Back To The Land Of Taliban

JUNE 11, 2008

NORTH WEST FRONTIER, PAKISTAN

         BRYAN LIKED THE MOUNTAINS. It was good to be back.  He’d been to the Hindu Kush many times in the past, and it was a place that never left him, the sight and particularly the smell of these mountains and her valleys. In the warm months it had a kind of sweet aroma that he liked. He could smell it in the helicopter as they flew. He was in familiar territory and it felt right.

Returning to the North West Frontier was therapy for him. A battery recharge not too different than a vacation to the Amalfi coast, or the Greek Islands would be for anyone else that lived and worked in London. The Hindu Kush wasn’t at the top of the list of requested vacation packages for most, and for damn good reasons. Wars had a way of keeping tourists away. But Bryan was wired a little different and needed a solid gut check every now and then. Here he could compartmentalize Gil’s murder. The Hindu Kush beckoned him.

“RPG in the air. Low two o’clock,” the Black Hawk pilot calmly announced over the intercom system, his tone only barely elevated.

Bryan look out the open door of the craft to see the flame of the shoulder fired rocket exactly where Staff Sergeant Horvath had called it. Corkscrewing, it was beginning to arc downward after just a couple of seconds of travel. The small rocket was obviously going to miss the helicopter low and aft.  Accompanying the RPG were automatic small arms fire from AK-47s, tracers visible as a few rounds tickled the fuselage. A second and third corkscrew followed the first. The door gunner returned fire with Black Hawk’s multi-barreled machine gun, shearing branches off trees from where the RPGs were launched.

Their cover blown, three Taliban militiamen carrying launchers and Kalashnikovs darted out from behind a tree at the base of a small hill. Wood provided zero protection. They were about two hundred feet below and now behind the flight. The lives of the militants were dependent on reaching safe cover near a collection of car size boulders that dotted the hillside. The boulders were fifty meters away. Odds were they wouldn’t make it, but their consolation would be a complete understanding of the nature of the Islamist afterlife.

“Dash two, you got those guys?” Horvath asked over the radio. The call was for his wingman in the escort AH-64 Apache Helicopter, flying at the same altitude, with five hundred feet of separation, and on a four o’clock bearing from the lead Black Hawk.

“Roger, One,” dash Two radioed as he trained his fuselage-mounted thirty-millimeter Chain Gun on the three, soon to be history, Taliban.

The gun coughed out five rounds as he squeezed a half second burst, leaving very little that was recognizable as human once the dust had settled.  Neither helicopter wavered even one degree from flight heading during the ten-second encounter. Bryan checked the disposition of the three SEALs riding along with him. Their demeanors were calm; none budged even the slightest. One so relaxed, his eyes were closed, as if to say, “I’m resting now – conserving energy. Once this thing lands, then I go to work.” Bryan thought he detected faint smiles beneath the heavy beards covering their faces.

“Yeah, it’s good to be back,” he thought.

The district of Chitral in the Hindu Kush awaited the flight, along with the rest of the SEAL team and a long-term coalition guide named Raza.

“It’ll be nice to see that good-natured Pashtun again,” Bryan said to himself.

The district was on the Pakistani side of the porous border with Afghanistan, approximately two hundred miles northeast of Bagram Airbase, their departure point. The Airbase was forty-seven miles north of Kabul, and had been secured by the Northern Alliance from the Taliban in the early days of Operation Enduring Freedom. By spring of the following year, the U.S. Air Force had moved in heavy construction equipment with C-17 transport aircraft. A total revamping ensued, and after almost two years Bagram had been turned into the primary base of operations for the coalition forces, supporting over seven thousand troops. It was the best staging area for operations like the one Bryan and the SEAL team would be undertaking over the next few days. The elite squad escorting him was an element of the Joint Special Operations Command and Task Force Blue. Only several years before the same team had pinpointed the location of one of the world’s most brutal terrorists, leading to his demise by two five hundred pound presents from an F-16.

As they flew up a valley and got closer to the Paki border, the terrain became rugged, almost inhospitable. That’s where the pockets of Taliban would take potshots at U.S. helicopters, but usually with similar results as moments before. Soon the hills turned into mountains. They were nearing their destination. He checked his watch. They’d been airborne for an hour.

“Staff Sergeant Horvath, what’s our ETA – about twenty minutes?”

“Right on the nose sir,” the pilot told him.

The flight had taken them along a track that over flew Jalalabad, Asmar, and the remnants of the compound destroyed by a cruise missile and Navy warplanes almost seven years before. He remembered it well.

“Same Goddamn camp,” he mumbled to himself as they passed it by. The compound had been rebuilt, and changed hands twice since that time. It pissed him off.

 “Captain Craig, we’re here,” Horvath announced as the Black Hawk touched down on a flat creek bed. Bryan grabbed his rifle and jumped out of the chopper. The four other members of the team were there waiting at the LZ.

They were standing in a small valley between hills that rose fast, becoming very large and steep. The valley was about one hundred meters wide and had a small stream flowing through the center of it. The elevation and the somewhat level area on the bank made it a good place for a landing zone. There were just a few large boulders. Flat areas with low elevation, meaning less than ten thousand feet above sea level, were almost nonexistent in Chitral.

