This shot a laser from a lens, at which time the box began to make a cheeping noise, like a bird trapped in a cold oven. The laser was invisible to the naked eye, but it contained a code that corresponded to one programmed in a bomb carried overhead by a waiting plane.
The drop of the bomb was positioned so that it “landed” on top of the laser. The bomb then rode the light beam to its destination. You could move the laser as the bomb dropped and the bomb would follow, redirected in midflight.
This was helpful when “lazing” a truck whose driver had sped away. You could follow the vehicle: the last thing the driver would see was the missile suddenly appearing in the rearview mirror.
At dawn on October 23, Nelson and Dostum started riding from Cobaki to the battlefield across the river, out on the plain.
They traveled down the narrow trail to the valley floor and picked among the river rocks and crossed the river, which split into three separate braids, shallow and fast. Even the river had been mined by the Taliban and they had to be careful where the horses walked. They rode into the shadow of the far valley wall and in the cooler dark along the rocks, with the horses’ hooves grating in the sand and ticking dully over the stones. They were heading south, hunting the trailhead to the top.
After an hour, they started to climb. With them were several of Dostum’s commanders, among them Ak Yasin, leading sixty men on horses, and Ali Sawar, who had watched Nelson and his team step off the helicopter at Dehi four nights earlier. Upon seeing them, Ali had thought, We will win this. We will beat the Taliban. He still felt the same way now. As they rose into the sun, Nelson could feel the heat in the rock wall, and then it started to rain. Light at first and then heavy. The trail turned to mud. The horses started slipping, the pounding of their legs coming up through the saddle as they drove their feet under them. The riding was dangerous as hell. Nelson thought he would fall and roll off the mountain ledge, a drop of several thousand feet.
“Get off your horse and walk,” Dostum scolded.
Nelson insisted that he would keep riding. It would seem embarrassing to walk. It would mean Dostum was a better horseman.
But Dostum was genuinely worried. Several weeks earlier, he had been riding up a mountain pass and his horse had slipped and the general had rolled downhill, catching himself just before he went off a ledge. As he lay on his back, he could hear rocks tumbling down the mountainside. If he had fallen, he knew that his men would be picking up pieces of him for weeks.
Now Chari, the translator and one of Dostum’s aides, begged the general, too, to please stop riding and walk his horse. “You cannot be hurt, General.” Chari thought not even a goat would try climbing this trail. “Who will lead us if you are hurt?”
“My body is not worth more than yours.” Dostum was glad for the concern of his men. As a matter of habit he absorbed such adoration gladly and took it as a sign of loyalty.
Chari was a chubby man of thirty-six, with a neatly trimmed mustache. He had worried that the Americans would not be able to ride horses and fretted that some of them hadn’t even known how to get on one. He had been fighting alongside Dostum for twenty-three years, and in the three years since the Taliban captured Mazari-Sharif, Chari had seen over thirty of his friends lose arms and legs in battle and to land mines. Now his life was in the Americans’ hands and he had vowed that he would help them succeed. Captain Nelson, he felt, was like a brother to him.
For his part, Nelson took notice of the fact that Dostum was scolding him like a father and worried for his safety. Ever since their arrival, Nelson had been sleeping with a pistol under his sleeping bag, just in case. Maybe the old man could be trusted. Maybe. Nelson didn’t ponder this for long. Trust no one.
He was riding behind Dostum when his horse slipped on the trail. It reared on its hind legs and paddled the air and tipped and Nelson was thrown. He hit the ground and rolled, taking care that he was clear of the horse if it was tumbling toward him. It wasn’t. He watched it flail and finally right itself. Nelson stood, brushed off his pants, pulled his cap right, and walked back to the horse, determined to get back on.
The horse stood with its chest plate of muscles shaking. Nelson talked slowly and reassuringly. He cocked his head. Above, from higher on the mountain, came the sound of wailing.
Nelson could look up and see a line of men on horses moving up the trail. At the top, on the rim, he saw specks, more men, moving around, milling, preparing for the fight. Nelson remounted and they resumed their climb.
