hadn’t had a sniper with them. They didn’t have the skill set to guarantee a one-shot/one-kill at ten football fields, and this was the kind of shot they had to be 100 percent sure of making—miss and they’d just spook the guy into deep hiding.
They needed a sniper who could make a crazy-long shot like that, if need be.
“Listen,” Scruffy Beard said to Nick, “can you hit a guy in a car moving at a thousand yards or more?”
“With a .30 cal, if he’s coming toward me,” replied Nick, “I might have a shot at it. But don’t quote me on it.”
A .30 cal sniper rifle cartridge is packed with significantly more powder and is a significantly more powerful round than the .308s Nick was shooting with his beloved SR-25. Pemberton, in fact, carried a big bolt-action .30 cal, and Nick was quite familiar with it. But he figured, if it came to it, he and Dirty Diana could handle whatever they needed to handle.
“All right,” said Scruffy Beard, whose name turned out to be Derek. “We want you to come in with us on this operation.” He took Nick to their tent, showed him some maps, and described the type of terrain they’d be operating in, and gave him a quick mission brief.
Irving was completely psyched. It was a classic sniper mission—exactly what he’d always dreamed of doing. He and Pemberton were going to spend days out behind enemy lines, stalk the hell out of this guy, and hopefully take that one perfect kill shot. Nick filled Pemberton in and got clearance from First Platoon’s CO. After a few days of packing and preparation, they were ready to go.
The final plan was this: they would go hunt this HVT, and once they got eyes on him, they would call in whatever platoon was nearby and available for support, much the way a city cop will call in backup before venturing into a crime-in-progress scenario.
First, though, they would stop over at a small marine outpost to link up and see what intel on the area they might have.
They loaded onto a Chinook—just the six of them: Nick, Pemberton, and the four recce operators—and flew west for about an hour, deep into Helmand Province: poppy capital, heroin central, the heart of Taliban country. As Nick peered out the chopper’s porthole he saw a stretch of tall grass, then scrabbly desert fields with huge intermittent sand dunes, then long swathes of Afghan-style semi-urban sprawl. As they reached their destination and began their approach Nick scanned the terrain below, looking for signs of structures. He didn’t see anything but open desert with a little grass. Where were all the marines?
As they dismounted he noticed a series of small craters in the earth. Had they been taking mortar fire here? he wondered. As they got closer he realized there were people sleeping in there. A marine came out to greet them in his underwear and flip-flops, smoking a cigar. Nick decided on the spot that he would never again complain about the air-conditioning back at FOB Wilson being too cold, or not cold enough, or the chow not being as hot as it should be.
Man, he thought, we are outside the freaking box.
At the back of the compound he found a sort of makeshift hammock made of 550 cord, that slightly stretchy braided nylon all-purpose parachute rope so common in the military. “I claim that one,” he said. “That’s where I’m sleeping tonight!”
But that didn’t happen. First they set up their comms, including the satellite radios and other arcane equipment the recce crew had brought, then spent hours monitoring and following the intel. And then they planned, and planned some more. For hours Nick studied maps and charts, planning out the whole operation, considering contingencies and alternates. He was doing his chess thing: looking at the board, working out in his mind the different plays, what his opponent might do. He went all that night and into the next day.
In fact, he wouldn’t be sleeping for days.
* * *
Mogadishu Airport butted right up against the ocean, its main runway running diagonally, southwest to northeast, in approximate parallel to the shoreline. Just below the halfway point, time and the elements had carved out a single scallop-shaped bite, forming a small natural seaport. Green Beach, so named for its rich green tropical sand floor, would be their base of infil and exfil.
Earlier that day there had been a lot of gunfire near the seaport; the day before had seen an intense spate of clan fighting. Mogadishu’s version of Hatfields and McCoys, only with heavy artillery. Right now, though, the environment seemed entirely benign. They could see tracer fire in the sky, but that was off in the distance, somewhere in or beyond the western edge of the city. Who was shooting? And at whom? They had no idea. Here at the airport the U.N. forces were still in charge, and everything was calm as could be.
Hundreds of marines had already gone to work, establishing their lines along the two-and-a-half-mile line of beachhead. Nearly eight hundred had come ashore in the first wave, half of those arriving in AAVs here at Green Beach.
