4
AFTER THE FALL, ROBERTS HAD PICKED HIMSELF off the snow. He slogged forward with his heavy gear, firing uphill with his SAW. The snow tugged at his boots, and its crust and uneven depths made him stumble. The sound of his gun certainly drowned out the noise of the Razor 03's turbines returning for him. He was likely running up the slope to reach a point on the ridge where he presumed Mack would come back to pick him up on the fly. He was laying down suppressing fire to assist the helo's safe return. He probably tried to call the helo through his MBITR radio hooked in his ear, its small boom mike near the edge of his mouth, but he could not have known that Mack's radios did not work.
When the Chinook, feet over his head, had scraped off the northern ridge and disappeared into the valley below, Roberts was left alone, with his gun, grenades, and automatic pistol. He had nothing else now to rely on for his life but his own ingenuity and luck. He probably (but not certainly) triggered his IR strobe to lead his rescuers back to him, knowing they would come. He had reached a low rock outcrop on the peak near a dwarf pine tree when he was struck. He fell between the tree and a bunker, later identified as bunker #1, only feet to the east of a low outcrop. He was bleeding. Blood spewed into the receiver mechanism of his SAW, and this caused a bullet to jam in the chamber, rendering the machine gun useless. He lay in the dark in a narrow space between that low rock outcrop and bunker #1. He could not move and probably was dying from loss of blood, if he was not already dead.
Only minutes after Roberts was wounded, the al-Qaeda fighters emerged from bunker #1 and a second bunker, identified as bunker #2, about a dozen feet behind the first, guarding the mountain's northern and eastern approaches. They came out of hiding under tarps in a tented command and control compound fifty yards to the west on the edge of a sheer cliff, and from across the open saddle, anchored 100 yards to the southeast by a huge rock outcrop. In the dark, without NVGs, the enemy fighters could not have known if the helo had dropped off a number of Americans who might now be waiting to ambush them.
In a short time, they discovered Roberts. If he was still alive, he did not shoot his SIG Sauer. Indeed, his fully loaded pistol remained in its holster, indicating that his wounds were grievous, or that he was unconscious or already dead. If Roberts was still alive—and nobody except the enemy fighters on the peak was close enough to him to have known his condition—he could not have prepared himself for what was to come. A separation as mental as it was physical formed an enemy in soldiers' minds as an abstraction. That was how Roberts must have hoped they would remain. His enemies were targets at the far end of a laser on his SAW; adversaries were distant figures on a ridge that a 2,000-pound smart bomb, dropped from 40,000 feet, atomized in a flash of light and a blast of sound. Until now, his enemy was a charred hunk of flesh torn beyond recognition as anything human. Or he was a face as seen on the TV news. He appeared in nightmares. He was all of these images, but he was not another human being.
A Chechen approached him who seemed to be in charge. He pointed the muzzle of an AK-47 at Roberts' head. And if Roberts was still alive, the Chechen executed him with a single bullet. If he wasn't alive, then the shot was meant as a “security round” to guarantee that he was indeed dead. The local time was 0427.
Before leaving home for Afghanistan, Roberts had jotted down a few thoughts and sealed them in an envelope to be opened only if he did not return. “I consider myself blessed with the best things a man could ever hope for. My childhood is something I'll always treasure. My family is the reason I'm the person I am today. . . . My time in the Teams was special. For all the times I was cold, wet, tired, sore, scared, hungry and angry, I had a blast. . . . All the times spent in the company of my teammates was when I felt the closest to the men I had the privilege to work with. I loved being a SEAL. If I died doing something for the Teams, then I died doing what made me happy. Very few people have the luxury of that.”
Now, the Chechen who had shot Roberts from close range bent down and straddled his body. He drew a blade and tried to decapitate him, cutting his throat to the bone. He bent over his body for two minutes, searching him. He found the strobe, which he handed to other fighters gathering around. Then he disappeared into bunker #2.
The other enemy fighters casually shook out Roberts' heavy ruck on the snow. They passed the strobe from hand to hand, perhaps without knowing its nature. One put on Roberts' black woolen watch cap. Another dressed in an extra pair of Gore-Tex BDUs. Another one, a Chechen as well, finally dragged the ruck and what contents remained, along with Roberts' helmet, across the snow nearly 100 yards down the saddle to a rock sleeping shelter lined with blankets, a few yards from a rustic mountain mosque that was nothing more than an arrow on a rock pointing to Mecca.
The other enemy fighters split up, with the excitement over for now. Some returned to the cliffside command and control shelters, others to the two bunkers beside the low rock outcrop, others to the DShK machine gun emplacement, and still others to an area to the immediate west of the bunkers under a pine tree, on which a decapitated goat carcass hung, where there was a camp kitchen with a gasoline stove and a shelter for the donkey. Some departed the peak altogether. Enough time elapsed for them to believe that the night was finished and the Americans would not return for their dead.
Watching the Predator feeds, what they imagined they saw horrified commanders at Bagram, Masirah, and Tampa, and set the wheels of imagination turning. Interpreting green blobs, they saw that Roberts was executed, as well he might have been. Their firsthand sight of the events excited emotions that would not subside for some time to come. Everyone wanted revenge. They wanted payback as much as they wanted to bring Roberts home. And they still needed to take control of Takur Ghar.