Frederick Forsyth: The Kill List

From California, Maj. Carson was shipped on to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington and thus presented himself to CIA headquarters, as per orders.

There were interviews, tests in Arabic, a compulsory change into civilian clothes and finally a small office in No. 2 Building, miles from the senior ranks of the Agency on the top floors of the original No. 1 Building.

He was given a pile of intercepts of broadcasts in Arabic to peruse and comment. He chafed. This was a job for the National Security Agency over at Fort Meade on the Baltimore road up in Maryland. They were the listeners, the eavesdroppers, the code breakers. He had not joined the Corps to analyze newscasts from Radio Cairo.

Then a rumor swept the building. Mullah Omar, the weird leader of the Taliban government of Afghanistan, was refusing to give up the culprits of 9/11. Osama bin Laden and his entire al-Qaeda movement would remain safe inside Afghanistan. And the rumor was: We are going to invade.

The details were sparse but accurate on a few points. The Navy would be offshore in strength in the Arabian Gulf, delivering massive air power. Pakistan would cooperate, but grudgingly and with dozens of conditions. The American feet on the ground would be Special Forces only. And their British equivalents would be with them.

The CIA, apart from its spies, agents and analysts, had one division that involved itself in what in the trade is called active measures, a euphemism for the messy business of killing people.

Kit Carson made his pitch and he made it strong. He confronted the head of the Special Activities Division and told him bluntly: You need me. Sir. I am no use sitting in a coop like a battery hen. I may not speak Pashto or Dari, but our real enemies are bin Laden’s terrorists — Arabs all. I can listen to them. I can interrogate prisoners, read their written instructions and notes. You need me with you in Afghanistan; no one needs me here.

He had made an ally. He got his transfer. When President Bush made his announcement of invasion on October 7th, the advance units of the SAD were on their way to meet the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. Kit Carson went with them.

The battle of Shah-i-Kot started badly and then went downhill. Maj. Kit Carson of the U.S. Marines, attached to the SAD, should have been on his way home when his unit was summoned to help out.

He had already been at Mazar-e-Sharif when the Taliban prisoners revolted and the Uzbeks and Tajiks of the Northern Alliance mowed them down. He had seen fellow SAD Johnny “Mike” Spann caught by the Talib and beaten to death. From the far side of the vast compound, he had watched the British Special Boat Service men rescue Spann’s partner, Dave Tyson, from a similar fate.

Then came the storming surge south to overrun the old Soviet air base at Bagram and take Kabul. He had missed the fighting in the Tora Bora massif when the Americans’ paid-for (but not enough) Afghan warlord had betrayed them and let Osama bin Laden and his entourage of guards slip over the border into Pakistan.

Then, in late February, word came from Afghan sources that there were still a few diehards hanging on in the valley of Shah-i-Kot, up in Paktia Province. Once again, the intel was rubbish. There was not a handful; there were hundreds of them.

The defeated Taliban, being Afghans, had somewhere to go: their native villages. They could slip away and disappear. But the al-Qaeda fighters were Arabs, Uzbeks and, fiercest of all, Chechens. They spoke no Pashto, the ordinary Afghans hated them; they could only surrender or die fighting. Almost all chose the second.

The American command responded to the tip with a small-scale project called Operation Anaconda and it went to the Navy SEALs. Three huge Chinooks full of SEALs took off for the valley, which was thought to be empty.

Coming in to land, the leading helicopter was nose up, tail down, with its ramp doors open, a few feet off the ground, when the hidden al-Qaedists opened up. One rocket-propelled grenade was so close, it went straight through the fuselage without exploding. It did not have enough time in the air to arm itself. So it went in one side, missed everyone and went out the other, leaving two windy holes.

What did the damage was the raking burst of machine-gun fire from the nest among the snowy rocks. It also managed to miss everyone inside, but it wrecked the controls as it ripped through the flight deck. With a few minutes of genius flying, the pilot hauled the dying Chinook aloft and nursed it for three miles until he could crash-land it on safer ground. The other two behind him followed.

But one SEAL, Chief Petty Officer Neil Roberts, who had unhitched his tether line, slipped on a patch of hydraulic fluid and slithered out the back. He landed unhurt in a mass of al-Qaeda. SEALs never leave a mate, dead or alive, on the field. Having landed, they came storming back for CPO Roberts. As they did so, they called for help. The battle of Shah-i-Kot had begun. It lasted four days. It took the lives of Neil Roberts and six other Americans.

Three units were near enough to respond to the call. A troop of British SBS came from one direction and the SAD unit from another. The largest group to come to help was a battalion from the 75th Ranger Regiment.

The weather was freezing, way below zero. Flurries of driven snow stung the eyes. How the Arabs had survived the winter up there was anyone’s guess. But they had and they were prepared to die to the last man. They took no prisoners and did not expect to be taken. According to witnesses later, they came out of crevices in the rocks, unseen caves and hidden machine-gun nests.

Any veteran will confirm that battles quickly descend into chaos, and Shah-i-Kot was faster than most. Units became separated from the main body and individuals from the unit. Kit Carson found himself alone with the ice and driven snow.

He saw another American — the headdress, helmet against turban, gave the identity away — about forty yards distant, also alone. A robed figure came out of the ground and fired an RPG at the camouflaged soldier. This time the grenade did go off. It did not hit the American but exploded at his feet, and Carson watched him fall.

He took out the rocketeer with his carbine. Two more appeared and charged him, screaming, “Allahu-akhbar.” He dropped them both, the second one barely six feet from the end of his barrel. The American, when he reached him, was alive but in a bad way. A white-hot shard from the rocket casing had sliced into his left ankle, virtually severing it. The foot in its combat boot was hanging by a sinew, tendon and some tendrils of flesh. The bone was gone. The man was in the first no-pain, stunned shock that precedes the agony.

The smocks of both men were crusted with snow, but Carson could make out the flash of a Ranger. He tried to raise someone on his radio but met only static. Easing off the wounded man’s backpack, he pulled out the first aid wallet and shoved the entire dose of morphine into the exposed calf.

The Ranger began to feel the pain, and his teeth gritted. Then the morphine hit him and he slumped, semiconscious. Carson knew they were both going to die if they stayed there. Visibility was twenty yards between gusts. He could see no one. Heaving the injured Ranger on his back in a fireman’s lift, he began to march.

He was walking over the worst terrain on Earth; football-sized smooth boulders under a foot of snow, every one a leg breaker. He was carrying his own one hundred and eighty pounds, plus his sixty-pound pack. Plus another one hundred and eighty pounds of Ranger — he had left the Ranger’s pack behind. Plus carbine, grenades, ammunition and water.

Later, he had no idea how far he slogged out of that lethal valley. At one point the morphine in the Ranger lost effect, so he lowered the man and pumped in his own supply. After an age, he heard the whump-whump of an engine. With fingers that had ceased to feel anything, he pulled out his maroon flare, tore it open with his teeth and held it high, pointing it at the noise.