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By Root 1461 0

a nine-line brief to the bomber. Their detailed instructions received, the pilots began to position their massive craft for the attack, taking them out of range of Pigeon’s radio. Waiting for a read-back, a confirmation that the aircraft had received all information in the nine-line correctly, Pigeon, realizing that the B-52 couldn’t hear his transmissions, jumped on SATCOM to Rob Scott. “Comms are down between me and the B-52,” he told the XO. With the huge bomber carving a broad turn into its final attack heading, Rob, in yet another example of his acting as the glue to keep the battalion’s operations moving forward, immediately contacted the Air Force’s ASOC, or Air Support Operations Center, in Bagram, which contacted the B-52. With a tenuous connection established, Rashman once again stepped up to the plate—using Pigeon’s coordinates, Zach got a read-back sent to Rob Scott and Ratkowiak and gave the cleared-hot call down the channel. As clouds began to roll in over the valley, the bomber released one GBU-31, its destination grid having been programmed into its guidance system by the bomber’s crew. As the B-52 then turned off its attack run, Pigeon prepared to call in a second strike as the bomb’s fins clacked back and forth, deflecting at computer-adjusted intervals, sending the huge munition inside an invisible cone of ingress with the tip of that trajectory field pricking the one-square-meter patch of earth Middendorf and Konnie reckoned to be where the last of Shah’s men would most likely be grouping. Just over forty seconds after the B-52’s crew released the bomb, night flashed to dawn and the JDAM erupted in a blinding fireball on the ridge to the north of the platoon.

“What about the second grid, Pigeon?” Konnie asked excitedly as Marines in the distance cheered at the billowing fireball, followed seconds later by the rumbling whump! of the distant impact. “Let’s finish ’em off.”

“I’m Rolexing TOTs, Konnie. With the comms the way they are, things are taking more time than normal,” Pigeon explained to the lieutenant—in aviator lingo—that he had to push back the time on target for the second JDAM.

“Come on, Pigeon,” Konnie goaded. “Smoke check—”

“Okay, Konstant. Shut the fuck up!” Grissom began. “And why don’t you go and put some fucking pants on, Lieutenant. You look absolutely ridiculous standing there. A real model officer, aren’t you? And what’s with your hand?”

“RPG, sir. Hit by shrapnel,” Konnie explained as he exhaled a long banner of cigarette smoke.

“Great. We were almost able to say that we got in that huge contact with the enemy and got out of it completely unscathed. But you had to go and get hit by RPG shrapnel—the only one of all the Marines out here tonight to get injured.”

“But it’s my birthday, Captain,” Konnie said, oozing sarcasm, before leaving to don his proper uniform.

“Cleared-hot,” Rashman called, working with Pigeon, the pilots, Rob Scott, and the ASOC after he received the read-back.

“Roger, bomb on target within the minute,” Rob Scott passed to Pigeon. After the night’s second “rumbling sunrise,” this time over a ridge to the northeast of the camp, the valley fell silent.

“Think we got ’em all, sir?” Konnie asked Grissom.

“We’ll know soon enough.”

13

KINETIC EXFIL

Up to sixty enemy killed in action over the past three days out of a force of eighty to one hundred—BREAK—enemy command and control now virtually nonexistent—BREAK—” Kelly Grissom earnestly listened to Rob Scott’s intel dump early in the morning of 17 August, the XO’s breaks giving him time to transcribe the information gleaned from numerous HUMINT and SIGINT sources. “Demeanor of survivors extremely hostile—BREAK—small bands of survivors staging to ambush coalition forces in both the Chowkay and Korangal valleys and possibly along the Jalalabad-Asadabad road—BREAK—these bands are possibly on suicide missions—BREAK—Ahmad Shah severely wounded—BREAK—possibly shot or possibly hit from shrapnel—BREAK—escaped to Pakistan and now seeking medical care.” The second-to-last line in the transmission put a grin on