16

FIRE AND WATER

ON THE MORNING of day three of the siege, the bandaged and aching SBS soldiers and their 5th SOF colleagues headed back to the fort. As they arrived at the scene of the previous day’s errant JDAM strike, they were shocked at the scale of the destruction that lay before them. As the 2,000-pound missile had struck, the T-55 tank had been blown into the air. It had come crashing down to earth in two pieces, with the body of the tank landing upside down and the turret next to it the right way up. Even now, there was still a severed human arm sticking out of the rubble next to the disembowelled machine. Parked up at the base of the tower there had been two Soviet-era armoured personnel carriers. As the JDAM’s blast wave had rolled over them it had torn them to pieces. It was like a giant tin-opener had ripped them apart.

Twenty-four hours earlier, the Northern Alliance soldiers and their British and American comrades had been pulling each other out of the smoke and the debris of the bomb strike. Now, they were hugging each other and embracing, as they discovered who exactly had made it out of there alive. As Mat, Jamie, Tom, Sam and Ruff stood around surveying the scene, the Afghans started handing around smokes and some local sweetmeats. There was a spirit of genuine camaraderie between the NA soldiers and their foreign friends now. Jamie felt himself being grabbed by one of the Afghans and smothered in a bear hug. It was the same Afghan soldier who had tried, and failed, to fire Jamie’s Diemaco on the first day of the siege. He seemed overjoyed that he’d found Jamie alive.

The soldier then proceeded to do a repeat performance of his charade from that first afternoon: helicopter rotor blades done with a twirling finger, the sound effects of the turbines to accompany it, and then a finger across the throat like a knife cut to signify death. And then the Afghan said simply: ‘Americans.’ Suddenly the SBS lads were cracking up laughing. The Afghan soldier was taking the piss out of the US warplanes having bombed their own forces. It was just the sort of grim humour that they appreciated. Once the merriment had died down a little, the grinning Afghan soldier asked for Jamie’s address back in the UK, so he could write to him.

Strangely enough, it was a great feeling to be back at the scene of the errant bomb strike and to have survived. The SBS soldiers had expected to get a hostile reception from the Afghans. But instead the reverse was turning out to be true. Somehow, it felt as if the British and American special forces and their fellow Afghan soldiers had been blooded together and were now true brothers in arms. Some of the American soldiers started handing out grenades to the Afghans – as if they would help make up for the errant air strike. Barely a minute later there were a series of loud explosions as the Afghans hurled the grenades over the wall in the general direction of the enemy, all for a bit of fun and games.

‘Will you tell your American buddies to stop handing out the grenades?’ Jamie remarked to one of the CIA officers. ‘They’re not sweets, mate.’

Jamie didn’t want to be a killjoy exactly. But sooner or later one of the Afghans was going to end up injuring himself, or someone else. And as far as Jamie was concerned there’d already been more than enough deaths from friendly fire at the fort.

Once the party atmosphere had started to die down a little, Captain Lancer took his men up to their former positions on the devastated ramparts. Now they faced the grisly task of digging in the rubble for any remaining bits of kit, and for any Afghan bodies that had not yet been recovered. One of the SBS’s LTDs had been completely buried in the air strike. As it was such an expensive piece of kit, the lads were keen to recover it – despite the compensation money already paid by the CIA. But as they commenced digging in the shattered brickwork and bomb-blast debris, they started coming under sporadic fire from the enemy positions in the southern end of the fort.

‘Fuckin’ get behind the wall before we all get fuckin’ shot,’ Tom yelled out, as rounds cracked into the dirt right next to him. ‘It’s only a fuckin’ LTD and not worth getting slotted for.’

Mat, Sam, Jamie, Tom and Ruff got down behind some cover and started to do a bit of shooting in return. The Diemaco made for a good sniping weapon, being fitted with a x4 magnification sight with cross hairs and accurate up to four hundred metres. It was a damn sight more effective than the AK47s that the enemy were using, that much was for sure. But few of the enemy soldiers were making themselves easy targets. They were hunkered down in their subterranean stronghold, and only popping up occasionally to crack off a few rounds, before disappearing again. There was little chance of the SBS soldiers being able to get a clear shot at them and pick them off this way.