The SEALs split into two groups and headed for their predetermined positions. Typically the two snipers would have been working together, in a classic shooter-spotter team, but for this op they were splitting up in order to cover the airport from two positions. Alex and half a dozen others, including the LPO (leading petty officer) and OIC (officer in charge), a comms operator, a corpsman, and another two men for security, would take up position toward the southwest; the other sniper and his team would set up on a hillside by the northeastern tip of the runway, about a mile and a half away. Alex wouldn’t see them again until after the op was over.
Alex and his team broke off to the southwest and patrolled to a spot they had already pinpointed from studying satellite imagery that would give them a clear, full view of the southern half of the main runway and all the buildings in the airport’s lower half. Reaching the solid cement bunker they had picked out as their base of operations, they climbed in and began setting up. Alex took out his M88 .50 cal, carefully slid the barrel out through the slit in the bunker wall—and found himself staring through his scope at the inside of the bunker’s goddamn cement wall.
Shit.
The slit was just big enough for the barrel—just the barrel. Not the scope. Somehow the satellite imagery had not told them this. So much for planning.
Time to get outside the box.
Alex stood, gathered his equipment, climbed out of the bunker, and clambered up onto the roof. It looked like he’d be making his “hide” out under the stars.
On the perimeter wall up on top of the bunker, they used sandbags to build a small fighting position that could hold up to four of them at a time. The rest of the guys could stay down in the bunker and swap out positions with those above. Alex would be staying on top for the duration.
He laid out his supplies and got his position set up. A quick survey of the area told him that the .762 he’d brought along would be worthless. Any hostile activity, if it happened, would almost certainly be coming from the other side of the runway, the city side. Unless he was going to be shooting at someone actually coming straight toward them across the runway (unlikely), the very closest shot he could expect to be taking would be at a range of at least five hundred yards, and probably farther.
Alex put the .762 away and got the Beast up on top of the sandbags.
And waited.
* * *
Now up in the snowy higher elevations of the Shahikot Valley, Rob and Tim found a good location to set up position. While Tim begin surveying the valley floor below and building his range card, Rob planted the big .50 into the snow on its bipod legs. Today Rob would be on the .50, Tim hunkered down on his right, serving as spotter. (Though a natural righty, Rob had trained himself early on to shoot equally well with either hand and preferred to shoot long barrel left-handed, which made the natural position for spotter to his immediate right.)
They knew immediately that the decision had been a sound one. Their position gave them an excellent vantage point from which they could glass the entire range below them. Looking around the valley with the naked eye, everything looked pretty quiet out there. No movement, no signs of life. But the moment they got behind their optics, they started picking out movement everywhere. It shouldn’t take too long to begin identifying the mortar pits and machine gun nests that had the Americans pinned down.
They didn’t have long to wait. Down at about 1,700 meters they spotted a man wearing a shawl, carrying an AK, walking with his back to them toward a mud hut area. Not a machine gun nest, but certainly an enemy fighter whose presence could spell American deaths if he wasn’t eliminated.
Tim fed him elevation and windage. Rob watched for a few moments, to make sure he was tracking the man’s progress correctly. There wasn’t much to track: he was walking more or less in a straight line away from them, which meant there was no horizontal movement requiring Rob to lead the target. He was, for all practical purposes, a stationary target.
BOOM!
There is nothing quite like the sound of a .50 cal round going off. Even a .300 Win Mag, not a shy sound, doesn’t come close. It sounded like the peal of a thunderbolt from the heavens. Which, in a way, is exactly what it was.
The round flew downrange toward the valley floor at a velocity of about 2,640 fps, or half a mile per second, arriving at the man’s location in a little under one second.
It missed, passing the man a few feet to his right, and drove into the ground a few feet in front of him.
As Rob made an automatic mental note (mild wind coming from the left) he watched the man through his scope and couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. If it were Rob who’d been walking along and had suddenly seen a high-powered round plow into the ground just a few feet away, he knew what he’d be doing right now. He’d be running like crazy and diving for cover. Not this guy. The man stopped, turned, and kind of waved his arm in the air (what did that mean?), then turned back around and continued walking in the same direction.
At the same pace.
No dropping for cover, no breaking into a run. Nothing. Clearly he’d seen the splash from Rob’s shot.
Rob was floored. Was the man completely stupid, or completely fearless? Or maybe he truly believed that, hey, if it was his time to go, if it was Allah’s will, then so be it. Rob didn’t really know, and he didn’t really care.
