15

NIGHT STALKERS

AS MORE AND more dead and wounded soldiers were brought into the makeshift triage area at the base of the wrecked tower, the extent of the losses from the errant JDAM strike were becoming increasingly clear. In addition to the four, badly wounded US soldiers, it seemed that the Northern Alliance had taken the brunt of the casualties. A five-man crew had been inside the T-55 tank when the JDAM had hit and they had died immediately, as had the four Afghan soldiers who had been perched atop its turret, and it was feared that as many as twenty other Afghan soldiers had been buried alive as the massive wall supporting the tank had collapsed.

Mat had been one of the lucky ones. He’d been knocked unconscious by falling masonry and lain beneath a half-collapsed beam for the best part of half an hour. When he’d finally come to, his last memory was of the arrow-like JDAM heading right for him. After regaining consciousness, Mat had peered around in the darkness of the wrecked tower and wondered if he was alive or dead. Then he’d spotted the light from a nearby doorway filtering in through the dust and smoke. Painfully, he had crawled towards it. He had emerged from the rubble bruised and battered and badly concussed. But as soon as he’d spotted Jamie he’d known that he had to be alive – for they’d always told each other that while Jamie was going to heaven Mat was going to hell. So there was no way they could be together in the same place if they were dead.

Up on the ruined parapet the 10th Mountain troops had finished setting up their M240 heavy machine guns, with arcs of fire covering every approach to the tower. The M240 is a 7.62mm weapon, the US equivalent of the GPMG. It is almost identical to the British weapon, and it is equally devastating. As the 10th Mountain boys settled down to engage the enemy, a group of some thirty raggedy figures broke cover from the fort’s central gateway and began charging towards the ruined tower. Screams of ‘Allahu Akhbar!’ reached the troops on the acrid wind, but they were ready. Suddenly, half a dozen M240s barked into life, and it was as if the enemy fighters had run into a wall of bullets, their charge quickly faltering.

Jamie, Mat and Ruff headed back into the chaos to help dig for the wounded and dead. As they did so, they heard the roar of the M240s opening up on the tower ruins above them. It was a mightily reassuring sound. They joined the Afghans combing the rubble for bodies. But the SBS soldiers could tell that the Northern Alliance troops were angry. The SBS lads were well aware of the fact that the Afghans had taken the brunt of the casualties, and while they couldn’t understand what the soldiers were saying, they could read the emotions and the resentment that was written across their faces. What the fuck have you done here? the Afghans were clearly thinking. What the hell’s going on? And why the fuck did you do that?

With the 10th Mountain boys providing covering fire, the evacuation of the wounded got underway in earnest. Some of the less serious cases were moved along the parapet to the eastern tower. But the worst cases had to be carried down the outer parapet of the fort and lifted across to the waiting vehicles. The 5th SOF soldier with the extensive internal injuries was the most serious of the American wounded. Tom and Sam had managed to stabilise his condition, but he required an urgent medevac. And they needed some form of usable transport in which to carry his prone form away from the fort. So Jamie got hold of the rear door of one of the four-wheel drives and ripped it clean off its hinges. Then he fetched an old carpet out of the wrecked tower, and made a makeshift, padded stretcher.

When the evacuation convoy finally set off for Boxer Base, they had eleven seriously wounded American and Afghan troops laid out on old rugs and improvised stretchers in the back of the vehicles. As they drove away from the fort, Major Martin got the comms going in the lead vehicle and started trying to call in a medevac chopper. He had one US casualty with blast burns all over his face, two with flesh wounds and bad concussion, and the one with the internal injuries. A mile or so out from the fort, the Major got a reply on his radio telling him to pull over on the roadside and wait where he was. Within five minutes a medevac chopper would be putting down right there to collect all of the casualties.

They stopped the vehicles and began debussing the worst of the wounded. But as they did so a silver minivan passed by in the opposite direction. A few yards further on it drew to a halt, and out of it stepped a news crew. They immediately started to film the scene. Within seconds, Major Martin had run across to them and placed his hand over the cameraman’s lens.