Whatever the Spectre gunship might have achieved in terms of destroying the ammo stores, it had not done nearly as much as had been expected in terms of taking out the enemy. The Northern Alliance commanders were trying to argue that there were less than a dozen enemy fighters left alive in the fort. But the SBS lads just knew that they had to be wrong. There were clearly more than enough enemy fighters with the energy and will to organise themselves properly and carry on fighting. While the NA forces did seem to be well in control of the situation from the outside of the fort, there was one big unanswered question that they would all have to face sooner or later. And that was how they were going to dislodge the enemy from the fort?

The previous night, General Dostum had left the siege at Kunduz and travelled back to Qala-i-Janghi. Upon arrival he had made it clear to his Afghan commanders that he was not a happy man. Apart from the devastation visited on the ancient fortress by the ‘prisoners’, he was painfully aware that he had personally negotiated the terms under which the six hundred fighters had supposedly surrendered. Sure, war was a nasty business and he didn’t exactly have a spotless reputation himself. But as far as the General was concerned, he had tried to hold out an olive branch to the prisoners and this is what they had done in return. Like most Afghans, the General viewed all soldiers as fighting men with a code of honour and conduct. Yet that code had been abrogated by the foreign fighters now occupying the fort, and he felt they had betrayed him.

Even so, the General appeared to want to give the enemy one last chance to lay down their weapons. He had brought with him two captured Taliban commanders. These were the same two Taliban leaders with whom he had negotiated the terms of the original surrender deal. Those terms had enabled any Afghan Taliban to lay down their arms and get safe passage back home to their villages. But as for the foreign Taliban – the Pakistanis, Chechens, Saudis, Sudanese, Yemenis, Algerians, Egyptians and assorted Europeans and Americans who had answered the call to jihad – they were to be given over to General Dostum’s custody.

The two Taliban leaders had been brought to the fort to try to re-establish the currency of that original ceasefire deal, to use their good offices to convince those still holding out in the fort to surrender once and for all. But with the battle now locked into a bitter and bloody stalemate, with each side giving no quarter, there was no way in which the Taliban leaders could get to speak to the besieged fighters. And even if they had been able to do so, there was little guarantee that they would have received a sympathetic hearing.

In addition to the betrayal by the six hundred prisoners, General Dostum’s other main worry seemed to be his horses. The mounts that the General had kept stabled at the fort were his finest, the cream of the Northern Alliance’s cavalry. The fact that so many had been caught in the crossfire of the previous two days’ fighting – and that some had even been eaten by the prisoners – added insult to injury, as far as he was concerned. Whatever else happened over the next few days, the General had made it clear that no more of his horses were to be harmed. In particular, there were two of his favourite steeds still tethered next to the central wall of the fort. At the end of the fighting those two horses had to be brought out alive.

‘Whatever you do, don’t hit those two little bastard nags tethered near the wall,’ Tom announced to the others, once he’d heard of the General’s concerns. ‘Cos if you do, Dostum’s going to have you for dinner.’

After a quick lunch break in the cover of the ruined tower, Jamie and Ruff got the GPMGs zeroed in on the windows of the pink building in the southern end of the fort. This had by now become the enemy’s redoubt. As the Gimpys roared into life, Jamie and Ruff pounded the enemy stronghold. But however many rounds they kept pumping into the target, more of the enemy kept coming back at them. As soon as the GPMGs stopped firing, enemy fighters would pop up from below ground and return fire. It was obvious that the bulk of the enemy fighters had survived the Spectre gunship attack. In the basement that ran beneath the stronghold building, even the Spectre’s big guns had been unable to reach them.

By the eve of the third day of fighting, the battle for Qala-i-Janghi seemed to have reached a no-win situation on both sides. Back at Boxer Base that night the SBS lads were racking their brains, trying to see if there was some way of breaking into the southern end of the fort and lifting the siege.

