Mag’s vehicle pulled up to the berm just as Amerine disappeared over it. He climbed up the embankment to see Amerine and the guerrillas running forward despite the gunfire ringing through the air. What in the hell does the captain think he’s wearing? thought Mag. Bulletproof everything?
As Amerine ran, he grabbed three guerrillas and diverted them to their left toward the hill, where he was certain he’d shot the Taliban with the RPG. He was motioning for them to get up there when he saw an old man walking slowly and deliberately toward the body of the Taliban whom Amerine had shot.
The AK-47 was in the dirt in front of the body, and Amerine moved forward, grabbed the weapon, and tossed it to a guerrilla behind him. The older man did not hesitate in his stride. He kneeled down, pulled the limp body onto its back, scooped his hands under what Amerine now saw was a teenager, and carried him back to the town. Amerine continued to watch over his shoulder as he began to climb up the berm, pausing when the man pushed open a door painted turquoise and disappeared into a building.
Most of the guerrillas had followed Seylaab, with Bashir just behind, into the streets of Shawali Kowt. When bursts of AK-47 fire echoed off the walls of the buildings, Amerine knew he had no hope of keeping control of the guerrillas; he needed to bring forward more fighters from Karzai’s position in Damana, set up a command post, and clear and occupy the town.
Amerine ran to the top of the berm, crouching beside Mike, whose truck was now parked below.
“What the hell happened to you?” Mike said when he saw the blood drying on the bridge of the captain’s nose and smeared down his cheekbones.
“Not sure,” said Amerine, wiping at his nose. He looked at the smudges on his fingers, which were numb with adrenaline.
More guerrillas streamed over the berm and headed into town, where gunfire could now be heard to the south near the river. Out of breath, JD and his split team joined Amerine and Mike.
“Where in hell did you come from?” Mike asked.
“There was a lot of panic on the radio, sir,” JD said to Amerine. “I know you said not to come forward unless you requested, but it sounded like you guys were in the shit. Did you get that fucker with the RPG?”
“I think so. Those are our guerrillas out there now.” Amerine pointed at the hill.
“Over there?” Mike said. “That’s a couple hundred yards.”
“Looks like good real estate,” said JD.
At the base of the embankment, Alex shouted up from the bed of the truck where he was working his radio, “Standing by with air!”
“Looks like we spooked them,” said Mike.
“For now,” said Amerine. “Let’s get out to that hill.”
The hill that had been occupied by the Taliban with the RPG rose twenty feet above the barren terrain sixty-five yards east of Shawali Kowt, a lone, elongated lump—like a whale surfacing from the desert floor—forty yards long and fifteen yards across at its widest spot. It was tallest and widest at the “head,” which faced northwest, toward town, as if the whale were swimming away, at a sharp angle from the Arghandab River, and tapered in both height and width toward the “tail.” A mortar pit surrounded by a low earthen wall was located where the blowhole would be on a whale’s head—a position the team suspected the Soviets had once occupied to lob mortars at the Pashtun Mujahideen. The hill was scarred with foxholes, shallow trenches, and the crumbling mud walls of a structure that had seen centuries of war.
This, the highest point in the immediate area, offered the best perspective of Shawali Kowt and the orchards and fields that began eighty yards to the south and stretched half a mile to the river, which flowed from east to west. Along the near side of the river, a quarter of a mile to the east, the men could see a small village that appeared to be deserted.
A half mile downstream to the west, about half the distance to the modern concrete-and-steel bridge, more than a hundred Taliban kicked up dust as they climbed the far bank of the dry riverbed and escaped to the other side.
Bashir, Seylaab, and thirty other guerrillas had flushed the Taliban out of the orchards and forced them across the river. The guerrillas were still firing their AK-47s from the trees.
“There’s a cluster of them regrouping!” Mike yelled.
“We’ve got air, sir,” Alex said. Amerine took a quick head count. His entire team was now either on the whale hill, on the berm, or with the trucks parked below it. Bari Gul, who had driven from Damana, was walking toward the hill; his guerrillas had parked in a semicircle beyond the team trucks and were covering their rear and eastern flank.
