Alone in the dark with nothing but your thoughts … time can draw out like a blade.
—Red (Morgan Freeman), The Shawshank Redemption, by Stephen King and Frank Darabont
In Hermann Hesse’s classic tale Siddhartha, the hero is asked what he has to offer, since he has no possessions. He replies, “I can think, I can wait, I can fast.” Later on he amplifies the point: “Being smart is good. Being patient is better.” The character of Siddhartha is meant to be an example of the ideal seeker on a spiritual quest.
If you ask me, he also could have made a hell of a sniper.
With all the breathtaking prowess in those long-distance shots, high-angle shots, through-the-legs shots, and from-the-hip shots, it’s easy to forget that the sniper’s most critical skills don’t involve shooting at all. (All together now: A sniper is first and foremost an intelligence asset.) Surveillance, route reconnaissance, detailed description, spending time out beyond the front lines, taking pictures and drawing sketches, gathering information, observing where nobody else goes and seeing what nobody else sees—that’s the foundation of the sniper’s contribution to war. Warrior, absolutely. Assassin, no question. Spy, quintessentially.
Put it this way. Yes, a sniper needs to be able to fight like a lion and strike like a snake. But even more critically, he must have the capacity to wait, watch, and see like an eagle.
* * *
Alex and his teammates waited for hours, Alex alternately sitting and lying on the cement bunker’s roof, the others spelling each other periodically. Every so often another few AAVs emerged from the Somali surf, belching out another few dozen marines, who joined the rest as they worked away at their fortifications.
At nine minutes after 0600, a thin laser line of sunlight poked up over the Indian Ocean at Alex’s back. He turned and looked. Four miles out, the mother ship waited. Beyond that, nothing but ocean for twenty-five hundred miles until you’d bump into Sri Lanka.
He turned back to watch some more nothing happen.
By 0800 hours the last few waves of the landing party had come ashore.
At 0830, the U.N.’s forces stationed a few miles to the northeast around New Port began to withdraw. Hour after hour, a steady procession of Bangladeshi troops and their equipment were loaded onto a fleet of ships the Coalition had contracted for the purpose and ferried out to sea. There were more than a thousand of them, along with tons of vehicles, weaponry (most of it on loan from the U.S.), and other equipment. It took all day.
Meanwhile, two and a half miles to the southwest, Alex waited and watched.
The northern operation was the easy part. The tricky part would come the next day, when the Pakistanis would start pulling out from their positions in and around the airport. Once the last elements of the U.N. force abandoned their current positions and pulled inside the landing force’s thin coastal perimeter, what would happen then?
As the hours ticked by, the sun slowly climbed.
They were practically sitting on the equator, and it was approaching the hottest part of the year. (Somalia hits its highest temperatures in April.) Still, being on the coast mitigated the climate somewhat, and the heat was not too bad. The flies, though: the flies were horrible. Big black motherfuckers, and aggressive as buzzards. You could shoo them away all you wanted, and they would be right back on you in seconds.
Could you kill a fly with a .50 cal?
And if you did, would the rest take the hint and leave?
Questions, questions.
The hours rolled on, and they kept watching more nothing happen. Finally, at thirteen minutes after 1800, the last orange crest of sun slipped below the western horizon: the Mogadishu skyline, such as it was, chewed to rubble by the ravages of civil anarchy.
The coming of dusk signaled a shift change: the flies left, and the mosquitoes arrived to take up station. If there is one thing worse than the flies in Africa, it’s the mosquitoes in Africa.
It was going to be a long night.
* * *
By the end of their third full day out in the Shahikot Valley, Rob and Tim had used up all their .50 cal ammo. There wasn’t much they could do up there in the crow’s nest now, so they pushed back into the position with the American scout teams, there to stay, at least for the moment.
The scouts had dug some foxholes and set up a command element, kind of an ad hoc admin area out of which they could operate with reasonable security.
The question was, operate how? And do what? At this point their .50 cal was nothing but deadweight. They couldn’t hit the targets they needed to hit with their other weapons. With a .308, like the one the American sniper had given Rob, they could shoot effectively out to maybe a thousand meters, possibly a little more. But these targets were way out beyond that; they were at two, three, even four kilometers. What could they really do?
Then they realized, maybe there was something they could do. They were, after all, snipers. Right now they couldn’t shoot—but they could still stalk. And in addition to their Leupold spotting scope they also had a laser range finder with some technology built into it that could do something pretty amazing.
The Leica Vectronix allows you to measure the distance between two lased points with tremendous accuracy. First you lase your target. Then you take a sounding shot (a shot placed purely for its use in gauging location, as Jason Delgado did on that rooftop in the middle of Baghdad) or move your view to a spot somewhere relatively near the target—say, a spot where aircraft has just dropped ordnance. You lase that reference point, then click and drag over to your target, just as you would click and drag with a mouse on a computer screen. And presto! The Vectronix gives you the exact distance between those two points.
The Vectronix was fairly new technology at the time, and not very many had it. Rob and Tim realized they were probably the only guys on the ground with the type of optics in their possession. Which meant they were in a unique position to precisely pinpoint multiple targets at extreme distances—machine gun emplacements, mortar teams, even howitzers, and others. And the Leica had an effective range of five kilometers, more than three miles. In other words, it could pinpoint targets clear on the other side of Shahikot Valley and up on the side of the Whale, if need be.
Of course, since they had no more .50 cal ammo, they couldn’t shoot those targets, not with their own guns. But they could be the eyes for guns in the air.