‘We got to think about this differently,’ Mat said to the others. ‘We ain’t going to break this siege otherwise. Whatever the idea, let’s hear it. For starters, those bloody irrigation channels, any ideas how they work and where they go to? They run beneath the walls, don’t they? Why don’t we use those – or the sewers if the place has them – to get in there and attack?’

‘They’re drainage channels,’ Tom responded. ‘And it’s been tried already, mate, only the other way round. First few hours of the siege, several of the fuckers tried to escape through them. They was met by the Afghans on the outside of the fort, who malleted ’em good n’proper, and that was that.’

‘OK, but that’s them coming out,’ Mat countered. ‘What about us nutters going in?’

‘If those fuckers’ve tried to use ’em to escape, they’ll be well on to the fact we could use ’em to try to get in,’ Tom replied. ‘Fuckin’ certain they will be, mate.’

‘But in theory it could bloody work,’ Mat persisted. ‘Cos we got to think of something, mate. All the firepower of us lot, plus the tanks, plus a squadron of F-18s, plus the Spectre gunship, and the fookers are still holding out. So let’s not write off any idea ’til we’re bloody certain about it.’

‘All right then, you go first, and come back and tell us all about it,’ Tom said. ‘Then we’ll consider coming after you.’

‘All I’m saying is, mate, we shouldn’t rule anything out,’ Mat said. ‘Cos it’s going to take something we haven’t thought of to break this bloody siege.’

‘Mat’s got a point, mate,’ Jamie interjected. ‘No way are bloody air strikes going to do it, not with them taking shelter down in the basements.’

‘An’ don’t I fuckin’ know it,’ Tom retorted. ‘Eventually, mate, we’re just going to have to fuckin’ go in there on foot and root the fuckers out. Nasty. Like rats down a fuckin’ drain. Like evil. I mean, do you fancy fighting your way into them fuckin’ basements? Cos I know I fuckin’ don’t. It’ll be like Custer’s Last Stand for ’em. But I don’t see any other way of fuckin’ ending it.’

‘If we do that, we’re going to lose a lot of blokes,’ Mat said. ‘Like I said, there’s got to be another way.’

‘Well, there might fuckin’ not be, mate,’ Tom replied. ‘Just got to face up to it. Might not be any other way of going about it.’

The lads discussed options for breaking the siege long into the evening, but by the time they hit the sack they were none the wiser as to how they would go about doing it. On the morning of day four of the battle, they returned to Qala-i-Janghi with no clearer sense of a battle plan. Upon arrival at the fort they had a quick heads-up with the Northern Alliance commanders. But they were still trying to re-assure the SBS soldiers that there were less than a dozen enemy holding out in the southern half of the fortress. Which, as all the lads knew, was a load of total bollocks.

‘Hey, there’s only bloody six of ’em left,’ Mat sang out, as they climbed up on to the walls of the fort to take up their fire positions on the ruined tower.

‘S’all right then,’ Tom responded.

‘Be over in a jiffy,’ Jamie added.

‘Have to be hard as fuckin’ nails, though, eh?’ Tom said. ‘I mean, if it’s the same half-dozen of ’em have survived all this time.’

As soon as they had resumed their sniping duties, the SBS soldiers could tell what was happening, and it was a repeat performance of the previous day’s action. Once again, they targeted a window in the pink building where four of the enemy were positioned, returning fire with their AK47s. When eventually they did see one of the enemy go down, seconds later there’d be a replacement fighter who’d popped up from below ground and taken up the same fire position.

‘Six of ’em?’ Tom snorted, as he took careful aim with his Diemaco. ‘More like six fuckin’ hundred, I reckon.’

By mid-morning it was clear that the battle was going nowhere. Finally, General Dostum decided that it was time to fight their way into the southern end of the fort. But the General wanted none of the British or US special forces soldiers going in on the ground. They were to remain in their positions and provide top cover as his Afghan fighters went in on foot. As soon as the SBS lads heard of the General’s plan, they knew that it was going to be a bloodbath. The enemy had perfect cover, and the Afghans would be going in there with none. The SBS lads had fought alongside these Afghan soldiers for several days now. They’d dug each other out of the rubble of the JDAM strike. They’d built up a strong sense of camaraderie with them. They had a deep respect for the Afghans as soldiers. They didn’t want to see these Afghan warriors get mown down in a futile attempt to recapture the fort.