‘Will ya stop filming, guys?’ he said. ‘You all hear me? This ain’t to be filmed.’

The cameraman appeared to agree to the Major’s request without complaint, and lifted his camera off his shoulder and put it down. But Mat was keeping a close eye on him. He could tell that the camera lens was still surreptitiously pointing directly at them and that the cameraman had kept his camera rolling. Mat pulled his shamag up to cover the lower half of his face and took a few steps across the road to the film crew. As he did so he grabbed his Sig Sauer pistol and flipped the weapon off safety, making sure that the cameraman had noticed him doing so.

‘FOOKIN’ WANKER!’ Mat snarled, as he placed himself bang in front of the cameraman’s lens. ‘You’re fookin’ dead if you keep doing that.’

As the cameraman stared back at him feigning ignorance, Mat felt rather than heard Jamie and Ruff taking up positions directly behind him. His two fellow operators towered over the news crew, and they just stared down at the cameraman with cold, unblinking fury in their eyes. There’d been a lot of people killed already during the last forty-eight hours, and Jamie and Ruff had done more than their fair share of the killing. They were pretty daunting at the best of times, but right now the essence of so much death clung to them like the dark shroud of the executioner.

‘OK. OK. I – I – I am stopping,’ the cameraman finally stammered, as he reached down to switch off his camera. He had some foreign-sounding accent that Mat couldn’t place.

‘You want your fookin’ brains spattered all over the fookin’ sand?’ Mat said icily, as he gripped the butt of his Sig Sauer pistol. ‘Or you want to get the fuck out of here?’

‘OK, OK. I fuck off,’ the cameraman answered, hurriedly, holding up his hands in a gesture of submission.

‘NOW! You fuck off NOW.’

‘OK, OK. Now I fuck off. But where is it you want me to fuck off to?’

‘Anywhere. JUST FUCK OFF. We don’t fookin’ want you around. So fuck off. NOW.’

As the terrified cameraman and his crew grabbed their kit and made a dash for their vehicle, Mat turned and watched them go, his eyes like murder as he did so. He’d just had some of his best friends pounded in that errant JDAM strike; several of his newly made American buddies were badly wounded and one or two might not make it through; and dozens of their Afghan fellow warriors were injured or lying dead in the rubble of the fort. What fucking right did that cameraman have to stick his camera in their faces and film all their pain and hurt, without even asking anyone if they minded? And then, as if to add insult to injury, the fucker had kept on filming even after the Major’s request to stop doing so.

‘Would you really have slotted him, mate?’ Jamie asked, as they watched the silver minivan accelerate away from the scene.

‘’Course not, mate,’ Mat replied. ‘I’d have marched the cunt out into the desert, made him kneel behind the bushes and put a few rounds through his fookin’ camera, just to make him really shit his load.’

‘He looked as if he was about to burst into tears,’ Jamie added, with a grin. ‘Were you the school bully, mate? Cos if you weren’t, your talents were seriously wasted.’

There was a practical side to Mat’s aggression that he didn’t need to explain to his fellow special forces soldiers. As SBS operatives, they could and did end up operating in some highly sensitive environments. The last thing they needed while they were up against hardened terrorists, drug dealers or warlords was to have their faces all over the media. That would be asking for trouble. Just occasionally, an SBS operative did get himself photographed by accident. On those rare occasions, the operator would be removed from all sensitive missions for some considerable time. But the worst-case scenario was one in which the media broadcast their images without Poole realising it – in which case their mugshots could unknowingly fall into enemy hands. Which was why Mat would have taken all necessary measures to stop that film crew on that roadside.

After several minutes waiting the promised medevac chopper had still not materialised, so they loaded the wounded back on to the vehicles and headed for Boxer Base. Upon arrival they laid out the wounded on the tables on the ground floor. Tom struggled to get a new drip into the arm of the seriously wounded 5th SOF soldier, but he couldn’t find a vein that would take it. Eventually, he was forced to get the soldier aboard the helicopter, which had finally turned up, without the drip being inserted. As the medevac chopper clawed its way into the sky, laden down with the American and Afghan wounded, Tom hoped and prayed that he had managed to do enough to keep the US soldier alive for as long as it took to get him to the nearest hospital.