Like most other conventional resources, air support had been badly lacking at the outset of Anaconda, but within the first two days the Coalition generals realized how badly they had underestimated the resistance their troops would meet. Soon a raft of airpower joined the party, including U.S. Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt (Warthog) attack planes, marine AH-1 Cobra attack helos, and more than a dozen additional Apaches from the 101st Airborne.
The American scout element Rob and Tim were attached to had set up a ground-to-air asset in their little ad hoc TOC. Which meant that Rob and Tim could lase targets with the Vector and feed precise coordinates to the forces in the sky, and continue raining down death upon the enemy.
They also had communication with some American mortar teams situated a little ways downslope from them, who were loaded with 81mm mortars as well as monster 120mm’s.
They started glassing. The scout unit put them into direct communication with the ground-to-air representative, and they started calling in indirect fire right and left on every target they could see—fast air, B-52s, Apaches, Cobras, F-16s, everything they had at their disposal. They located knots of fighters moving in and out of compounds, vehicles transporting them from one position to another, mortar pits and machine gun nests they hadn’t been able to reach before—all kinds of targets that they had seen while up in their crow’s nest but hadn’t been able to engage even with their .50 because of the extreme distances.
They became two lone snipers wielding a “sniper rifle” comprised of an entire fleet of American airpower. Talk about leverage.
At one point they identified a mortar position clear across the valley, high up on the edge of a cliff on the side of the Whale. At nearly four and a half kilometers (2.8 miles) away, it was the farthest mortar position they’d identified. There would have been no way they could ever have gotten to that target before without physically moving down into the valley and walking right through enemy-held territory. Now they called in a Cobra attack helicopter, which flew over and dumped its payload.
Watching those attack choppers raining down destruction, they could see the place being absolutely destroyed. Clearly, there was no one alive left.
Then, as they scanned the area with their scopes, they saw movement.
“Holy shit,” Rob murmured. “Those guys are still in there.”
They’d been raked with machine gun fire from the Cobra’s big guns and bombed with Hellfire missiles—and they were still there. Rob and Tim couldn’t tell what caves might be there or how far back they might go; the entire valley, like most strongholds in the eastern Afghanistan mountains, was laced with networks of caves and tunnels. Still, it seemed beyond the limits of physical possibility that these guys could still be alive.
Yet there they were.
Now Rob called in a B-52 bomber run, his first. Soon they saw a telltale vapor trail streak across the sky, and moments later the five-hundred-pounder landed with an enormous boom and shock wave they could hear and feel clear across the valley.
After the smoke cleared, they resumed glassing the area.
“And, so help me,” says Rob, “we see this fucking guy—moving.”
The man slowly pushed something aside, a large blanket, or piece of wood, or some other sort of covering, then stood up and bolted from his position, most likely back into a tunnel.
It’s not too often you see someone get up, dust himself off, and run away after a B-52 drop. But this guy? They figured he probably got out of there safely and lived to fight another day. The Afghanis had a knack for doing just that, as the Soviets had learned to their considerable chagrin in the eighties and America was just beginning to experience firsthand.
Hour after hour, Rob and Tim sat in position on their ridgeline, glassing, lasing, clicking-and-dragging, calling it in … glassing, lasing, clicking-and-dragging, calling it in. They continued identifying distant targets and calling in air support for the rest of that day, and throughout the next day as well.
Rob estimates that the time he and McMeekin spent lasing targets and calling in ordnance over those two days had even more impact on enemy forces than all the shooting they did the entire time they were in the Shahikot Valley, both before then and afterward. And they did a lot of shooting.
* * *
It didn’t take Jason long after arriving in Husaybah to see the limitations of their unit’s patrols.
Marines were going through the city on foot, which was an improvement over the more superficial drive-throughs that came before. When they took the area over from the army’s Third ID, the marines instituted a curfew, and that was a big help, too. If anyone was out on the streets at night, by definition the chances were good they were up to no good, and they were fair game for questioning and possibly detaining.
But it was a big city and there was a lot to surveil. Jason could see that normal patrols weren’t telling them what was really going on. They needed to do some extended urban hide operations, to insert themselves deep within the tissue of the city.
This, he soon discovered, could take some careful planning and bureaucratic maneuvering. For example, the marines were mandated to take men from the Iraqi police and Civil Defense Corps with them on some patrols (“bullshit politics, bro”). Jason had no clear knowledge as to whether or not they could trust these guys, but he doubted it, and he was careful not to share much information with them. He took them along, got along with them fine, but observed carefully. Before long he noticed that on certain ones of these joint patrols, the Iraqis would at some point quietly shift to the back of the stack. He also noticed that those were the same patrols where bad things would happen—an armed confrontation or attack, or an encounter with a roadside bomb. (“What a fucking coincidence.”)
Despite the fact that he was the sniper platoon leader, and even though he had some great commanders in French, Neal, and Gannon, Delgado often found himself chafing at what seemed to him pointless missions.
One of the marines’ principal aims in Husaybah was to help guard the border and prevent illegal supplies from leaking into Iraq, which included working with the Iraqi border patrol, teaching them how to use dogs, how to search vehicles, and other border-policing activities. But this felt a bit like trying to bail out a sinking ship with a colander. The border itself was ridiculously porous, and the city’s civil authority structure was so shot through with corruption that any real attempt at enforcement was doomed to fail.
One night found Jason ghillied up with his team hiding out in almond groves, trying to catch people smuggling illegal goat milk across the border. He figured this was no doubt at the request of some Iraqi official the Americans were doing their best to get along with (“more bullshit politics”). To Jason it was an egregious waste of time and human resources. Here they were, the only snipers in all of Husaybah, a city of 100,000 with rampant crime and simmering insurgency, and they were lying in wait to intercept a goat milk operation?