“We’ve got a vehicle,” Mag said. Raising his binoculars, Amerine saw a green sedan tearing down the road paralleling the opposite bank, approaching the fleeing Taliban from the direction of the bridge. It stopped next to a group of them.
“Put a bomb on that fucking thing,” said Amerine.
Alex talked an F-18 onto the vehicle. “Weapon away,” he said.
Despite the language barrier, Bari Gul understood what was about to happen and began to shout out one of the few English words the Americans had heard him utter: “Taxi! Taxi!” He frantically pointed at the vehicle. “Taxi! Taxi!”
Amerine looked again. The Taliban were gathering around the car, which had a small sign on the door he had missed before. “Shit!” he said, turning to Alex. “Anything you can do about it?”
“I’ll try,” said Alex, who calmly radioed the F-18. “Pilot’s walking it away,” he told Amerine seconds later.
The pilot, controlling the 500-pound laser-guided bomb, moved the crosshairs of his targeting system a fraction to the north and the bomb exploded harmlessly in the dry riverbed with a teeth-rattling boom. As soon as it hit, six Taliban poured out of the taxi even while the mob of men continued to crowd around it.
“They’re armed,” Mike said.
“Reengage.” Amerine gave the order to Alex, then told JD to send SITREPs to Task Force Dagger and to Fox, who he assumed was back in Damana. “And let Hamid know what’s going on. Then get our guerrillas into a perimeter on this hill.”
“Roger that. Wait a minute,” said JD. “You can tell Fox yourself. He’s here.”
“What?!” said Amerine. “Who the fuck is with Hamid?”
Fox, Bolduc, and Smith had parked their truck at the base of the hill and were running up it. Shaking his head, Amerine peered back through his binoculars in time to see the taxi blow up in a black cloud. The remaining Taliban scattered into the orchards and fields across the river.
Amerine turned his attention to the bridge. Taking and controlling both sides of the structure would require a complex plan, and Amerine wasn’t sure the guerrillas were capable of carrying it out. Then he noticed a prominent hill topped with the crumbling ruins of a fort rising from the fields two hundred yards northeast of the bridge, on their side of the river. It was the perfect overlook. From there, ODA 574 would be able to control the bridge—the next best thing to seizing it.
“Hey, sir,” Amerine said to Fox, who was now standing beside him, “there’s our bridge.”
Fox lifted his binoculars.
“Our guerrillas are too scattered to get to it before dark,” said Amerine. “I’m going to consolidate here and attack it tomorrow.”
“There are some people on the hill,” said Dan. “You gonna take a leader’s recon out there?” He raised his eyebrows up and down rapidly.
“I think we can see all we need to know from here.”
“Should we drop something on it?” asked Alex.
“Can’t really tell who’s on it,” said Amerine. “I don’t see any weapons. Besides, we need to occupy those ruins. We don’t want any unexploded ordnance sitting around.”
On top of the hill shaped like a whale, JD placed the team in a security perimeter, starting at the higher and wider western end and working his way east. The circular mortar pit became the command post, the earth inside of it stained with the blood of the RPG-firing Afghan that Amerine had shot.
Awaiting orders, the guerrillas, including Bashir and his men, were sitting in small groups between the hill and the berm. Nobody had seen Seylaab since he’d led the charge into town, so the Americans could barely communicate with the Afghans.
“Get a perimeter around this hill with Bari Gul’s men,” Amerine told JD. “We’ll be staying here tonight. I’m going to run over and see if those guerrillas know where Seylaab went.”
“We’ll co-locate our command post with yours,” said Fox.
“You aren’t heading back to Damana to be with Hamid?”
“No, I think we need to be out here.”
“Okay, sir.” Amerine walked out of the mortar pit with JD.
“So, they’re staying?” said JD.
“Yeah,” said Amerine. “I think we need to do what you suggested back in Petawek and establish a liaison with Hamid again. If they aren’t going to do it, we will.”
“But tomorrow we have to take the bridge,” said JD. “That’s going to require the whole team.”