As soon as the wounded had been evacuated the relentless urgency went out of the situation. The SBS soldiers sat around at Boxer Base in a stunned silence, lost in their own thoughts. Somehow, they had just survived a direct hit on their positions from a 2,000-pound JDAM. That alone beggared belief. In that one hit, half of the 5th SOF force had been put out of action, and scores of the Afghans had been killed. But somehow, the eight SBS lads had just walked away. By some miracle of chance none of the eight SBS soldiers had been seriously hurt. The worst injuries that any of them had suffered were Jamie’s and Ruff’s busted eardrums.

‘Fuck me, we should be dead,’ Jamie muttered, voicing the thought that was on everyone’s mind.

‘Two-thousand-pound bloody JDAM,’ said Mat, quietly. ‘Us lot were, what, thirty metres away when it hit? No way should anyone’ve survived.’

‘Someone was looking after us, that’s for sure,’ Jamie added.

‘Reckon it was the two white doves, mate,’ said Tom, the remark slipping out before he’d even realised it.

‘The two what?’ Mat asked.

‘The two fuckin’ doves, mate,’ Tom replied. He’d said it now, and he knew from experience what was coming. To deny it would only make matters worse. ‘Two white doves. Birds. The feathered kind, mate.’

‘Funny, I didn’t know you blokes was hit by that JDAM,’ Mat snorted. ‘Cos you sure must have some bad concussion. “Two white doves.” Sounds like you been hallucinatin’, mate.’

‘You reckon?’ Tom retorted. ‘Should’ve left your sad arse in the rubble when we had the fuckin’ chance. Anyhow, Sam saw ’em too.’

‘So there’s two of you blokes been hallucinatin’,’ said Mat. ‘It’s a wonder you can bloody shoot straight, if you keep seeing shit like that in that fort.’

‘Bro, let’s just not go there,’ said Sam, as he and Tom exchanged glances. ‘Guys like my bitch Mat there, there’s just no tellin’ ’em.’

An hour later and the SBS soldiers gathered together with their remaining 5th SOF colleagues in one of the meeting rooms. The mood was sombre, as Major Martin stood up to begin a debrief on the disastrous events at the fort. The US Major wanted to get all the facts down as quickly as possible. There was sure to be an inquiry into what had gone wrong and it was his duty to investigate as quickly and thoroughly as possible. An officer with the US military police had arrived to direct the debrief. As Mat wrapped his bruised and battered hands around a mug of hot, sweet tea, he glanced across at his fellow SBS soldiers and realised what a complete and total mess they were in. They were sat there covered in dust and dirt, with their cuts and flesh wounds freshly bandaged, looking for all the world as if they had just walked away from World War III.

‘You guys sure you’re all OK?’ the US military policeman (MP) asked, directing his comments at the SBS contingent. ‘I mean, I wanna do this now, while it’s fresh in your minds. But only if we can. You all aren’t indestructible or something, now are you?’

‘A nice cuppa and we’ll be right as rain,’ Mat replied, forcing a grin.

‘After a good brew we’ll be back out there again,’ Jamie added.

‘Tell you one thing, though,’ volunteered Tom. ‘Could easily have been a second friendly-fire incident up there – in which case we’d be needing more than a fuckin’ cup of tea to put us right.’

‘Buddy, I’d like to hear all about it,’ the MP announced, pulling a notebook from his chest pocket.

‘Well, it could all have been a fuck sight worse than it was,’ said Tom. ‘If we’d not called off the fuckin’ air strikes when we did there was a one-in-three chance that we’d’ve been the next to be malleted. Four sets of coordinates were put up to the fast air – two of which were enemy targets and two of which were friendlies. The first set he hit was the friendlies on the north-eastern tower. So, chances are pretty good it would’ve been us got hit next, on the western tower.’