But he went along. He knew he had to pick his battles. He could go along quietly with the more asinine missions—if it meant having the freedom to also go out on the missions that mattered.
And those missions revealed a sobering picture.
One day, not long after the episode with the Iraqi border guard and the Syrian shooters, Jason got a whiff of some useful intel that some suspicious activity might be going on in a certain residential neighborhood. That night, Jason took a team out on a reconnaissance op.
This was not a traditional two-man, shooter/spotter operation. Someone had to man the optics; someone had to be on the radio; they would need two people on security, who would also sit with the family of the house they were taking over. And since they were planning to be out for twenty-four hours or more, they needed enough men to rotate out tasks while giving each team member a chance to catch a few hours of rack time. So they went out as a four-man sniper team, augmented by a couple of infantry grunts pulling security, making a six-man element all told.
They inserted at three in the morning, when most everyone in the city was asleep. They slipped through the streets, staying in the shadows, exactly as Nick Irving and Pemberton and their recce colleagues would do five years later in Helmand Province.
On some of these nighttime ops a few of them would wrap themselves in plastic trash bags, then go out and hide in the garbage piles all night to see if anyone tried to bury an IED in trash heaps, inside paper bags, or in dog carcasses, as they sometimes did. But not tonight. Tonight they were taking over a home in that residential neighborhood they wanted to watch.
They reached the address they’d picked for their hide site. The house was surrounded by six-foot walls, typical for the neighborhood, closed by a simple steel gate. Not hard to climb, but that wasn’t practical because the moment they did it would start clanging back and forth and wake up the people. And the dog, if they had one. So they scaled over the cement wall at its most solid point.
Now came entry. They couldn’t exactly bang on the door. Using a tactic they’d worked out by now, they searched out the window that held the home’s air-conditioning unit, then tapped lightly on the glass with a pistol. Tap-tap-tap. Experience told them that the whole family would be sleeping here, and someone would always come to the window to see who was tapping on it.
Someone did. Jason made eye contact, got them to open the window a crack, and quietly said, “Efte’elba’ab. Efte’elba’ab.” Open the door.
They hustled back around to the front door and got into the house without making any noise. Since everyone in the family was already in one room, they kept them all there. Sometimes they would bring an interpreter along with them, but not tonight. Jason picked up one of the family’s phones and dialed a local number.
Back at camp, a phone rang in their suite of little bank offices, which the snipers shared with the canine handlers and the HET (human exploitation team) guys. HET maintained a landline there so that whenever an informant in town might want to give them any intel, they could just pick up the phone and call.
“Yo, it’s Delgado, whassup,” he said when the phone on the other end picked up. “Listen, put the terp on and have him tell this guy what’s gonna go down.”
As Jason handed the phone to the father of their temporarily captive family, the terp (interpreter) got on the other end. The father spoke a few words into the phone, then listened for a while, as the terp told them that they would be completely safe, what would be happening, what to do and not to do while the snipers were there, and the rest of his instructions, all of which he knew so well he could probably have given them in his sleep. Then the father started speaking. Jason’s limited grasp of Arabic didn’t let him catch most of the words, but he followed the gist of it. The citizen was giving up some intel, something useful. They usually did. Having six armed marines standing there in the middle of their living room was a little intimidating.
The snipers donned head wraps and dishdashas (man-dresses), so that if someone passing by the window happened to look in and see them, they’d think nothing of it.
While the infantry guys watched the family, Jason and his snipers went through the house looking for a good vantage point. As they went, they unplugged and gathered up whatever phones they found, so no one would try to sneak one, go plug it in, and try to call somebody. A second-floor room offered the best OP; they drew the curtains. They would be observing just through a crack.
This would now be their urban hide and observation post for the next twenty-four hours. Sometimes they would do this for forty-eight or even seventy-two hours, but this time they had planned for a one-day op. From here they could observe everything going on in the neighborhood around them. They would take photographs, draw sketches, and record their observations in detail.
No one in the adjacent buildings knew they were there, so the neighbors would all go about their day, business as usual. If anyone came knocking on the door, they would let them just knock. If they persisted and didn’t go away on their own, Jason would eventually open the door and add them to the party. Congratulations, you’re going to be late for dinner. But this time it didn’t happen. They were left alone.
And then they watched. They were there all night. When morning came, they remained.
After a few hours, they saw one of their own foot patrols go by. The marines moved down the street and around a corner. The moment they disappeared, Jason noticed a young boy emerge from a nearby house, run up onto a small hill, and start tapping his leg. Then he ran back down and back inside the house. “What the hell was that about?” he murmured to himself. Then it occurred to him: there were six guys in that patrol.
The boy had tapped his leg six times.
Okay. Got it. The kid had just counted how many marines were in the patrol and communicated that to someone elsewhere in the city. Someone was using this kid as an intel asset.
A week or so later he saw this happen again, and then again. Sometimes a kid would jump up and hold out his fingers, visibly counting. And not just troop numbers. Sometimes it was about a patrol’s direction of movement, or force of arms, or whether or not there was an officer involved. Whoever was behind this operation, they were scouting out and compiling all kinds of information about how the Americans worked.
Jason noticed that these guys were also using their women as tactical pawns. For example, the task of sitting on weapons caches was evidently being delegated to women in the community.
