1
FIVE DAYS AFTER THE BATTLE, SLAB HAD JUST FINISHED breakfast—it was just after 0830—and was hanging out in his tent in the forecourt of the mud fort at Gardez when a call came in. A roving Predator was spying on a convoy of SUVs. It was moving swiftly along dirt roads from the Shah-i-Kot toward the Pakistani border. This in itself was plenty to set off Task Force 11's alarms; these few days after Anaconda would have created enough breathing space for a high-value target to escape Afghanistan. The risk of a convoy traveling in daylight signified a certain urgency, and besides, the Predator was identifying a security force rolling with the SUVs, which was typical of the way that bin Laden and his top lieutenants traveled the backcountry. As always, the problem was intercepting them; as the crow flies, the border was no more than 5 miles away, but the biggest imponderable was always whether they could reach them in time.
Slab ran for a truck to take him, Randy, and Kyle to the flight line. This was their mission, after the detour of the fight on Takur Ghar, with the loss and pain of that day, and Slab was ready to rumble, if for no other reason than, as he told it, “to get his head back in the game.” He was mindful that Task Force 11 had spun up many times before in anticipation, and each time they had returned to Bagram with empty hands, in some instances not even sighting what they'd hoped to destroy.
Three Chinooks of the 160th SOAR were waiting with their rotors spinning, along with two MH-60 Black Hawks, to carry a QRF of Rangers as a blocking and security force. They were told the code name for the mission was Wolverine.
After taking off, the Predator vectored them in, and from a distance they could see, without being seen, what the convoy consisted of—two SUVs and one accompanying pickup truck. The helos sheered off and flew away to orbit out of sight when the convoy suddenly halted at a grouping of huts by the roadside. The SEALs aboard the helos preferred to catch them in the open and on the road, and they waited while the al-Qaeda fighters entered the houses, possibly for food or tea. They were not long, and soon the hunt was on.
The helos came up on the convoy from behind, flying down on the vehicles at full speed no more than 50 feet overhead. The first Chinook's mini gunners in the side doors and the ramp gunner with an M-60 opened up, and the strafing stopped the vehicles in a line. There was a white Toyota 4Runner and a red one, plus a white Toyota pickup truck crowded with nineteen men bristling with RPGs, AK-47s, and hand grenades. As the helos turned to come back around, the al-Qaeda fighters scrambled out of the vehicles and ran for cover, some toward a dry creek bed with a low bank for protection.
They were fleeing along terrain that would not be to their advantage if the helos returned. Indeed, it would have made a perfect ambush on a road that doglegged over a dry creek. They ran into the creek below a gentle rise on one side sloping downward into low ground. Dressed in traditional Arab garb, long shirts and pants, they huddled against the bank, aiming their weapons at a rise about 50 feet away.
Unseen by the enemy, the three Chinooks touched down in two defilades to let off their shooters.
When he ran off the Chinook's ramp, Slab was carrying his SR-25 high-powered sniper rifle. He went up the incline to just under its crest and got down on his belly, crawling the final yards. When he looked over and down, what he saw nearly made his heart leap. About 150 feet in front of him sat the two SUVs. The other Chinooks had landed to his left, and their teams ran up another rise, looking down on the creek bed and the pickup truck. Lying beside Slab were Kyle and Randy and “mobility guys” with heavy machine guns. Slab leveled his rifle's sights on one al-Qaeda fighter who had waited too long to leave his vehicle. He killed him with a single shot.
Now, other enemy fighters began bailing out and dashing away, while still others struggled just to get out and raise their weapons. One was shot in the driver's seat and fell to the ground.
Next to Slab on his belly, Kyle could express his view no better than by saying, “Phwoww.”
Slab shot two more fighters scrambling out of the two cars. Another one was loading an RPG in the back of the 4Runner. The driver of the lead 4Runner fell out of his door.
In less than five minutes, all nineteen were dead.
Slab ran down the hill. For the most part, he was looking at the bodies of ginger-haired Chechens, some Uzbeks, and a few Arab Afghans, certainly all al-Qaeda fighters. One man was wearing a woman's burka and jewelry, and one carried hand grenades on straps under his arms. Searching their SUVs and the truck, the SEALs later found a Ranger's flash suppressor, grenades from a manufacturing lot that was traced back to the Rangers on Takur Ghar, and a white Garmin GPS with Gordon stenciled on it that one of helo crewmen on Takur Ghar had lost, Gordon being a reference to the name of an earlier task force.
When the time came, they piled back aboard the Chinooks and headed for Gardez. They could not help but characterize Wolverine as some kind of “payback” for what had happened, but it wasn't that, no matter what they said.
Some months later, after Slab had returned to America, he was sitting in the warm air of the Florida Gulf, outside a steak house named Ruth's Chris, sipping a Crown and Coke with ice. As he was telling this story about Wolverine in a quiet voice, several SUVs drove up to let out passengers, who included numbers of men Slab's age, sleek civilians who behaved and looked like they were Masters of the Universe. A swagger and studied indifference suggested a self-assurance born of success, which was clearly their measure of combat and their victory; they knew how to order filet mignon and single malts and fire up Cohibas with the polish of practice. Their brush with shooting war had occurred not far away, at the Cineplex. Of course, their gaze went right past Slab on the bench in a muted buttondown shirt and khakis. A companion said to him, “You know, they'd like to be you, these men, to do what you do. They compensate by eating steaks and talking sports and making money.”
Slab stared back with a look of complete incomprehension, as if to say, Why would anyone want to be me?