Victory Point - Ed Darack [95]
After a short introduction and lunch inside the police station’s mud-and-brick-walled inner courtyard, the Marines headed west, on the final leg of their journey to Camp Blessing. As the pastoral landscape surrounding Watapor blurred into the background and the convoy sped toward the heart of the Hindu Kush, Donnellan pondered just what he’d find at Camp Blessing; after hearing so many stories about the lonely outpost, he wondered which of the many tales would reveal themselves as fact and which exaggeration.
Coming around a turn, the convoy rumbled into view of the domineering Sawtalo Sar, and the Marines soon eyed the village of Matin at the mountain’s base. The broad, flat plain they traveled narrowed to a corridor barely wide enough for a Humvee to traverse, with sheer cliffs on both sides and the frigid Pech River almost a hundred feet below. As the convoy slowed, each driver made sure to stay well behind the vehicle in front of him as he approached a blind turn in the road, a bend marked by a large, diamond-shaped boulder. Unbeknownst to the drivers, a couple hundred feet above the boulder, two of Shah’s men, one with a video camera, and another with a modified cordless phone, hunkered down in sinister wait.
Days, weeks, or possibly months earlier, most likely in one of the small houses high on the slopes of Sawtalo Sar in the Chichal area, one of Shah’s paid operatives carefully enhanced two blasting caps by squeezing C4 around them, then poured high-explosive powder into the bottom of a pressure cooker. After attaching the blasting caps to a modified cordless phone (cordless phones sold in Asia have greater transmission power and hence range than those sold in the United States), the man, who was known to work with his young son at his side, placed the detonator assembly inside the pressure cooker, filled the pot with charge, then sealed it with a crank atop its lid. Before the convoy rolled through, almost certainly at night, one of the extremist’s hired helpers buried the device twenty feet east of the diamond-shaped boulder, a point marked by a flat tan rock that, visually contrasted against the darker earth of the slope against which it was propped, was visible from hundreds of meters distant. After the ambush of the SEAL recon team and then the shoot-down of the MH-47, Shah was clearly looking to continue his reign of terror.
The first two “hardbacks” (standard, four-seat Humvees), one of which carried Donnellan, rounded the bend as the third, carrying eight Marines and an interpreter, approached the point of the road marked by the tan rock. Moments later, Shah’s triggerman rose from his hide and depressed a single button on his phone’s keypad, arming the device. Just as the driver of the third highback rounded the bend, the world before him went black as a concussive wave of earth shattered the Humvee’s windshield and enveloped it and its nine passengers in a boiling orange-and-yellow fireball. The powerful blast crushed the Humvee’s undercarriage and mashed the heavy diesel engine onto the laps of the driver and front passenger as it launched the vehicle airborne in a reverse summersault. Not a second later, the vehicle lay upside down, pointed east. Donnellan’s vehicle skidded to a halt; immediately the call went over the net that a Humvee had been hit by an IED. Bartels, constantly monitoring