One day Jason observed a squad of marines approach a house where they had reported seeing a cache of weapons off-loaded. As the marines approached, a woman ran out, yelling at them, trying to grab them and swing on them. It was almost as if she were trying to provoke them. At first Jason didn’t understand what the hell she was doing or why she was doing it. Then he caught on. She was trying to provoke them, to get them to take a swing at her, or worse. The ones pulling the strings, the ones who were giving her and all the others their marching orders, wanted the Americans to hurt them, maybe even kill them. It would make the Americans look bad, which in turn would make them easier targets for an aroused and angered populace.
Of course, it didn’t work. The marines weren’t about to go in and hurt or kill unarmed civilians. But armed hostiles? No problem there. Those guys, Jason was entirely prepared to hurt or kill.
And he did. Which was what kept getting him in trouble.
* * *
As the afternoon shadows melted into dusk, Nick Irving and Mike Pemberton set out on foot for the location where they would set up their all-night hide to wait for the expected morning attack on their marine hosts.
They walked out single-file, the six of them: Irving and Pemberton; Finnegan, the comms operator from the recce team, plus two marine snipers and one marine with a machine gun, all in ghillie suits. Within a short time the marines’ secure area had disappeared behind them. They were alone now, just the six of them, in enemy territory.
The group arrived at the edge of a little village, about a mile and a half from the marine compound, just as night began to fall. From this point on they continued moving very slowly.
They stopped when they reached a spot where there was about a thousand yards of open field. Out to their nine o’clock stood about a mile of open fields, leading off to a little creek. Straight ahead lay another village; this was where all the local Taliban lived. This was where the morning attack would come from, and they planned to have eyes on these guys long before the attack began.
By this time it was dark out, but the moon was still quite full. They moved off at the vector the marines directed at an extremely slow creep. After a short while one of the marines said, in a voice so quiet it was nearly inaudible, “This is where you guys want to be.”
They stood before a small, well-built mud home, surrounded by another one of those area-typical big mud walls, with a locked blue metal door in the middle of it. It looked abandoned, but it could have been occupied. They had no way of knowing. Nick sent Finnegan, the comms guy, up first, because he was carrying an M4, a weapon more suited to a quick-reaction QCB situation, if one should happen, than Dirty Diana or Pemberton’s big bolt-action .30 cal. Nick put himself second in line, Pemberton on rear guard. They stacked up at the door.
The marines, meanwhile, went back to set up in the open field, to a well-camouflaged hide site they’d already established out there on previous stalks, where they were going to crawl in and wait out the night.
Finnegan cracked the door a bit: a soft breach, no flash bangs, no running, no noise. If anyone was in there, they would have to tie them up and have them wait it out along with them.
Nobody. He slowly pushed the door open. Nick followed him in. They were through the door. They started clearing the place.
To the right was an outdoor kitchen setup with a roof on top. To the left, the actual living quarters. Then there was a small yard in front, with stoves, piles of wood, bunches of clothes, and other signs of active domesticity. But no people. Good.
Nick’s first thought was to set up inside the kitchen area, with its little rooftop. They punched a small hole through the wall so they could look out with their rifle scopes and spotting scopes. Nick didn’t like the position. It didn’t give him the vantage point he wanted. It didn’t give enough range. It just didn’t feel right.
They continued moving, over to the left.
“Hey, man,” Nick said softly to Pemberton, “we need to go up a little higher. I want to get a field of view, everything out to a mile.”
If need be, Pemberton could probably make a shot out to 1,300 yards or more. Nick had seen him do it. The longest Nick had pulled off with that rifle was 1,800, but that was at a really high altitude, and on a steel target.
They moved on into a second compound structure that was a little more elevated, dug in their position, and set up their sniper hide and overwatch position.
They radioed back to the marines and told them they were set up and good to go. The marines had just gotten to their position and told Nick exactly where they were. Nick looked off to his left, directly at their location, and didn’t see them. He checked the location with them to make sure he’d gotten it right.
“Yeah,” they replied, “we’re right here. We can see you guys.”
Nick was staring right at them and couldn’t see a thing.
“Dude,” he said, “that’s scary.”
They hunkered down and waited. No moving. No talking. It was now somewhere between 2100 and 2200, or nine and ten at night. It was going to be a long wait till morning.
Off to his right Nick noticed what looked like a pile of clothes. He was about to push the pile off to the side—but then thought better of it. He decided he didn’t want to disturb anything or do anything that might look out of place from the way things usually were. They wanted to leave no trace behind. He left it all exactly as it was.
He told Pemberton to take an hour-long nap. Finnegan was down at the bottom of their position, his back up against the wall. His job was to make sure no one came through the front door. He just sat there with his gun. Nick had no idea how he occupied his mind for all those hours.
I thought sniper hides were cool, he thought. This is boring as hell.
Nick thought about all the stakeouts he’d seen in movies. They always seem to have some kind of interesting conversation. No conversation here. Just the conversation in his own head, which he was already bored with.
He ate a little bit. Tried to empty his mind. Found it full again.
After a few hours he thought, Screw this, man, I’m going to have a cigarette. He had with him a pack of shitty Afghan cigarettes. He got down and put a hood up over himself, so no one could see the light flashing on the outside. Once the cigarette was lit, he kept the burning end covered. He knew that you can see that cherry-red ember from a cigarette a good mile away. If he were the one seeing that little red cherry in this situation, he’d just aim right at it and shoot. Chances were good, he’d hit the guy in the face. That was, after all, where the “three on a match is unlucky” superstition came from.
And it wasn’t just a superstition. First guy: range. Second guy: windage. Third guy: BOOM.