‘What does the General think his men are – bloody bulletproof?’ Mat asked, incredulously. ‘They’ll be no more than cannon fodder when those fookers catch sight of ’em.’

‘It’ll be a massacre, pure and simple,’ Jamie added. ‘As if there hasn’t been enough death here already.’

‘Why doesn’t the General send a couple of his fuckin’ tanks in with ’em – a T-55 or even a T-64?’ said Tom. ‘I mean, send the armour in first and use it to blast the stronghold from close range.’

‘Bloody cracking idea, mate,’ Mat enthused.

‘Well, it ain’t fuckin’ rocket science, is it, mate?’ said Tom. ‘At least that way the Afghans’ll have some fuckin’ cover to advance behind.’

‘Come on, Einstein,’ Mat replied, enthusiastically, ‘let’s put your plan to the bloody General then.’

With the help of one of the CIA officers acting as a translator, Tom and Mat went and presented their idea for the plan of attack to General Dostum. At first the General was less than enthusiastic. He argued that he’d already lost one tank to the errant US air strike, so why should he risk any more. But then Tom outlined in graphic detail what was likely to happen if the tank wasn’t used, and how many of the General’s soldiers would get massacred. And Mat pointed out that the only weapon the enemy had with which they might conceivably take out a T-55 was the RPG – and it would take an extremely lucky shot to penetrate the tank’s armour. If the tank kept itself front on to the enemy positions and held back a good distance, it would be able to pour shells into the stronghold pretty much with impunity. So what did the General have to lose?

Pretty quickly the General found himself warming to their plan. And he decided that if they were going to do it this way, then they would do it well. He ordered one of his crack T-55 tank crews to prepare to lead the ground forces into the southern compound. As the tank manoeuvred its way into position at the entranceway to the fort, some sixty Afghan soldiers clustered behind it, clutching their AK47s. From their vantage point on the battlements, Mat, Tom, Jamie, Sam and Ruff readied themselves to provide top cover. They heard the bellow of the tank’s engines as the crew prepared for the advance, and then there was a belch of thick, oily smoke as the T-55 lurched forward into the fort. Finally, the British, American and Afghan forces trying to lift the siege of Qala-i-Janghi were taking the fight into the heart of the enemy’s heartland.

The SBS soldiers watched through their sniping scopes as the tank clattered forward, the Afghan troops following in its wake at a crouching run. As he followed the T-55’s halting progress, Mat felt certain that this was a signal moment in the siege of the fort – that the enemy’s iron grip on the southern half of the complex was finally about to be broken. He hugged the butt of his Diemaco close to his shoulder, as he trained his sight on the main window of the enemy stronghold. As soon as the T-55 entered the enemy field of fire, machine-gun rounds started slamming into the tank’s armour, but with little effect. First one and then another RPG round streaked across the compound towards the lumbering machine, but both impacted well wide of the target.

Momentarily, Mat caught an enemy gunman at the window in his sniping scope. In that split second he squeezed his trigger and three rounds went tearing into the fighter. Mat watched as his bloodied body slumped forward over the shattered sill of the window. But within seconds a second enemy gunman had taken his place, taking cover behind the body of his dead comrade. More enemy fighters appeared at other windows of the stronghold now, drawn to the battle by the clatter of the approaching tank. They started putting down a wall of fire on to the approaching T-55, and the Afghan soldiers sheltering at its rear. And from their sniping positions on the battlements Mat, Jamie, Sam, Tom and Ruff started pumping rounds into the enemy figures.

The tank advanced some sixty yards into the southern compound, as the SBS sniping kept the enemy’s heads down. By the time the T-55 ground to a halt, the enemy fighters had still failed to score a direct hit with an RPG. There were some further belches of black exhaust fumes followed by the whine of its turret motor, and slowly the tank’s cannon swung around and was brought to bear on the target. After a few seconds’ inactivity, a gout of smoke and flame shot forth from the barrel, and the first round from the tank’s main battle gun slammed into the enemy stronghold. For a moment there was an ominous silence, as the T-55’s crew hurried to reload and the enemy reeled from the shock of the explosion. And then there was the menacing death rattle of machine-gun fire rising above the fort walls, as the enemy launched a desperate counter-attack.