“Once we’re in control of the bridge, we’ll send Dan and Mag up north to be our link to Hamid. Now I need to find our interpreter so we can tell all these guerrillas what we’re planning to do.”
A truck with some of Casper’s men pulled up to the north side of the hill, while Amerine headed in the direction of the nearest building, where several familiar guerrillas had gathered. Seylaab was not among them, so he moved to another group seated along a wall and repeated Seylaab’s name until a man stood and pointed toward the center of town.
Okay, thought Amerine, Seylaab is playing Rambo. Hopefully he’ll remember he’s our interpreter and get his ass back here before dark.
As he turned back toward the hill, an impulse drew him to the spot where the Taliban had fallen, the lone teenager charging from town that Amerine had shot. Amerine numbly watched some guerrillas pick up blood-covered rocks and put them in their ammo pouches for souvenirs. He needed no physical token to remember this brief battle, which was already replaying itself in his mind.
“Hey, Captain!”
Zepeda came around the corner of the building and stopped a few yards from the stain on the ground where the young Taliban had fallen. “Not the best idea being out here alone.”
“I was looking for my interpreter,” said Amerine, heading back toward the hill with the spook.
“Heard you shot someone on that hill over there,” Zepeda said.
Amerine nodded. And also a teenager he kept to himself.
“Your guys are claiming it was a two-hundred-or three-hundred-yard shot,” Zepeda said as they crossed the street where Amerine had fired on the large group of Taliban. “Jesus, lot of blood down here too. How many guys did you shoot?”
“Not sure. Turned them around, though.”
At the top of the hill they found another of Casper’s men named Mr. Big talking with Ronnie and Mag near a sticky-looking puddle inside the mortar pit.
“It goes this way,” said Mag, following streaks of blood that headed off the backside of the hill and toward the river. “Looks like his buddies dragged him into those orchards.”
“Welcome to the club,” Mr. Big said quietly to Amerine, who gave him a puzzled look.
“The man-killer’s club.” He winked and slapped Amerine roughly on the shoulder.
Unsure how he felt about being a member of this particular “club,” Amerine went to check the perimeter, taking stock of the fortifications on the northern side of the hill. At the far end, Bari Gul was standing with his guerrillas and some locals, staring at the seemingly deserted village along the river to the east.
“Taliban,” said Bari Gul, pointing to the village. Then, to convey the number, he stabbed the air repeatedly: “Taliban, Taliban, Taliban, Taliban, Taliban.”
Amerine nodded. “I get it; many Taliban.”
Using binoculars and hand motions, Bari Gul singled out a compound with a large building inside. He pantomimed bombs dropping from the sky.
Karzai had warned Amerine about Afghan-style retribution, that they would gladly bomb everything in sight to settle old scores. While Amerine was confident he could rely on Bari Gul in battle, he didn’t know if he could trust his judgment in this situation, especially since he seemed to be getting his intelligence from locals Amerine didn’t recognize. He would have to check with Karzai.
“No bombs,” he said, shaking his head.
Just before dusk, an excited Seylaab returned to the hill and recounted his adventure to Amerine: of chasing the Taliban through the streets, of capturing a Taliban flag as a gift for Karzai, of chasing them into the orchards with Bashir and his men. At this point, he began to make sounds like gunfire, then rattled off the rest of what must have been a hell of a story—in Pashto.
Amerine let him finish before steering him over to Bari Gul’s position, where he was watching the village to the east; people had been spotted occasionally walking between the buildings. After fifteen minutes of Seylaab’s interpreting, it became clear to Amerine that the building they wanted to bomb had been a Taliban refuge, but Bari Gul’s men couldn’t agree on whether that was last month, last week, or yesterday. Still, Bari Gul and the locals wanted it bombed.
Again Amerine refused, telling Bari Gul that unless they could visually identify armed men or believed the building to harbor an immediate threat, they would have to wait until he discussed it with Karzai.
By dusk, half of the three hundred guerrillas had come forward to Shawali Kowt, leaving the other half with Karzai and the spooks in Damana. Trucks were, as usual, parked haphazardly everywhere. Between the vehicles, these Afghans sat in large circles, laughing and at ease, occasionally firing off bursts of celebratory gunfire to punctuate their revelry.