Keeping his ember covered, he took a drag, then exhaled the smoke downward, blowing it onto the rooftop so it would spread out and be absorbed by the dirt and all the crap on the roof. The thing tasted like cardboard. It was the most disgusting cigarette he’d ever had.
Within thirty minutes he’d smoked the entire damn pack.
Now he’d run out of things to do.
He woke up Pemberton and told him they needed to start getting their targets set up and keep their brains moving.
They started by mapping out the pattern of how the wind was moving. Using their night vision scopes, they observed the tops of the grass and the leaves flickering on the trees. They knew there was a very slight wind coming off the creek, and they knew it was moving up toward their position. Good: they had a mild left-to-right wind. Every once in a while, it would change, but at least they knew its general velocity, which was about three to five miles an hour. They notated it.
Then they started mapping out possible targets and where they would come from. If I were a bad guy out there, where would I be? Looking at every single position, marking it in his brain, then marking it down on paper. They set up which sector Nick would cover, and which sector Pemberton would cover. “If anything starts happening from here to here, you engage, and anything from over here, I’ll engage.”
Then he started taking distances of potential targets, using his rifle scope. He knew the size of an average Afghan doorway, the size of an average car tire, and with those and a handful of other solid reference measurements he could work out fairly precise distances.
The distance from them to that building over there was 720 yards; to that one over there, 725; and on throughout the grid.
There were about twenty to twenty-five buildings in his sector; Pemberton had maybe ten in his sector; mainly it was open field. Nick thought, If I were the bad guys, I would flank us to this open field, up to our nine o’clock. He smiled. If that happened, Pemberton would just lay those targets right down.
Doing his chess thing.
Nick was no longer bored.
* * *
At midnight on the Mogadishu shore the dicier part of Operation United Shield began. Now that the Bangladeshi forces had vacated the Somali seaport to the north, it was time for the other half of the U.N. contingent, the half occupying the airport grounds, to pack their bags and leave, too.
Alex and his team had now been in place for about twenty-four hours, but the next twenty-four hours would likely not be so tame. There was no moon out (the new moon happened to fall on March 1, the following night), and the blackness could not have been blacker, the total lack of ambient light making the SEALs’ night vision equipment useless. Whatever happened out there, he would have to rely on whatever illumination the marines created with flares or other spot illumination.
The Pakistani forces now commenced a maneuver known as a “passage of lines,” a term that describes the movement of one entire fighting force through another fighting force’s active combat position. In this case, the thousand-plus Pakistanis plus admin staff, plus all their equipment, would be withdrawing from the airport grounds, outside the secure perimeter, toward the beach, to positions within the secure perimeter, at which point they would begin the trek up to the seaport and begin the lengthy process of unloading their vehicles and ammunition and preparing everything for boarding, a process that itself would take nearly another twenty-four hours.
Passage of lines is a complex and delicate operation under any conditions. These guys were conducting it during the darkest nighttime hours, and with forces of multiple nationalities, both significant complicating factors. It would also involve not only more than a thousand troops but also seventy tanks and armored personnel carriers. It was enormously complex and would take massive coordination. The marines would be busy.
All through the night, the evacuation proceeded, people filing out of the buildings, boarding their vehicles and driving up to New Port and boarding the ships. As much as the spotty illumination allowed it, Alex watched the entire airport complex being gradually drained of its personnel.
At 0600, tanks rolled up to serve as security at the guard towers and other manned watch positions around the airport, as the last dribble of personnel evacuated their positions and headed northeast to join the exodus. The last to leave were a few dozen civilian U.N. personnel and a dozen logistics staff. Then they were gone, too.
Nine minutes later, a crack of sunlight appeared over the rim of the Indian Ocean. Then, in the flat gray half-light of early dawn, the tanks also began falling back, leapfrogging up from southwest to northeast toward the seaport, maintaining a sort of rolling security as they went.
By 0630, it was done.
Twenty-six months after U.N. troops first landed to commence Operation Restore Hope with great fanfare and high expectations worldwide, the entire two-year effort had packed up and gone home. The airport was now deserted. All that was left was a few square miles of abandoned sand, tarmac, and empty buildings … and the landing force, quietly watching.
Now the place was up for grabs.
* * *
Every night, as darkness threw a blanket over the day’s firefights and temperatures in the Shahikot Valley began to plunge, the men with whom Rob and Tim had dug in turned their attention to an entirely different problem: survival.
Nighttime in the Shahikot was weird. For the men dug in on the side of the mountain, it was their downtime, since the firefights and mortar attacks and such would cease for the night. For the AC-130 Spectres overhead, though, this was office hours, and any sleep the men got was to the background rumble and boom of air strikes.
And of course they had to maintain steady security around the clock. One night a Taliban fighter walked right into their position, clearly not intending to do so. Whoops. They quietly bagged and tagged him. One less guy to shoot—and one less to shoot at them—during the day.
But by and large, it was not enemy forces that threatened them at night, it was the elements. Not the men hiding in the mountains, but the mountains themselves.
These guys were in extremely good shape when they landed in Afghanistan. In the airborne unit where they’d been serving, physical fitness is a huge thing, much like it is with SEALs. A short run was five miles, and doing a fast ten before breakfast was a commonplace thing. They ran constantly, along with weight training, swimming, and various other kinds of PT. They were one physically fit team.
But those mountains did take their toll. They were doing a good deal of climbing up and down the slopes, in that loose-gravel kind of treacherous desert-mountain soil that can send you skittering on your ass in a heartbeat. And getting around on the mountain ridges was complicated. If they wanted to move one klick to the north to gain access to a different field of targets, they would have to climb up and down five, six, seven klicks just to reposition themselves at that one-klick distance.