As they rose higher, they heard the steady boom of an artillery gun. Dostum told him it was being fired by the mayor of a nearby village, who was lobbing shells at the Taliban line, randomly, but enough to distract the Taliban from the approach of Dostum’s men up the cliff.
“Hurry, we must keep moving,” said Dostum. He wanted to get to the top quickly.
He was worried that the Taliban would find them. They would come at them with their old Russian fighter jets and shoot them like flies.
The wailing grew and Nelson and Dostum soon passed men headed down the trail, the wounded and the dazed, vacant-eyed men coming back from the battlefield to the Alamo. They stumbled along. Some passed silent as statues, faces stitched tight in masks. Others whimpered like babies.
Dostum leaned from his saddle and saw a man groaning in the pouch of a coarse, rank blanket that was held tight at its corners by four straining men. The soldier’s skull was cracked open. He rolled his head to the side and Dostum could see the brain, gleaming white, and then he rolled back and he looked just fine.
They came out on top of the valley with the plain spread beneath them in all directions. The day before, Dostum had gotten on the radio and put out the word that any man who could fight the Taliban should come to this place and be prepared to die.
Now there were some 600 men on horses and on foot moving out onto the plain, readying for battle. They remained screened from the Taliban’s view by the hills. Dostum couldn’t believe his luck that they hadn’t been discovered. The enemy was just a half mile away. He and Nelson rode several hundred yards to a rock promontory and beheld the spectacle.
Using his radio, the excited general began directing traffic. First, 100 riders lined up behind the first hill. And then a second hundred on foot positioned themselves behind the second hill. Soon they were spread in six lines behind six hills, the horses rearing, the men shouting, cracking whips. The dust they raised drifted above the battlefield, and Nelson wondered if the Taliban could see it.
He glassed their position. Three tanks in waiting. And two ZSU-23s, one on each end of the Taliban line, which stretched about the length of a football field. The Zeuses had given them hell the day before. They had to take those out. Nelson guessed there were about 1,000 Taliban dug into the trenches, armed with RPGs, AK-47s, and mortars.
He realized that the Taliban had reinforced themselves and that this was going to be a bigger fight than yesterday’s. Dostum’s men would have to swarm the Taliban line; but if they paused, they’d be chopped down by the increased volume of fire. They had to make the Taliban break their position and flee. They had to attack the armor and disable it. They had to do what seemed impossible.
“We are in a good position,” Dostum assured him. “Because if we can break them out of here, they will have to run. And they will keep running all the way to Mazar-i-Sharif.”
“Also,” he added, “after yesterday’s bombing, their morale is low.”
Fakir, Dostum’s senior leader and most trusted confidant, had sent scouts ahead at night to probe the Taliban positions. By intercepting their radio calls, he had learned that they were terrified. They were afraid to sleep at night for fear of attack.
Dostum was delighted by the news. There was an old saying in Afghanistan: Death comes at any time, on the street, in a war zone. You never know. If today was the day, so be it. He was ready.
And with a man like Fakir at his side, how could he go wrong? They had been fighting together for fourteen yea
rs. Bearded, with piercing brown eyes and a wry smile, Fakir was from Dostum’s hometown, Sheberghan, a dusty city clotted with gas wells and lashed by lonesome winds slicing off the steppe.
It was now midafternoon. In several hours, the plain would be dark. Dostum said they would start the battle soon.
CIA officers Mike Spann and Dave Olson were standing nearby on a rock outcropping of their own, overlooking the battlefield. Standing down below in the stiff grass was J.J. Mike was holding their three horses.
One of Dostum’s men rode up, a thin, excited fellow in riding boots and a green field jacket. He announced that the attack would begin any minute. And that they should be ready. And then he galloped away.
J.J. asked his two friends if they were ready.
They said they were.
The CIA officers had spent the past days sending so many e-mails back to K2 and Langley, and attending so many meetings with warlords, arranging alliances, that one of their Afghan counterparts thought they might be glorified clerks. “I have these Americans with me,” he had remarked, “but I don’t think they’re soldiers. They spend all their time with laptops.”