‘Go figure,’ remarked the US policeman. ‘So what did happen, bud?’

‘Well, we aborted the fuckin’ air strikes, didn’t we?’ Tom replied. ‘Just kept screaming “ABORT, ABORT, ABORT” into the radio until the pilot pulled up and out of the attack. But that’s how fuckin’ close it was.’

It took over two hours to go through the events of the last night and early morning in detail. The men were at ease and allowed to smoke and get their brews in, but they had to persevere and get through it. There was some conflict in the various recollections of the events surrounding the friendly-fire incident, but no violent disagreement. Many of the facts were not in dispute. Both the friendly and enemy coordinates had been put up to the pilot in the correct format used by the US military. And while the JDAM had been going in danger-close, that had been a calculated risk that the soldiers on the ground had agreed to take. The main point of contention seemed to be that those doing the FAC had not had eyes on the enemy target, or so Tom and Mat argued.

‘In my book, if you’re doing FAC you need to see the target that’s being hit,’ Mat remarked. ‘It’s a golden rule that you should have eyes on target.’

‘Too right,’ said Tom. ‘I mean, you can go down there and recce it and then take the coordinates away with you, and make it a pre-recorded target. But even then the fuckin’ FAC guys have still had eyes on target and have a mental picture of it in their minds. So they can describe it to the pilot. In a live situation like we was in, it’s simple: the FAC guys should’ve had eyes on target.’

‘Fair point,’ Jamie said. ‘But the FAC boys aren’t here to explain it from their end, are they, mate? Cos they was underneath that JDAM. Anyway, whether they had eyes on target or not it still doesn’t account for how the pilot managed to drop a two-thousand-pound JDAM on friendly coordinates.’

‘Well, let’s say the JDAM was buggered,’ said Mat. ‘A faulty GPS or something. It’s still got the whole of the Afghan desert where it could have landed. The chances of it scoring a direct hit on the friendly coordinates are just about zero. The only way I can see it doing that is if the JDAM had been programmed to hit those friendly coordinates. So, got to be human error, ain’t it?’

There were only two things that seemed as if they could account for the friendly-fire incident. The first was simple pilot error – the lead pilot mistakenly punching in the friendly coordinates as the first target to be hit. The second was human error on the ground – the FAC team mistakenly putting up the friendly coordinates as if they were the enemy target. And none of the men in that room knew which was the correct explanation for the errant JDAM strike. What they did know was that things could so easily have been so much worse. It was the armoured mass of the T-55 tank combined with the thick mud walls of the tower that had taken the brunt of the JDAM’s impact. Without those two factors it was highly likely that all of them would now be dead.

The soldiers spent the rest of the day at Boxer Base tending to their injuries and recovering. There were bruises, flesh wounds and sprained limbs to be dealt with. And even for those like Ruff who were impatient to get back and resume the fighting there was little chance that they might do so. Few of the SBS and 5th SOF soldiers had managed to recover their weapons from the rubble of the bombed-out tower. The plan for the remainder of the day was to recover their fighting fitness and get battle-ready. For now, there were more than enough Northern Alliance soldiers up at Qala-i-Janghi to keep the enemy bottled up in the fort.

That afternoon, the CIA officers at Boxer Base presented the SBS with a sizeable lump sum in cash: $40,000 as expenses to cover their trashed gear, and another $200,000 to pay for a new laser target designator. The LTD that the lads had been using was buried in the debris of the JDAM blast. The CIA officers had also entered into negotiations with the Northern Alliance commanders over how much compensation was to be paid to them, to make up for their deaths and the destruction to equipment (including the T-55 tank). One of the stumbling blocks to a deal being struck was that the CIA suspected the Afghan commanders of inflating the estimates of their dead, in order to extract a larger payment. Once a compensation deal was reached, the Afghan soldiers started returning the Diemacos and other missing bits of kit to the SBS at Boxer Base.

