Victory Point - Ed Darack [67]
6
AMBUSH
With the waning glow of dusk a faded memory and the moon still hours from cresting the high, serrated complex of mountains to their east, the aviators piloting the two MH-47s guided their Chinooks through the darkest of Hindu Kush nights. Bound for Sawtalo Sar, they sped ghostlike over the village-dotted expanses of the lower Kunar Valley, then pressed ever higher above the vicious peaks surrounding the target zone. Viewing the world around them from behind the eerie green glow of their NVGs’ reticules, the Army special operations aviators drove the powerful, heavily armed helicopters deep into the heart of the very worst of the enemy’s lair. Intimate with the terrain from previous nights’ decoy drops, the pilots once again hovered their craft over insert zones surrounding the village of Chichal and the summit region of Sawtalo Sar before the lead ship peeled off, arcing to the south of the mountain’s uppermost triangular bulk. As the decoy bird roamed near more populated areas above the upper Korangal, the Chinook carrying the recon team slowed as it approached a point about a third of a mile south-southwest of, and three hundred feet in elevation lower than, the peak’s true summit, the “saddle” between Sawtalo Sar and Gatigal Sar. With the clak-clak-clak of the craft’s twin rotors resonating in muffled ka-klatter-ka-klatter-ka-klatter echoes off the walls of the Korangal and Shuryek valleys, the SOAR(A) aviators eased the muscular bird into a perfect hover about thirty-five feet above a patch of lightly treed ground as the MH-47’s crew chief lowered the Chinook’s rear ramp and deployed a single three-inch-thick fastrope. The four members of the recon team, laden with a broad array of gear from food and water to weapons, donned their lightweight Pro-Tec helmets and calmly stood in anticipation of their phase of the mission, then approached the very rear of the craft. Both “torquing” with stacked clenched hands and pinching the line with their boots’ inner soles, the SDVT SEALs slid into the abyss of the night’s dimensionless pitch darkness and connected with the ground just seconds later, fanning out away from the MH-47’s rotor wash as soon as their boots hit the deck. Feeling the fastrope go limp once the last of the team reached firm ground, the crew chief—trained for and accustomed to direct-action raids where he’d jettison the fastrope as soon as a team hit the ground—instinctively detached the line; the olive-drab fastrope snaked to the earth with a dull whump as the crew chief alerted the pilots that all four had successfully inserted. As the Chinook’s turbofans’ screams and its rotors’ clak clak claks melted into the silence of the staid night with the MH- 47’s quick departure, Murphy, Dietz, Axelson, and Luttrell moved toward OP-1. But the four didn’t know about the dropped fastrope—this wasn’t a direct-action hard-hit raid, but a covert insert, necessitating as small a footprint as possible. And for the SDVT recon team on the ground that night, that meant no footprint whatsoever, given that they were operating on Sawtalo Sar, literally in the den of some of the most viciously determined extremist fighters in the world. Relatively unfamiliar with each respective unit’s comprehensive standard operating procedures, neither the SOAR(A) planners nor those of NAVSOF discussed the post-insert fate of the rope during mission planning. The SEALs assumed the SOAR(A) crew would retract the fastrope, as this was a covert insert; but the TF-Brown aviators assumed that the SEALs would cache the line, as they