The Main Enemy Milton Bearden (read full novel .txt) 📖

ISLAMABAD. (THIS DATA RETRIEVED FROM THEIR MEDICAL RECORDS.) BELIEVE THAT ISLAMABAD WILL THUS BE ABLE TO MAKE CERTIFICATIONS AS NECESSARY IN THE FIELD. HQS WILL HANDLE ALL OTHER SPECS.

2. NO FILE.

Touché.

Islamabad, November 1987

Another silver bullet made its debut late in the year—the 120 mm Spanish mortar. For the first seven years of the conflict, the resistance had only the Warsaw Pact 82 mm mortar in their artillery arsenal. A reliable weapon, the 82 mm mortar was nonetheless limited in range and effectiveness as employed by the mujahideen. Indirect firing tactics were taught to the Afghan gunners but rarely used; instead, the resistance fighters normally fired their mortars at targets within direct sight at ranges of no more than a few thousand yards. The new Spanish mortar, larger and with devastating explosive power, had a range of about ten thousand yards. It came, moreover, with a ranging system worked out by Langley in close cooperation with the U.S. Army that fused the low-tech mortar with the high-tech world of satellite guidance.

It was as simple as it was effective. The mortar team would infiltrate by night to within about eight thousand yards of their target, preselected by screening satellite imagery of Soviet or DRA garrisons. The mortar men would set up their tubes and then determine their own precise location using a global positioning satellite (GPS) receiver. Once their exact coordinates had been calibrated, the leader of the team would feed the GPS data into a small computer, add the coordinates of the target, and then query the computer for the precise compass direction and elevation to aim their mortars in order to hit their target with the first round.

The gunners would attach a specially designed “north-finding module” to the mortar tube and adjust its azimuth, or compass direction, according to the information provided by the computer so that it would be pointed precisely at the target. Winds aloft could be factored into the calculations to ensure that the first round fired at the target hit it with full surprise. The firing procedures, seemingly complicated to the layman, were quickly picked up by the Afghan gunners selected to head the mortar teams. In theory and in field tests, the new satellite-guided system would be a remarkable breakthrough for the resistance fighters who heretofore relied on “walking” their mortar rounds in on a target and in the process forfeiting the element of surprise. We trained the mortar teams in October and dispatched the first of them into the Konar Valley in late November.

Chagasaray, Afghanistan, 2235 Hours, November 28, 1987

The Konar Valley is among the most picturesque settings in eastern Afghanistan. The fast-flowing Konar River cuts through a series of spectacular gorges and winds its way through valleys with sheer walls rising up thousands of feet to pine-covered plateaus. Along the river are stands of poplar, cherry, and apricot trees; the occasional rope-and-board suspension bridge provides the only means of crossing over the river to the east and to Pakistan’s rugged northern territories.

The Spetsnaz battalion garrisoned at Chagasaray about midway down the valley toward the Jalalabad plain had for years had a free hand in running interdiction operations against the infiltration routes from neighboring Pakistan. Tonight, it would have the tables turned on it.

The combined Pakistani-mujahideen team made its way across the Konar River well after dark, leading pack mules loaded with four Spanish mortar tubes, base plates, assorted ammunition, and thick asbestos blankets for wrapping the still hot tubes and loading them onto the mules after the attack. The caravan made its way undetected to a point eight thousand yards from the Spetsnaz garrison.

After setting up their mortars precisely as trained, the team checked and rechecked the GPS readings and the azimuth and elevation of their mortar tubes. Once satisfied that everything was done exactly right, they loaded the heavy mortar bombs into the tubes. The gunners grasped their lanyards and tensely awaited the order to fire. When it came just after 2230 hours, they pulled their lanyards and all hell broke loose.

Three of the tubes fired as planned, but the fourth exploded, killing two of the crewmen and seriously wounding a third in the jaw with a piece of shrapnel. Uncertain of the cause of the disaster, the officer in charge ordered the mortars dismantled and loaded on the mules, along with the dead and the wounded gunner, for the hurried return to Pakistan.

Ojhri Camp, 1020 Hours, November 29, 1987

I met with my Pakistani counterparts the next day to probe what might have happened. The mood was dark as we searched for answers. The first thought, a long shot, was that the cold temperatures at the higher elevations of the Konar Valley might somehow have acted on a flaw in the metallurgy of the mortar tube, causing the failure. But we dismissed that as unlikely and finally decided to put the mortars on a supply flight that was at the Pakistani military airfield at Chaklala that day and send them back to the United States for testing. We sent the wounded gunner back on the same flight for treatment—his jaw had been nearly blown off, and he had traveled on mule back to Pakistan with it held together by his tightly wound turban. According to the Pakistani officer on the team, the wounded man had never uttered a word of complaint.

Back in the United States, the Army replicated the same cold-weather conditions for its tests of the remaining mortar tubes but failed to duplicate the failure experienced in Konar. Suspicions from the outset pointed to the most logical, fundamental error made during the preparations for the attack, what mortar men call a “double feed.” Testing that suspicion, Army investigators purposely loaded one mortar tube with two rounds—a double feed—and fired it. As expected, the tube exploded just as the one had in the Konar Valley, leaving no doubt among the investigators that an overanxious gunner had loaded his tube twice that night without realizing it. And he’d paid for