As the afternoon wore on there were sporadic bursts of gunfire up at the fort, and bitter exchanges of mortar fire. But there seemed little chance of dislodging the enemy any time soon. Their forces numbered in the hundreds still, and they were well entrenched in the southern end of the fort. They had ample supplies of water via the irrigation channels, and they had been eating the flesh of some of General Dostum’s horses that had been caught in the crossfire. Most importantly, they had an almost unlimited supply of weaponry, as the fort’s capacious arms stores had been stuffed to capacity. For now at least, the battle for Qala-i-Janghi seemed to have reached a stalemate.

But that night, a blow would be struck to break that impasse. At 2200 hours Major Martin, Jamie, Ruff and Mat headed up to the fort to oversee a night attack on the enemy. Around midnight there was the faint drone of an aircraft overhead, as a US AC-130 Spectre gunship began to circle lazily above the fort. As the watching special forces soldiers donned their NVGs, an extraordinary scene became visible to them. The Spectre gunship was using an infrared searchlight to comb the whole of the southern end of the fort for targets. The powerful ray of eerie green illumination that was beaming down from the night sky was only visible to those using NVGs, and it was an awesome sight to the watching British and American soldiers.

As it flew a series of search transects back and forth above the fort, the gunship was preparing to unleash its terrifying firepower, which would rip through the enemy positions. Coordinates were being fed into a state-of-the-art on-board computer system that pre-planned the strikes on the enemy targets. The AC-130 Spectre carried a powerful array of side-mounted, trainable weaponry, including two M61 20mm Vulcan cannons, one L60 40mm Bofors cannon and one M102 105mm howitzer. The $70 million aircraft also carried a crew of fourteen, including a low-light TV (LLTV) operator, an infrared detection set operator and five aerial gunners. As the Spectre flew over Qala-i-Janghi at an altitude of 10,000 feet, all of its human and technological know-how was focused on detecting and targeting enemy movement in the darkness below.

Mat, Jamie and Ruff waited with bated breath for the aircraft to open up on the enemy positions from the night-dark skies. As they did so, it occurred to Mat that the aircraft truly was living up to its name – the Spectre, a ghostly presence or apparition. The giant, four-engined aircraft was invisible in the darkness and all but inaudible to those on the ground. That morning’s surprise air strike had gone horribly wrong, the dawn wake-up call for the enemy turning into a nightmare for the allied forces. But now the Spectre was preparing to give the sleeping AQT fighters a midnight alarm call – after which many of them would never be waking again.

Suddenly, there was what looked like a golden stream of fire arcing down from the night sky, and the Spectre began pounding the southern end of the fort with its weaponry. As thousands of large-calibre rounds slammed into the enemy positions, interspersed with the giant shells from the howitzer, a series of thunderous explosions rolled across the fort. Repeatedly, the Spectre gunship made silent passes over the fort, and on the fourth pass the infrared detection set operator spotted three enemy figures grouped around a mortar. Even as they had dropped a round down the mortar tube, the Spectre’s crew were feeding their target coordinates into the aircraft’s on-board computer system. Now, as the Spectre started spewing fire into the fort, the M61 operators opened up on the mortar crew, spraying a deadly barrage of 20mm rounds into their position.

As the gunship completed its attacking pass over the fort, a huge ball of flame lifted up from one of the buildings, followed by a series of enormous explosions. They in turn kicked off a dramatic firework display, as rounds, ammo belts, grenades and mortar shells went firing off into the air. As the night sky above the fort was lit up a burning white, Mat, Jamie, Ruff and the Major broke into a round of spontaneous applause. The Spectre had just hit the fort’s main arms dump, and much of the weaponry and ammo that the enemy had been relying on to sustain their uprising had just been blown sky-high. The AC-130 flew away from the scene and the pilot reported back on a job well done. As far as he was concerned, now that his AC-130 Spectre had been allowed to do its work the ground forces should expect little further trouble from the enemy.

‘Aaaahhhh!’ The unearthly screaming pierced the gloom of the underground basement, again and again and again. ‘Aaaaahhhhhh!’

