Not a Good Day to Die (12 page)

Having secured Hagenbeck’s approval, Mulholland took his suggestion up the chain of command. It met with a positive response from CENTCOM and CFLCC. Mikolashek gave Hagenbeck an overview of the operation being planned, but without all the details, because Hagenbeck didn’t have the clearances necessary to be read in on the compartmented intel. This was not as frustrating as it might have been for Hagenbeck. He had been in the Army for thirty years and was used to not being read in on every detail of an upcoming operation immediately. What
was
frustrating for him and his troops was the two months spent cooling their heels at K2 while a couple of hundred miles to the south, their country was at war. “We were really chomping at the bit to do something,” Hagenbeck said. “We thought we’d gotten there at the tail end of the war in Afghanistan, and we weren’t gonna see much action. So when we heard that there was some Al Qaida there, we wanted to be a part of the fight. When [Mulholland] extended that offer, we jumped at the chance.” But Mikolashek said nothing at first to indicate any intent to send Hagenbeck’s headquarters south. The Mountain staff continued planning their return to Fort Drum. Within a few days, those plans were shelved. In a video-teleconference around February 5 Mikolashek gave Hagenbeck as direct a hint as he could that his mission was about to change: “Start thinking about how to spell ‘Bagram.’”

JIM
Larsen, in Bagram to establish a Rakkasan quick reaction force, strode briskly along the 300 meters of muddy road that separated the Rakkasan tents by the runway from Dagger’s advanced operating base in the middle of the base’s cantonment area. The AOB building looked from the outside as if it might once have been a movie theater for the Soviet troops garrisoned at the base. But the large kitchen and sleeping quarters in the rear of the building suggested it had actually been a mess hall. Now it was occupied by 5
^th
Special Forces Group’s B Company, who had patched up the roof with some plywood to make the run-down building habitable. The work area was at the front of the building. This was the room where briefings were held, and it was full of people when Larsen climbed the steps leading up to the front door and disappeared inside.

The Rakkasan officer walked into a scene he found hard to fathom. About twenty Dagger personnel and at least one TF Bowie representative were discussing the Shahikot Valley. Most of the Dagger troops appeared to be NCOs, but it was hard for Larsen to tell, because none of the long-haired, bearded men wore a uniform, and all called each other by their first names. But Larsen didn’t find this unusual. He’d gotten used to the sight of heavily armed commandos in ball caps and jeans. What surprised him was that Major Perry Clark, Rosengard’s deputy, was leading this scruffy group—none of whom resembled an infantryman’s version of a soldier, let alone an officer—through a textbook version of the Army’s military decision-making process. This was the meticulous—some would say needlessly detailed—process by which Army doctrine says units should plan operations. It is the sort of thing that Ranger and other light infantry staffs pride themselves on, but not something that Larsen expected from Special Forces troops. Having taught tactics for two years at the Army’s Command and General Staff College, Larsen knew good staff work when he saw it. He was seeing it now.

The reason for the meeting was clear. Mikolashek had ordered Dagger to draw up a plan for the Shahikot that relied on Special Forces and Afghans as the main effort. Clark was leading his staff through a “receipt of mission,” in which they analyzed the task in hand, the intelligence on the enemy, the troops, the terrain, and the time available in order to arrive at an operational concept that had a good chance of success. Once the discussion moved beyond what was known or assumed about the enemy to the topic of what troops might be available, eyes turned to Larsen: What could TF Rakkasan contribute? Almost two full infantry battalions, he replied, so long as Wiercinski was allowed to pull most of 1-187 out of Jacobabad. Larsen didn’t pick the two battalion figure just because that was all TF Rakkasan could spare. It also seemed to be the minimum needed to execute the role envisioned for the 101
^st
troops: sealing the passes on the valley’s eastern side. Larsen reckoned it would take about a company (90 to 100 men) to close each pass completely. “When you started doing the math, it quickly became a two-battalion operation,” he said. That seemed to satisfy Clark and his colleagues. The Dagger guys hadn’t specified how they wanted the infantry forces to get to their blocking positions, but to Larsen there was only one answer—air assault, the 101
^st
’s raison d’être. “This mission had the 101
^st
written all over it,” he said later. He was confident that the “psychological impact” of helicopters full of troops descending suddenly out of the sky would unhinge the enemy fighters. The meeting moved on, but Larsen’s mind was already racing.
Two battalions!
That meant a brigade-level air assault, something that had only happened once since Vietnam. But would two battalions be enough? The intelligence on the number of enemy in the valley was vague.
We’ll need a reserve,
Larsen thought. During a break, he dashed across the road to a tall gray building that housed the forward command post of 10
^th
Mountain’s 1-87 Infantry. Although most of that battalion was still at K2, in late November the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Paul LaCamera, had moved his C Company and a small command element to Bagram, where his troops assumed the same perimeter security and other force protection missions they had been conducting in Uzbekistan.

