The Hunt for Bin Laden: Task Force Dagger Hardcover - 2003

First line

just been inserted into northern Afghanistan, and the prey would be Osaka bin Laden and his terrorists. Once the twelve Green Berets touched down, Captain Mark Nutsch, the team leader, had his team sergeant, Paul Evans, split the A-Team in half once again.

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Tiger Roars

"On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against al-Qaida terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. These carefully targeted actions are designed to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime."

-President George W. Bush, address to the nation, October 7, 2001

Darye Suf Valley, northern Afghanistan

November 5, 2001

Late morning

It was dawn when the two dark matte-green Special Operations MH-47 Chinook helicopters landed on the alien moonscape of the Darye Suf Valley floor in northern Afghanistan. One dropped off half of the twelve-man A-Team that would be known as TIGER 02. The other held the quick-reaction force (QRF) that would be needed if the insertion turned out to be hot.

Flaring out above the desert sands, the long, fat chopper reduced the power to its rear rotor blades and brought its nose slightly up. Thick, coarse sand blacked out the windshield's view as the Green Berets on board checked the magazines on their weapons, made sure a round was chambered, and took off their safeties. The first two ran off the tailgate and took up security positions in the sand as the others threw off their rucksacks and bags of equipment. A fine-tuned killing machine had just been inserted into northern Afghanistan, and the prey would be Osama bin Laden and his terrorists.

Once the twelve Green Berets touched down, Captain Mark Nutsch, the team leader, had his team sergeant, Paul Evans, split the A-Team in half once again. Six of the twelve-man team separated into two three-man close air support teams. Close air support, also known as CAS, or "calling air strikes," would be one of the key components in fewer than four hundred Green Berets winning the war in Afghanistan in just under six months. In fact, in the first ninety days of the war, there were fewer than 120 Green Berets on the ground, fighting a Taliban and al-Qaida (AQ) army composed of tens of thousands of hardened "holy warriors."

Nutsch and Evans had been assigned in early October to General Abdul Rashid Dostum, the Northern Alliance warlord commanding the troops who would bear the brunt of the fighting. The young captain and the tough master sergeant were preparing to advise and assist Dostum in taking back the key northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif before Christmas, when the Afghan winter would turn its worst. The Taliban forces were arrayed against the Northern Alliance in vastly superior numbers, and they held defensive posts all along Dostum's intended route of attack.

General Dostum was a big man, over six feet tall, and ethnically, he was Uzbek. He had been trained by the Soviet Army to fight against the Afghans, but defected after becoming disenchanted with the Soviets' methods. Dostum spoke almost no Arabic, but communicated in a smattering of Dari, Russian, and Uzbek. He was viewed by his enemies as a brutal military commander, with an intense hatred of Islamic fundamentalists that was documented back to the 1980s, before the Taliban's rise to power in Afghanistan. With his crew-cut graying hair, barrel chest, and imposing presence, Dostum was a gregarious commander who had changed sides many times.

As the press spent their time hypothesizing about America's tactics, the Green Berets laughed at the notion that the war would take a hiatus during the terrible Afghan winter and, of course, Ramadan, the Muslim month-long period of fasting, contemplation, and prayer. So did their ultimate commander, President George W. Bush.

Two Air Force personnel were assigned to each of the Special Forces' twelve-man A-Teams, after Green Berets were already on the ground. The Air Force combat controllers were experts at calling in air strikes and performing air traffic control functions. But, according to the Green Berets, the greatest benefit of the additional two Air Force personnel was that they brought two extra satellite radios with them. This allowed Evans and the other team sergeants to break their teams into four three-man elements during close air support missions. They could form a half-moon shape with their teams, effectively controlling and overlapping their fire support, drastically improving the already devastating firepower they called in.

Master Sergeant Evans picked one of the Air Force CAS specialists for his three-man CAS team, so he could see firsthand what all the fuss was about. He never had a problem calling in CAS, and there had never been a case of a Green Beret sergeant calling in friendly fire on his own team. The only such cases they had heard about had involved officers, who were not as adept at such tasks. Evans, Staff Sergeant Mike Elmore, and the Air Force sergeant were dressed in the local garb worn by the Northern Alliance. They wore long checkered scarves and round brownish-tan or gray wool pakols, also known as "Massoud" caps, named after Ahmad Shah Massoud, the assassinated legend and former leader of the Northern Alliance. Their attire allowed the Green Berets to blend in with the locals from a distance. The three men also all sported beards they had started growing in mid-September back in the States, when they were first alerted for their deployment to Afghanistan.