‘By the grace of Allah, get us out of here!’ one of the brothers was crying. ‘Help us! We’re trapped! Allah have mercy.’

‘Has it gone? Can you still hear it?’ Ali asked fearfully, as he crouched in the darkness beneath the basement stairs, nursing a shrapnel wound to his right thigh.

‘It may have gone, brother,’ Ahmed answered wearily, from out of the darkness. ‘I can’t hear it any more. But that doesn’t mean a thing. I didn’t hear it the first time it hit us.’

‘The kafir strike the brothers silently, from the air, in the dark of the night, like the cowardly dogs that they are.’ Ali spat out the words, his voiced laced with fear and a wild, bitter fury. ‘May Allah punish them with all His wrath for what they have done this night. May they burn in eternal hell for what they have done to us, secretly, as we slept.’

‘It is not so bad, brother,’ Ahmed tried to reassure him, placing a giant hand on Ali’s arm. As he did so he winced with pain, the fresh wound to his shoulder pulsating with agony. ‘Most of the brothers were deep in the basement when the kafir gunship fired. Only those near the doorway were hit. Many have survived.’

‘It is not so bad, brother?’ Ali shook his head in despair. ‘We have no bandages, no dressings and no morphine and the brothers are bleeding to death and calling for their mothers in this stinking basement. We are using our turbans to patch up their wounds, brother. Our sacred turbans.’

For a second Ali and Ahmed squatted there in silence, listening to the cries of the wounded echoing around the dark walls.

‘Just look at what they did to you, brother,’ Ali continued, with vehemence. ‘Over these past two days none of the kafir soldiers could get your mortar team. By the grace of All Merciful Allah you were so quick, so deadly. So, what did they do, brother? They targeted you under the cloak of darkness, silently, without warning, from the air. And yet you say it is not so bad. Look at your wounds, brother. You didn’t even see the aircraft that did that to you. You didn’t even hear it. You didn’t even know it was there. How can we fight such things? How can we fight such things, brother? They are breaking us, Brother Ahmed. Slowly, bit by bit, hour by hour, they are tearing us apart and breaking us down with their cursed technology, their cowardly, secret weapons of war.’

‘But by the grace of Allah, we are still alive,’ Ahmed replied, forcibly. ‘We knew it would not be easy. Yet we have endured, brother. And while we still have breath in our bodies we can fight.’

‘But for how much longer, brother?’ Ali asked, despairingly. ‘And to what purpose? Great and glorious it is to die in the jihad, brother, but not to suffer and bleed to death like pigs, like dogs in a pit, while the kafir pick us off at their will. How can we fight them, brother? How can we fight them? Maybe we should finish it here and now, brother – a quick, honourable death at our own hands? Is that not a better way to go to meet the Holy Prophet, peace and blessings be upon Him?’

‘Brother Ali, it is not yet over,’ Ahmed urged, taking his friend’s face between his giant hands and staring into his eyes. ‘Remember, brother, they still have to take this ground that we control, this fort. And we have shelter, brother: even their cursed gunship cannot hit us deep in the basement like this. We have water. We have weapons. If you give up, Brother Ali, truly all the brothers will lose heart. Imagine when the kafir are forced to come in here, brother, to fight their way into this fort, on foot, clearing it building by building. Then we shall be waiting for them, brother. We shall wait for them like death itself lurking in the basements, and we shall strike the kafir down.’

‘But do you really think they will come, Brother Ahmed?’

‘They will come. They have to,’ Ahmed answered, quietly, matter-of-factly. His years of experience in combat meant that he knew how this battle had to end. There was no way that he could see for the enemy to dislodge them from the fort, unless they came in on foot and cleared every room, every underground passageway. And that would mean hand-to-hand fighting – at which stage all the kafir’s technology and air power would be of little help to them. ‘Hold on, Brother Ali. Hold on. Be strong. By the grace of Allah, we shall have our day of glory. And then the kafir will know our anger as it rages like a storm upon them. We cannot do that, brother, if we take our own lives.’