Larsen and LaCamera had served in the 2
^nd
Ranger Battalion together in the late 1980s, and Larsen wondered if his buddy wanted to get in on the action being briefed across the street. As luck would have it, LaCamera was visiting K2. His operations officer raised him on the phone. Believing two Rakkasan battalions ought to be able to handle the couple of hundred enemy fighters thought to be in the Shahikot, Larsen was hoping LaCamera might spare a platoon that the Rakkasans could use as a reserve. But LaCamera told Larsen that he could probably commit a company to the fight. (By the next day LaCamera was talking about making his whole battalion available.) Larsen retraced his steps and sat through the remainder of the briefings. At the end of the evening Clark invited him to another meeting. This one was to be held the next day in the Dagger safe house in Kabul, and Larsen was welcome to hitch a ride with the Dagger contingent driving down the next morning. But there was a catch: He would have to wear civilian clothes, so as not to attract attention en route to the capital (as if a couple of vehicles full of well-armed American-looking young men in mufti would pass unnoticed by the locals).

Larsen didn’t have any civilian clothes in his rucksack. But the Ranger old-boy network came through yet again for him. An ex-Ranger assigned to TF Bowie loaned Larsen a set of civilian clothes for the journey. Combined with an Afghan hat and scarf somehow procured for him by another Rakkasan staff officer, the civvies did the trick. No one would mistake Larsen for an Afghan tribesman any time soon, but at least the Dagger guys would let him ride in their pickup trucks.

The next morning the two-vehicle convoy assembled by the AOB. In addition to Larsen, the non-Dagger passengers included three CFLCC staff officers who had flown in specifically to attend the Kabul briefing: Lieutenant Colonel Andy Nocks, from the deep operations cell; Lieutenant Colonel Craig Bishop, who coordinated special ops activities in the CFLCC operations cell; and Commander Jim Merkloff, a military intelligence officer. Larsen climbed into the back seat of a maroon Toyota pickup. As a Ranger company executive officer, he had jumped into Rio Hato airfield during the Panama invasion, and another Ranger job had taken him to Haiti in 1994, but this was a different level of adventure altogether. The soldiers crammed into the cabs of the two trucks had their weapons—M4s and 9mm pistols for each of the Dagger troops—locked and loaded. There were to be no refreshment or bathroom breaks. The full water bottles in the trucks were for drinking, the empty ones for pissing in. The trip lasted about two hours. Gazing out of the window as he rode, Larsen was awestruck by the Shomali Plain’s lunar landscape, the rusting hulks of T-55 tanks and ZSU antiaircraft guns by the side of the road, the unexploded ordnance lying on the curb like traffic cones that a passing vehicle had casually knocked aside, and the cemeteries full of fighters who had fallen in battle, with black, green, and red Afghan flags fluttering in the winter wind above many of the graves. The Shomali Plain marked the northern approach to Kabul. The green flatlands had served as a battlefield during each of the last twenty-three years, and it showed.

The Toyotas pulled up outside the safe house at midday. Larsen, who had spent the last few weeks shivering in dusty tents in Kandahar eating MREs, walked into the safe house and discovered how the other half lived. Task Force Dagger and the CIA had been the architects of the triumph over the Taliban, and for those Special Forces soldiers lucky enough to be based in Kabul, the palatial safe house, which had served as a Taliban guesthouse, represented the first fruits of victory. “It was a beautiful mansion, four stories, each floor probably had 900 or 1,000 square feet. Just an amazing place, and they lived in that with a cook,” said an envious visitor. “They were living good.” Larsen was equally impressed. “The best thing about this place was the food,” he said. “They had real food, not like Kandahar or Bagram. I mean real food—meat, rice, bread, and snacks with recognizable names on the wrappers.”

