Black Site (45 page)

Benji didn’t think about it again as he reentered the stairwell with his men.

Tomahawk moved with the CIA operator toward the stairs.

“You hurt?”

“My face, man! It’s bad!” Even in the low light Tomahawk didn’t think it looked too bad. Maybe a busted nose, tops. Still, he patted the American on the back, then shouted up the stairwell. “Got a wounded friendly, coming up!”

“Roger!” came the reply from the ground-floor room.

Tomahawk pulled the injured American up the darkened stairs, held him by his arm, and led the way with the light on his rifle. At the top of the stairs he handed him off to another man. On the way out the front door of the stockade “Joey Barnes” grabbed a towel from the floor, shook out some bits of stone and broken glass, and then covered his face. He reentered the light of day with all but his eyes covered, and he was led over to a medic set up on the far side of the two burned-out Black Hawks.

The assaulter accompanying him said, “Take a knee here and the medic will check you out. We’ll have you over to Bagram in no time, buddy.” Then the young Delta man turned away and returned to his mates in the stockade.

Daoud al-Amriki stood there, covering his face with the towel in case any of the CIA men who had seen him before the soldiers appeared were still alive. A few feet in front of him a medic had just finished pushing an IV into the arm of another injured man. Al-Amriki heard the medic talk on his radio, ordering a medevac to land.

“Let me help this helo land, and then I’ll take a look, sir,” the medic said to al-Amriki.

While the soldier’s back was turned, the al Qaeda operator knelt over to the unconscious patient with the IV in his arm, pulled the long combat knife and the tan-colored .40 caliber Glock from his chest rig.

The small helicopter came in for a landing not fifteen yards from the medic in the center of the compound. In the sky above other choppers circled.

The medic turned back around. Said, “Okay. Let me take a look at—”

Daoud al-Amriki rammed the knife into the medic’s stomach, just below his body armor.

The man staggered backward, fell back over the other wounded assaulter on the ground.

The Little Bird was, at that moment, landing with its side toward the injured man on the ground. Consequently, neither the pilot nor the copilot witnessed the commotion behind them and to their right. Instead, the copilot jumped out of the left seat and began running around front to help load the casualty. Al-Amriki came around the back of the Little Bird, avoiding the copilot, and climbed into the man’s vacated seat.

The pilot saw the stranger climbing in next to him. Over the spinning propeller he shouted, “What the hell do you think—”

Al-Amriki pointed the Glock between his eyes. “Fly! Now!”

The copilot arrived at the two wounded men on the ground. He wondered where in the hell the medic had gone. Looking down at one of the injured, he recognized a soldier named Dice, knew he was the medic who had called for the casualty evacuation not sixty seconds earlier. Dice lifted a hand covered in a bloody latex glove and weakly pointed to the copilot’s Little Bird.

The copilot turned around in time to see his small black helicopter rise straight up into the sky.

It took thirty seconds for the other choppers to notice the Little Bird streaking off to the east instead of the west. A radio call from a Delta assaulter on the ground came just after. The other helicopters began broadcasting to one another about the hijacked chopper, and a few seconds after that, both of the circling gunships began giving chase.

*   *   *

Three levels belowground, Benji had made it to T.J. and his men.

“Good to see you, Colonel,” Benji said. But T.J. cut him off.

“Did you get the American?”

“What American?”

“Shit! There is an American AQ guy! Dressed as a Ranger. He’s the one running this op.”

Benji waved away the worry. “All the Rangers are dead. Let’s get you up and you can tell Monk what you know.”

Hammond was unconscious now, so he had to be carried by a pair of assaulters. Other men began coming down the stairs, causing a logjam.

Finally, as they started up the stairs, Benji’s radio came alive with the transmissions about the American CIA man who had stabbed Dice and hijacked a chopper.

T.J. shoved past Delta men trying to help him as he rushed to the surface.

*   *   *

The hijacked Little Bird landed in an intersection in western Peshawar. A gunshot rang out and a man climbed out and ran for his life.