Now they were going to prove otherwise.
To pass the time at the Alamo, Spann had followed a nightly ritual of fifty push-ups and sit-ups before bed, followed by twenty minutes of Bible reading. After that, he wrote in his diary, in which he recorded the comings and goings of a mouse he had befriended, and whose antics he reveled in recording for his children, and wife, Shannon, back home in Virginia.
To Shannon, he had written that he wished he could see her so they could slow-dance to a favorite song.
“One thing has troubled me,” he wrote. “I’m not afraid of dying, but I have a terrible fear of not being with you and our son…I think about holding you and touching you. I also think about holding that round boy of ours…. It would be cool to have a slow dance with you…”
Now came the sound of the artillery gun starting the fight.
Nelson had been setting up the satellite antenna while Vern Michaels unpacked the heavy radio when they heard the gun. Nelson would give the order to drop the first bomb. He had already radioed the target coordinates of the Taliban line to a fighter jet overhead. With him was weapons specialist Charles Jones, who had arrived in time for the battle from base camp in the river valley. It was Jones’s job to stick with Nelson as they rode into battle while Michaels manned the radios.
Nelson said goodbye to Michaels and turned his horse to follow Dostum. Dressed in khaki pants and black coat, a blue turban wrapped atop his head, Dostum sat upright as he glided smartly in the saddle onto the field.
Nelson felt his heart pound in his chest.
He and Dostum pulled up their horses beside J.J., Spann, and Olson.
J.J. was carrying a Browning 9mm pistol in a holster on his right thigh and an AK-47 on a strap around his neck, hanging down within easy reach. A pouch stuffed with ammunition was slung over his shoulder. He was dressed in jeans and hiking boots from L.L. Bean; a knit cap was pulled down over his ears. Spann was sitting on a white horse that was too small for him. He was dressed in jeans, black T-shirt, and a gray overshirt with a pair of binoculars in the large front pocket.
Dostum explained the battle plan. The horsemen would charge the middle, the infantry would attack the flanks, and machine guns set on adjoining hills would spray covering fire.
“Come, let’s follow the attack,” Dostum said.
Spann, Olson, and J.J. looked at each other. Was the general serious?
And then Dostum spoke into the radio: “Charge!”
A wave of horsemen climbed the back side of the first hill, crested it, and rode down it, quickly picking up speed.
Before them lay a half mile of ground folded into hills. At the end lay the Taliban guns, eerily silent.
And then they opened up.
Mortars started dropping around the horsemen, sending up fountains of red dirt. Rocket-propelled grenades whizzed upward as the Taliban tried timing their impact with the arrival of the Afghans on the crest of each hill. They were missing, for now.
Dostum kicked his horse and broke into a gallop. Nelson and Jones followed, with the three CIA officers behind.
Nelson didn’t know exactly where Dostum was going, but he wanted to follow. He figured the old man would ride several hundred yards, over two or three hilltops, and watch the battle from this better vantage point.
As he rode, Nelson saw men topple in their saddles, punched by rifle fire. He heard the pop and whine of rounds passing by his head. He got on the radio and called back to Michaels.
“Drop the bombs now,” he said. He wanted to time the strike so the bombs hit before the horsemen arrived.
Ahead, the horsemen charged the middle of the line, about 600 yards away. The men on foot trotted behind, grimacing, gripping their rifles and RPG tubes, ducking whenever they heard an explosion or the whine of a passing bullet.
Nelson looked up just as the Taliban line exploded. The bombs from the jet overhead smashed near the tanks and also destroyed one of the ZSU-23s. Dostum’s men let out a cheer and quickened their pace.
As he rode, J.J. started passing Taliban fighters who had been hiding in the grass. They jumped up shooting, and J.J. spun in his saddle, firing his AK. Spann came upon a Taliban who was running away, back to his line, when suddenly the soldier turned and took aim. Spann shot the man in the head.
