Victory Point - Ed Darack [129]
“Yeah, I did get here just in time. Get your head DOWN!” Eggers responded after a few more bursts as a wavering hiss announced the first of a volley of football-size 120 mm mortars sailing over their heads. Boom! Trees splintered and rocks shattered as a mushroom cloud of earth clumped into the sky, knocking the wind out of the three members of Ronin with a pummeling concussive blast. Eggers radioed Lemons, who was on the hook with both the mortar team and Doghouse, and adjusted fires. The scout/sniper team leader told the mortar team to “walk” a swath of destruction along the north ridge throughout Shah’s men’s positions and along what he felt to be their most likely egress routes. Within a minute, Lemons had Doghouse cleared to fire, but he also had a problem: the members of Ronin that day sat at the very, very outer edge of the 105 mm howitzers’ range; when rounds are fired onto such complex terrain, at a target over eight thousand feet above sea level, their trajectories, if off by just a few tens of meters horizontally, could result in a much-greater vertical offset, thereby sending the shells down onto Ronin’s position.
Hearing the distinctive sound of an incoming artillery round, Eggers, Roy, and Pigman prepared for the explosion . . . but heard instead a deafening roar echoing throughout the mountains.
“What the”—boom!—“hell!” Roy wondered out loud. “Did someone just fire a rocket at us?” Then another round descended, it, too, followed by a thunderous roar and a huge explosion.
“That must be the rocket assist portion of the round’s flight,” Eggers said.
“Man, that’s close,” Roy began as yet more 105 mm RAP rounds impacted the north ridge, just a few hundred meters from Ronin’s position, directly on target. Soon the barrage stopped . . . as did the enemy’s ambush.
“Hopefully we got some of them, and then the 120s and 105s finished ’em off,” Pigman observed.
“Well, we probably won’t ever know. They’re good about dragging off their dead, and we’re in no position to go and do a battle damage assessment,” Eggers replied. “Now we gotta get you out of here,” the team leader continued. “Will you take some morphine now?”
“Hell no.” The corpsman stubbornly held firm in his resolve. “It’s still just three of us—and if they somehow survived that barrage, I wanna shoot as many as possible if they come back!” Pigman said as he grimaced in pain. “They almost had us like the SEALs—same number of guys, same positioning, everything!”
Eggers agreed—Shah’s men had ambushed Ronin in virtually the same manner as they had attacked the NAVSOF recon team, using plunging, interlocking superior fires from extremely well-covered—virtually invisible—positions with eight to twelve men broken into a few positions.
Eggers radioed Captain Zach Rashman requesting a Dustoff extract. Then the sniper team waited. As Rashman worked furiously to coordinate the extract, which would require Echo-3’s Marines to secure an LZ, Pigman slowly began to drift into shock from blood loss. Within an hour after the first shots of the ambush, Guyton and his Echo-3 Marines had sprinted up to the snipers. As they desperately searched for an LZ amid terrain that was inaccessible even for a nimble helicopter like a UH-60, the pilots and crew of two Dustoff Blackhawks raced into their craft at Jalalabad Airfield and spun up the birds’ engines. Escorted by two Shock Apaches, the aviators could feel their helicopters struggling at altitude in the afternoon air; although they rocketed up the Pech River Valley at around seven thousand feet above sea level, the intense August afternoon heat pushed the density altitude much, much higher. And once they were close to the mountain itself, that heat would cause all types of convectional turbulence for the pilots.
The lead Dustoff, piloted by Army Chief Warrant Officer Rob Henninger, followed the Apaches up the Shuryek Valley, intending to arrive at the snipers’ location by passing over the north ridge, a route the Apache pilots felt to be less of a threat than the