Forty seconds later an identical Little Bird touched down in the intersection just long enough for two Delta assaulters to leap to the ground. The chopper shot back into the air, flew low and fast in a tight circle as the Delta pair moved toward the chopper with their rifles high. They found the aircraft empty save for the body of the dead pilot. After a brief radio exchange between the men on the ground, the helicopter circling above them, and personnel in a Black Hawk back over the Sandcastle, another Little Bird landed in the street, this time disgorging the copilot. He ran to the copilot’s seat of the other Little Bird, and one Delta man boarded each helicopter.

Seconds later both of the helos were back in the air, retreating to the west.

Daoud al-Amriki disappeared into the markets of Peshawar, searching frantically for a telephone.

FORTY-EIGHT

Inside the ground-floor room of the stockade, Monk placed the Turk’s camera on a wooden table. He and T.J. looked at it. Timble had explained to the master sergeant the significance of the camera in front of him and the problems it could cause.

Monk’s prescription for the problem was succinct. “Thermite?”

“That’ll do it,” T.J. said.

Monk pulled a thermite grenade and laid the camera and the grenade in an empty metal ammo can. “Fire in the hole!” he shouted as he pulled the pin on the thermite. The men backed out of the room, and a searing heat followed them through the doorway. Sputtering flame shot out of the canister burning everything it touched.

*   *   *

Pam Archer’s UAV banked over the eastern outskirts of Landi Kotal, began flying back to the Sandcastle. She’d been heading toward Peshawar to look for the missing Little Bird, but a pair of CIA Reaper drones had moved into the sector, so she was called back to base by Grauer. On her way back to Jalalabad, she decided to make one final pass over the Delta hit.

All the action was over, as far as she knew. Several men had been injured, but she hadn’t heard of any KIAs from Grauer other than the Little Bird pilot. The assault seemed to have had its snags, but, she admitted, it had gone better than she’d expected.

And Racer was still alive.

She eyed the traffic on the N25 highway. It had picked up with the morning—even the huge battle a few hundred meters from the road hadn’t halted the flow of trucks heading from Pakistan toward the Afghanistan border. It was amazing how accustomed people around here had become to violence.

Ten thousand feet below Baby Girl she saw the three big Black Hawks descending as they prepared to land to exfiltrate the Delta team. She decided to turn back around, to make one more circuit of the area of operation to keep an eye out while the boys loaded up.

A flash of light in the mountains to the east of the Sandcastle caught her eye. She looked at the area it had come from, but then her eyes changed their focus to the far side of her monitor.

One of the Black Hawks emitted billowing black smoke and began slowly rotating, losing control of its XY axis.

“Holy shit!” she shouted into her mike.

“What the hell was that?” came Grauer’s voice in her headset. He had seen it too.

“That sure looked like a SAM!” As Pam said it she was certain it had, in fact, been a surface-to-air missile. She panned closer to the portion of the hill where she’d seen the flash. There, secreted down in a tiny crevasse that ran parallel to the wall of the Sandcastle, a two-man team hefted a long green tube. She enlarged the image.

One of Grauer’s analysts spoke in the OC, and Pam could pick up her voice in the headset. “That’s an Anza. Probably a Mark 3. They are Pakistani-made, knockoffs of a Chinese design. Damned effective against choppers out to five kilometers. The Pakistani army has them.”

“Guess the Taliban has them too,” Grauer said.

On a hunch Pam decreased the magnification on her camera and began scanning the rocky hills around the Sandcastle.

Two more flashes in the mountains to the east now. A pair of missiles shot into the sky from points a quarter mile apart. Above the brown earth a circling Little Bird dove and banked hard to the right, desperate to avoid them.

*   *   *

Kolt Raynor stood with T.J. and the other ex-prisoners, watching in horror as the big Black Hawk above them spun on its center axis and its nose dipped. In seconds it made a hard, spinning crash landing near the western wall.

Raynor began running toward the wreckage when he heard another explosion, to his right. A Little Bird helo, just back from Peshawar, had taken a direct hit from a missile and exploded in midair. Burning debris fell five hundred feet and landed in the hills to the north of the Sandcastle.

Behind him Kolt heard Monk shouting, “From the east! SAMs from the east!”

The second and third Black Hawks landed without incident, and men began helping the Eagle 01 survivors aboard.

