Ian Slater: Choke Point

“Yes, sir,” Morgan answered, adding, as he put down the phone, “They’ll like that .”

David Brentwood heard the deep brrr of the bulky Pave Low coming in over the ravine. He saw the dim outline of the chopper’s portside crash-resistant external auxiliary fuel tank as the pilot trimmed the craft. Then the tank’s silhouette in his NVGs was lost against the helo’s body, the pilot deciding against dropping antimissile “sucker” flares because a rain of incandescent decoys would announce to any hostile in the area that infidels had arrived. Rules of Engagement meant that David, in urgent need of first aid, would have to go up first. Next, the bodies of Jamal Hassim, Eddie Merton, and the four commandos killed in the cave would be hauled up, followed by Sanchez, the only other survivor besides Brentwood, whose job it would be to hook up the dead. It would take time, it would be dangerous, but Special Forces’ first commandment was: “Thou shalt not leave a comrade injured or dead.”

Intuitively, David felt badly about insisting that he be the first in line for extraction, but common sense, together with SpecFor’s Rules of Engagement, had to overrule his better nature. If his arm could be saved, either by the 18D first response/trauma medic among the chopper’s six-man crew or at the battalion MASH unit at Tora Bora base, he could fight again, and go after Li Kuan before a dirty bomb appeared in an American or somebody else’s city.

As he ran out to grab the rope lowered by the chopper into the ravine, the.50 caliber machine gunner on the Pave’s rear ramp door moved his weapon left to right on the pintle mount in concert with his NVG sweep of the razorback ridge that cut the night sky like a knife blade, no more than a hundred feet away. Sanchez, emerging from the cave’s entrance, knelt to cover Brentwood amid the onslaught of dust and pebbles kicked up by the helo’s downdraft. The ramp gunner saw a flash at one o’clock, swung his.50 hard left, and unleashed a full burst, the machine gun’s deafening staccato overriding the whack of the sniper’s armor-piercing round hitting the right auxiliary tank, whose sealant wall did not prevent a leak, but there was no flame. The pilot, wanting to jettison the tank but afraid it might strike Brentwood, who was still on the ground directly beneath the chopper, yelled through his mike, asking if he was hooked up to the SPIE line. The copilot, meanwhile, released a rain of orange antimissile flares.

“Are you hooked up?” shouted the pilot. “Do you copy? Are you—”

“Yes, I am! Go! Go! Go!” And the Pave’s bulbous-nosed radar dome and in-air refueling proboscis dipped in unison. The chopper’s rear rotor tilted as the Pave rose swiftly above the dark V-shaped cleft of the ravine, the helo’s rear ramp machine gunner laying down suppressing fire until the last possible moment, the ramp door closing like the mouth of some airborne flame-spitting dragon. David, still on the ground as the Pave Low took up the slack, clung to the rope with his left hand, his right dangling uselessly.

Then suddenly he was off, his body and boots a tiny exclamation point to the pilot, the commando leader dangling over two hundred feet below the chopper. In fact, Brentwood was only ten feet off the ground, his illusion of height caused by the freezing air roaring into his lungs as wind currents buffeted him from side to side, dangerously close to the narrow ravine’s cliffs, like a pendulum’s bob. The vapor trail of the Russian-made rocket-propelled grenade streaked up from a razorback hide and was clearly visible to Sanchez at the cave’s entrance.

Not being a heat-seeking missile, the RPG’s 1.7-kilogram high-explosive antitank round struck the helo below the right engine mount’s cowling. Black smoke poured out of the helo, which immediately began losing power. In an instantaneous decision, the pilot jettisoned the right auxiliary fuel tank that had already been hit by the range-finding sniper bullet. The tank dropped like a bomb, but the pilot was right to release it, for now he could see that the tank was afire. David felt the whoosh of hot air as the tank plummeted past him, no more than ten feet away, a second before the chopper rose another fifty feet. The burning tank, smashing into the ground, exploded, vomiting out an enormous pear-shaped orange flame that engulfed the cave’s entrance, incinerating Sanchez and Jam’s inert body.