Then there was the altitude, which made things worse. Being up at 8,500 feet plays havoc with your energy levels. (The cold and altitude even cut the life of their radio batteries in half.) This was the highest altitude at which either the Americans or Canadians had ever fought.
The big problem, though, was the cold. Severe, unrelenting, bone-chilling cold. The kind of cold that slips in through any available portal and silently steals your life away.
Back at Bagram, when they’d been told not to bother packing for more than twenty-four hours, Rob had gone ahead and packed his trusty little WhisperLite portable gas stove, some extra gas canisters, and enough food and water for seventy-two hours—and also grabbed some cold-weather gear: gloves and toques (wool cap, pronounced tuke) and neck warmers, things like that. He did leave his sleeping bag behind, but instead he took a ranger blanket into which he’d had sewn a zipper that would allow him to use it, if necessity called for it, as a lightweight sleeping bag. An American staff sergeant had glanced at this and said, “You know, you’re not going to need that.” He gave Rob a look that said, Why the hell are you hauling around all that unnecessary crap?
Rob rolled up the blanket anyway and tucked it into his waterproof GoreTex bivvy bag, which he stuffed into the top of his valise. Tim was doing likewise. A few Americans kind of laughed at them. “Hey, aren’t you guys Canadians?” In other words, What, you afraid of a little cold? Isn’t it supposed to be pretty chilly where you guys live?
But nobody was prepared for the brutal nights they faced on those mountains. Here in the Afghan mountains it went well below freezing at night, with the considerable wind chill pulling the effective temperatures even lower.
Rob and Tim would take turns, one on the gun and night vision keeping security while the other jammed as deep as possible into that zipped-up ranger blanket to eke out an hour of thin sleep, then trade places. One especially frigid night they huddled up together for a few hours just to achieve something vaguely close to warmth.
In the morning they would see the Americans, huddled four or five guys together, desperately trying to conserve some body heat. They saw the early signs of hypothermia. It was getting serious.
By this time the Canadians had gone well past the seventy-two hours they’d packed for, but the Americans were in even worse shape, since they’d packed for only twenty-four. At several points during those four days attempts had been made to resupply them, but so far it had proved too difficult and too unsafe; the helicopters kept getting engaged by enemy firepower. The Americans had already lost a few choppers and more than half a dozen men in the early days of the op, and command was now supremely skittish about sending any more birds into danger.
Not only had Rob and Tim run out of ammo, they had also run out of food. Rob thought about his recce course back in Fort Lewis, Washington. A live chicken and a raw potato. That was sounding pretty damn good right about then. He glanced around at the dismal Afghan landscape. They might as well have been on the moon. No chickens here, and no potatoes, either. Nobody here but us humans.
What was worse, they were also running out of water. They knew that soon they’d be in trouble. By the end of day four, that trouble had arrived. At this point they’d been a day with no water at all, and they could feel dehydration setting in. And they knew it was worse for the Americans.
But Rob had an advantage.
If he’d listened to what he was told and packed for twenty-four hours, he wouldn’t have brought anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary for a short mission. Why load himself down with extra weight for stuff he didn’t need? But he didn’t listen. Rob didn’t grow up in the city, where you can get whatever you need by ducking into a store on the corner. He knew what it meant to improvise, break the rules, and survive in the wilderness. He grew up there.
He had packed for survival.
He had brought that WhisperLite portable stove.
On the morning of day five, after an especially bad night, Rob and Tim gathered up all the empty two-liter water bottles they could find, took a day pack with them, and started climbing, heading up outside the safety zone, bound for the snow line. Before long they were back up there, on their own, up where they’d first seen those Taliban footprints just a few days earlier.
While Tim watched his back, Rob set up the little stove and fired it up. He started melting snow, filling up their empty bottles one at a time, adding iodine tablets they’d brought with them to purify the water. It took quite a while to fill all the bottles they’d brought.
They set off down the mountain again.
Once they were back down at their ad hoc base camp, Rob went rummaging in his rucksack. Along with his other supplies he had also packed a sizable quantity of juice crystals. The Canadians liked this product as an emergency source of instant energy; it served almost like a jolt of caffeine, only less jangling on the nerves. And it took up hardly any space or weight.
He passed some of the packets over to Tim and they both started adding the crystals to the bottles, shaking them up, and passing them around. For some of the guys who had progressed further down the hypothermia road, Rob warmed the juice-flavored water over his portable stove. One by one, the Americans started showing a little more color.
The firefights resumed. Rob and Tim got back on their range finders and continued lasing targets, calling in coordinates, raining down death, until the long night came over the mountain once again.
In the early morning hours of their sixth day in the Shahikot Valley, someone finally managed to get a resupply drop to the unit successfully. When Rob and Tim sorted through the drop, they found not only enough food and water to keep them all going, but also an extremely welcome addition to the cache: more .50 cal ammunition.
Their two-day stalk was over; they were back on the hunt.
It was time to start pulling the trigger again.
* * *
From February through mid-April the level of violence in Husaybah continued to simmer as the city baked. There were random mortar attacks on the camp. Roadside bombs went off here and there, causing minor damage but in no discernible pattern. An IED would go off and a marine would get hurt. They would isolate the area, bring the dogs out, try to sniff out where the traces of bomb came from. They’d talk to the locals and HET would run their HUMINT sources. Nothing added up to anything significant.