The three special operators crouched behind a mound of dirt in an old bomb crater and set up their equipment. The first piece was a large, olive-green, rubberized spotting scope, and the second piece resembled something akin to a giant pair of olive drab binoculars mounted on a small tripod, with a trigger attached to a coiled length of cable. It was called a SOFLAM. SOFLAM (Special Operation Forces' Laser Marker) is special-ops lingo for a laser designator, which shoots out a laser beam to mark the enemy target so that a laser-guided bomb can strike it.

"Scanning for targets," announced Air Force Staff Sergeant Matt Leinhard over his satellite radio. Evans stared through the lens of the spotting scope, scanning from left to right across the face of the barren, rocky ridgelines that lay ahead. Evans abruptly stopped his scan. "I've got eyes on a target!" he exclaimed.

Staff Sergeant Elmore, the team's weapons sergeant, began punching data into the Panasonic "Toughbook" laptop computer lying open in front of him. All of their information would be useful with the reports they would be delivering later to TASK FORCE DAGGER headquarters.

"Good to go! SOFLAM ready," the towering six-foot-plus Elmore replied.

The Taliban and al-Qaida forces would never quite understand

the concept of smart bombs or the lasers that targeted them, and in

the weeks ahead, a rumor began wildly circulating among them that the Special Forces possessed a "Death Ray" that would destroy anything they aimed it at. The Death Ray was about to unleash a healthy dose of American vengeance.

Sergeant Elmore aimed the laser marker at the front of a Taliban bunker built into the face of the hillside half a kilometer away. Inside the firing ports of the enemy bunker he could see the muzzle flashes of automatic weapons. Bullets cracked overhead as the Berets began taking enemy fire. Sergeant Leinhard picked up the satellite radio and began speaking into it. The snapping of automatic rifle fire raked the shelter just above their heads and made it difficult to hear. The three special operators ducked down behind the berm as the enemy bullets showered dirt onto their backs.

"We have two F/A-18s on deck," Sergeant Leinhard announced, his ear pressed to the LST-5 satellite radio.

"Target is marked," Sergeant Elmore replied, squeezing the trigger that shot the invisible, infrared laser beam into the front opening of the enemy bunker.

A pair of Navy F/A-18 fighters streaked across the sky twenty thousand feet in the air above the scene, so high they were virtually invisible to the naked eye. One of the planes banked sharply and swooped down, letting loose a thousand-pound laser-guided bomb. As the smart bomb whistled through the air, its internal computer homed in on the laser signature. The bomb's tail fins directed it on its collision course with the enemy bunker. The three special operators braced themselves, keeping their mouths open so the force of the blast wouldn't rupture their eardrums.

About half a minute passed, then BOOM!

The earth shook as the bomb detonated directly over the top of the bunker, throwing a giant brown cloud of dirt, fire, and black smoke high into the sky. Master Sergeant Evans waited for the aftershock to pass by them and then peered out through the scope. In place of the bunker was a huge, smoking crater. He could see the body parts of slain Taliban soldiers scattered around it.

"Target destroyed!" Evans shouted to his partners as he peered through the spotting scope, a wide grin on his stubbly face.

For a long moment there was silence once again, then the entire hillside erupted into a fierce volley of fire. Now, through the spotting scope, Evans could see the muzzle flash of machine-gun fire coming from another bunker on the Taliban-controlled hillside.

"I've got eyes on another bunker!" Evans cried out, tapping his partner's shoulder and pointing toward it.

Something streaking through the air caught their attention. It looked like the Taliban were shooting Roman candles into the sky above their heads. The smoke trails from the objects began to fall toward the earth in front of the Americans' position.

"RPGs!" Elmore exclaimed. The Taliban were shooting rocket-propelled grenades toward them, but instead of aiming them directly at the Americans' position, they were lobbing them skyward like mortar rounds, hoping to land one behind the mound of dirt in the crater that was protecting the American advisors to the Northern Alliance.