He worked the bolt mechanism in a practiced one-two-three blur—up and back, spent cartridge ejects, forward and down, slamming home a fresh cartridge—made a quick adjustment for wind, and let the second round go.
He planted this one right in the man’s back.
It was Rob’s first kill; it certainly would not be his last.
For the rest of the day the two men continued locating, sighting, and engaging targets—including the mortar pit that had held the guys of Tenth Mountain captive.
When darkness fell they headed back down toward the safety box. As they hiked down past the same American team they’d passed on their way up, a few of the guys who’d told them they were crazy for going up there came over and said, “Hey, thanks, man!” Evidently the news had spread about how busy the Canadians had been up there, and how they’d been able to eliminate the mortar position that had Tenth Mountain pinned down. A few of the Americans started applauding.
To Rob and Tim, it felt like a day well spent.
The next morning they climbed back up the mountain to go outside the box again and spend another day taking out whatever targets they could find. Again they watched as the snow cover spread out and became an unbroken blanket at about the nine-thousand-foot mark. Again they had that spine-chilling feeling that went beyond the effects of rarefied air and bitter temperatures. This time, though, the riskiness of what they were doing hit home, in a literal and decidedly uncomfortable way.
They had just pushed outside the box, set up their long gun, and started glassing the valley, when they both heard a loud, piercing crackkkk! like something breaking right between the two of them.
In an instant both men were down on the ground. Though neither one had ever heard that sound before, at least not that up close and personal, they both knew what it was. It was the sound made by a high-speed round cracking the sound barrier.
A single shot. Without question, a sniper round. And it had passed directly between them, inches away from both men. An American sniper had seen them, taken them as enemy combatants, and put a round in their direction with near-fatal accuracy.
Blue on blue.
McMeekin got on the radio and said, “Cease fire! Cease fire!”
Once they’d determined that no more Coalition rounds were coming their way, they got down to the business at hand.
While they’d taken out that particularly troublesome mortar pit the day before, there were still others out there, and they seemed to have an endless supply of rockets.
Down on the valley floor the two snipers noticed a dried-up wadi bed where two or three guys would go back and forth across the valley, from the vicinity of the Whale down to an area below Takur Ghar called Ginger Pass. Walking between them were several donkeys loaded down with some big boxes. It didn’t take any inside intelligence to know what was in those boxes. So that was how those mortar teams kept being resupplied with fresh rockets.
Tim got one of these donkey runners in his sights. BOOM! Another thunderbolt from the sky. The man went down.
The donkey convoy paused, trying to make out exactly where the shot had come from, but the sniper team was situated at such an extreme distance that they couldn’t work it out. They continued on. Before long Rob and Tim had acquired a second target. BOOM!
The men were now confused. They’d lost two of their company and had no idea where the shots were originating from. They got down on their knees, then on their bellies, and started crawling through the wadi, no doubt figuring that this would take them completely out of their invisible assassin’s line of fire. As long as they were snaking along on their bellies, they wouldn’t present any kind of target, right? But that assumed that the bullets were coming at them from the same elevation where they were. Which of course, they weren’t. Rob and Tim were so high up that they could look right down on them. In fact, when the men started crawling they made themselves into easier targets, not more difficult ones.
Before long Rob and Tim had racked up a pretty decent body count. But the donkeys didn’t stop. They’d made this trip who knew how many times, and it didn’t seem to bother them that their human handlers were now lying dead all around them. By the time Rob and Tim had shot the last man standing, the donkeys had moved out of range, carrying their mortar supplies off to wherever they were headed.
When the donkeys eventually reappeared with new handlers, they took them out, too. Eventually they had to take out the donkeys themselves.
By the end of their second day up there they had completely shut down that resupply line.
And that was a good thing, too, because now they faced a new and different problem.
When they boarded that Chinook at Bagram three days earlier, Rob carried the big .50 with five rounds in its detachable magazine. In addition to his C8 combat rifle and Browning 9mm sidearm, and the rest of his kit, he also carried extra radio batteries and twenty extra .50 cal rounds. McMeekin carried the radio itself and, along with his C8 and Browning 9mm, another ninety .50 cal rounds. The third member of their team, who served the role of security, carried a C7 with 203 grenade launcher plus thirty grenades and extra rounds for their C7 and C8 rifles, but no .50 cal rounds.