“Captain Craig, good to see you again – set your gear down here sir – we’ll inventory and cut Horvath’s flight loose,” the SEAL team Commanding Officer said. “Alright Hotshot, Turk, Proton - let’s get a gear check and get the hell out a here. Capisce?”

The muscular man dishing out the orders was veteran Navy SEAL Lieutenant Timothy Thomas, affectionately known as T Squared, or sometimes also called simply “el tee.”  He’d just been frocked to Lieutenant Commander and hadn’t pinned on new rank yet. The men were enjoying the shorter version address while they still had the chance.

“Roger that Lieutenant. Good to see you too,” Bryan said. Thomas was a good man, and had been here with him as far back as Enduring Freedom. “Déjà vu, all over again – wouldn’t ya say,” Bryan added with a slap on the Lieutenant’s back.

“You got that right sir.” 

Bryan laid his rifle down and began going through a mental checklist of every item he’d brought. He felt comfortable with the equipment and weapons. It was akin to riding a bike, sort of, he thought. As a SEAL he’d been through all the intensive training, with annual refreshers along the way, and he kept up to speed with the rifle and the pistol, practicing at an English shooting range on a routine basis. Skeet shooting with a few of his English country gentleman buddies kept his aim honed too, but there was nothing like the real thing.

He looked at his weapons today. A mental checklist followed. “Heckler & Koch Mk23 .45 caliber handgun and four clips - twelve rounds each.” He felt it with his right hand to be sure it was in its holster and attached to his belt.

“Combat knife to slice an’ dice, right next door” he noted while his hand was there on the belt.

Lying next to his backpack was his new favorite weapon, the M8 Lightweight Combat Assault Rifle. Made of ultra-light composite material, the replacement to the M4 was twenty percent lighter, weighing just six pounds, and fired 5.56mm ammo. He’d a total of seven magazines in his vest.  “Two hundred and forty rounds should do the trick.”

As for the remainder of the gear in, or on his tactical vest, he’d a canteen, three protein bars, Bic lighter, Night-Ops illumination light, two signal flares, night goggles, radio, handheld GPS, PRC-148 radio, and aspirin. Everything combined, weighed less than thirty pounds.

The rest of the seven SEAL Team members were outfitted pretty much the same as Bryan, with the exception of two men with very different rifles. Turk was carrying the M60 general-purpose machine gun. The fearsome automatic rifle fired 7.62 millimeter rounds, capable of laying down fire suppression on targets from a distance of fifteen hundred meters. But Cowboy had the weapon that really scared the hell out of the enemy. The Barrett M107 semi-automatic fifty caliber, interdiction sniper rifle, had a maximum effective range of more than two thousand meters. Capable of piercing the armor of a personnel carrier, it could cut a man in half before the sound ever reached the target. Used as a sniper rifle, a verified kill had been made from a mile and a half.

Lieutenant Thomas waited to see the thumbs up from the team, and then sent Horvath and his flight on their way. The Black Hawk and his escort Apache lifted off. The drop off had taken less than a minute. The “whop, whop, whop” of the helicopters soon faded.

The Lieutenant spoke up. “Okay, gather round - brief.” The men formed a semi-circle. The SEAL commander and his team had been brought in for Bryan with little advanced warning. Thomas pulled out a waterproof map of the area and placed it on top of a boulder that met him chest high.

“Captain Craig here needs to meet with one particular Chitrali top dog. Prince Rehman and a squad are north of our location; maybe ten clicks at the most, and on the move. We need to link up the Captain with Rehman so he can do whatever it is that he has to do, then get ‘im back here and go home. Sound good?” KISS - he loved being back!

“Now, and this is the important part - we’ve got unknown numbers of Taliban between us and Rehman. There are hundreds throughout the area - possibly more than a thousand. They’ve been skirmishing with Rehman’s militia.” He scanned his team to make all understood.

“Our job is to get Captain Craig and Rehman together for a sit down. Raza will be the interpreter as usual.” The Lieutenant looked over to a boulder two hundred feet up the hill. There the bearded Pashtun man sat patiently.

“Our job is not, I repeat not… to seek out and engage the Taliban. The ROE on this mission is to engage when, and only when engaged upon. Now that’s not because we’re suddenly friends with these guys, but time is of the essence. Is that right sir?”

“That’s affirm, Lieutenant.” Bryan saw Turk smile and wink at Proton.

“So we don’t want to be screwing around all day trying to pop Taliban. If they get in our way though, then we’ll handle them like SEALs. Understood?” Everyone nodded.

“One last thing, this mission is about what happened back home on Memorial Day, so enough said.” He looked at Bryan again for acknowledgement. Bryan nodded.

“So let’s be successful, let’s be Americans, let’s be soldiers, but most of all … let’s be SEALs. Hooh Yaw.”

The rest of the team repeated the SEAL greeting. “Hooh Yaw.”

“All right then, let’s roll.”

As they grabbed their gear and began walking toward Raza, Bryan knew what the wink was for; he’d heard it many times before.