As the Northern Alliance soldiers had advanced for the first time into their end of the fort, Ali and Ahmed had rallied the brothers for one last, decisive battle.

‘This is our chance to fight and kill the kafir dogs,’ Ali had urged them. He was exhausted and injured and his voice was weak, but he tried to hide all this from the brothers. ‘Use every window and every door. Prepare to massacre them, to tear their throats out, to cut out their infidel hearts.’

But then, the first of the T-55 shells had slammed into the stronghold, tearing it – and those brothers inside it – apart. After a salvo of six further rounds, the giant tank churned its way further into the compound, crushing the corpses of the martyred brothers under its tracks as it went. Further high-explosive shells punched huge holes in the walls of their redoubt, shrapnel ripping into the brothers and lacerating their bodies. They brought about a sudden end to Ali and Ahmed’s dreams of a glorious last battle. Within seconds, their plans to spread death and destruction among the besieging enemy forces, their hopes of waging a victorious jihad, had been torn to pieces.

The smell of acrid smoke and the stench of burning flesh filled the brothers’ holdout. Down below in the basement, there was complete chaos and mayhem where the iron girders keeping up the ceiling had collapsed and the walls had come tumbling in, crushing the brothers and pinning them to the floor. The subterranean passageways had been transformed into a terrifying, shadowed, charnel house – a place reeking of the stench of death, and ringing with the screams of the injured and the dying. Rather than finding the Paradise that they had been promised, many of the brothers were at this moment trapped in a terrible, agonising hell on earth.

Among the two dozen wounded lying in the shattered remains of the stronghold at ground level there was a giant, bearded figure with a smaller, darker figure at his side. Ali and Ahmed, leading the resistance from above ground, had been among the first of the brothers to be hit by the T-55 shelling. Their bodies were lacerated by shrapnel, and they had suffered terrible internal injuries from the shell’s blast. As they lay there amid the smashed walls and the broken bodies of their fallen brothers, both men knew that they were dying and that with death would come an end to the suffering and the killing and the hatred and the bitter, endless bloodshed.

‘I see a bright light … my beloved Brother Ahmed,’ Ali murmured, through cracked and bloodied lips. ‘It is … the light … of Paradise, brother … Paradise … awaits …’

‘Praise be … to Allah … brother …’ Ahmed replied, his words choking on the blood that he was coughing up from his lungs.

‘Help … me … to stand, brother,’ Ali whispered, his arm gripping Ahmed’s with a sudden, vice-like strength. ‘Let us … stand … Let us walk … together … into Paradise.’

Agonisingly slowly, the two wounded brothers staggered to their feet. Still clutching their AK47s they stumbled to the nearest window – which had been blasted into a gaping hole the size of a garage door. They reached the opening and it was full of thick, choking fumes that swirled around the ruined building. Obscured by the smoke, each brother held the other steady as they raised their weapons and opened fire. But as soon as they did so, the SBS soldiers up on the fort’s battlements spotted the muzzle flashes among the shadows. In a split second, Mat, Jamie, Sam, Tom and Ruff had readjusted their aim, and half a dozen bullets riddled Ali and Ahmed full of holes. By the time their bloodied bodies hit the floor of the building, Ali, the self-appointed leader of the brothers, and his loyal lieutenant, Ahmed, were dead.

As Ali and Ahmed’s weapons stopped firing, an eerie silence settled over the enemy stronghold. Smoke poured forth from the ruptured building and the bodies of the enemy dead lay where they had fallen among the shattered rubble. As they watched over the ruins through their sniping scopes, the SBS soldiers presumed that the battle for the fort was finally over. But little did they know that down below in the basement there were still scores of surviving brothers. Brothers who had vowed to continue the fight to the last, to kill or be killed, to find their path to Paradise.