Spycraft - Melton [205]
According to the plan, four Pave-Lows would fly in formation crossing into Afghanistan, then separate. Two would go to Kandahar and two to another base. Flight time was estimated at three hours, getting the team to Kandahar sometime after midnight.
Just before dark, the techs loaded the two helicopters with the two and a half tons of containers, boxes, and bags. An extensive preflight briefing covered topics ranging from landing positions to combat search and rescue (CSAR) procedures. Each team member was issued a Glock 9mm before boarding the craft.
Bad luck boarded as well. A warning light blinking in the cockpit of one Pave-Low a short time after take-off sent the OTS team back to Pakistan airbase. Once on the ground, the team reloaded their gear and million-dollar duffel bag onto a new Pave-Low, only to be told the replacement helicopter also suffered from mechanical problems. At the last possible minute for the night operation to continue, the ground crew isolated and fixed the problem.
As they lifted off from the base, the noise inside the Pave-Low drowned out conversation. Gunners positioned themselves at the opened side doors and the back ramp was opened for the .50 cal gunner. Crossing into Afghanistan, all three gunners opened up and test fired. Adding to the noise, the opened doors created an uncomfortable internal wind tunnel. “Only then,” recalled Mark, “did we learn what a cold rough flight really was, when the helicopter began bouncing up and down from the wind of the southern mountain range.”
Three hours later, the chopper hovered over bomb craters and debris before touching down on a dark runway of what was once a state-of-the-art airport. Built in the 1970s, Kandahar International Airport was at one time the largest and most modern in Central Asia, but it had been severely damaged in the Russian invasion in the early 1980s. After the Soviets left, the airport became a stronghold for Taliban and al-Qaeda forces, which turned its runways into minefields. Recent U.S. bombing raids had added to the destruction, pockmarking the tarmac with deep craters and littering it with the debris of war. Now, with the airport recaptured by U.S. Marines and Pashtun guerillas, control of the once modern structure—less than twenty miles outside Kandahar—signaled the end of the Taliban’s fixed presence in the area.
With the chopper’s blades still turning, the team rushed to off-load the gear in the fifteen minutes the pilot allowed before taking off for the return flight to Pakistan. No reception committee greeted the six as the Pave-Low vanished into the night, leaving the team alone on the darkened runway at four o’clock in the morning. The team stood beside thousands of pounds of high-tech equipment and the money bag they had hauled from plane to plane and chopper to chopper, used en route as a pillow, footrest, and bed. Mark noticed that the strings securing the stacks of hundred-dollar bills had come untied leaving a bag filled with 10,000 loose bills.
Armed with only Glock 9mm sidearms, the team had no choice but to wait in the open on the runway. “We had been told that the Marines moved onto the airfield a few hours before, but they were nowhere to be seen,” recalled a team member. “We had no contact plan. Six sets of headlights suddenly popped up at about three hundred meters and headed our way. We hoped they were friendlies.” The headlights were from vehicles belonging to two Marine units supported by Delta Force operators.
The Marines greeted the OTS team in short-bedded Toyota pickups woefully inadequate for hauling 5,000 pounds of equipment to the Governor’s Palace in downtown Kandahar. Two trips would be necessary, the trip taking an hour each way.
The palace compound had until recently been home to the Taliban’s reclusive one-eyed spiritual leader Mullah Omar. A chief architect of Taliban rule, Omar had issued the religious decrees that turned