Raynor saw others ahead of him rushing to look for survivors of the downed Black Hawk, so he turned and ran the other way, toward the eastern wall of the Sandcastle. He knew the attackers would be Pakistani Taliban, but he had not expected them to come from that direction. The terrain on both sides of the Khyber Pass was brutal, but this force of men had managed to make it overland, not via the convenient highway that had been cut right through the mountains.

Kolt, Benji, and Monk all arrived at the wall at the same time. Kolt had picked up an AK from a dead Khyber Rifles guard on the way, and he climbed a wooden ladder to a stone landing that allowed him to look out over the hills to the east. The other two men shouldered up to him, and as they peered through the stone parapets they could see heads peek over rocks in the distance. But there was no gunfire toward their position from the enemy force. It seemed the enemy were concentrating on taking out the air assets.

Kolt understood, and he explained to the others. “This was part of the plan. Al Qaeda knew American choppers would come to sanitize the black site after the AQ hit. These guys must have been camped out here waiting to knock them out of the sky.”

Just then, a Little Bird on a strafing run over the hills was hit with a streaking Anza missile. The chopper shuddered and smoked, but it remained airborne. It turned back to the west and began limping for the Afghanistan border.

Benji lifted his HK416 and fired at the cluster of rocks from where the rocket was fired, over three hundred yards away. He stopped firing, doubtful that he’d hit anything. Then he turned to Racer and asked, “Why didn’t these guys start shooting the helos as soon as they came? We’ve had air assets buzzing overhead for twenty minutes. Why did they open up just now?”

Kolt thought for a moment. “Because the AQ guy in charge, this American T.J. told us about, ordered them not to fire until he gave them the signal. He was planning on getting out of here on one of his two Black Hawks. He would have told the Taliban commander to stay concealed until he called him and let him know they could start blasting helos.”

“So the American AQ guy just made a phone call to these guys out here.”

“That’s right.”

Benji said, “Shit. How are we going to exfil with all these fucking SAM crews?”

Monk had been on the radio, communicating with the helicopter air support and ordering the Little Birds to move off five kilometers, out of range of the Anza missiles. He turned to Benji and Kolt and said, “We don’t have the vehicles to go overland. It’s five klicks to the border. We’ll have to suppress these crows ourselves with what we’ve got.”

“What about UAVs?” asked Raynor.

Monk shook his head. “There are a pair of Agency Reapers above us, but they aren’t authorized to provide close air support.”

Kolt turned and looked at the master sergeant. “Then what the fuck
are
they authorized to do?”

“They are here to wipe any evidence away. They are going to level this place as soon as we get out of here.”

“Damn it! Can’t they make an exception and help us out?”

Monk shrugged. “I’m sure they are knocking that request up the chain of command right now.”

“Shit!” shouted Kolt in utter exasperation. “Not a damned thing has changed in the past three years!”

Benji stated the obvious. “Look, Monk. We’ve lost three choppers already, and we have no idea how many missile launchers are out there. There is no way we can take off without getting nailed.”

Monk just nodded, trying to figure a quick way out of this. They could wait for the Reaper drones to get the go-ahead to launch Hellfires on the missile crews, but every second they stayed here at the Sandcastle the danger increased. Monk wanted to get the hell out of here, now.

Kolt turned to Monk. “Listen. When those two Black Hawks take off, every one of those missile crews is going to have to pop up from cover to launch. One man with a scoped rifle, if he’s willing to stay behind, can keep those heads down, or blow those heads off.”

“Any volunteers?” Monk asked sarcastically.

Raynor answered immediately, “Me. Get me a scoped rifle and I’ll keep them occupied.”

“And
then
what?”

“Then I head overland toward the border.”

Monk shook his head. “That is ridiculous. No way.”

“I’m not under your command, remember? You can’t stop me.”

“The hell I can’t! I’ll put your ass into one of those helos myself!”

“I’m
not
getting in one of those helos. They are going to get shot down unless I engage the missile crews.”

“Staying here is suicide, Racer!”

“I’m not staying here. I’m going to head up into those hills to the west. Give me five minutes to get some high ground, and then you guys take off.”