The pair of Green Berets manning the spotting scope and the laser marker slid backward on their bellies, seeking as much overhead cover as they could find. The RPGs exploded on the ground in front of their position, showering them with rocks and rubble, and filling the air with black smoke and the smell of cordite. Leinhard was crouched nearby, his hands clamped over his radio headphones. They glanced behind them, down the ridgeline to their rear, to see if any of the rocket-propelled grenades had flown that far.

About a hundred men crouched below them, hidden among the rough boulders. From a distance, they looked the same as the three special operators, but they were in fact Northern Alliance freedom fighters, called mujahadeen, most of them clutching a variety of old AK-47 assault rifles. They looked up at the two Green Berets and their Air Force sergeant with a mixture of fear and nervousness.

"It looks like these guys want to leave," Elmore said to his partners, chuckling. One of the crouching Northern Alliance militiamen yelled up to them in Dari, the native dialect, barely distinguishable over the roar of enemy fire and the thuds of detonating grenades.

"The muj want to get out before the Taliban can launch a counterattack," Leinhard shouted over the gunfire. The muj were scared, but not of the Taliban. General Dostum had warned his soldiers that he would personally kill every one of them and their families if an American were so much as superficially wounded.

"Tell them we're going to hold tight, we've got the high ground," Evans responded.

Ignoring the danger, the three soldiers low-crawled up to the top of the berm yet again. The hailstorm of gunfire continued, peppering the ground in front of them and cracking through the air overhead.

The glint of metal caught the three soldiers' eyes as they saw something large rolling out from behind a hidden position on the Taliban-held ridgeline. For a second they thought it was a Russian T-55 tank, but in the place of a main gun there were four smaller barrels. It was a ZSU-23-4, a Russian antiaircraft gun left over from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Through the spotting scope, Evans could see the operator's head sticking up out of the turret, and as the enemy soldier swung the turret toward them, the four 23mm barrels bristling out of the turret's center began flashing rapidly, throwing out clouds of smoke.

"I've got two more F/A-18s on deck!" Leinhard shouted.

By this time, the ZSU, or "Zeus," as the Afghans call it, began throwing a volley of rounds in their direction. To them it sounded like the chugging of a steam locomotive, and the rounds blasted rocks and dirt into the air all around them.

Sergeant Elmore aimed the laser marker at the ZSU's turret. At the same time, the Zeus began rolling backward toward cover. Elmore held the laser beam steady on the front of the berm the antiaircraft vehicle now hid behind. The only thing that gave away its position was the black puffs of diesel smoke that rose from behind the berm.

BOOM! Another thousand-pound bomb exploded, throwing a mushroom cloud of dust and thick black smoke high into the sky.

"I can't tell, but I think we neutralized the ZSU," Sergeant Leinhard called out on his radio.

The 23mm cannon fire from the Zeus had just been eliminated, but the Taliban rifle and RPG fire were increasing. It was a constant barrage, and down the hill on the friendly side, the Northern Alliance soldiers began to grow even more nervous and weary.

"Tell them if they can hang on another ten minutes, I've got a B-52 on the way!" Leinhard shouted to his partners over the roar of the battle as he held his ear to the radio headset.

"Hoo-ah!" shouted Sergeant Elmore, unable to contain his excitement, and then he relayed the message to the cowering muj hunkered down behind them.

"It better be quick," Sergeant Evans replied, "because we've got enemy troops in the open out here!"

The Green Berets were carrying the M-4, a special version of the

M-16 assault rifle, shortened, with a collapsible stock and outfitted with a scope, laser designator, and an improved 5.56mm boat-tailed 70-grain bullet. It was a twenty-first-century version of the old XM177E2 the SOG (Studies and Observation Group) recon teams had carried in Vietnam.

A stream of charging Taliban began running down the enemy hillside toward them. The two Green Berets returned fire, picking off Taliban fighters, who tumbled down the slope like rag dolls after being hit by the special operators' bullets. Ten minutes seemed to stretch into an eternity as the wave of charging Taliban grew closer. The terrorists were closing the gap, now running up the front of the friendly hillside, less than two football fields away from the Americans' position.

The Green Berets looked to their rear, and saw the muj behind them starting to beat a hasty retreat back toward the east, to their original position.