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This was my nightmare, ever since I first stared at those plans back in the briefing room: the four of us starkly silhouetted against a treeless mountain above a Taliban-occupied village. We were an Afghan lookout’s finest moment, unmissable. We were Webb and Davis’s worst dream, snipers uncovered, out in the open, trapped in nature’s spotlight with nowhere to hide.
“Holy shit,” said Mikey.
7
An Avalanche of Gunfire
Down the mountain, from every angle. Axe flanked left, trying to cut off the downward trail, firing nonstop. Mikey was blasting away...shouting,...“Marcus, no options now, buddy, kill ’em all!”
We edged back the way we had come, into the shadows cast by the last of the trees. It was not far back to waypoint 2, and we took a GPS reading right there. Mikey handed over navigational duties to Axe, and I groaned. Moving up and down these steep cliffs was really tough for me, but the streamlined, expert mountaineer Matthew Axelson could hop around like a fucking antelope. I reminded him of those two correlating facts, and all three of my teammates started laughing.
For some reason best known to our resident king of Trivial Pursuit, he led us off the high mountain ridge and down toward the valley which spread out from the elbow of the dogleg. It was as if he had decided to eliminate the dogleg entirely and take the straight line directly across to waypoint 3. Which was all fine and dandy, except it meant a one-mile walk going steeply downward, followed, inevitably, by a one-mile walk going steeply upward. That was the part I was not built for.
Nonetheless that was our new route. After about fifty yards I was struggling. I couldn’t keep up while going down, never mind up. They could hear me sliding and cursing in the rear, and I could hear Axe and Mikey laughing up front. And this was not a fitness problem. I was as fit as any of them, and I was not in any way out of breath. I was just too big to track a couple of mountain goats. Laws of nature, right?
Our path was inescapably zigzagged because Axe was always trying to find cover, stay out of the moonlight, as we grappled our way back up the cliff to waypoint 3. We reached the top approximately one hour before daylight. Our GPS numbers were correct, as pla
He chose a position over the brow of the summit, maybe eighty feet down, right on the uppermost escarpment. There were trees, some of them close together, but directly beyond them was more barren land. We dropped our heavy loads, the four-mile journey complete, and tipped the grit and stones out of our boots. They always find a way in.
Medically, we were all okay, no injuries. But we were exhausted after our grueling seven-hour hike up and down this freakin’ mountain. Especially Mikey and me, because we both suffered from insomnia, particularly prepping for an operation like this, and we hadn’t slept the night before. Plus it was freezing cold, and we were still soaked to the skin even though the rain had stopped. So, for that matter, was everything we carried with us.
Da
This was plainly a logging area, maybe abandoned, but a place where a lot of trees had been cut down. Away to our right, the night sky above the highest peaks was brightening. Dawn was near.
Da
Mikey came over to talk briefly. And we all stared at the brightness in the sky to the east. Lieutenant Murphy, as command controller, called the shot. “We’re moving in five.” And so we picked up our heavy loads once more and set off back the way we’d come. After a hundred yards we found a down trail on the other side of the ridge, walked below the waypoint, and selected a prime spot in the trees overlooking the village, which was more than a mile and a half away.
We settled in, jamming ourselves against trees and rocks, trying to get into a position where we could rest on this almost sheer escarpment. I glugged from my water canteen and, to tell the truth, I felt like a plant on the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Da
Axe, ever alert, stood guard, blending into the mountain to my left, his rifle primed despite the quiet. He was probably doing a New York Times crossword which he’d memorized word for word in his head. He did not get much peace, though. My tree turned out to be some type of a mulberry, and since I could not even doze off, I spent the time hurling the berries at Axe on account of his shaky attitude during the climb back up the mountain.
Then another major fog bank rolled in and settled over all of us and the valley below. There was again no way to see the village, and the trouble with fog banks is they are likely to turn up in the same place often. It was plain we could not remain here in effective operational mode. Once more we had to leave.
Mikey and Axe were poring over the maps and sca
Da
And once more we all hoisted our packs and set off to the new hiding place. It was only about a thousand yards, but it took us an hour, moving along, and then up, the mountain, right onto that granite finger at the end of the ridge. And when we got there, I had to agree it was perfect, offering a brilliant angle on the village for the lens, the spotting scope, and the bullet. It had sensational all-around vision. If Sharmak and his gang of villains were there, we’d get him. As Mikey observed, “That guy couldn’t get to the goddamned communal shitter without us seeing him.”
Da
I stood there gazing at our new mountain stronghold with its massive, sheer drops all around. It was perfect, but it was also highly dangerous. If an attacking force came up on us, especially at night, we’d have no choice but to fight our way out. If someone started firing RPGs at us, we’d all be blown to pieces. There was only one way out, the way we had come. A skilled strategist like Sharmak could have blockaded us out here on this barren, stony point, and we’d have needed to kill a lot of guys to get out. And there was the ever present, disquieting thought that Sharmak’s buddy bin Laden might also be in the area — with probably the biggest al Qaeda force we’d ever faced.