Strike Force Delta (28 page)

And coming right behind them was a third wave of invaders: hundreds of regular Zabul villagers who had created a small army of organized looters and were now spread over the liberated part of Khrash, robbing the bodies of the dead.

When Hunn and company did come upon a house that held a lot of living, breathing mooks, the ones that actually shot back at them, they would attack it full force. Heavy weapons, grenades, kick the door down, and go in blazing. They found bad guys everywhere in these buildings. They were in the closets, in the bedrooms, hiding in the ceiling. They were so crazy, so fanatical, or so doped up on qat, they would frequently reveal themselves too early by letting out a tongue-lapping scream and plunging at the invading Americans with their fists or knives, their heavier weapon unprepared. At such close-range fighting, the Delta guys used their bayonets more than their triggers. The larger,
better-trained, stone-cold sober Americans won every battle, causing the wooden and clay floors to run thick with blood.

On the particularly hard-fought structures, the Delta guys would keep one mook alive, bring him to the roof, hang him over the side, and then raise the American flag themselves. Anytime the guys in 1st Delta looked behind them, all they saw was flames and smoke and dozens of American flags, whipping in the breeze.

Only when they got to a really hard target would they call in one of the choppers. Two flares would usually bring one calling; another flare shot at the target would bring the wrath of Hellfires or nose cannons. On those occasions, there was rarely anything to hang a flag on or a mook from, not after the copter was done with it.

By the 30-minute mark, 1st Delta had cleared eight blocks and sent dozens of Islamic fighters running. Just how far they would run before they realized this was really a grand hoax—or at least the B-52 strike was—no one knew. The hope was they'd keep running right into the river.

They left a large residential part of town and came to one that was more industrial. A bunch of repair shops, opium-processing plants, and gas stations. They took a few incoming rounds, but when the entire squad fired back en masse, on this strange night, that was usually enough to scatter whoever was shooting at them.

Hunn and his guys began the clearing process. No one was home in the repair shops or the gas stations. Just before they busted their way into the opium factory, the
Psyclops
plane flew over again; it was now simulating
the sounds of a great land battle, explosions, the noise of tanks moving, and lots of gunfire. Even the Delta guys found themselves ducking; that's how real it sounded.

They cleared the opium business, set fire to the bins of poppies, and as a joke each trooper took a long, deep, noisy sniff of the resulting smoke.

Then Hunn and three other troopers went out the back door and it was here that they found the propane tank.

It was probably used in the poppy processing, Hunn theorized to his men. A lot of heat was needed to get the weeds to turn into the product from which they would eventually make heroin, slated for Europe's streets. Propane burned high. The tank looked to hold several hundred gallons. But when Hunn knocked on the side of it, it seemed empty.

This was a slight problem. Hunn just couldn't leave this thing sitting here, empty or not. Even if it contained just a few vapors, as he suspected, it was too much potential explosive material to leave in their wake—and God only knew what the follow-up Zabul troops would do with it.

So Hunn, never shy to make a little noise, took matters into his own hands.

He had his men step back about twenty feet. The tank was now about fifty feet away. Hunn raised his weapon, and before his men could say anything he fired a burst from his M16 directly into the tank.

That's when he discovered that the tank, as it was under pressure, was not empty but actually full.

Hunn saw the bright white light first. He never heard the sound, never really saw the flames. It was just the
bright white light and the sensation that he was floating through the air. His first thought was one of amazement:
I must be dead
. . ..

Actually he was flying through the air—and three of his troops were up here with him. The force of the blast literally blew them right out of the alley and onto a major thoroughfare, nearly a half-block away.

One of his men crashed through the window of a scarf shop, landing out in the sidewalk. Two more came down on top of a
kaffee
cart. Hunn himself, all 250 pounds of him, just missed smashing into a wrecked and burning car and came down in a relatively soft mud hole instead.

He landed facedown, the bright white light replaced by the very dark brown mud. He sat up immediately. He couldn't believe he was still alive. More incredibly, the other three troopers thrown by the explosion were alive and unhurt, too.