Nelson rode past dead and dying men, the air misting with the iron scent of blood, the burnt sting of gunpowder. Smoke hovered above the field. The charging horsemen raised their RPG tubes and fired at the Taliban. The explosions rocked them in their saddles.
Up ahead, Nelson could see the Taliban line breaking in places. Here and there, like a sand wall crumbling. Nelson was amazed when he saw that some of the Taliban were running toward Dostum’s men, their hands held high in surrender.
He was equally surprised when they started falling face-forward, dead, in the dirt. He would later learn that they had been shot in the back by their commanders still on the line.
Dostum reined his horse and cut across the field to its right flank, then pulled up and stopped. The general did not like what he was seeing. The Taliban had dialed the range on their remaining ZSU-23. The rapid banging of the antiaircraft gun hurled through the Afghan line. Men blew apart in their saddles and were lifted off the ground as they walked, cut in two.
Of the 600 men who had started the charge, Nelson guessed that maybe there were 300 still in the fight. The remainder had been wounded, killed, or had scattered. And Dostum’s men were close, within striking distance for victory. One last hill separated them from the Taliban, about 100 yards. But Nelson sensed they were losing momentum.
The horsemen halted, uncertain what to do, trapped by gunfire. Some of them jumped from their saddles and crouched at the feet of their nervous horses, trying to make themselves smaller targets.
Dostum was furious. “We are losing!” he said. He yelled into his radio: “Attack! Attack!”
His men did not move. Nelson watched as Dostum leaped from his horse, reached into a saddlebag, and retrieved several magazines of ammunition for his AK-47. And then he started to run.
Straight down the hill toward the Taliban line.
Worried for his safety, one of Dostum’s men ordered Spann, Olson, and J.J., as well as about fifteen Afghans, to form a perimeter around the rear of the general’s advance.
Nelson watched Dostum as he ran. He was running and firing at the Taliban line. Nelson expected Dostum to drop at any moment, fatally wounded. He watched him halt to change magazines and start running again. He was passing by his own men, who looked up amazed and, finally, embarrassed. They mounted their horses or took off on foot, forming a line with their general, the horsemen firing over the horses’ heads and racing on. Nelson could feel the battlefield swell. It had taken on new life.
“What do we do?” asked Jones.
“We gotta go with him,” said Nels
on. “If he gets killed, we’re in a world of hurt.”
They rode down the hill but pulled up before they got too close to the Taliban line. Nelson watched as the Afghans coalesced as a smoky swarm, bristling with gun barrels, flashing with explosions. They descended on the Taliban line with a roar. Nelson gazed in awe.
Dostum’s men attacked the Zeus and killed its terrified gunners. The remaining Taliban threw down their weapons and ran. They were shot unless they surrendered first.
On the hill, one Afghan soldier reached to the ground with a knife and made a swift sawing motion.
He stood and thrust aloft a head, the head of a Taliban soldier, swinging by a fistful of black hair, a dripping pendulum, as the sun drained from the day.
They had won.
As the battle raged, Dean back at K2 in Uzbekistan was listening to the action on a radio. Communications officer Brian Lyle had set it up on a lark on a plywood table, wondering if he could even tune into anything. He was dialing through the frequencies when he heard the sound of gunfire and excited American voices calling in bomb strikes. They all stepped closer to the table.
There were twelve of them, men in their thirties and forties in rough beards, and since leaving Fort Campbell three weeks earlier, it had been a trying vigil for Dean wondering if he would get into the fight. When he learned that Nelson had gone first, his heart sank, a feeling he hid from his friend. Dean and Nelson had been groomsmen at each other’s wedding, and before that they’d suffered through Ranger School together, and had been roommates during various other schools the Army had put them through to make them elite soldiers.
Earlier in the month, back at K2, they’d been forbidden to fraternize as they awaited their missions, and Dean had been dying to talk to his buddy about his upcoming assignment.
One day, Dean walked up to Nelson as he was standing at one of the “piss tubes,” open-air camp urinals made of plastic pipe, one end buried in the ground and the other stuck up at waist height.