Which meant that between them, they set out with a total of 115 rounds for the long gun. All of which they had now shot.
Their packing for seventy-two hours had been spot on. But seventy-two hours had come and gone, with no mission end in sight.
And they had just run out of ammo.
* * *
When Jason Delgado and his team of snipers got back from their aborted 440 mission to base, he learned that he was in some deep shit, all right. Which made no sense to him whatsoever. The leadership of a marine sniper platoon is as follows: first in charge is the platoon commander, usually an intel officer; second in command is the platoon sergeant; then comes the chief scout, who is nominated from within the platoon and is typically the most senior HOG in the platoon. In Husaybah, Jason served as both platoon sergeant and chief scout. The platoon commander, Lieutenant Doug French, was a solid guy who trusted Jason and had given him fairly free rein.
So why had he now been recalled back to camp for a scolding?
In a way, Delgado wasn’t even supposed to be there. After his marine battalion took Baghdad in 2003, his term of service was over. He was supposed to be back in Brooklyn, getting his degree in media studies and flexing his muscles as an artist and filmmaker. So why was he being called before a battalion commander for shooting people in Husaybah?
It’s hard for us now to fully appreciate the general mind-set of 2003, but back then the campaign to liberate Iraq had seemed to a lot of people like pretty much a slam dunk. The Shock and Awe campaign and push into Baghdad was a roaring success. Saddam was out. The good people of Iraq were free. We won, right? As far as the American top brass were concerned, now it was a matter of transitioning from successful campaign to graceful, gradual withdrawal.
You’re welcome, Iraq, was the general sense of things.
So when Delgado returned home from that deployment, there was no firm plan to go back into war. Plus, he was itching to get out of that platoon. As much as he loved the marines, the platoon commander on that first deployment had been absolutely terrible. This guy was so weak he couldn’t run more than two miles. For early morning PT, he would get the guys into the gym to play basketball. Here was a platoon of men who’d been tortured for two years preparing them for the reality of war, guys who routinely ran five, six, seven miles every morning—and now this dick was getting them together to play basketball?
The rest of the battalion leadership was excellent, from Lieutenant Colonel McCoy right down to their platoon sergeant. But a bad CO can ruin an otherwise awesome platoon, and that is precisely what this CO did.
So Jason and his buddies mutinied. As an act of rebellion, when they returned to the States, all eighteen of them left the unit and got themselves moved to Third Battalion, Seventh Marines, intending that to be their transition home and EAS (end of active service). But that wasn’t what happened. When they got to Third Battalion, Seventh Marines, they realized the battalion didn’t have a single HOG (certified scout/sniper) in their sniper platoon. It was a sniper platoon of PIGs—and they were deploying to Iraq in less than a month. These poor guys had no odds; they were about to go into a meat grinder.
Jason couldn’t see letting that happen.
He talked to two buddies from his first platoon, Steve Reynolds and his shooting partner, Jesse Davenport, and the three decided to stay on and help the guys out. And now here they all were, back in Iraq—Steve working a team in Al Qaim, Jesse in another nearby location, and Jason running the platoon here in Husaybah.
In terms of leadership, it felt like this time he’d won the lottery.
Doug French was one of those all-too-rare leaders who not only knew what he knew, but also knew what he didn’t know. He focused on intel and deferred to Jason in all matters sniper. “Let me do what the battalion needs me to do, which is be an intel officer,” he told Jason. “You run your missions by me, and if I have a problem, I’ll just grunt at you.”
The CO of Lima Company, Captain Richard Gannon, was an incredibly down-to-earth guy who gave an actual shit about ordinary marines. Jason had never seen a marine officer so beloved by his troops, let alone a company commander. When Gannon gave instructions, Jason would sit and quietly drink it in for the sheer pleasure of listening to someone who so clearly knew what the hell he was talking about. At the same time, Gannon was the kind of officer who knew how to listen to his men, too. Like Lieutenant French, he respected his snipers and encouraged Jason to come up with his own missions.
And Captain Gannon’s second in command, First Lieutenant Dominique Neal, was another excellent leader, a guy who wore his feelings on his sleeve and had the respect of his men.
But Jason wasn’t here to see Lieutenant French, or First Lieutenant Neal, or Captain Gannon. He was here to see the man himself. And the man himself was not happy.