The rest of his men came barreling around the corner moments later. They helped Hunn back to his feet and checked the three others. Cuts and bruises were the worst of their injuries.

Meanwhile, the repair shop, the gas station, and the opium factory were all now reduced to flaming embers, this as the small mushroom cloud the propane explosion had created was still going straight up into the night sky. One of the copter pilots flew over, more curious than anything else. Its rotor blades neatly cut the mushroom in half. Every window within a quarter mile had burst in the explosion.

Except those in the storefront next to the mud puddle Hunn had found himself in. Once he cleared the crap
from his eyes, he took a long look into this shop and realized that they had just hit pay dirt.

It was a store that sold cell phones.

Hunn immediately led four men into the store. The one thing the American strike team lacked was communications with one another. In that respect, they had hit a gold mine—or so they had thought.

They found the clerk cowering behind the counter of the very cluttered store. The Americans looked down at him. He was shaking all over.

“Where are all the fucking phones?” Hunn screamed at him in English.

The man looked up at him in terror. “No more! No more!” he screamed.

And it seemed true. The shelves were empty, at least of cell phones.

Then, still terrified, the clerk added: “I don't have any videotapes, either . . . .”

Lieutenant Ozzi's attack squad had also made good time.

After leaving the utilities circle, they'd continued on to clear two more blocks of houses, both sides of the street, in just twenty minutes. As before, the opposition had been stiff at first. But whenever Ozzi and his Zabul friends returned fire in volume, those terrorist fighters they didn't kill quickly ran away.

Again, it was hard to believe that just a year before the diminutive Ozzi was riding a desk in the basement of the Pentagon. He'd never received any combat training beyond what was needed to qualify for his commission at Annapolis. But being a part of the Ghost Team was training enough. It was like going through Parris Island,
Airborne training, and survival school all at once. He had such faith in Murphy, this didn't seem so strange for him to be doing. And luckily, the Afghani fighters he was leading were brave and hard fighters. At least, they weren't running in the other direction any time an explosion went off.

Ozzi and his team continued moving, way beyond what the plan called for. They eventually reached a large deserted intersection, a broad meeting of roadways. On one corner sat a good-sized building that had once been a hotel. There was an enemy machine-gun position sticking out of a building on the opposite corner. The gunners were inexperienced, sending off a few bursts as soon as Ozzi's team came around the corner.

This was probably the worst thing to do. Ozzi's guys took cover, and Ozzi fired the flare gun in the general direction of the gun position. The green phosphorescent light was like a siren. Suddenly one of the F-14s swooped down from nowhere and laid a five-hundred-pound bomb right on top of the machine-gun nest and then streaked away. The bomb blew not just the gun but the entire building sky-high, setting off a number of secondary explosions farther down the block.

Ozzi's guys immediately ran across the street and into the entrance of the hotel. The rush of the battle was flowing through them like hard liquor now. It was chaos, but it was also combat and, as always, everything, though happening fast, was actually unfolding in slow motion for them. The adrenaline rush, plus the complete lack of casualties among Ozzi's team, had him feeling higher than a kite.

That's when he stepped in the front door and found the bodies, and he felt everything drain out of him.

There were eight of them. Women and children, they'd all had their hands bound and their throats slit. They must have been stopped trying to escape in the opening minutes of the attack and executed by the city's religious police. Whatever happened, their deaths served no military value. It was just murder, plain and simple.

Ozzi was furious—and his Zabul allies stunned. No sooner had they tripped over the corpses when they started taking fire from the second floor of the hotel lobby. A spiral staircase led to this second level. There were about a half-dozen terrorist fighters up there, firing down on them.

Even though the bullets were splattering all around them, Ozzi let out a scream, something in the approximation of, “Let's go!,” to his Zabul squad and up the stairs he went, firing his M16 wildly in front of him.