“I’m going down!” yelled the Pave’s medic, grabbing his trauma pack. The helo’s ramp was opening again, its.50 caliber now joined by the helo’s right-side 7.62 minigun.

“Go!” yelled the pilot, who fought against the fierce winds coming up from the ravine, which had no doubt been strengthened by the auxiliary tank’s explosion. He realized, as the medic must have, that any attempt to winch Brentwood up farther would spell disaster, given the helo’s severe “rockabye” motion. Either Brentwood would be smashed against the rock face or, delaying the Pave, make the helo a sitting target.

“Disengage!” the medic yelled at Brentwood.

David didn’t have to be told twice, both men falling within seconds of one another from the SPIE line, ten feet to the ground. David rolled onto his injured arm, the pain shooting so fast to his brain that he momentarily passed out, the medic dragging him behind the cover of boulders twenty feet from the cave’s entrance. David’s pain was so intense, however, that a moan escaped him. “Shut up!” the medic told the Medal of Honor winner, injecting him with a vial of morphine. He taped David’s arm and started an IV drip, the wind almost blowing off his Kevlar helmet, which was pelted by small pebbles and dust as fine as talc. But all the medic could think of now was whether the Pave pilot had had time to send a Mayday to Tora Bora, and if so, had they heard him?

“Goddamn CIA,” he cursed. They’d given the Afghans hundreds of heat-seeking Stingers to fight the Soviets, and now the missiles were being used to kill Americans. The world was crazy. And now the Russians were helping the U.S. fight the terrorists.

He checked Brentwood’s pulse. It wasn’t good. Why in hell had the helo stopped dropping flares to avoid Stingers? Probably, the medic guessed, because the copilot was conserving them for the run back over hostile areas to Tora Bora. It occurred to him then that if al Qaeda got to him and Brentwood, he could barter his medical skills and supplies for his survival. “You goddamned coward!” he berated himself aloud. “You’re Special Forces, for Christ’s sake. One of Freeman’s boys. Get a grip!”

He saw David Brentwood struggling with his left hand for the mouthpiece to his camelback, but the water sack had been lacerated either by the firefight in the cave or by shrapnel from the explosions of the helo’s jettisoned fuel tank. The medic took off his own camelback but warned David, “Just a sip.”

The helo, now free of any encumbrance, rose high and, barely missed by another RPG round, banked sharply to the left for twelve hundred meters, beyond the maximum range of an RPG. From there, the Pave, hovering, its machine guns roaring, aided by infrared searchlights, began raking the razorback, now that the helo had more freedom to move. “Winds are dying down,” noted the pilot. “Maybe we could have another go?”

“Why not?” said the copilot, sounding braver than he felt.

“Missile three o’clock low!” shouted the pilot, hauling hard on the Pave’s yoke, narrowly avoiding the RPG. The Pave’s gunners laid down suppressing fire left to right, the helo banking hard toward the ravine, the copilot warning the medic this would be the last attempt.

The medic was frantically lashing himself to Brentwood when the weighted SPIE line thumped him in the back, sending his helmet flying, knocking him and Brentwood to the ground. “Jesus Christ!” But he was quick enough to grab the line and clip on. The line, now slacker, dragged past him. The Pave’s pilot tried to ease the Pave up, but despite the helo’s heavy enfilade, another RPG was coming straight at him. He dropped the helo abruptly, and the medic and Brentwood, who had been rising before, were now dumped. For a moment the medic thought the SPIE line had been jettisoned again to save the chopper. The RPG exploded high above them on the ravine’s cliff face, sending a rain of rock fragments down on the two men. The whack on Brentwood’s helmet was so loud that the helo’s winch man swore he heard it above the rotor slap. The baseball-size fragment that struck the helmetless medic wasn’t heard by anyone on the Pave as the helo rose quickly, simultaneously winching the two men up.