Larsen’s sense of arriving at some Shangri-la was only slightly disturbed by the odor of mildew that greeted his nostrils as he descended the stairs into the dank basement where the meeting was to be held. Several days earlier Dagger and Bowie had announced they would be holding a meeting to allow Dagger to present their concept for an operation to crush the enemy forces in the area south of Gardez known as Shahikot, and to figure out how best to fuse the various sources of intelligence. Representatives from K-Bar, the CIA, Task Force 11, CFLCC, the Coalition and Joint Civil-Military Operations Task Force, and Task Force Rakkasan had been invited. Now about forty-five people were crowding into the basement. A sense of expectation hung in the air. These men had known nothing but victory in Afghanistan, and now the opportunity to take a huge step toward completing the destruction of Al Qaida appeared to present itself. Larsen didn’t recognize most of the attendees, and their civilian clothes made it hard to even hazard a guess which organizations they worked for. But he spotted a few familiar faces, including those of Pete Blaber and a major named Mark O. who ran the AFO operation in northern Afghanistan out of the Ariana. Larsen knew both from their time in the Ranger Regiment and was glad to renew acquaintances. “It was great to see their faces again, even with the beards,” he said. “They were real warriors—true to the core.” Among the others there were Gary Harrell, regarded by Larsen as “a legend,” Commander Ed Winters—a SEAL who was the TF 11 operations officer—and Chris Haas, who served as the moderator.

Rich, the CIA chief of station, began by updating the group on the latest intelligence. His spies were reporting about 200-250 enemy fighters in the Shahikot, the only remaining Al Qaida concentration in Afghanistan. He urged action. History showed that Al Qaida and its allies did not like to fight in the winter, preferring to husband their forces for spring offensives. His conclusion was blunt:
We must take the battle to the enemy by attacking this winter, forcing the enemy to fight in conditions to which he is unaccustomed, when the passes are less accessible.
The experienced agent pressed for action by February 15, just a week away.

The senior AFO intelligence analyst, Sergeant First Class Glenn P., laid out everything that was known about the Shahikot. Human, signals, and imagery intelligence pointed to a concentration of between 200 and 1,000 Al Qaida, IMU, and Taliban fighters in the Shahikot, Glenn told his audience. There were also indicators that a high-value target was in or around the valley. Brian Sweeney, who had flown down from K2, presented a detailed analysis of how and why the enemy was gathering south of Gardez. He didn’t have all the answers, but he used deductive reasoning to fill in the gaps as he outlined his “ratline” theory. “That was one of the best briefs I’ve ever heard,” Blaber told him when he had finished.

The talks by Sweeney and Glenn P. complemented each other. Their analysis was founded on the assumption that the Al Qaida forces at Tora Bora had escaped via two routes: one straight into Pakistan and another southwest to the Gardez-Khowst region. Those who had taken the southwest route were now ensconced south of Gardez in some of Afghanistan’s most defensible terrain. They had been joined by IMU fighters who had fled south through Logar and Paktia as the Taliban regime disintegrated. The Shahikot’s proximity to Pakistan made it an even more attractive refuge to Al Qaida and their allies. Analysts present from other agencies, including the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, agreed.

Perry Clark then outlined Dagger’s concept for attacking the Shahikot. It was the same concept Larsen had seen the Dagger troops refining the night before, involving an attack from the west by Zia’s troops and their Special Forces advisers, with the Rakkasans sealing the escape routes to the south and east. However, Clark and Glenn Thomas, the Texas 14 team leader who was also in the room, poured cold water on Rich’s hopes of attacking within the next week. Zia’s force would not be ready for another ten to fifteen days, they said. The Dagger proposal was only a concept. No one beyond Dagger had approved it, and no other forces had been officially committed. Harrell became frustrated with the lack of commitment he perceived from some in the room. Task Force 11, represented by Winters, was particularly reluctant. Winters said his organization would consider participating in the operation, but wanted no role in the planning, for fear it would distract them from the hunt for high-value targets. Dagger and Bowie wanted to know who stood with them as they worked to turn this from a concept in a dingy basement in Kabul to violent, bloody reality at 9,000 feet in the Shahikot. “Okay, who’s in?” Harrell asked loudly, as if he was rounding up a Wild West posse, not setting the stage for the biggest battle U.S. troops had fought in a generation. Blaber was first to respond. “We’re in!” he said loudly and without hesitation. Sensing Blaber’s confidence, “the rest of us followed suit,” Larsen recalled.