When Jason and the others got back to the camp, Lieutenant Colonel Lopez was waiting there for him with his legs crossed, his finger on his lip, the very picture of an authority figure about to administer a serious tongue-lashing.
“Do you know what you just did, Sergeant?” he said.
“Yeah,” said Jason, “I just pulled some poor border agent out of some shit.”
Lieutenant Colonel Lopez drilled Jason with a withering look. “You know you killed two guys across the border, in Syria. Right?”
Aha. So that was what this was about. No wonder he’d been recalled from their mission. Jason had been outside the box, all right. He’d shot his rifle clear outside the border of the country they were stationed in! And kill shots at that.
But Jason did not intimidate easily. I didn’t do shit wrong, he thought.
“Well,” he said, “they were shooting at him, and they were wearing black pajamas. I don’t know why Syria would want to start a war with Iraq while we’re sitting right here, sir. I didn’t know if they were inside or outside the border. All I knew was that they were shooting at this poor guy. I don’t know what else I can tell you.”
What he thought but didn’t say was, And besides, I called it in first—if anyone’s getting burned for this it’s the officer who gave me the okay.
Which was what saved his ass. It was the watch officer’s job to plot that location the moment Jason gave him their coordinates, but instead of doing that, he just gave them an immediate thumbs-up. The commander didn’t seem very happy about it, but he couldn’t do anything to Jason. If anyone was going to get in trouble, it was the officer who cleared the shots, not Jason.
What annoyed Jason was that the line of questioning wasn’t, “Hey, Delgado, you’re my guy on the front lines, tell me what happened out there,” as it would have been with Doug French or Captain Gannon. The tone of it was more like, “Do you realize what you’ve done? Well, we’re going to open up an investigation.”
This was the first time one of Jason’s shots prompted an investigation—but it sure wasn’t the last. In fact, over the next six weeks it would happen again and again, as he kept seeing trouble, taking what he viewed as appropriate action, and then getting called onto the carpet for it.
Delgado was way outside the box, and, at least for now, he was all alone out there.
* * *
On their second night at the remote marine outpost in Helmand Province, Nick Irving and his spotter, Pemberton, went out hunting. Time to pull away from all the communications equipment and go stalking their prey.
They left on foot, just five of them: Irving, Pemberton, one of the recce operators, and two marine scout snipers, who knew the lay of the land there better than their guests did. It took them several hours to reach the village where they were headed. It wasn’t all that far, but their progress was slow.
As they started moving into a more populated area they slowed to a crawl. They had night vision, and the locals did not, but this just happened to be the night of that month’s full moon, which shrank that visual advantage. Though it was after midnight, they could still clearly see the stray person here and there who was up—which meant, of course, that they could also be seen. So they had to use the cover of shadow.
That was Nick’s primary job as they moved: keeping everyone in the shadows.
So this is what it feels like to be a ninja, thought Nick, and he suppressed a grin.
Back in sniper school Nick had gone through an exercise called a “fun stalk.” It wasn’t graded, you didn’t have to pass; the idea was to sort of stretch out and see what you could do, probe the outer limits of outrageousness. You didn’t have to carry a rifle if you didn’t want. You could dress up however you wanted to dress up. A few students wore bright yellow, just to see if they could pull it off and still not be seen.
Nick was partnered with a guy named Chris. They both wore T-shirt, jeans, and baseball cap, and stalked with their sniper rifles.
The instructor with the high-powered binos, the one they were stalking against, was an old-school sniper from the SOTG (the Marine Corps’ Special Operations Training Group) who had spotting powers that bordered on the supernatural. Everyone hated this guy. Nick had seen him call out a team of snipers stalking him from a thousand yards away—without binoculars. “I see his left shoulder!” he’d called out. And no shit, the walker went to exactly where he directed, and touched the guy’s left shoulder. At a thousand yards, with no scope, just his naked eye. And the stalker was wearing a ghillie suit.
So Nick and Chris went up against this guy in their T-shirts and jeans. They set off, moving inch by inch, slowly eating up the yards like twin snakes. When they reached their FFP (final firing position), this fact was relayed back to the watch post.
“Give those guys a fucking pat on the back,” said the old HOG, “because I don’t see shit.”
In all the sniper instruction he went through, every course, every session, Nick had never been caught; not once.
Now it was time to put those skills to work.
