1
MAKO 30 WAS LIFTING OFF FROM GARDEZ, AND Slab was planning for what he needed in advance of landing on the peak. On the radio, he told the crew of GRIM-32, “I will need preassault fire. When we are a minute out, you are free to fire on anything you see on that LZ.” He wanted to give Roberts a chance to break away if he was still alive.
As he orbited his gunship over Takur Ghar, working his end of affairs to coordinate the return to the mountain, what D. J. Turner had just heard appalled him. The risk of killing Roberts if he fired, Turner felt, tied his hands. What and when he would shoot was for him alone to decide, anyway. What if Roberts was hiding behind a rock or had burrowed in the snow? Turner felt optimistic about Roberts' chances; indeed, he half expected to hear his voice come up on his radio. The Spectre would give him ample fire when they knew where he was, and not until. Turner did not want his search and rescue mission to turn ugly because he reacted too quickly. If Roberts came up on the radio and said, “Hey, I'm fifty meters away from those twelve or fifteen guys you are looking at,” Turner would open fire. But not until then.
Ian Marr also had a say about the use of the gunship's weapons. He told the crew, “Listen, we don't know who's who down there. Most likely one of them is an American who may be captured or killed, but I am not going to kill him if he's alive.” He recalled hearing talk about the SEAL team climbing the mountain for Roberts. Were the SEALs in the process of making the arduous climb? Could those men on the peak passing the IR strobe actually be the SEAL team, or might it be another special operations team that had come to the lost man's rescue? Marr told Slab that without a positive identification of the people on the peak, the Spectre would not fire its weapons.
Slab argued, “Well, whoever has the strobe when we approach the LZ, that's Roberts.”
Marr told his crew, “I don't think the strobe is a litmus test anymore. Anybody could have it at this point.”
Slab offered another idea: Turner's Spectre could fire on the peak as it approached the LZ, and whoever ran free of the other men would be Roberts.
Marr replied to this, “No, we're still not going to engage. If he fell out of a helicopter, there's a good chance that he's injured and can't run, and if he's captured, he may be restrained, and again not be able to run.”
Slab knew a less nuanced reality. If Roberts was already dead, no amount of gunfire on the peak would change that. If he had been captured, the enemy would not have let him live for long; he'd be dead by now. And if he wasn't dead or captured and was hiding, anything that could be done to distract the enemy could help save his life.
The GRIM-32 crew was too acutely aware of the dangers of loose trigger fingers. There had been some of that already. Two days before, at dawn on Saturday, March 2, Operation Anaconda had begun with a planned aerial bombardment followed by the insertion of the “anvils.” The bombardment fizzled, and when a local Afghani warlord named Zia Lodin and 380 of his Afghan troops, trained by the U.S. Army's 5th Special Operations Group, entered the field of battle as the “hammer,” their transport of clearly marked “Jinga trucks” and pickups bogged down in freezing rain and snow. GRIM-31, with Turner piloting, lost and with a broken navigational computer, mistook the convoy for al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters. An Army Special Forces chief warrant officer named Stanley Harriman, riding with Lodin's troops, could hear the AC-130 describing what they saw. Harriman radioed in a panic, “You are describing us. You're describing us.” A lethal barrage scattered Lodin's troops, terrified them, miraculously killing only two, including Harriman, and wounding fourteen. With good reason to wonder whose side they were fighting on, Lodin's troops fled the battlefield and refused to return for nearly a week, until the battle was all but over. The incident chastened Turner—indeed, every gunship crew flying in Afghanistan—and they drew in their wings, becoming far more circumspect. Slab was faced with the consequences of that now, aboard Razor 04 and approaching the peak.
Turner told Slab, “OK, we do not know the status of the missing person on the ridge; we don't know if he's among those people or hidden nearby. There's going to be a danger of us striking him if we shoot. We just don't put rounds out of the plane willy-nilly. That's not going to happen. Are you sure higher is clearing us to shoot on that ridge?” He told his crew to keep the guns on safe.
Slab needed preassault fire. Roberts needed it, if he was alive. The gunships were meant to support the ground troops, and they were not supporting Slab in any useful way. “Motherfuckers,” he blurted, thinking, If their guns are so accurate, let them prove it now. “Go around,” he told Friel. “I want the fires.”
“No, it isn't going to happen,” Friel replied.
“Go around again,” Slab told him, hoping that by going around they could induce GRIM-32 to cooperate.
There wasn't enough fuel to go around again.
Friel declared a fuel emergency.
