Джозеф Файндер - House on Fire

Abdul Rahim said he’d received a desperate call from a member of Khalid’s family. He wasn’t being held for ransom. They were going to lop off his head in the village square in the morning, to make an example of him.

Khalid was a slight man in his twenties who stammered a little in English but was a super-fast interpreter and a dear person. Everyone liked him. We needed him. There was no debate about whether to attempt a hostage rescue to get Khalid back. We all loved the guy and wanted to try to save him. We were all in agreement.

Our team leader, Captain McShane, called the company commander at Jalalabad and secured permission for a limited rescue operation. But how to carry it off? Normally we’d have a few days for mission prep, a few days to gather intelligence by whatever means possible. Then a day or two to rehearse. But if we were going to save Khalid’s life, we had to move that very night.

All we knew was that he was being held hostage in some compound in this small village. If we were going to move at midnight, we had maybe twelve hours to gather all available intel on the house where Khalid was imprisoned.

And since I was the intel sergeant, that was my job.

I begged Jalalabad to lend us a drone, a UAV, to fly and circle over the village for five hours and collect whatever info we could. We needed to develop a pattern of life, as it’s called. The company commander said okay.

That allowed us to locate the right house. It turned out to be fairly obvious: the only house in the village that kept a sentry on the roof. I estimated there were six to eight men inside the house.

The team leaders and I met in the Op Cen, the team conference room, sitting in metal folding chairs around a four-by-eight plywood table. It was a chilly afternoon. People don’t know how cold it can get in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan. It snowed several inches every week.

When it was my turn to speak, I let everyone on the team know that this was going to be riskier than normal. There were far too many unknowns.

“So noted,” said Captain McShane, and everyone fell quiet for an uncomfortable few seconds. “Moving on.”

We came up with our CONOPS, or concept of the operation. Then all the fallback plans, the PACE plans — the primary plan, the alternate, the contingency, and the emergency. (The military loves its acronyms.) Our ops sergeant had put in a call to his higher-ups at Jalalabad for permission to use a couple of Black Hawks. He decided we’d infil via helicopter a few terrain features away. This would reduce the sound of the choppers.

Then we’d move on foot to the target area. Once we’d set up the observation and support positions, the stack would move toward the compound and position itself for entry through the front door.

Meanwhile, I got to work on the operational preparation of the battlefield, the OPE. That meant I checked on the weather, terrain, enemy situation, and so on. It was a cold, dry night, which was good. I requested overhead imagery. I did a terrain study using maps and photos, to help determine the infil and exfil routes. And where the choppers should land.

This was all on me, which just jacked up my stress level.

We rehearsed the mission a few times. Did a few walk-throughs. The warrant officer announced that I was going to be the first guy in the stack, since I was most familiar with Khalid. Sean was fourth. The hostage rescue was scheduled for midnight. Zero hundred hours.

And I had a bad feeling about this mission.

Partly that was because of the odds. You can only go through so many gunfights and not get shot. That was one thing. The odds said it was my turn to get shot. But partly too it was because I was number one in the stack. The lead guy’s the one who sets off the IEDs or gets shot. Someone’s got to be the lead, though, and plenty of times I had volunteered for it. But that day my Spidey-sense told me something was going to go wrong, so I didn’t volunteer — and got chosen all the same.

Over the course of the evening, while we waited for zero hundred hours, we all tried to decompress in our different ways.

Some of us worked out. Most of us hung out in our barracks. Some guys played online games; some listened to music. You often used to hear a 3 Doors Down song playing, “When I’m Gone” (“Love me when I’m gone, when I’m gone”). Merlin did Sudoku, super-advanced, black-belt stuff.

Some guys put on headphones and blasted music so loud you could hear it clearly in the barracks. A lot of the guys Skyped with their families, just to say hi. You weren’t allowed to tell them that in a few hours you were going on a hazardous mission in which you might be killed. Instead, you were “just checking in.” It was always the dangerous missions that inspired people to make one last phone call. Sean called Patty, and she immediately figured out something was looming, but that was just Patty.

Everyone was nervous. Your stomach gets tight. The adrenaline is pumping. I checked the fit of my helmet, made sure it was on right. Did a comms check to make sure my handheld communications device was working. I found if I spent some time before a mission doing all my pre-op checks, it kept my anxiety at a manageable level.

I read a book by Lee Child. I like the Jack Reacher stories. And I waited. I thought a lot. We didn’t know how many guys were in the house or what kind of arms they had. Nor could we tell how many might be lying in wait in neighboring houses. It had occurred to me — and I’d told the entire team my theory — that the Taliban had kidnapped Khalid as a way to lure us into an ambush.

Any of us could be shot or KIA that night.

There were too many unknowns.

At just before midnight, we gathered on the airfield near the two Black Hawks. It was our detachment of twelve, plus Abdul Rahim, the other interpreter, and what’s called a JTAC, an Air Force special tactics airman. That made fourteen of us. Seven in each chopper.

We checked our communications devices, the MBITRs. We checked and checked again: Did we have our tear gas grenades? Protective eyewear? Fragmentation grenades? It’s always the little things that go wrong, so you obsessively look at every detail. We examined our M9 Beretta pistols, our M4s, the magazine pouches for the M4s. Put on our earmuffs that plugged into our MBITRs, which protected our hearing but also let us all stay in communication. Made sure we had the gloves to avoid burns. Checked our NODs, our night observation devices — that’s night-vision goggles to you. One of our slogans used to be “We Own the Night.” In part, that’s because the enemy didn’t have night-vision equipment. We could see in the darkness, and they, at that time, could not. Maybe by now that’s changed.

We were all wearing body armor plates front and back. Hanging from the plate carrier was a bunch of equipment, including the medical kit.

That one you didn’t want to forget.

We all strapped into our harnesses in the helicopter and took off quickly. The doors remained open, despite the cold night. It wasn’t a long trip, maybe thirty klicks. On our headphones “When I’m Gone” was playing, like a soundtrack to our infiltration. It was intended to pump everyone up, get everyone hyped up and ready. To me, that night, it sounded a little morbid.

We landed in a small river valley, pulled off our seatbelt harnesses, and jumped out of the chopper. I could feel the icy river water through my boots. We were completely exposed.

We made our stealthy approach into the village, clutching our M4 rifles, and over to an observation point where we could see the compound where Khalid was being held. Sure enough, through our NODs, we could see there was one sentry on the roof, as the drone had spotted. One of our team members was watching the drone’s feed on a small screen and confirmed that the house was exactly as anticipated.