Squads of marines from the line platoons continued patrolling the streets, but there wasn’t a great deal they could do. In a way, the situation was weirdly reminiscent of Vietnam, only instead of melting into rice-paddy villages and tropical wilds, here the perpetrators would slip away into the urban jungle of this border town. A roadside bomb would go off, or shots would be fired, and the source would evaporate into the city landscape before it could be identified. They knew plenty of insurgent activity was going down. They just couldn’t quite see it.
Except for Delgado and his team, who knew where to look, or more specifically, when to look. The line squads continued doing their patrols during the day. For the snipers, most of the important work was happening at night.
They did this for weeks on end, and they learned an enormous amount about how the city operated and what was going on behind the scenes. They saw weapons being transported in and out of trucks, men setting up what was clearly a mortar nest on the bed of a flatbed truck, improvised explosive devices being planted.
Meanwhile, Jason kept getting into trouble. Not intentionally, and not because of any attitude issues or insubordination. That chip on his shoulder that got him tossed out of his first indoc was long gone by now. What kept getting him into trouble was that he was shooting people.
There were times, as when they rescued the beleaguered border guard in Jason’s first week there, when he would radio in for permission before he took the shot. But there were also plenty of times (like that amazing hip shot that stopped the bomb-maker speeding away from an IED explosion) when he just didn’t have time to call it in. And every time, he got called on the carpet to explain himself. Another shot, another interrogation, and yet another investigation. Over the weeks, Jason got to know just about every lieutenant in Lima Company, because every lieutenant there took a turn being the investigating officer. It got to a point where it was almost funny.
Except that it wasn’t.
For Jason this all only added to his increasing frustration. To the lieutenants, each one of these events was an “incident,” like a police department investigating an officer who has discharged his weapon. They viewed Jason’s sniper team as cops policing the populace in an unruly town that just needed to have civil order preserved.
Jason was seeing an incipient battle zone.
Jason knew one essential fact of life about the city: money drives everything. In struggling cities and neighborhoods where order breaks down and a more dog-eat-dog culture emerges, the crime world thrives. Corruption runs deep. Jason grew up seeing it.
“You’re not going to piss on my leg and tell me it’s just raining out,” as he puts it. “I’m from the streets, I can see what’s going on. I can smell bad, bro.”
And the bad he was smelling was showing a pattern. These guys weren’t smuggling goat’s milk, they weren’t small-time criminals, and they weren’t just doing your typical border-town gunrunning. They were systematically moving massive amounts of arms, drugs, and money—bricks and bricks of American cash. Jason had never seen so much money in his life. And not only automatic weapons of all sizes but also tons of munitions: RPGs, mortar shells, 107mm rockets (a popular insurgency missile because it’s fairly easy to fire with an improvised launching tube), and more. A full arsenal.
Why? Because they were funding a rebellion. They were funding a war against the Americans and other Coalition forces. From Husaybah the goods would travel along the Euphrates trade route to Ramadi and Fallujah. Husaybah was the gateway to the money and ammunition that was being laid in to make war throughout Iraq.
But Jason was the only one making these shots, because he and his team were the only ones in Husaybah staying out there in the midst of the civilian population, hiding out for days at a time, and getting to see what was actually happening. No one else was seeing the way this situation was developing.
After a while he started feeling like Dirty Harry: the guy out on the street taking down bad guys and pissing off his captain for doing it. It got to the point where he almost started second-guessing himself. Was he going a little too aggressive with these people? Was he making bad decisions?
Was he reading more into what he was seeing than what was really there?
Meanwhile, things kept getting worse.
On April 14 the violence intensified further.
That morning a squad set up patrol watch on the roof of a beaten-up three-story building, an abandoned hotel the marines had dubbed the Crack House. As they stood on the roof surveilling the area, a 155mm artillery shell buried in an innocent-looking pile of scrap exploded, injuring one marine in the foot and another in the neck. Someone on a nearby rooftop, no doubt watching for just the right moment, had triggered the explosion, most likely with a cell phone. Gunfire erupted in a firefight that lasted nearly an hour.
A sniper team set up less than half a klick to the northeast, on the eastern edge of the city, heard the explosion and got on optics to see what was happening. One of Jason’s snipers, Matt Thompson, stood up to get a better look around—and a single shot rang out. Crack! The high-speed round slammed into his left thigh, punched clear through and into his right thigh and exited to smash into his holstered pistol. Thompson went down. Unfortunately for Matt, he was a lefty. Had he been a righty, his pistol would have been slung on the other side of his body, and chances are pretty good it would have taken the bullet. The bullet that penetrated both legs was a 7.62. Definitely a sniper. Shit.
It was touch and go there for a while. Thompson was hit on his femoral artery and bleeding badly. They got him safely back to base and medevacked out; he survived, but had to be shipped home.
At about the same time this was all going down, a convoy of vehicles led by Colonel Lopez was ambushed in the Husaybah-Karabilah triangle, off the northeast corner of the city. Lopez was grazed in the back but returned fire, killing a few of the attackers; his translator was injured and had to be medevacked out. A number of others were badly wounded. A squad responding to that attack intercepted a few vehicles near the scene, and in the melee that followed the squad leader, Lance Corporal Jason Dunham, threw himself on a live grenade to protect two buddies. Dunham died of his injuries a week later and posthumously received the Medal of Honor for his actions—the first marine to receive the Medal of Honor since Vietnam.
That was a hell of a lot of contact in a single day.
Jason was upset about the deaths. He was also pissed off that he’d lost one of his snipers, and the son of a bitch who’d hit him was clearly a sniper for the other team.