Slab realized that the decision had been made for him. He now had no other choice but to land on the peak without preassault fire, which at the very least would have forced the enemy to dig into their bunkers and keep their heads down. He was about to do now exactly what he'd done before on Razor 03—plow into an ambush without the help of the gunships, which had failed him miserably once already and were failing him again, and would do so a further time before the morning light. There was no use in arguing with Turner and his crew. They had made their decision. Slab and Friel had made theirs.
Now that he'd denied Slab, Turner tried to help MAKO 30 in other ways. His crew identified an offset landing zone between 600 and 800 yards to the east and several hundred feet below the peak on a steep and snowy ledge where Friel might be able to get a wheel down and let the team off. However, Friel had already said there was no offset he'd approve of. He saw nothing even remotely workable as an LZ on the mountainside within an approachable distance of the peak. Besides, he was fuel-critical. Slab wanted nothing to do with the offset plan from the start. Climbing to the peak was even less of an option now than before. It was almost daylight. A climb from an offset would take MAKO 30 more than an hour, and in that time Roberts would surely be dead.
As GRIM-32 droned over the mountain, Turner studied the head-up display, an angled, semireflective screen against the cockpit window on his left shoulder that fused all the available sensor data in one place. Through heat signatures, he could see twenty-five people on the peak, who he now had to assume were al-Qaeda. Their numbers changed as more of them moved in and out of shelters, bunkers, crevasses in rocks, and from under tarps. Marr saw the same images in his screen. He said to the crew, “We've been watching these guys for a while now. Two guys have been walking around that rock all night and I know they are bad. Why don't we shoot them?” He was asking because he had to ask. If one person in the crew objected to firing the guns, the trigger was not pulled. Now, upon Marr's request to fire, an officer in the cockpit raised an objection, and the gunship held fire.
Turner discussed with Masirah marking the offset LZ to ensure that Friel knew where to land. The back-of-the-envelope plan that he was developing called for Friel to radio him when he was five minutes out. At that time, Turner would mark the offset LZ with invisible laser light that Friel would be able to see through his NVGs. Once MAKO 30 had departed the helicopter, Friel would fly to the Texaco refueling point, if he felt the helo could make it that far, while Turner would remain on station overhead MAKO 30 to fire on the ground in advance of their climb up from the offset LZ.
After minutes went by with nothing from Friel, Turner called Bagram. “What's the status of that?” he asked. “What time can we expect that to happen?”
“They are now inside one minute out.”
Turner could not reach Friel. The SATCOM radio on his gunship, he said later, inexplicably refused to function. He was forced to relay his communications through a line-of-sight system, and relays had a high potential for errors of interpretation and understanding. This kind of relay through multiple nodes was like the old parlor game of telephone, whispering a single sentence around the dinner table to see how garbled it came out at the end. Turner said that maybe the Air Force was jamming signals to prevent al-Qaeda and Taliban from communicating. Or maybe it was the mountains, or the moonlight, or gremlins in the systems. Or maybe it was what Turner knew from long experience to be a real possibility: that the radio itself had failed. SATCOM radios were unreliable at the best of times. They balked when overloaded with traffic, and Turner rarely had heard such rapid-fire communication on the satellite nets as he had since Roberts had fallen. Or maybe it was that Slab and Friel just weren't listening. They no longer gave a damn what the gunship said. The official explanation was that the radio jinx had spread to Friel's helo, and neither the gunship nor Razor 04 was communicating back and forth, relay or no relay. In fact, they were not hearing each other, like a squabbling married couple fails to hear what the other is saying, because no understanding of what was needed could be reached, the divisions being what they were.
Turner told his crew, “They're holding.”
But they were not holding. Slab was telling Friel to go around again for further reconnaissance of the peak.
Turner relayed to Friel, “Look for the burn east.” The gunship continued to mark the offset LZ. The infrared operator, seated in the enclosed booth in the body of the aircraft, suddenly shouted on the internal radio net, “Holy crap! The helicopter has gone back to the original LZ!” Turner shouted in his radio, as if shouting could help, “Don't bring that helo in there. It's a hot LZ. Hold position, hold position, hot LZ. Stand by for words! Hold off!”
Aboard Razor 04, Friel had already alerted his customers for final approach. The MAKO 30 team members stuck their faces in windows and the two doors, looking down through NVGs for a sign of Roberts and enemy on the peak. Slab peered through the bubble window. Nothing was going on that he could see.
Friel told him, “It ain't going to be good.”
The time was 0458—thirty-one minutes after Roberts had died.