He took the steps two at a time, dodging bullets, screaming to his men behind him, suddenly reenergized with adrenaline and rage. The mooks were shooting down at him, even throwing Molotov cocktail–type bombs at him. But this did not slow Ozzi's ascent. He was firing nonstop and screaming at the top of his lungs. He was acting so crazy, the mooks began pulling back, running away from this madman.

Up to the second floor he went. He sprayed the stairs up to the third level with gunfire and continued climbing, still screaming nonsense and in Arabic urging his Zabul fighters onward. A burning bottle of gasoline came down on him, thrown by one of the retreating mooks. It hit Ozzi on the shoulder. He picked it up and threw it back at them, while never losing a step. It exploded above him, nailing two of the fighters. They
both went over the railing in flames, screaming all the way down.

Still Ozzi charged on. He shot three more of the retreating mooks in the back. His M16 ran out of ammunition, but this was no problem. He simply shouldered his weapon, picked up an AK-47 dropped by one of the fleeing mooks, and kept on firing, hardly losing a second in the transition. All the while he was shouting at his men to be careful on the stairs, to zigzag, to move around, to not give the enemy a good target.

He reached the third level. Now all that was left was a ladder that led up to the roof. He shot the last mook going up this ladder in the rear end and flanks; he fell backward with a crash, mortally wounded.

Ozzi reached the bottom of the ladder, still yelling at his men. He looked up the hole in the roof and incomprehensibly saw a gas stove coming down at him. He dodged it at the last possible moment, yelling for his men to “
watch out!
” while he fired his gun over his head, in hopes of hitting the people who'd hurled this thing down at him.

Finally he reached the top of the ladder to find the two remaining mooks standing on the edge of the building, holding empty weapons, staring back at him. He didn't hesitate a moment. They didn't need prisoners; plus he was sure these were the people who'd killed the innocents they'd found below.

He put a half-dozen bullets in each of them. Both men pitched off the roof to the street below.

Only then did Ozzi stop to catch his breath and stop his heart from beating out of his chest. Then he turned around to address his men, to give them congratulations
for clearing the building . . . and for the first time realized that he was alone.

No one was behind him. No one was inside the hotel. The charge up the stairs? It had been a one-man performance.

He started laughing. It was hilarious and absurd at the same time.

But then he looked over the side of the roof and saw that the street behind the hotel was filled with terrorist fighters. Not just on foot but with three pickup trucks armed with huge 75mm weapons.

Technicals
. . ..

He looked over the other side and saw even more fighters, a small army of them, and they were carrying heavy machine guns. Behind them, on the next street over, more trucks, more large weapons. Without knowing it, Ozzi and his men had walked right into a hornet's nest not of Khrash's religious police but of hardened Al Qaeda fighters.

Ozzi dashed back to the hole in the roof and looked down at the third floor. Still he could not see his men—they'd simply vanished. But he could see, down in the hotel lobby three floors below, the Al Qaeda fighters streaming in, carrying their heavy weapons with them. There was no way Ozzi was going down that way.

In other words, he was surrounded, without much ammunition, with no flares left and no real idea where the hell he was.

It was now 0040 hours.

Forty minutes into the battle, Ryder still had six bombs left. The last one he'd dropped, in support of
Ozzi's attack squad, had been a direct hit. Ryder had followed it up with a strafing attack right through the middle of the city, once again scattering Islamic fighters who had foolishly gathered in the central square, weakly firing up at him as he bore down on them, no more than 50 feet off the ground.

But after this, his latest low-altitude supersonic buzzing run, he put the F-14 on its tail, turned completely over, and found his nose pointing south again.

It was strange—there were now smoke and flames rising over more than half of the city. The Old Quarter was almost completely obscured by the results of the battle as Kennedy's 2nd Delta team continued to clear the ancient neighborhood with help from the Zabul tanks. The fire in the east-side slum that had housed a lot of the Taliban fighters had already burned itself out. The city's utilities centers were still aflame, as was its midsection as the twin prongs of Hunn's and Ozzi's attacks continued marching westward.