Victory Point - Ed Darack [136]
“You’re good!” a Marine yelled. Lining up the aiming sights on the bright flashes of enemy fire before him, Padilla squeezed the trigger. Click—Boom! Reddish-orange fireballs popped out of both ends of the launcher. Padilla tossed the spent tube as the warhead accelerated toward the insurgents—then struck their position, dead-on. The grunts continued firing, then the enemy fell completely silent.
“This is Fox-1, I think everyone in Fox-3 is dead—the entire platoon!” On Hill 2510, Geise pondered how he’d make the call to battalion higher as he watched the attack that night unfurl before his eyes. There’s no way they can survive that, he thought. It looks like a scene from Star Wars, with all those green and red tracers and exploding balls of yellow flame. Then a small number of Shah’s men attacked Hill 2510. Geise directed his Marines to return fire—and as happened a few hours earlier, the aggressors turned and ran. Fox-1 would continue to hold firm as Star Wars raged on.
“Come on, Konnie, now’s not the time,” Middendorf began as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, assuming that Konstant had run to his position—which was still taking sporadic fire—to bum a Marlboro.
“No. I’m not here for a smoke,” Konnie responded as Dorf tried not to laugh at him. Konstant was wearing just his flak, Kevlar helmet, boots, and underwear—no pants. “Pigeon needs us to work up targeting grids. He’s got air on the way. But they need ten-digit grids for a JDAM drop.”
“What’s with your hand, Konnie?” Middendorf asked. Blood, from a shrapnel gash, was oozing from the top of Konstant’s right hand. “Guess your luck ran out tonight.” Middendorf laughed.
Konnie looked at his watch—a minute past midnight on the seventeenth of August. “Hey, I just realized that it’s my birthday. I just turned twenty-four this minute.”
“What a birthday party you have here,” Middendorf observed drily, then jumped into the job of finding targets for Pigeon. But a ten-digit grid, required for Pigeon to clear a JDAM GPS-guided bomb drop, was far too small a plot of land—one square meter—to resolve on Middendorf’s map. He and Konnie, doing a quick map recon, determined the most likely routes of egress for whatever of Shah’s force had survived. But the highest resolution Middendorf could discern was an area represented by an eight-digit grid (ten meters by ten meters). So he just added a zero to the northing and a zero to the easting, then passed the now-ten-digit grid to the FAC.
Cruising at over thirty-five thousand feet, a B-52H Stratofortress of the Air Force’s Fifth Bomb Wing based out of Minot Air Base in North Dakota, tracked toward the Hindu Kush and the Chowkay Valley, packed with two-thousand-pound GBU-31 JDAMs. With the survivors of Shah’s force now on the run, Pigeon worked up a final attack plan for the bomber, based on the grids identified by Middendorf and Konstant, as Grissom, Konnie, and Middendorf looked on.
“What’s takin’ so long, Pigeon?” Konnie asked.
“A B-52 doesn’t turn on a dime, Lieutenant,” the FAC shot back. “Not like those A-10s that can just fly around in tight circles all day long inside the valley.” With direct comms established with the B-52, Pigeon began to pass