Proton started with a nice tenor. “Day–oh I say-day-ay-ay-oh.” 

Day light come an we droppin the bomb.” Turk chimed in with a nice baritone on chorus.

 “Run mister Taliban – we know where you’re hidin’”

“We kick your ass an we want come home.”

“Day–oh I say-day-ay-ay-oh.”

“We kick your ass an we want come home.”

SEALs, standing for Sea, Air, and Land, are U.S. Navy Special Operations teams that carry out missions considered to be beyond the capability of the conventional military. The team had all been through the same training, and could operate across a broad spectrum of areas, which included maritime, desert, arctic, and mountainous. They were masters of the universe in many mission areas; expert marksmen; where it’s said that a SEAL could draw a smiley face on a target from fifty feet with a handgun; skydivers, conducting night jumps from twenty thousand feet and parachuting into the sea where they would scuba to a target area; and of course, skilled in hand-to-hand combat. Silent killers!

As if attending a perpetual costume ball, Navy SEALs dressed to blend into their environment, and the team with Bryan that day looked very different than their counterparts elsewhere in the world. They had the same weapons, maybe even the same tactical vests, or perhaps the tan T6 tactical boot, but it ended there. Five were wearing Pakols, a traditional wool hat of the indigenous tribal men, and two had on tan baseball caps, both backwards. Shades were optional, but in the mountains everyone wore them. Bryan opted for the tribal look, complete with the native wool Chapan tunic coat over his vest. A two-day old beard had sprouted.

They trekked along the steep terrain in echelon, professional mercenaries on their mission.  Proton led the way, staying twenty meters ahead of the team. As point man he was the eyes and ears. Behind him was the commanding officer. “El-tee” carried the CAR-15 assault rifle with grenade launcher. Bryan, just a few paces in back of Thomas, hung close to the team commander so the two could talk. Scattered from there over the next twenty meters, Turk with the M60, Cowboy and his fifty cal, Hotshot who had the URC-112 SATCOM radio, and Doc the corpsman. Cleaning up at anchor position, Senior Chief “Sinbad” Sailor, the senior non commissioned officer and eighteen-year veteran of the SEALs. Raza was a floater, sometimes he was in sight, and then suddenly he’d vanish. It was just before 8 am, with any luck they would rendezvous the Prince and his two-dozen men sometime later that night.

Prince Rehman ul Mulk was the leader of the tribes throughout Chitral. The capital of the district, also Chitral, was in a large valley forty kilometers from their position. Many of the villages were virtually inaccessible by vehicles from the south. The mountain passes between Chitral and the rest of Pakistan were on the average above eight thousand feet and usually impassible for anything other than mules. A four-wheel drive jeep could make it through less than ten percent of the passes, and only in the summer. Being so remote, the people were largely untouched by civilization. They preferred it that way.

Officials in Islamabad really had no idea how many people lived in this district of the North West Frontier Province. The unofficial census counted two hundred thousand scattered throughout in tiny mountainous villages. An official census of the area was impossible. And the people were very different from any other in Pakistan, consisting of many different tribes, languages and beliefs. A few villages had even managed to resist conversion to Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, or Buddhism, maintaining unique religions of their own. The Kalash were idol worshippers, a religion very similar to the ancient pagan beliefs of the Greeks, praying to deities that closely resembled the twelve Gods of Mount Olympus.

Of the fourteen different languages spoken in the area, none had evolved into written form, and the illiteracy rate in the mountains was above ninety percent. Lacking reading and writing skills, and with the region always in conflict, it came as no surprise that the major industry was now gun making. Boys would become young apprentices of the trade when they were just four years old. Masters before they were teens.

Needless to say, the government of Pakistan had absolutely zero control over the people of the “Badlands.” Bryan thought it ironical that a nuclear power would have peoples that were living in a time Daniel Boone would have considered primitive.

They’d trekked now steadily for four hours along the steep grade of the hillside and could see snow capped mountain peaks of the high Hindu Kush in the far distance. Raza, who had disappeared two hours before, was now in sight again, jogging toward the team. Reaching them he began conferring with Thomas, a mini-meeting lasting for at least a minute.

“Probably just found us the only whore house,” Cowboy said. The rest started laughing. Cowboy was the comedian in the team. Every team had one. 

Thomas slapped the Pashtun on the back and turned, waving the men in close. “All right listen up people. Raza’s made contact with a couple of Rehman’s men. Almost had his throat cut in the process, but he looks A-okay though.” Lieutenant Thomas smiled and put his arm around the smaller man, squeezing his shoulder. “We’re two kilometers from a Kalash village. Raza’s set up a prelim powwow with a couple of the Prince’s men. They want to establish some ground rules for the big sit-down with Rehman.”

Contact so quickly. “A very good sign,” Bryan thought. Word made it to Rehman from the ISI faster than he’d expected. The Prince knew he was coming and was obviously very interested in meeting. Would the talks bear fruit? Bryan was hoping that he’d soon learn the true nature of what Petrov had going on, and who else was involved. The stakes were growing higher. With Gil now gone, Bryan had lost one very important asset. He wanted payback. Revenge?