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

evening of the Jalalabad ambush. His message was brief and to the point: The first team deployed to Nangarhar had brought down three targets late that afternoon. Would I please advise Mr. Casey and ask for some satellite coverage of the scene? I returned to the office and reported the claim of success to Langley, along with the observation that on the heels of the Kharga attack just one month earlier, the events at Jalalabad today might trigger a shift in mood of the Afghan resistance.

When I picked up the cable traffic the next morning, I had two messages on top of the stack from headquarters. The first cable thanked me for my account of the shoot-down reports but cautioned me to take claims of success by the mujahideen with a grain of salt. I was instructed to secure independent confirmation of these and future kills.

The second cable, referring back to the first, was short and to the point. It said, in inimitable Langley cablese:

BELAY REF, SATELLITE IMAGERY CONFIRMS THREE KILLS AT JALALABAD AS REPORTED. PLEASE PASS OUR CONGRATS FOR JOB WELL DONE!

I watched with deep interest as Soviet air operations stood down in eastern Afghanistan over the next week. When operations resumed, patrolling aircraft were flying much higher than before the ambush.

The war was entering a new stage.

Langley, September 26, 1986

Jack Devine, chief of the Afghan Task Force, flipped through the twelve-by-eighteen sheets of the morning pass of satellite coverage of Jalalabad and decided on the spot that the war had taken the turn he needed. On the heels of the total destruction of the ammo dump at Kharga a month earlier, what he saw before him gave him the crucial ingredient he was looking for—momentum. He picked up the phone and dialed Casey’s office two floors up.

When the DCI’s secretary came on the line, he said, “Jack Devine. Can I see him right now? I’ve got some photos he ought to see.”

“Come on up and I’ll work you in,” said the DCI’s secretary.

Devine made a quick call to the DDO’s office to inform Clair George and his deputy, Tom Twetten, that he was heading up to Casey’s office to show the DCI the satellite photos of the Jalalabad shoot-downs, getting quick clearance to skip the chain of command.

The Jalalabad imagery was a fluke, a lucky hit by a satellite that just happened to be passing over in an orbit that offered cloudless coverage of Jalalabad hours after Engineer Ghaffar brought down the first three helicopters. But it was a fluke that came at the perfect time.

Casey was alone when Devine was ushered into his office. As Devine spread the imagery sheets on the desk, Casey leaned over to get a better look.

“These are the three helicopters brought down in the first deployment,” Jack said, pointing to the burned-out hulks clearly visible in the high-resolution satellite photos.

There was a twinkle in Casey’s eye as he said, “This changes it all, doesn’t it?”

“It does. There hasn’t been a day like this in a long time.”

“They’re gonna lose, aren’t they?” Casey mumbled.

“This changes the dynamic. That’s for certain,” Devine answered, not willing to go as far as Casey seemed to be taking the first Stinger attack.

“Leave ’em with me, Jack. I’ll take ’em down to the President.”

The meeting was over almost before it started. But Devine left the DCI’s office convinced that the old man really believed something new had entered the equation in Afghanistan. Now if only they could keep it up.

Islamabad, September 30, 1986

I hit the rewind button and played the tape again. I could make out Engineer Ghaffar, full black beard and beige rolled-wool Chitrali hat, just as he elevated and fired off his Stinger. Then the shaky picture cut to another gunner firing and to his missile drawing its white condensation trail in a graceful arc across the cloudless sky. The next frames showed the missile closing in on an MI-24D helicopter now centered on the screen. As the missile struck the chopper’s engine, the sound of the explosion was drowned out by the cries of Ghaffar’s team shouting over and over, “Allah hu Akhbar!” The next minute of tape was a collage of jumping feet, earth, sky, and an occasional knee, as the cameraman on Ghaffar’s team abandoned his task of recording the ambush, dropped his camera to his side, and joined in the celebration when two more helicopters were brought down in rapid succession.

After another break in the sequence, the twisted hulk of one of the downed helicopters came into focus. Then a crouching mujahideen with a Kalashnikov at his side floated into the field of vision, approaching the crash site on foot. The final ten seconds of the film were a series of gruesome shots of the Soviet crew of the MI-24D, their lifeless bodies strewn about the wreckage. In the background audio were the voices of the Stinger team, their Pashto curses and epithets being hurled at the mutilated crewmen, punctuated by rapid fire from their Kalashnikovs. The body of one of the dead crewmen bounced and rolled a little as the submachine rounds ripped into it. Finally, the camera zoomed in on the face of a dead Soviet soldier. He looked about twenty, his face somehow peaceful in the awful setting. I thought of my own son, a Ranger officer who spent a lot of his time in helicopters, and of these dead soldiers’ parents somewhere in the USSR.

I turned to my admin chief. “Make copies of this and get it off to the task force right away. But cut out the last scene at the crash site. I don’t want that to go to Washington. Let me see it again when you’ve edited it.”

Kabul, 40th Army Headquarters, September 30, 1986

The reaction in Kabul to the first Stinger ambush outside Jalalabad was mixed. On the one hand, a near total stand-down on flight activity was called within hours of the Jalalabad incident while 40th Army investigation teams surveyed the