One more thing. The team at the Crack House had observed men firing on them a few houses away wearing identical black robes with red-and-white head wraps. The sniper element over to the northeast also reported that they were fired upon, from a different location, by guys wearing identical black robes with red-and-white head wraps.
That sure as hell didn’t sound like spontaneous urban violence or random attacks. There was something coordinated about what they were doing, something intentional. It was like they were probing the Americans’ defenses, pushing on them to see exactly how they would respond.
Like it was all preparation for something big.
* * *
Dawn finally broke in Helmand Province. Nick Irving sat and waited. For now, at least, the long night was over.
Just then Finnegan called over quietly; he’d just heard from the marines back at their compound. They’d decided they didn’t want to wait for yet another morning attack. They wanted to take the fight to the enemy. They were on their way to join the group.
All riiight! was Nick’s first thought. They were going to see some serious contact.
At the same time, it seemed kind of bizarre that the marines would make the decision to go in on the very same day that Nick and his team were out there, ready to ambush them. Nick wished they could hang on and wait a bit. He could already see signs of people in the village starting to prepare. He could see the movement, feel the energy in the air, that sense of something bad about to happen. He knew that very soon, the moment these guys presented themselves clearly, he and Pemberton could do some real damage.
The two snipers were perked up and ready. Nick had his spotting scope set up right next to where he sat with Dirty Diana, everything clean and good to go.
Okay, the marines were coming. So be it. Nick would support the overwatch. From his high-ground vantage point, he could see things the marines couldn’t and was in a good position to take out danger before it happened, or call it out if he couldn’t hit it himself.
Just as the sun began peeking up over the horizon, giving a grayish tint to the scene before him, he heard the approach of a column of Humvees. Then—
Ssssnap! Ssssnap!
Someone was taking sporadic shots at the marines. Nick heard them on the radio asking, “Hey, you guys see where that’s coming from?” The marines in the Humvees couldn’t see it. The marine snipers in their hide couldn’t see it. Nick couldn’t see it, either.
Then the whole area in Nick’s sector started coming alive, people hustling, running around, clearly getting ready to fight.
Nick called over to Pemberton, “Hey, man, get ready to start dropping guys.” But neither of them saw any weapons yet, so neither of them took any shots. So far, it was just a bunch of people running around.
The marines were getting closer.
Nick noticed one guy in his sector who stood out. Something about the way the guy was acting struck him as suspicious.
Gunfire erupted. The marines’ column was being fired on. Nick heard their .50 cal gunners return fire. Their guys were in serious contact.
Just then the guy Nick had been watching ducked behind the corner of a small house. A moment later he reappeared bearing an RPG. Nick looked a few degrees to the right. A marine Humvee was approaching, closing in on passing the guy at a distance of maybe fifty meters, at most. For an RPG that’s not point-blank range, but damn close.
He looked back at the guy. Sure enough, he dropped down to one knee and took aim. He was tucked into the corner pretty well; the Humvee driver didn’t see him. Besides, the Humvees were absorbed in their own firefight, engaging targets mainly in the opposite direction.
From his long night of detailed calculations, Nick already had the kneeling guy’s range: 743 yards. He quickly dialed the distance into his scope.
“Watch this guy,” he told Pemberton.
“On ’im.” Pemberton was already there.
The two didn’t need to talk, at least not in sentences. For months they had already been operating together like a single organism, and a word or two was all it took to convey the necessary meaning.
On ’im.
Rog.
Pemberton’s job was to watch the target and make sure Irving had hit him, and if not, then to see exactly where the bullet went.
Irving’s job was to shoot.
BOOM.
The shot took the man in his upper stomach area. The guy dropped and folded, like a folding chair collapsing.
Up to this point the enemy hadn’t suffered any actual casualties. Yes, they were mounting attacks on the marine camp every morning, but they were the type of firefights where both sides shot at each other but no one really hit anybody, it was just a bunch of bullets flying back and forth. (You might be surprised how often this happens in war.)
Now these guys suddenly saw their friend just drop, DOA. And Dirty Diana was wearing her suppressor, so the shot was quiet, too, and probably impossible to hear in the midst of the rest of the gunfire.
It freaked the Taliban forces out. They started shooting like crazy. One Tali fighter stood up a little too brazenly—Pemberton took him out with a single devastating explosion from the Win Mag. Now a barrage of gunfire started pouring onto the site where Nick and Pemberton were holed up. Nick and Pemberton returned fire, joined by their recce mate, joining in with the marines.
The barrage didn’t last. After a few minutes the Taliban collected their slain and made a hasty retreat. Nick later learned that after that dawn skirmish, that marine unit never got attacked again for the rest of that deployment. The victory came at a cost, though: during the barrage, the marines had taken one KIA as well.
Just then they got a call from the other recce operators back at the marine base. Rangers from Second Platoon evidently had some intel on where their HVT was now headed and were on their way to rendezvous. Which meant that as soon as Nick and Pemberton could extract themselves from their ambush of the ambush, they had to get back and plan for the next mission—the real mission, the reason they’d gone out there in the first place.
When they got back to the marine compound they found four truckloads of men and equipment waiting for them. Second Platoon had arrived. Dress rehearsal was over. Time to plan and move.
While the platoon organized themselves and prepared for their nighttime departure, Nick lay down on the ground by a good-sized rock he’d noticed. Not much of a pillow, but it would have to do. He placed his head on the rock and stretched out his aching limbs. He was hoping to grab a few quick Zs. Aside from a catnap snatched here and there, they had now been up four days straight without sleep. A very long night.
It was about to get a lot longer.