Fox and Bolduc settled into ODA 574’s command post in the mortar pit, telling Amerine that they were “coordinating with the CIA” to handle Karzai. Meanwhile, Smith had backed his truck up to the nearest building—a deserted medical clinic—which JD had designated as the team’s sleeping quarters, and was unloading his radio equipment.
Anticipating a counterattack, Amerine set security at 50 percent, and JD and half of the team headed down to the medical clinic to get some sleep. Amerine watched them cross the hundred yards of open ground, smiling when he saw that the pole from which the white Taliban flag had been hung was now flying the flag of Afghanistan. At 6:30 P.M. it was dark enough for the rest of ODA 574 on the hill to don their NODs and hunker down into the fighting positions they’d chosen to cover their assigned zones. Mag put his go-to-hell pack in a shallow trench facing the river, checked his weapon, and, before sitting down, trotted a few yards away to investigate a shadow he’d noticed two-thirds of the way down the slope.
“We’ve got a bunker over here!” he called out to Amerine.
“How the hell did we miss this?” Amerine said, joining Mag. He stared at the opening of what looked like a cave just below the trench line marking their security perimeter.
“It doesn’t look like it can go very deep,” said Mag.
“You want to lead or cover?”
“I’ll cover you, sir,” Mag said with a smile.
They walked down to the large opening and, without making a sound, turned on the lasers mounted on their carbines. Mag knelt on the slope above, while Amerine crouched on one side of the entrance, which was a couple of feet wide and high enough to allow him to walk upright, his beam lighting the interior earthen walls in an infrared glow.
Cautiously, Amerine peeked around the corner and scanned the recess fully, his laser tracking quickly from one side of the bunker to the other. The small space was empty, except for a beat-up carpet on the dirt floor. Calling out “All clear,” he entered the bunker. Mag followed.
On cue, three of Bari Gul’s men came in behind them, carrying blankets and flashlights that blinded Amerine and Mag, who quickly pulled off their NODs. The Afghans smiled at the Americans.
“Guess they found a home for the night,” said Mag.
&nb
sp; With half of ODA 574 asleep in the next room, Smith worked by the glow of his open laptop to orient the satellite antenna out the open window of the clinic and into the night sky. When the computer was dialed in, he sat back in a folding chair and surveyed his work space. His M4 carbine was propped up against the wall, his rucksack was on the floor beside him, and six inches to the right of the keyboard was his “spitter,” an empty water bottle for the big dip of Skoal packed behind his lower lip.
As he began to type out a message to Task Force Dagger, the stillness was shattered by machine-gun fire. Out the window he could see tracers lighting up the sky—originating from the bridge and heading in his direction.
Fumbling in the dark, Smith stuffed his equipment back into his rucksack, ran outside, heaved the pack into his truck’s bed, and slammed the tailgate shut. He heard something to his right and smelled hashish. Pulling on his NODs, he peered around the side of the medical clinic and saw three guerrillas on their haunches, the embers of their hash pipe glowing through his night vision.
Over the machine-gun fire somebody yelled out from the hill, “All right, everybody get up here. This is it. This is the Alamo!”
Come on, everybody, let’s get high. Smith sang his own impromptu version of the Vietnam War–era hit by Country Joe & the Fish, steadying his nerves as he got in the truck and drove the short distance to the hill. Whoopee, we’re all gonna die.
JD and the rest of the sleeping members of ODA 574 were awake, armed, and up the hill—spontaneously dubbed the Alamo—three minutes after the first gunfire shattered the silence.
Alex was on the radio calling out “troops in contact” Dan was sending word to Task Force Dagger. The guerrillas parked near the Alamo were running for their trucks in a frenzy, tossing supplies in the backs, leaping in, and spinning their wheels as they tore out through the berm and north into the desert toward Damana.
“What do we have?” JD asked Amerine, who was watching tracer fire from enemy guns streaking across the bridge a little over a mile to their west.