Once they reached the outskirts of the little village, they began making their way to the spot Nick had picked out that would give them the best visual and tactical advantage.
Everything Nick had done up to this point in his career as a ranger, even here in Helmand Province, had been extremely fast-paced. Run into an objective, bag the guy and/or shoot everything up, and get out. Tonight there was no running, no shooting, no commotion or chaos. Tonight success was measured in inches and long minutes that oozed past, second by nerve-racking second. It was a total transformation from warrior to spy. They crept along for a few feet, stopped, listened. Did he hear anyone moving? Smell anyone’s presence? They began moving again, incredibly slowly. A mime troupe on Valium.
Nick found the place. Felt the door. Found the lock. Picked the lock—quietly, quietly. Opened the door. Slipped silently inside.
“It was so damned scary,” says Nick, “being out there by ourselves, completely alone in the middle of this village. It was insane. We were sneaking around in someone’s house with sniper rifles.”
They laid up there all night long, waiting for their target to come into the area. No one spoke more than a whispered word or two. Finally fingers of light began stealing in from the edge of the village with the silent approach of the sun. All their senses became heightened. If their target appeared Nick would take the shot, then they would immediately break down and get the hell out of there.
Their target did not arrive.
As the sun continued its climb, they slipped out of the house, away from the village, and back to the marine outpost for fresh intel and another round of planning. More chess.
Later that day (it now being Wednesday, July 8), the team got intel from a group of marines from about a half-hour ride away, where evidently a lot of activity was happening. The intel suggested that their HVT might be heading in that direction. They needed to go over there and take a look for themselves.
They made the ride on Amtracs, not the most comfortable ride under the best of conditions, which these sure were not. They bumped along a trail (“Calling it a dirt road would be generous,” says Nick) out through the desert scrub. As they drove Nick noticed a series of little red markers marking the path, and asked his marine hosts about them.
“Oh yeah, those are land mines,” he said. “We have to stay within those markers.” He grinned. “Otherwise, boom.”
“Wait a minute,” said Nick. “So, if we get in contact, we can’t veer off the trail? We have to just sit here?”
The marine shook his head. “Not to the right, not to the left, not the slightest bit.”
Bullshit, man, Nick thought. He figured he’d rather take his chances with a run through the land mines than just sit there in a rolling coffin and get shot up.
Making the ride in broad daylight was good, in that it allowed their driver to see the red markers, but also bad, in that they were clearly visible to all the people who lived in the areas they traversed. Nick more than half expected some good local citizens to wave to them as they passed, then shoot them in the back. He’d seen it happen in Iraq.
But it didn’t happen here. After a tense but uneventful ride, they arrived at their destination, an abandoned schoolhouse that was really no more than a bare structure of concrete and mud. The marines who greeted them had been living out there for six or seven months, in this grimy, sweat-soaked place. Their toilet was a cardboard box that they would use for a while, then ignite with some diesel fuel and burn, then get another cardboard box.
If where they’d just come from was a remote outpost, this place upped the ante.
“Dude,” said Irving, “how do you guys live out here, man?” They had one satphone, which they used to sneak in a call to family maybe once a month or so. Back at FOB Wilson Nick was used to talking to his family at least once a day.
They were greeted by the base commander, who mentioned that they’d been getting attacked daily for the past few months. It happened every morning at the same time, about five o’clock, just before sunup.
The recce team leader looked at Irving and Pemberton and said, “You guys want to help him out?”
Nick and Pemberton had different ROEs (rules of engagement) than their hosts’. The marines had to wait until they were actually being shot at before they could engage. The ranger snipers could shoot someone if they felt threatened, if they felt someone else was threatened, or if the person had a gun. If Nick saw a guy with an AK-47, he was automatically cleared to shoot. All of which, along with their training as snipers, could put them at a distinct advantage in this situation. This was not their mission, but hey, they were here, right?
“Hell, yeah,” said Nick.
He got on the radio and pitched the idea to their chain of command, who were skeptical at first but eventually signed off on it. (Irving admits that if they’d said no, chances were good he would have said “Fuck it—we didn’t hear that part” and gone out anyway.)
After hitting the maps and working out the best place to set up their hide site, they readied their ghillie suits and equipment, grabbed an MRE and some water, and got busy waiting for the sun to dip below the horizon.
At this point they had been three days straight without sleep.